Weekly Readings #141 (10/14/24-10/20/24)

about the eleventh hour

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I posted “The Word En Masse,” an episode on Walt Whitman and his Song of Myself, to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The most important part of that episode is my explanation of why Whitman’s free verse is not free at all but carefully controlled by a series of poetic and rhetorical techniques (alliteration, anaphora, interior rhyme, apostrophe, parataxis, and more) that combine to express his vision of the expansive e pluribus unum of the American self and the American nation. While I discussed at length Whitman’s poetic of masturbation, I also emphasized that Whitman’s onanism was productive and fructifying, like the Egyptian god Atum’s; those who try to write verse completely “free” of formal and aesthetic shape, by contrast, are likely masturbating in the pejorative sense, slaves to impulse and therefore not free at all. Here endeth my Sunday sermon. Next week: Emily Dickinson, the moon to Walt’s sun, the anchoress to Walt’s loafer, the cloistress to Walt’s open roadster, but as brilliantly emblematic an American self (and self-singer) as Walt ever was. We must take them together as night and day, I once wrote, these two central poets of our national tradition. Thanks to my paid subscribers, and for those who aren’t paid subscribers yet, please join us!

I also remind everyone in these darkening autumn days that spring will come again, and with it will also come my novel Major Arcana in a beautiful edition from Belt Publishing. You can pre-order it here, but this week I want to emphasize, as pictured above, its availability on NetGalley for anyone who’d like to request a digital review copy. Honest or at least entertaining reviews are always welcome in any public forum.¹ Also for review purposes: if you can’t wait until next spring to read Major Arcana, paid subscribers to this Substack can also access the original serial of the novel, complete with my audio rendition (though please note this is not the final text of the book). Thanks to all who have supported it so far!

For this week, what I hope is my last word on the culture-is-stuck debate. Please skip the footnotes, and please enjoy!

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Electric Wine: Laboring in the Virtual Vineyard, 2004-2024

Rembrandt, The Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (1637)

In the “golden age of blogging,” circa 2004, arguments about particular topics would spiral for weeks, everyone weighing in multiple times on their own blogs—not to mention the comment threads, the Twitter/X of those pre-social-media days, where things got much more acrimonious and insulting, where for the first time one could see the likes of tenured professors or political professionals lose their heads and spew vicious invective in every direction.²

I raise this point of media history because it contextualizes the brief point I’d like to make today as the no doubt enervating “is culture stuck?” debate enters its third week. Some of my commenters have accused me, I think, of being too optimistic about the subject, and in his beautifully chastening polemic of this week on the subject, “The Vineyard and the Meth Lab,” Matthew Gasda responds indirectly to my suggestion that the cultural process at work in the 2020s isn’t as different as that of the 1920s as declinists think:

Displays of newness are not displays of soulfulness. Innovation must coordinate with complex cognitive processes, formal ambition, respect for tradition. High European modernism, for example, absorbed moving images and the music hall because it was an ultra-literate culture with a high level of general education and exacting standards. It wasn’t good because it made use of new media and mediums; it was good because it was able to transcend them. New ideas and phenomenologies, like types of grape, took root in cultivated soil.

This is undoubtedly right about (for example) Eliot, but it might understate the progressive nihilism or nihilist progressivism of (for example) Joyce and Woolf, in whose dream-worlds we now currently spend our days for better and for worse, every day a Bloomsday in our new imperium of permanent revolution. The latter’s song of herself was one long suicide note, the former’s exceeding even Whitman in its cosmic self-entranced self-pleasuring. They consumed tradition even as they consummated it in the arias of their (respectively) large and small deaths. You have to read Homer and Shakespeare to read them, of course, but mostly to find out why you never have to quite read Homer and Shakespeare again. Their words feed the leaping flame of tradition’s pyre. I say this as disinterestedly as I can, and not with a great deal of pleasure, and for the full argument I direct you to the intense and even somewhat anguished episodes on Woolf and Joyce in the Invisible College archive.

It is generally my intention to restore the shock and affront offered by the greatest art. Right and left agree in their culture war that the dead white men and women were some kind of anodyne or complacent upholders of the status quo when nothing could be farther from the truth. Gasda acidly quips, “I’m guessing there are some brilliant innovators of the Satanic liturgy.” Woolf and Joyce, and Melville and Whitman too, are arguably just these liturgical innovators, though only Melville, with his avowedly “wicked book,” baptized in the name of the devil, was fully conscious of authoring such a Black Mass.³

The ethical, political, and spiritual status of modernism’s various styles of orgasmic apocalypticism aside, however, I want to make an argument closer to home. I think culture was truly stuck in about the aforementioned year 2004. History had ended—it may still be ended, in fairness; events have not yet quite refuted Fukuyama, though the thesis is looking shakier by the day—cinema had triumphed, television was on the march, pop music was stupefied, and the last great generation of novelists wasn’t being replaced by figures of equal gravity. Only the debates happening online in the aforementioned golden age of blogging gave me any hope at the time.

