The first of many books–and more importantly, many introductions–I discovered by Robin Wood. I could (and often do) pick up any book by Wood, begin on any random page, read for as long as I can devote the time, and be inspired to fresh ways of watching, listening, feeling, thinking, loving and living that are by some magic attuned to whatever art’s moving me at that time in my life, to whatever cultural grappling is most on point in my communities. I do not always agree with his critical claims about particular works of art, but I adore his approach to art criticism beyond description.
I do not need this, because my SJG collection is among my proudest: every sole-authored book, in hardcover, in gorgeous condition. Whoever is reading this and does not know his work needs it immediately. Originally published in the magazine Natural History and ostensibly (mostly) about paleontology and evolutionary science, these essays end up touching on a great many topics–including baseball and music, to my delight.
I was incredibly lucky to take two courses with this great literary critic as an undergrad, and luckier still (that’s right, luckier than “incredibly”) to get to know him a bit personally–a cup of coffee, a personal invitation to a colloquium shindig, an evening with a small group of students at his home, a letter from him recommending me for graduate study. Other than Dylan and maybe a couple of other artists, the musicians I valorize with obsessive listening and occasionally highlight on this site would, I suspect, hold zero interest for him–but his example of playful, irreverent, cranky engagement of the art he does find worth his time is still educating me three decades on.
Everyone knows him as a novelist, or maybe as an author of novellas/mezzo stories they turn into movies. Yet I almost never like the novels, and even the best of the mezzo movies (Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption) are just decent original stories. His creepy short stories, however, are terrific reading that tickles me in a quite specific place no other stories ever do, but the reason I love him and want to write like him is the material for which he’s least famous. I love his nonfiction essays that, like Robin Wood’s, combine memoir with reader-response-style art cricism and (like early Wood, certainly not so pointedly as post-coming-out Wood) a dollop of cultural studies: this book, Danse Macabre, his columns in Entertainment Weekly.
Even while writing almost exclusively about baseball (much later, he wrote a couple of fun books about true crime that I enjoy), and even while first tacitly and then gradually more explicitly reflecting political stances I have always found troubling and would now directly repudiate, this writer deeply influenced how I think about making arguments and trying to use wit in nonfictional prose.
Selling Dust 