Why subscribe to Homo Vitruvius?
Why read a writer?
Because you like what he says. You like the way he says it. He makes you think. He makes you feel. Maybe even, when it all goes right, he takes you somewhere: the air is a little thinner, it’s fragrant, there’s a certain kind of — luminous — light . . .
That’s what Homo Vitruvius is about: the rewards of language, the artifice of the written word. It’s the site — the stack — where every week I publish what I create out of words.
I write in all genres, from poetry to fiction to essay to drama, and my concerns, through my life in literature and as a writer, reflect a regular engagement with history, society, and ideas, an engagement that produces, sometimes, political and cultural commentary as well. In all this, Homo Vitruvius serves a passionate dedication to the writing itself. To revise Wallace Stevens (“Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”), not just words about the ideas but the words themselves. The writing isn’t just a vehicle to a destination, a means to an end — it’s a destination. I hope you’ll find the travel its own reward.
As a professor of English, I’m also a reader. I’m a reader first. I write what I read of the world, the text of the world, which is mine and everyone’s passage through it, to be deciphered and interpreted, understood and mistaken: (“Sing of human unsuccess”). In various ways, then, my writing on Homo Vitruvius is often about reading. Why not read yourself how it all began, with my very first essay here:
My second Substack
“To warn against, prepare for, and persevere until.”
Art, culture, information, and ideas for a free, tolerant, and democratic people.
My original introduction here, in italics, in the “warn” and "prepare” phase is just below. What followed was a defeat, what I called “year zero.” Now we are in the “persevere” phase. So I offer as samples below both the original, introductory essay of American Samizdat and the essay I published just after the election.
Americans cannot be complacent about what is at stake, which is everything. There is no Constitutional, institutional, or traditional bulwark, no compact in the blood of 1776, the Civil War, or World War II that will save American democracy from the cruel and corrupt, dishonest and autocratic, fascistic threat of Trumpism. They all have failed, breached one by one for nine years. None but one: this coming presidential election. And even then, in an earned and fortunate victory, we will need to protect its outcome. In defeat, it will be a different year zero.
You can read the introductory essay of this Substack, conceived to meet the challenge of Trumpism in the 2024 presidential year, below.
Complacent America
The Publication Schedule (arriving in your mailbox at 6 a.m. EST)
Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat aim to publish once a week, these days on Saturday mornings. The two Substacks offer not a commercial service but rather the gathered and arranged artifacts of my creative imagination and intellectual archaeology. The quality of what I present to you is more important to me than a rigid schedule.
Among my recent non-Substack publications is my 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word published by Finishing Line Press.
In 2015, I was a featured writer in the inaugural issue of Footnote: a Literary Journal of History.
Currently, I’m serializing on Homo Vitruvius, as I write it, a book-length memoir, “an exercise in intellectual and spiritual accounting,” titled Reason for Being in the World.
I am also at work on a novel of the Sixteenth Century Magellan expedition’s circumnavigation of the Earth, The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena. I wrote about related topics in an earlier, regular feature of Homo Vitruvius called The Magellanic Diaries. I am at work, too, on a contemporary California noir novel, adapted from my screenplay, They Called It Paradise.
Dip your toes in to learn more
A few popular essays about myself
A Portrait of the Artist from a Young Sentence
Who
A Death in Summer
Two of my favorite essays
Cool, Man
Life in Motion
There is much, much more in the vaulted archive with a paid subscription. I offer no paid-subscriber-only writing on Homo Vitruvius. Everything is free on first publication. After three months, all writing recedes from view into the archive. Subscribers of any kind, paid or free, are welcome and valued and offered the same work to read. But I no longer teach fulltime, and I write not as pastime but as vocation. Aside from the writing’s inherent worth, I can use the money to make a living, as almost any writer can. Aside from supporting writing you value, your paid subscription will purchase access to an archive that contains multiple books’ worth of my writing. In addition, with a paid subscription come, on request, a free digital download of Waiting for Word and, for purchase, signed copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
About the Homo Vitruvius name and logo
Leonardo Da Vinci’s 1487 Renaissance and pre-Enlightenment drawing, known as Vitruvian man, inspired by ideas of the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio, sought to represent, in a man equally circumscribed by the circle and the square, a “Canon of Proportions”: a “cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). [Leonardo] believed the workings of the human body to be an analogy for the workings of the universe." That is, to see the human in the universe and the universe in the human, or, as I add, to think in proportion, even about the disproportionate.
The human and thinker best representatively depicting such an ideal, Homo Vitruvius wryly maintains, is of course, Buster Keaton behind bars, forlornly gazing beyond them.
Finally, for now, why not visit my writer website?
Thanks so much for reading. You read; therefore, the writer exists.
If you like writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, and emotional explorations that range, I hope you’ll consider becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll gain access to the full archive, beyond the 3-month paywall and a free digital download of Waiting for Word on request. You’ll also have the opportunity to purchase signed hard copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. Most importantly, you’ll be supporting writing you appreciate.
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