An anonymous commenter once asked me, “what was the experience of going from no internet (at least in its modern form) to it suddenly dominating everything in one’s life?” I answered: the really rough patch was the intermediate period between the last decade the world was mostly analog (the 1990s) and the first decade it was mostly digital (the 2010s), despite the socio-political chaos (wokeness vs. populism and then the pandemic) caused by the latter. If you were extremely online in the 2000s, which I sort of was, and the monoculture still reigned, and even in some respects seemed like it would reign forever, everything felt sort of hallucinatory and unreal, a bright waking nightmare; this is what Mark Fisher’s writing captures well, the disappointed cyber-utopian’s dazed horror at a permanent zombie mainstream. Before that, in the analog days, counterculture and mainstream culture were more stably sealed off from each other, and you didn’t necessarily expect them to bleed into each other, but also thought you could make a go of it in the counterculture if you could find your way there. (I didn’t start going online until I was 18, in the year 2000, when I went to college.) Whereas now, it’s all one thing. Pace Angela Nagle’s famous title,⁴ there are no normies left to kill. The Boomers can’t stop fiddling with their phones at the restaurant table while I keep mine politely in my pocket; they read their ebooks while I still only read (at least anything serious) in print; and they’ve seen memes I’ve never even heard of. Perhaps we’re all hallucinating these days, but we’re in it together.

Resuming my present discourse, the above gives a hint as to why I can’t write off internet culture. Would either Gasda or I, with our notable lack of elite pedigree, really have a public voice without it? I know he made his name with live theater, and even got into the paper of record on its basis, and now I have a traditional book deal, and all the rest of it, but does any of that happen without help from online discourse? I remember when I felt like American culture was dead. That isn’t how I feel now. To borrow Gasda’s titular analogy between culture and cultivation, the vineyard has seasons of dormancy as well as of ripening and harvest. Christ’s very parable of the vineyard, moreover, teaches that the latecomer will receive the same reward as the earliest laborer. (It’s sometimes as if Christ had more in common with modernism’s antinomians than with the mundane churches who have governed in his name.) As I once argued in response to a contention that cinema was dead,⁵ the internet has rescued literature, not killed it. Movies and TV killed the word, while the internet has brought the word back. Or what else are we doing here?

1. I can’t believe I forgot to mention in the Whitman IC episode the time he placed his own anonymous reviews of Leaves of Grass in three separate journals, including The American Phrenological Review, where he prophesied that he would be “either the most lamentable of failures or the most glorious of triumphs, in the known history of literature.” When you start celebrating and singing yourself, where does it end? If you have the goods, though, why not? As I’ve stated already, I have not practiced this particular deceit—Pound did it, too—but that if I did, my own tactic would be to write the type of negative review that sells the book. Part of me wants to rip the proverbial Band-Aid off and post the complete ideological critique of Major Arcana that a righteous youngster on Goodreads will eventually provide. Let’s see if we can get this thing banned in Boston, as Whitman’s book was.

2. I will offer an example—I don’t remember if I ever discussed this publicly before—mainly because of the ironic light it throws on contemporary ideological debates. The year was 2006; the tenured professor in question was one Professor B. (no real names here). Not to auto-infantilize—though this is the habit of the age—I was all of 24 years old. Professor B., anticipating Obama’s later distinction between smart and dumb wars, argued against the Iraq War but in favor of the Afghanistan War as well as earlier humanitarian interventions. I argued by contrast that humanitarian intervention was the cover for an imperial will-to-power and that intellectuals of the metropole should in the main work to delegitimize the very idea. Professor B. told me I sounded more like a libertarian than a leftist. (A hit, a very palpable hit!) The spiraling comment sections went on forever, on his site and mine (I was blogging on Livejournal). People now known as tankies took my side, people more in the Christopher Hitchens camp took his. Vulgar execrations and accusations flew. We thought we were left-wing and they were right-wing; they thought they were left-wing and we were right-wing. It became an academic controversy. Someone made Professor B. promise he wouldn’t destroy my academic career, seeing as I was a first-year graduate student and he a tenured professor. (Judging from the state of my “academic career”—laawol!—he must not have kept his promise.) Here we are 20 years later. What tricks has history played on us amid the circulation of ideologies, where right and left change hands every generation? (By the way, Tao Lin thinks this is deliberate technique of the regnant powers to keep the populace bewildered.) I remain absolutely skeptical of war and the state, though I have abandoned almost every element of the Marxism and Third Worldism I once harbored and have come around to the very need for liberalism in culture that Professor B. was at the time rightly at pains to emphasize in the face of my radical-chic credulity. My erstwhile interlocutor has—well, see for yourself.

