LettersAt3amPress – Manifesto: A Radical Aesthetics
BY MICHAEL VENTURA, September 26, 2021
Letters at 3AM – Manifesto: A Radical Aesthetics
"Aesthetics" is a sloppy word for a hodgepodge concept, officially defined as: principles guiding artistic work. A radical aesthetic is something more: the crossroads at which your vision of beauty meets the way you actually live. We know writers whose profe
ssed politics are nothing like the aesthetics implied by their work, and politicians whose aesthetic preferences imply a wholly different politics than what they work for. Not to mention the legions of bourgeois whose vision of beauty has so little to do with the way they actually live that the basic mechanism of their lives is a cover-up. The writer must either be willfully oblivious to anything resembling a radical aesthetic or must come to terms with how a work-in-progress or a work published relates to the writer's daily, hourly life -- the realization that how you live IS what you believe. I think of Randolph Bourne, a hunchbacked dwarf with long fingers who played Bach on a beat-up piano and wrote brilliant essays from 1911 to 1918, when he died of pneumonia and poverty at the age of 32. Bourne took for granted that every political stance implies an aesthetic and every aesthetic implies the political. Bourne wrote: "One keeps healthy in wartime not by a series of religious and political consolations that something good is coming out of it all, but by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part." There are bigger, uglier, more permanent wars now: wars against the Constitution, against democracy, against education, against knowledge, against tolerance, against inclusion, against kindness, against women, against people of color, against the poor, against mercy, against forgiveness, against originality, against beauty itself – wars between and within the crazed and whiny right, the timid whiny middle, the blinkered whiny left, and every damned corporate boardroom. Total war, 21st century style. That's the wartime I hear in Bourne's sentence. Bourne again: "Now, while everything that is respectable in America seems to be putting its effort, with a sort of joyful perversity, into the technique of destruction, are there no desperate spiritual outlaws with a lust to create?"
Of course there are. But few are to be found in mainstream publishing, nor are there many in the ghettos of academia where artists of all stripes now hide for safety and where all are in grave danger of losing touch with life beyond the campus. As for the "literary industrial complex" that supplies mass-market book chains, think of them as Hollywood-like publishing studios, geared to the fashionable enthusiasms of the moment and short-term profits. Editors and agents who serve these studios are of a type and entirely too alike, their collective experience is too narrow, and they are too in the thrall of money to foster a vibrant literature. What might a vibrant literature look like in this USA? A literature that sees itself as an adventure in beauty and thought, voiced by storytellers, poets, and thinkers who stake their lives on their visions. A literature that misbehaves and can't be trusted to toe the line of any worldview or doctrine. Above all, a literature that can speak across class, race, gender, age -- tough-minded, straight-talking, unconfined by the fashionable niceties of "correctness." For going-on-eight years, and with ever-fluctuating resources, LettersAt3amPress is proud to have published eight books we believe in, by women and men who live their art, as we attempt to live by the words of Zengetsu:
LIVE WITH CAUSE AND LEAVE RESULTS TO THE GREAT LAW OF THE UNIVERSE. Jazmin Aminian Ventura & Michael Ventura
