Ever feel artless? A little awkward when it comes to discussions about novels, music, plays, movies? And/or do you wish there was a bit more artfulness in those same works?

ARTLESS is a newsletter for you. Its mission is to champion artworks as artworks, to work out what makes a particular artwork good, and make the case that it’s less what poems, songs, TV shows etc. are about than how they’re about. And to share that with you, dear subscriber.

Be a dear. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

See it as like The Financial Times’ ‘How to spend it’ but where ‘it’ isn’t your crazy salary but your cultural attention. Your go-to place for literary profiles and film criticism free of the suck-upage of in-house reviewers or the dryness of academia. A personal shopper but for books rather than glad-rags and not starring Kristen Stewart. All by someone who’s careened through a career in the world of arts and letters as an author, editor and critic and who can tell you how worldly, unromantic and worthwhile it is.

For a sample of my essays and fiction published elsewhere:

The newsletter will also be where I gather snappier art recommendations, minority reports on classics 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.

So why subscribe?

Ever watch Culture Shows and your eyelid starts twitching? Read the hem of a broadsheet that’s left to book reviews and find your fingers have punched holes through the paper? Sent catatonic by Metacritic? Get relief.

Keeping ahead of the jonses

Look at them dab their lip, trying to remember the name of this Substack, see the dissimulation of their mumbling, as though it could hide that they’re too late. But you, you glow blue and serene in the knowledge that You Have Subscribed.

JOIN US.

What’s one more internet forum to argue into the void on? Nice soft white void. Eternally replenishing wax tablet. Mm.

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Your rough guide to the arts and my rough time working in them, trying to rescue the principle of art for art’s sake

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Novelist, scriptwriter, critic, everyone is.