Come in. Let me show you around.
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: essays on literature, culture, society, and all things human, with poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir added to the mix.
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 life, to be deciphered and interpreted, understood and mistaken. In various ways, then, my writing on Homo Vitruvius is often about reading.
Though, perhaps, both inevitably and by propitious chance, my work here grows beyond my original intent, I do have an original purpose.
You can read more about My Substack Project here:
The Publication Schedule (all arriving in your mailbox at 3 a.m. PST)
Mondays: The 4 paid subscriber series: 1) Recommendations and Reviews (Recs & Revs), drawn from my research and engagements with art, history, and culture; 2) The Magellanic Diaries posts (history, culture, and ideas related to my novel in progress, The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena, on the Ferdinand Magellan expedition, first to circumnavigate the earth); 3) the Extraordinary Ordinary People series, with explanation here; 4) A Reader’s Review, a monthly compendium of the best of my broad periodical reading, followed by a free, in-depth Thursday exploration into the ideas of one the recommended articles.
Thursdays: The free stuff: personal and intellectual, creative flights of imagination in essay form, stories, poems, fictions and nonfictions.
Among my recent non-Substack publications are my 2021 poetry collection Waiting for Word published by Finishing Line Press.
Also in 2021, my writing on Native America, “San Carlos Apache Reservation,” to accompany the documentary photography of Julia Dean, appeared in the summer “Americans” issue of ProgressivEzine. Since then, in fall 2022, I published my culminating thoughts, after a lifetime of reading and teaching him, on “Hemingway in the Twenty-First Century,” in the Hong Kong review. My poetry appeared in the spring 2023 California Quarterly.
In 2015, I was a featured writer in the inaugural issue of Footnote: a Literary Journal of History.
Currently, I’m at work on a novel of the Sixteenth Century Magellan circumnavigation of the Earth, The Dream of Don Juan de Cartagena. I write about related topics in a regular feature of Homo Vitruvius called The Magellanic Diaries.
What you can find on Homo Vitruvius
Memoir
Creative nonfiction
Poetry
Essay on literature, culture, and society
The paid series
About the substack letter’s 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, it is the position of Homo Vitruvius, 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.
Become a Vitruvian by subscribing and you’ll receive one free essay per week, on Thursdays, and a preview of the three current paid series of posts on Mondays, as well as access to the most recent three-month archive of essays.
Become a paid subscriber and get full access to the newsletter and website, including the Monday paid series, the complete archive of essays and access to purchase signed copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote. You’ll also be supporting writing you value and helping to sustain Homo Vitruvius, a product of my passions, which are fueled by their heat but can also use food and drink to sustain them.
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Join fellow Vitruvians
Be part of a community of people who share your interests. I have some very interesting and talented friends here on Substack. You’ll be getting to know them, too.
AJA
Writing that dares, thinking that delves deep, emotional explorations that range. Become a paid subscriber of Homo Vitruvius today. You’ll get access to the full archive, Recs & Revs posts, the Magellanic Diaries, and Extraordinary Ordinary People. You can also buy signed copies of Waiting for Word and Footnote.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
“Not just words about the ideas but the words themselves.”