3. Thus of course Naomi Kanakia’s argument of this week that “[m]odernism sometimes seems like a bit of a trap to me—a sterile blossom,” and that readers and writers should accordingly focus on the 19th-century novel. I’ve made a similar argument myself. We almost certainly ought never to have left what George Steiner called the 19th century’s “garden of liberal culture.” I hope I am not understood to be denying that on the other side of a century Elizabeth Bishop called “the worst so far.” It’s just that we did leave it and have to live with some of the consequences, not all of which have been bad, o felix culpa. My self is hopelessly cleft in twain, then, which is why (for example) some critics have judged Major Arcana too modernist and some not modernist enough.

4. I speculated earlier this year that the failed prediction at the end of my 2017 Nagle review might come true this year. That was one Democratic candidate and two Trump assassination attempts ago, but events have not yet disproved my prediction a second time. The implication in my footnote is that Trump has too much elite collaboration this time to be overthrown by the administrative state as easily as in his largely (and partly self-) sabotaged first term or his “fortified” re-election bid. Such a prediction doesn’t depend on his winning in November, though from where I currently sit (in a or the swing-state whose embattled Democratic incumbent senator has just run an ad touting his ties to Trump) I suspect he will. It only needs a more even electoral contest to come true, which this electoral contest has been. Thus I preemptively declare myself prophetic. Overall this is a funhouse-mirror reflection of the election of the aforementioned year 2004. A close election the Democrats should win that may end up won by the Republicans instead, with all eyes on the Rust Belt, except that this time the Democrats are the Cheney-approved end-of-history imperial war party and the Republicans the party of a shaggy populist and semi- (probably inauthentic) anti-imperial rhetoric? It really is dizzying; I hardly know where or how I stand; I begin to feel I’ve lived too long. I am not a partisan and fear elements of what both parties have done and will do in both their ideological incarnations. All parties are war parties in the end. The calculus of the lesser evil always debases the soul. If the suffering of even one child calls into question the existence of God, then what does the suffering of even one child say about the legitimacy of the Democratic and Republican parties? And yet one sometimes makes this calculation, albeit with never enough fear and trembling. For one notable example, this time I’ll give Brother Gasda—I don’t why I’m talking like Cornel West; it just feels right; it must be all my rhetoric of prophecy—the last word, even as I know there can be no last word on this worldly subject, and that even this word has in its way (link appropriately via Angela Nagle on Substack Notes) been contested:

The free-floating talking point that “Trump and the Vance/RFK/Elon/Tulsi coalition will end democracy” spectacularly inverts our political reality. This coalition, for all its flaws, offers a necessary check on systems that spy, wage war, and enrich corporations selling both chemical and spiritual poisons. 

I don’t imagine that there’s a romantic, utopian outcome in which the relationship between citizen and state is redressed in the next four years—but we need foresters willing to clear the statist underbrush. Such an executive wouldn’t be a caretaker of bureaucratic overgrowth, but a restorer of political ecology. Imagine a president wielding a chainsaw, cutting back invasive administrative agencies, allowing sunlight to reach the floor of civic life. This clearing could be a controlled burn, allowing new political growth: self- and local governance.

5. Even cinema’s looking better these days, though, isn’t it? I’ll put the relevant passage of my earlier discourse here, nevertheless, if you don’t want to click through: Ross Douthat in the New York Times argues that American cinema reached its apogee in the late 1990s with the triumph of Titanic in 1998, around which the entire nation convoked, and then the filmic annus mirabilis of 1999 (year of The Matrix, Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Virgin Suicides, etc.), before the internet, broadly speaking, fragmented both the national audience and the very form of film. (The internet is the phenomenon for which McLuhan mistook television.) Douthat proposes an effort to canonize film through education, fully instituting it, like opera and jazz or drama and novel before it, as a once-pop and now-high art form:

But at this point, 20th-century cinema is a potential bridge backward for 21st-century young people, a connection point to the older art forms that shaped The Movies as they were. And for institutions, old or new, that care about excellence and greatness, emphasizing the best of cinema is an alternative to a frantic rush for relevance that characterizes a lot of academic pop-cultural engagement at the moment.

One of my formative experiences as a moviegoer came in college, sitting in a darkened lecture hall, watching “Blade Runner” and “When We Were Kings” as a cinematic supplement to a course on heroism in ancient Greece. At that moment, in 1998, I was still encountering American culture’s dominant popular art form; today a student having the same experience would be encountering an art form whose dominance belongs somewhat to the past.

I had a similar experience. The undergraduate Film Analysis class I took in 2001 introduced me to some of the great cinematic works, many of which became personal favorites: Halloween, The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Wings of Desire, Breathless, Do the Right Thing. We didn’t realize then that the movies were about to be over; we thought they had triumphed forever—and vanquished literature forever. The online world, in my view, gave literature a new lease on life, though we haven’t fully taken advantage of it yet.