“Even though I’m writing about very dark material, it still feels like an escape hatch.” — Olivia Laing

“As a writer, I am always trying to get past abstraction, the world of ideas, and putting actual objects in my writing — paintings, photographs — really helps with that. They’re beautiful tools with which to think.” — Olivia Laing

It’s Olivia Laing’s birthday today.

Every generation needs a new voice bringing a fresh interrogation on art with a voice speaking to where we are, where we’ve come from, where we might be going. Big Picture, but also minute and personal. It is hard to do: many try, most fail. Like a Susan Sontag. Or Ellen Willis. Or Camille Paglia! Hell, Tom Wolfe. Mencken.

You may not even like some of these writers. Whether or not you like them is irrelevant. Someone bringing something new to the table doesn’t come along every day (or every generation): when they do, pay attention! Engage with it, even to say “I disagree”. I’m so tired of people DISMISSING other peoples’ voices. Boring.

More on Laing after the jump.

“At some point, you have to set down the past. At some point, you have to accept that everyone was doing their best. At some point, you have to gather yourself up, and go onward into your life.” — Olivia Laing, Trip to Echo Spring

Laing is very learned, but not scholarly or academic. For the most part, I am self-educated, although my public school education was a good start. I was a theatre student, I wasn’t studying art and literature on even an undergraduate level. I was done with all that, except for an elective here and there. I am alienated from – and resist – criticism looking at art through an ideological lens, or “school of thought” or whatever. It’s just not a familiar way of thinking for me. I read many writers who approach every subject through one lens, and many do good work. But I like writers who live in a messier more subjective grey-ish zone of personal impressions, bolstered up by precedent. Honestly, it’s what I have always tried to do in my own writing. Laing accesses autobiography through writers/artists/activists – no distinction. I so understand this. My discovery of Oliver! – the movie – when I was 10, led me down a path of exploration so intense it IS my autobiography.

Laing is in a continuum with writers like William Hazlitt, Coleridge, Keats, the Romantics, those massively-educated eccentric writers, who took enormous interest – scientific, theological, artistic, personal – in the world around them and wrote it all out in cultural commentary. Laing is part of what used to be called “The Humanities”, the overall-scope of art history, including drama, architecture, literature, music, etc. – how different eras build on each other, accumulating like layers of sediment. My friend Beth and I were recently talking about how grateful we were for our Humanities teacher in high school. Most of my history-knowledge started in high school. So something like the Humanities was a great starting point. Beth said, “Listen, I know about the different Greek columns only because of Humanities in high school.” I rattled off like a robot, “Corinthian, Ionic, and Doric.” Understanding where stuff comes from, the different traditions and “schools” is important, and when you have even a little bit of knowledge … history stops seeming like history and starts feeling like life, and suddenly the past is no longer closed to you. The artists you love throughout history walk beside you, whisper in your ear, they still have things to tell us.

This, for me, is how Laing’s writing feels.

I recognized in Laing’s books something I have tried to do myself: personal writing that is not personal-only, artistic discussions which don’t exclude the personal (Sometimes I read theory-based writing and wonder … “where are YOU in all of this?”). Two of the books are hybrid-formats: travelogue, memoir, cultural criticism, sociology, political, environmental.

So to get specific:

The first book was To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface , where Laing took a walking “tour” of the River Ouse, the river where Virginia Woolf drowned herself. Water imagery dominates Woolf’s writing. The book is about Woolf, the Ouse and its geology, and the history of man’s attempt to control water. There is no attempt to be distant or “objective.” Laing walks in the sunshine, thinking about Woolf, observing the natural world, meeting people, researching.

Her next book was The Trip to Echo: On Writers and Drinking, my “way in.” Laing takes a train trip across the United States, traveling to key locations for six American writers. Laing is interested in the connections between alcoholism and writing. Why are so many writers alcoholics? Laing wonders how the alcoholism “shows up” in their writing? This is a travelogue as well as literary criticism as well as an exploration of addition (and how it impacted Laing in her childhood). The writers discussed: in-depth explorations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, John Berryman, Tennessee Williams and Raymond Carver. Brilliant book.

Laing’s best book is The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. A book about loneliness in the city. Laing, as always, starts personally. Laing went through a terrible breakup, while living in New York City, feeling like an exile. The city itself is lonely-making (although that’s one of the appeals, paradoxically). Laing focuses on artists who represent “the lonely city”: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, David Wojnarowicz … Laing has been asked why didn’t include more women (in this and in Echo Springs). EIf we are now more accepting of the fluidity of gender, which we damn well should be, then women loving art made by men, seeing themselves in art made by men, finding art made by men compelling and challenging and fascinating – should not be controversial. Men, you’re not off the hook. Read books by women, see movies about and by women.

I used Lonely City as my launch-pad for my piece about Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was… – VERY proud of that piece, and how it took a life of its own (which I just wrote about for Tom Noonan’s birthday). Producer Scott Macaulay, reached out to me on Twitter telling me how much he liked the inclusion of Laing’s book on loneliness.

Laing’s work was one of the inspirations for my column at Film Comment, actually. I wanted to explore intersections between film and literature, film and painting and poetry etc. So much writing about film is circular: films referencing films. I have always tried to loop in other things. I loved paying tribute to Laing, who inspired the column, in my piece on What Happened Was….

There have been more books: Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency: a compilation of Laing’s essays on artists: David Bowie, Basquiat, Sally Rooney, Georgia O’Keeffe, an exploration of how artists can help us navigate our own time of “emergency”.

Because it is an emergency.

Everybody: A Book about Freedom, with meditations on Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, Andrew Dworkin, Nina Simone … and last year came a book on gardening and utopias, which I haven’t read yet. There are also a couple novels.

Prolific.

 
 
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