The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains

Saturday 8/8/26

We'll put that right in the title of one of these entries. Write that down. Learn it. Remember it. Share it. Spread the word. For nothing is more true about true art.

If there is no life in the thing, it isn't art. For example: All MFA writing and almost all current writing in the world, practically all of which is done--at the acclaimed press, the "revered" literary magazine that is unknown outside of that far flung gated community at the most remote points of the margins of society, The New York Times, the genre mill--by AI anyway.

In the rare instances when it isn't technically done by AI, you can't tell because no one has the ability in this world to write such that you know it's by a human on the one hand, never mind could only be done by that human on the other.

And if it couldn't only have been done by you, single human unit, it certainly can't be great.

It's not just the ability, either. It's everything that would need to go into developing that ability. The endless hours over many years. Writing for hours and hours and hours every day of one's life.

There is no life in a Justin Taylor story. A Yiyun Li work. A George Saunders story in The New Yorker. Paris Review gilded English department tote bag fiction. McSweeney's caste system conformity fiction. One Story debutante ball, dry-palmed wankery.

Lifeless, pointless aridity.

Up and down the hallways of today's so-called literature, there's nothing but this aridity. Where nothing grows, nothing happens, there's no meaning, no point, no earthly reason to read any of it, even if this was a world full of voracious readers perpetually on the lookout for the next text to devour.

Genre is a matter of people not knowing any better. It's no different than yet another cliched, bad show on a streaming service that a lonely person "binges," the same as they fire convenience store chips into their mouths. There are far better, far more entertaining, and, yes, far more companionable things out there. It doesn't just have to be bologna sandwiches because they're all you know and you won't even try and find anything else.

"Life" doesn't mean more organisms. More people. Can we please be intelligent here?

Life means that which makes us human. The life force of the human soul, both collectively and individually. That which we identity as familiar, real, true, and of vital, defining importance in the deepest parts of ourselves, even if we've never beheld or experienced it before. It's what makes you push back from the desk and say, "My God."

It makes you cry for everyone you've ever known and people you don't know yet, and yourself. Painful tears, maybe. Tears of joy, maybe. It sends you out in the night for a walk around the block--no, make it two--to get some of the world's cool air into your lungs. To feel the earth under your feet in further confirmation that you are here, with your "here-ness" amplified, and you are alive, just as this work of art that you will now carry forever is alive inside of you.

Your life has been added to with life in a way that might as well be endemic to you, tailored to you, done exclusively for and, more importantly, in concert with, and you, or parts of you, as you'd not known.

Thus, you yourself are more alive than you were previously.

Do you really think that's what is happening, what anyone believes is happening, in a classist special from a plagiarist like David Szalay?

No life = no art. The more life = better art. The most life = best art.

The most life and things that are themselves beyond human life and revealing of it = art that is more than art and is life unto itself, and life without limit or end.

Say it with me:

The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains.