As you know (who am I kidding? you don’t know - there isn’t even a “you” to address on this infrequently visited website) I’m working on a book about the great art and culture critic Dave Hickey. As part of that project, I just published a long essay in The Point about my visit to see Dave in Santa Fe. An excerpt:
He treated you like you were supposed to get out there and do something,” Hickey once wrote of his old theater professor Walther Volbach, who’d landed at Texas Christian University after fleeing the Nazis. “He told me I was a callow redneck with all the spirituality of a toilet-seat—that I could possibly cure the former but would probably have to live with the latter—but that was great! Nobody had ever told me I was anything before, so I took it to heart.”
Dave on the page is a gentler presence than Herr Volbach, but he’d done for me, as a young would-be writer, something like what Volbach did for him. He’d deflated me, and liberated me. Nobody cared whether I dedicated myself to writing. It was a selfish, superfluous thing to do, and one that deserved no presumption of virtue. If done right, however, it could be wonderful and world-shaking. Dave also revealed to me who the real enemies of such an endeavor were. They were the “Aryan muscle-boys” who would bend art to serve their stern, humorless deities.