Weekly Readings #70 (06/05/23-06/11/23)

gems amid offal

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

It’s been an active week in John-world. First, in the company of Sam Worthington, I left the storied Hotel Abyss and took to the blood-spattered asphalt (“down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean”) to attend the Art of Darkness podcast’s first live show, which I reported on here. Second, for paid subscribers, I posted free pdfs of my three previous novels—Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, and The Class of 2000—which has already led to discussion of the latter two perhaps under-appreciated works over on my Tumblr, with one reader calling the classically realist suburban tragedy The Class of 2000 my best book. Finally, because it stands alone as a short story as well as an integral part of an ongoing narrative, I made the most recent chapter of my serialized novel Major Arcana, “The High Priestess,” available to all readers, not just paid subscribers. The paywall will fall again this week, alas, as the novel departs darkest New England for the big city and the world of comics. Please subscribe today!

For this week, a wide-ranging reflection on the merits and demerits of having a wide range. Please enjoy!

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Bathroom Chandelier: How Can I Be Interested in That?

Lady Frieda Harris, Six of Cups, Thoth Tarot

Another exciting development this week was Blake Smith’s unspeakably generous tribute to me. (“Tribute to me” is a beautiful phrase, lovelier than “cellar door.”)¹ One scrupulously critical passage in the encomium, though, albeit one that eventually redounds to my credit, brought to mind something I’ve wanted to talk about here lately: “at least once every week or two I find myself stung with annoyance asking ‘how could he be interested in that?’” Examples include: “truly silly people like Logo, Ulysse, Yarvin, and the world of Urbit.”

Over on Tumblr, in a post otherwise devoted to mocking the CIA’s Pride celebration with a few punning lines from Lacan about the structural inability of “the Law” to command the kind of disruptive ecstasis I once understood the flag the CIA now flies to signify,² I also noted that I was reading Lacan because an old friend from graduate school asked me to. She was motivated at least in part, I believe, by the same few reservations about my possibly indiscriminate intellectual tastes that Smith expressed. I recalled the amusing sentence about Camille Paglia from Gillian Rose’s incomparable deathbed testament, Love’s Work:

She is convinced of her originality and dismissed Jim’s urgings that she read Lacan, to temper the archetypal patterns of Sexual Personae.

My question, then, is this: what are the bounds of intellectual discourse, the proper parameters of intellectual good taste? Smith and I share in common what he calls a “provincial” background—not the same provinces, either culturally or geographically, but the same distance from the culture of the metropole, an upbringing in houses to which, as he put it on Eminent Americans, the New York Times and the New Yorker did not come.³ Smith attributes his “Jacobinism” to this background, but I am largely without Jacobinism.⁴ The rich you will always have with you, as our savior said, and anyway I might someday join them. I have to register my judgment against metropolitan culture another way than by imagining its material dispossession.

I was also never much of a true believer in academe. The job situation in the academic humanities is so bad now that it’s blotted out the memory of how bad it was 20 years ago. In any case, I never planned for a tenure-track job and considered the Ph.D. program—they can’t revoke the stipend if I admit this now, can they?—a form of public assistance to aid my developing literary career. The aim, early and late, was to write what could neither be ignored nor forgotten; the only peer review that matters to me will be conducted by the readers who’ll read me after I’m dead, not some anonymous and resentment-laden assistant professor whose imaginary turf my thesis on James Joyce has transgressed. (“Peer review” in a field like literature is utterly grotesque—spiritually illegitimate—but that’s a conversation for another day.)

Years ago, I was talking to an old friend of mine, one who left academe, and we were talking about the phenomenon of people with protracted formal educations calling themselves “autodidacts.” We found it a bit self-serving but also self-servingly thought the term applied to us, too, despite our own protracted formal educations. He concluded that an “autodidact,” by contrast with what we might call an “official intellectual,” is one to whom this question, asked in outrage, might apply: “You actually believe this shit?”

In other words, the official intellectual, at least in the humanities, handles “radioactive material”—the visions of deranged poets, the speculations of pre-scientific philosophers, the manifestoes of revolutionaries, all manner of theological and theosophical theses, the testimony of seers and shamans, etc.—with the calipers of an intellectual method (usually some combination of historicism and formalism) meant to neutralize them as ideas in which anyone might sincerely believe or ways of life anyone might actually adopt. Autodidacts, by contrast, are prepared to be convinced by the next book they pick up.

