2025 review

This was one of my least successful years as a writer, in terms of people reading, sharing, discussing etc my work—but not for lack of writing!

Much of what I wrote was about literature—mostly, but not all, gay, and all of it concerned, somehow, with the problem of how an individual writer can relate properly to a cultural/canonical tradition that is too insane to be sincerely believed in (Merrill and Snyder), too heroic or cliquish to be tolerable (Alan Ansen), too accomplished to be added to (Hart Crane and Harold Bloom), or too corny and cliched to be identified with (Tim Dlugos). I also thought about this problem via the art critic Harold Rosenberg, who, like the writers and literary critics I discussed, moved beyond the avant-garde into a kind of ‘second tradition.’

A lot of that concern with tradition and carrying on was specifically about seeing gay culture as an inheritance—and preparation for the book I’m working on about this topic. I wrote a sort of pitch for the book in a recent volume on the state of today’s gays. The central figure is—you probably know by now—Michael Denneny, a leading gay publisher of the 70s and 80s and former student of Arendt. I talked about him with the head of Bard College’s Arendt Center, and wrote essays on his student days and graduate work. Along those lines, I also had a conversation with my friend Domenic DeSocio about the best gay writer, Andrew Holleran.

In addition to the literary/cultural/gay stuff I did some miscellaneous ‘political’ writing, on Foucault and liberalism, and an interview with Julius Krein on politics and Christianity—and wrote about Rosenberg’s reworking of Marx. But it was not a very political year, writing-wise. What is there to say? Things seem terrible, and terrible in a way that is, on the one hand obvious (my wit and learning are not called for) and on the other resistant to thought (my dullness and ignorance don’t reveal any path forward).

I’m not sure if thinking about ‘culture’ is a flight into irresponsibility (I was reading recently about Ming-dynasty literati who, after the fall of the dynasty, became Buddhist priests or otherwise took to the mountains to record their dreams, write poems, and grind elixirs—one sympathizes!), or a proper polishing of the mirror while waiting for something fit to appear in it.