Ever feel artless? Out of your depth when it comes to what you should read or watch or listen to next? At the mercy of algorithms and aggregators like Goodreads and Metacritic without any meat-space critic you trust? Overwhelmed by all the commentary on albums and movies and books but underwhelmed by its quality? And but do you wish there was a bit more artfulness in those same artworks?

Then welcome to ARTLESS. My mission here is to champion artworks as artworks, to work out what makes a particular artwork good, and make the case that it’s less what stories, songs, poems, plays etc. are about than how they’re about. And to share that with you.

So why subscribe?

Arts journalism in establishment media is compromised by the need to maintain access to the artists; cultural criticism you get in academia is almost competitively dry. What you need is a reliable source of expertise from a passionate amateur. Someone who’s careened through a career in the world of arts and letters as an author and editor, and who can tell you how worldly, unromantic and worthwhile it all is.

For a sample of my passionate amateurness, here’s some criticism and fiction I’ve had published elsewhere:

• Grist to the fun machine - on Ramy Youssef’s TV sitcom Ramy, Tribune magazine

• “I never did like smart-ass utopians” - on the novel Always Coming Come by Ursula K Le Guin, Strange Horizons

• “Words can’t express” - short story, 3AM Magazine

• “No Minister - looking back at The Thick of It and looking forward to Veep” - Medium

JOIN US.

Subscribe to get the above and more. This newsletter is also where I gather snappier recommendations, minority reports on classics, advice for artists, my diaries of working as a writer and any other notabilia. Call it an uncommonplace book, an against-my-ruin shoring of fragments. As if one of Fernando Pessoa’s alter-egos wrote from the grave The Substack of Disquiet.