The point is not to stigmatize the official intellectual; the material often really is radioactive. Only by being neutralized, by being placed in the museum, as it were,⁵ can discredited discourses be preserved at all for purposes of scientific study and aesthetic pleasure; prior and more absolutist cultures would simply have immolated these discourses’ material vessels, whether the priest or the scripture or both. I don’t want to mindlessly valorize the autodidact, either, who may be about to download The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and read it with maximum credulity.

Still, the autodidact is willing to be a first-order rather than a second-order reader—to ask, for example, if D. H. Lawrence’s novels might offer any answer to life’s questions rather than asking how D. H. Lawrence’s novels exemplify (and in ways consciously inaccessible to the author) changing norms of sexuality in the years around the Great War. In this way, the autodidact’s reading is not a retreat from reality but a venture deeper into it, as opposed to the official intellectual, who may here answer to the old reproach against the academic for flying from life. Insofar as second-order reading becomes a class marker—that is, insofar as the intelligentsia is a discrete class—then one not to the manner born, even if assimilated into the culture of the official intellectual, may forever retain the habits of the autodidact.

Because the autodidact sees the loss in liveliness accompanying the official intellectual’s neutralization of culture, the autodidact doesn’t necessarily prize the types of culture the official intellectual does and has therefore a greater tolerance for styles of thought outside official norms—again, for better and for worse. Then there is the tragicomedy that ensues when the autodidact, shut out of academe while he lived, is canonized within it later, e.g., Walter Benjamin, scolded in life by the grandees of the Frankfurt School that his mystic leaps failed to obey dialectical logic, but enshrined after death as the radical academic’s patron saint. But is this a difference of degree or of kind from Yeats’s canonization as the century’s great poet despite or because of his converse with spirits? It’s a strange world; I don’t rule much of anything out. I rule out less and less as I get older and older.

The consequences of my own autodidacticism haven’t been dangerously political as such—though I’ve made no secret that I find the professional class’s compulsive and hysterical psychosexual revulsion against Trump itself revolting, very nearly an instance of the Nazi affect they project upon this parvenu they revile precisely because he represents forms of life and of flesh they cannot govern, not even within themselves.⁶ This is, in its way, “provincial middle-class Jacobinism,” a certain obdurate if rarefied fidelity to the political culture in which I was reared, despite all this culture’s grievous faults that I’m sure you don’t need me to enumerate.⁷

Mostly, however, my autodidacticism has been aesthetic. I think of those lines from the Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

In early adulthood, you scorn your adolescent interests and adopt sophisticated replacements. J. M. Coetzee displaces John Steinbeck as your model for the political novelist, for example, and maybe rightly so. Later, though, you may learn what was intriguing and valuable about those jejune attractions in the first place.⁸ In practice, this has meant rediscovering the basic acceptability—to myself—of my early literary tastes, or of certain kinds of “instinctive” reactions to narrative emplotments, fictional characterizations, orders of language.⁹

It’s meant as a writer of fiction that I proceed by feeling, rather than allowing myself, as I once did, to be paralyzed by an overly intellectual sense of my work’s formal organization or political implication. If the feeling is right, the intellectual justification will follow of itself; if the feeling is wrong, no amount of thought can save it. And it’s meant, as a canvasser of the culture, that I’m willing to take seriously strange characters and compelling rhetoric even if I can’t quite translate them into terms acceptable to the part of my mind trained to be the official intellectual. It may be as my character Simon Magnus reflects in the latest chapter of Major Arcana,

Tarot and comics, then, were the highest forms of artistic consciousness, despite both forms’ association with fortune tellers and smut peddlers, gypsies by the roadside and hack artists who couldn’t get hired anywhere else. “‘Despite’ or ‘because’?” Simon Magnus would rhetorically ask interviewers and audiences—for wasn’t wisdom always scattered in the trash, pearls before swine, gems amid offal, shards of divinity lodged in the prison of the flesh?¹⁰

1. Smith reflects on the ludicrous recursion of commentary involved here:

It’s embarrassing, or ought to be, when I find myself appreciating someone who appreciates me, and thus, surely, appreciating them to whatever degree because they appreciate me.

I shamelessly add another layer, appreciating the appreciation of me written by someone I appreciate. I note that Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound anonymously wrote positive reviews of their own books. In times like these, when the collapsing institutions are ranged against one, there is almost no limit to the amount of hype one has to generate for oneself, whether we are embarrassed about it or not.

2. All glosses of the unreadable Lacan should of course be footnoted with something like, “If in fact that’s what he meant—who the hell knows?” Then, by way of an apologia for our surreallo-therapist’s impenetrability, we should also note his aim to fuse Freud not only with structuralism but with Russian Formalism as well, that school pledged to using language against itself to disrupt settled habits of thought and perception. There is, accordingly, an authentic therapeutic use for a language that subverts the illusory stability of the ego and the social structure in which it’s caught and by which it’s constituted. As Hobbes once said to Calvin, “Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.” I am willing to be minimally charitable to the rebarbative Lacan because several commentators have suggested that his theory systematizes and codifies Joyce in the same way that Freud systematizes and codifies Shakespeare. (Who, by the way, is Jung’s corresponding literary artist? Goethe?)

3. I began buying the New Yorker from the magazine stand at Giant Eagle (a regional grocery chain) when I was in high school. I think my first issue featured Lillian Ross’s recollections of Hemingway, whom I was then discovering. I also remember what must have been a very early music review by Hilton Als—I wonder how it would go over now!—arguing essentially (or anti-essentially) that PJ Harvey was “blacker” than Lauryn Hill, aesthetically speaking. On the other hand, that the New York Times is a worthless propaganda rag was and even today remains a judgment held in common between the provincial “Reagan Democrat” milieu I grew up in and the academic radical world I was later acculturated into.

4. I suspect we need an astrologer on this case. Libra rising is probably the relevant stellar determinant for me: I’m too much of a people-pleaser ever to erect a guillotine.

5. See my essay on In the Flow for Boris Groys’s account of the development of museums and of aesthetic appreciation as revolutionary gestures. Groys writes:

Instead of destroying the sacral and profane objects belonging to the old regime, they defunctionalized, or in other words, aestheticized them. The French revolution turned the designs of the old regime into what we now call art, that is, into objects not for use but for pure contemplation. This violent, revolutionary act of aestheticizing the old regime created art as we know it today. Before the French revolution, there was no art—only design. After the French revolution, art emerges as the death of design.

6. That their psychosexual hysteria—a chandelier above the toilet!—has so destabilized and disregulated this elite that they would be willing to violate, against their own eventual interests, the principle of not prosecuting former presidents, all of them implicitly and inherently criminal, speaks for itself. I say prosecute them all—start with W. Bush—or prosecute none, but just one? C’mon, man!

7. See on or around this topic Smith’s most recent piece, “Mugged by Reality,” on “conservatives as the new queers”—not meant as a compliment to either of the named groups; meant rather to suggest the damage done by even justified paranoia and resentment to the intellectual life, damage done by closets of all sorts.

8. It helps, I have to say, if you had some inborn taste even in adolescence, though. My mother’s business card reads “aesthetician.” So might mine, if I had one.

9. From the safety of Tumblr, though I should have known better, I recently picked a fight with a well-known public critic whose artistic sensibility I find positively injured by its own finickiness, this in somewhat scarily incongruous combination with a totalizing politics to suggest the future reign of some style police. To quote from that famous first issue of n+1, “You can go through the defense of taste and come out the other side, as if you jumped out the kitchen window into the alley dumpster.” He retaliated on Twitter by saying he found my own occasionally elevated prose style so “pretentious”—mistaking gratuitous luxury for true good taste being an unfailing mark of the arriviste, cf. again Trump’s bathroom chandelier—that it was trying his “magnanimity.” His magnanimity! In my head, I heard a cartoonish urban Italian-American working-class voice: “Getta loadda Motha Teresa ovah heah!”

10. Two notes on this passage, which, in any case, is the utterance of an ethically ambiguous fictional character and not my own thesis. First, it’s not to be confused with poptimism, since the kind of culture poptimism promotes, i.e., mainstream pop music and movies, is mass-manufactured and engineered from the top down (due to the amounts of money involved in the production) to a much higher degree than items like comics, books, and occult paraphernalia, though of course everything takes place “under capitalism.” I am interested not in “pop” but in the intersection of “high” with “fringe,” insofar as digital leveling has left any of these discriminations intact. Second, for the sensitivity reader, I know perfectly well that one is not supposed to say “gypsies by the roadside,” but the character making the observation in less enlightened times does not. It’s called verisimilitude.