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BANGER

Oscar Wilde thought he was slick writing Socratic dialogues on aesthetics and criticism, while talking about the Greeks.

I’m not convinced. Any book that uses its own title too much in parlance is bound to get stuck in circular logic.

One of the things I look for in any fictional account of artists’ lives, and the setting, is an accuracy that is really just a mirror to my own life as an artist. I usually want a number of cultural signifiers that ultimately end up more like tropes. This book has some tropes but I think Jay’s first person accounts of his envy do something important. They function like fictional criticism. Fictional criticality.

I’m really curious about where a story like this goes. Stories that begin with such banal and established suffering. The protagonist is one of those barely living precarious laborers—a “failed artist.” But I haven’t gotten there just yet.

Written in an epistolary style keeps the book somewhat ambient, as though we are not to derive meaning from the story, but instead arrive at a sense of understanding how things were for people who had the ability to write things.

Middle of the book becomes an arc of theories and discoveries. It’s really beautiful actually.

Honestly I wonder if there’s always a moment in science fictions where I speculate if the story is about artificial intelligence. But maybe the great joy of sci-fi, generally, is speculating on the actual subject of the story. What it’s “about.” This all happened for me in chapter 5.

Actually an amazing complement to When We Cease to Understand the World.

The narrative is told in first-person by a pure mathematician. He starts the whole thing in a sort of elitist manner launching platitudes about his own career and how unsettling his discipline is to the sciences and humanities; it took a few pages to disengage from them and recognize that this was the character’s voice and not definitive. It then takes these philosophical highs and farcical lows. Lost, vintage wit.

I bought this book at first because it seemed incredible that a single artist could inspire a book of 12 essays by a single writer. This isn’t a biography. It seems that John Yau is almost writing a treatise about art criticism, with Johns as a conduit? Chapter 4 is great.