Thanks, Plans, Conversations

The future of Personal Canon Formation

“Leslie,” oil on canvas, by Pier Hardin

I started Personal Canon Formation a month ago, and I am surprised by and grateful for all of the positive responses. Thanks to all of you. Thanks for subscribing, thanks for the encouragement, and thanks for reading!

Today, I would like to share some of my plans for PCF over the next few months and encourage your suggestions and engagement. Please respond in the comments below. I would love to see more conversation here.

What’s in a subscription?

I plan to continue with the twice-a-week posting schedule. These posts are now and always will be free to read. For the handful of you who have become paid subscribers, I am considering various options for extras just for you. (Huge thanks, by the way, to paid subscribers! You help to sustain my work.) One possibility is a weekly recommendation—a mini review of a book or record that I think just might be a candidate for your personal canon; or, alternatively, something like a “What I’m Reading or Listening to Now” post. Another possibility is for paid subscribers to have access to audio versions of each post. But please let me know: what possibilities appeal to you? What other suggestions do you have? Maybe you have an idea that I haven't thought of yet.

If you have a free subscription, never fear. You don’t need to pay anything if you don’t want to, and you will continue receiving the regular two posts a week. However, if there are features that you think would be worth paying a small subscription price for (the above, or something else), then please let me know. In any case, I will keep the cost of paid subscriptions very low for those so inclined—less than my standard cappuccino-with-oat-milk coffee shop order.

Forthcoming features

Classroom Journal

This fall I will be teaching two courses at my university, a survey of English Literature, and a course on the history of literary criticism from the ancients to the early twentieth century. For at least one of the weekly posts during the semester (and sometimes two), I will be writing about the texts that I am teaching in these classes and what we are talking about in the classroom. (It was early subscriber Patricia O’Farrill-Donalson who inspired this idea—thanks, Patricia!) Many of these texts are part of my own personal canon: Jane Austen’s Emma, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, and Beowulf, just to name a few. I’ll also be discussing the critical and aesthetic ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir, Wordsworth, and many others. In the spring of 2024, I will be teaching a graduate course called “Medieval Ecologies from Beowulf to Tolkien,” and I will continue the classroom journal for this course as well. Fall classes start in just a couple of weeks (hard to believe, I know), so you will be hearing more about all of this soon.

Guest Canons

I will be soliciting guest posts from some of my wonderful colleagues and friends so that they can tell us about their own personal canons.

Conversations with Extraordinary People

This will be an occasional series of conversations (not interviews) with writers, musicians, artists, readers, and scholars about the kinds of art and culture that matter to them.

Original Art

Beginning with today’s post (see above), I will often be featuring original art by my brilliant friend, Pier Hardin. Please check out her art at pierhardinart.com. She recently had a dazzling show at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Mobile.

There will be no AI-generated art here! Art by humans only!

I’ll make an exception to give you an example of how hilariously bad (in addition to being unethical) most AI art is. I asked the native Substack art generator to give me a picture of a book club, and this is what it came up with:

Book club

What the hell is going on here!? What sort of bizarro book club is this supposed to be?

(I realize that there are much more sophisticated AI art generators, but I couldn’t not show you this hot mess.)

OK, back to future plans:

More stand-alone essays on . . .

. . . The Beatles, Sibelius, Middlemarch, yoga, Rose Tremain, Miles Davis, Twin Peaks, New Orleans, Haydn, Patrick O’Brian, Shostakovich, Norah Jones, Toni Morrison, Dickens, the TV series Severance, and Radiohead, among many other topics.

Book Club?

I’m not sure about this one, but if there is enough interest, I might consider starting a book club connected to PCF, with monthly Zoom meetings and discussion forums. This might be another possibility for paid subscribers, simply because it will involve more work. But if you would be interested in this, whether or not you are currently a paid subscriber, then please let me know in the comments.

Conversations with all of you

This is what I’m looking forward to most. Please comment on posts; please talk to me and to each other, here or in Notes. I can also open up the Substack chat feature on various topics if there is interest. I’m even open to starting a Discord channel. Again, I would love for this enterprise to become one big conversation among smart people who care about art and culture.

Thanks again, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours!

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash