Weekly Readings #80 (08/14/23-08/20/23)
libraries gave us power
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I was happy to appear in the RealClearBooks symposium on Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It? with my review, “Afraid of the Novel.” (Thanks to Alex Perez for the invitation.) I’m the negative voice in the symposium. Stephen G. Adubato of Substack’s own
states some of my own objections much more gently in his review and balances them with appropriate respect for Epstein’s literary eros. Still, I tried to make sure that my judgment at least took the form of an immanent critique, the most useful critical method in the Marxist repertoire and generative even outside the Marxist framework.1 An immanent critique demonstrates how a text fails to fulfill its own premise, rather than holding it accountable to some external (i.e., transcendent) standard irrelevant to what it’s trying to accomplish. In this case, I show how Epstein’s admirable refusal of totalizing ideology becomes a totalizing ideology of its own and forecloses too much literary pleasure and insight, even as he charges today’s leftist ideologues (not wrongly) of doing the same.2I also published “The Queen of Cups” this week, the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. Part Two of the novel now roars toward its catastrophe as occultist writer Simon Magnus and aniconic artist Marco Cohen undertake their momentous collaboration on Overman 3000, the gnostic-futurist graphic novel that will alter the culture—and their lives—forever. The next chapter drops this Wednesday. Please subscribe today!
For today’s post, a bit of an omnium gatherum as summer lazily trickles toward its listless conclusion. First, a wholly new reflection on some library bans; second and third, revised and expanded versions of two pieces that originally appeared on Tumblr this week in response to reader questions, one about the politics of Nietzsche and the other about my 10 favorite films. Please enjoy!
Libraries Gave Us Power: No Stopping the Heart
I noticed the other day an article about a public library in Mississippi whose conservative board has targeted the Heartstopper series of YA graphic novels:
The “Heartstopper” graphic novel series will no longer be available to minors at the Columbia-Marion County Public Library after its board agreed to a group of enraged residents’ demands to remove them from the young during a meeting on Friday. They will now be restricted to the adult section.
The board also agreed to initiate a review of every book in the young adult section for possible removal. The “Heartstopper” series, which is also a popular Netflix show, tells the story of two teen boys who fall in love but does not feature any explicit sexual content. The board did not explain its rationale for removing the books from minors’ access.
The library temporarily pulled the series from the shelves after an Aug. 9 meeting in which residents wrongly claimed the books were “pornographic.” One person at that earlier meeting claimed “homosexuals” were using the Heartstopper books “to recruit your kid, my kid and grandkid to get into that lifestyle.” The books also prominently feature a transgender girl.
They sell this book at Target, not to mention that anybody with half a brain and a wifi connection can download it in the next 10 seconds from a publicly available pirate site, so good luck banning it.3
But the story caught my eye for another reason. I haven’t read Heartstopper all the way through—it’s very much not my aesthetic—but some students once did a presentation on it in the same class where I was teaching Moto Hagio’s epochal “boys’ love” manga, The Heart of Thomas. The class as a whole had looked mildly askance upon Hagio’s erudite Wagnerian melodrama about suicidal Platonic boy-angels and smolderingly endemic fascism in a German boarding school, but the presenters extolled Heartstopper as comforting and salubrious. I asked them why, since Heartstopper and Heart of Thomas are both gay-boy stories by women and more or less for women. Aren’t both books, for all intents and purposes, boys’ love comics, raising the same ethical issues about who gets to tell whose stories and to whom and for what purposes? They told me that Heartstopper in all its gentleness deals more responsibly with issues of mental health and sexual assault than Hagio’s operatic saga. Has anybody, I wondered, considered informing the library board in Mississippi of this?
One summer when I was 11, I checked Jerzy Kosinski’s Steps out of the public library and read it in one sitting at the public pool.4 Steps is a work of surreal, fragmentary, and often violent modernist pornography, something like Kafka crossed with Anaïs Nin. It’s a pretty good book; it handles no issue responsibly; it won the National Book Award in the irresponsible year of 1969 and counted Hugh Kenner and David Foster Wallace among its admirers. Jerzy Kosinski, though, was a bit of a confidence man, so who knows if he wrote it all himself? The librarian, thank God, had no idea what it was. Now most libraries use self-checkout, so the point is probably moot.
Use and Abuse: Nietzsche to Your Right, Nietzsche to Your Left
A reader wrote to me on Tumblr with this question. My answer follows.
You’ve expressed your interest in, if not agreement with, the Nietzschean right. What do you think the prospects are for a rehabilitation of Nietzche on the left?
The left is so permeated with Nietzsche that they don’t need to cite him by name. For example, take their voluntarism about most forms of identity: this is an adaptation of his injunction to become who you are, crossed with his sense that language and discourse are pragmatically transformative (both of these routed through Foucault and his followers). The left’s Nietzscheanism halts before their racial ideology: they don’t regard racial identity as optional, at least for now, which he would judge an “abuse of history for life.” Nietzsche at his best would dismiss “generational trauma” and the like as weak-minded self-constraint, though at his worst he does write in more biologistic terms.
Ultimately, though, Nietzsche is more compatible with the left than the right, at least the left after the fall of Marxism.5 If the closest thing we’re going to get to a revolutionary subject is the class of experts, then a philosopher who extols individual becoming and the power of discourse beats one who talks about the materiality of labor. In other words, a left that believes language and not labor makes the world has Nietzsche and not Marx as its philosopher. Where the left has retreated from Nietzsche recently is in their over-moralization and bureaucratization of creativity, whether individual self-creation or the creative work of artists. I see some signs this is abating, however.
For an example of what’s at least somewhat refreshing about a Nietzschean right, I confess I did listen to Bronze Age Pervert’s Red Scare appearance. While I obviously disavow just about everything he said, I found cheering the part where he told them that these IQ-fixated Darwinist biological-racist types like Sailer and Hanania have, like Darwin before them, the small souls of Victorian shopkeepers—no sense of sublimity, to which the transgression of the criminal at least bears some witness. You can go much too far with that idea—I don’t romanticize violence at all: every crime is an uncommitted work of art, as Adorno almost said—but still, what’s Dionysian about an IQ test? I’m not a creationist, I’ll leave biology to the biologists, but for my purposes Darwin doesn’t help: he can’t explain either why I’m writing this or why you’re reading it.
A more old-school anti-Nietzsche leftist like Corey Robin would say that behind the religious veneer, behind Allan Bloom’s denunciation of the Nietzschified left in The Closing of the American Mind, the Reagan- and Bush-era neocons were crypto-Nietzscheans all along, making war as part of a vitalist project to renew the nation. This is sort of true, but redounds just as well against the liberals, as in Christian Lorentzen’s critique of BAP (now paywalled, alas) to the effect that the “bugmen” he disparages pretty effectively run the most dominant empire in human history. Not that this would be exculpatory for Robin or for other sons of Lukács like Geoff Waite or my old prof Tim Brennan. Waite:
The hypothesis and polemic: Neither “conservative,” “proto-fascist,” nor “proto-Nazi,” Friedrich Nietzsche is in fact the revolutionary programmer of late pseudo-leftist, fascoid-liberal culture and technoculture. Here his deepest influence is subconscious and subcutaneous. If any one person or thing is responsible for the death of communism as imagined fact or “the death of communism” as ubiquitous concept, then it is the concept “Nietzsche,” the man Nietzsche. Whom else should we then acknowledge? Whom else should we thank…or curse?
Michael Lackey’s Modernist God State is a brilliant example of left-Nietzscheanism, particularly as applied in literary criticism. Theories of modernity are largely theories of which German philosopher is to blame for Auschwitz. Lackey pins it on Kant and celebrates the modern novel from Conrad to Erdrich as the Nietzschean therapy we need to treat the incorrigible idealism that makes us slaughter others in the name of “the truth.” It’s a very 2000s “New Atheist” book, bracingly so, but I have my Catholic schoolboy side and my occult-shop mystic side, too, so I think it’s important to consider Chesterton’s worldview alongside Nietzsche’s and to remember how much Nietzsche owed to Emerson and how much larger Emerson’s soul is than Nietzsche’s.
Even an anti-philosopher is still a philosopher—not an artist. Artists love Nietzsche because he’s the only canonical philosopher who really seems to understand the psychology of the artist. Philosophers have too narrow a canon, though, and when we put him in the line of the artists, a line preceding as well as succeeding him, he doesn’t look as grand.
I’ve probably talked around your question more than I’ve answered it. Surely I need to read more Nietzsche, though I have read a fair bit from The Birth of Tragedy through to The Anti-Christ. (I concede I abandoned Zarathustra halfway through due to its bombast.) Please see my against-the-grain reading of The Genealogy of Morals, according to which the Jews and the Christians are that book’s heroes. I will end with a quotation I’ve shared on here before, in case anyone missed it the first time, from John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses:
It must be stressed that Lawrence, for all his Nietzschean debts, was not like Nietzsche. The range and subtlety of his imagination went far beyond Nietzsche’s. The Nietzschean warrior ideal, and countenancing of cruelty, could only have seemed disgusting to Lawrence, who turns his characters not into warriors but into flowers. […] To cite such passages—and there are hundreds of them in Lawrence—and to contemplate the impossibility of Nietzsche having written them, is not just to emphasize that Lawrence was a poet and that Nietzsche was in some respects a desperately restricted and unfulfilled human being. It is also to contend that, for Lawrence, the stance of natural aristocrat, with its presuppositions of isolation and alienation, was adverse to all the promptings of his sympathetic imagination, which taught him to fuse and integrate.
More important than a left- or right-Nietzscheanism is an artistic consciousness large enough to encompass and transcend all division. To his credit, the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy understood that.
Top 10 Redux: The Life and Death of Cinema
A reader wrote to me on Tumblr with this question. My answer follows.
A little late in the game, but had you received a Sight and Sound ballot, what would be your top 10 (I was reminded of the list because Paglia’s ballot was floating around Twitter recently, relentlessly mocked, but I mean, they're all fine films, and cinema is a populist, bourgeois medium...)
My list will be more controversial than hers. People reacted against her campy historical picks, but as a gay-male-identified lesbian she’s entitled to them. Even her Italian-American self-assertion via The Godfather is unexceptionable, and most of the rest were revered Euro art films. Network TV used to play The Ten Commandments annually around Easter—do they still do this?—and as a kid I watched it every single year, religiously as it were, relishing its ludicrous maximalism. Does that count for nothing?
I came of age in a different era than Paglia, learned to ask different things of the form, and anyway am not the all-around cinephile the Silent and Boomer critics tended to be, bowled over as they were by the thing’s novelty.6 (I made some notes on my taste here.) I find refreshing John David Ebert’s assertion that cinema before about 1970 doesn’t interest him much; he says the same about comics, and there’s more truth in that, too, than people want to deal with. The point is not to disparage the early masters in either form but to observe that the whole standard of the art rose, as well as its technical capacity. I could argue by application the same for the novel: it doesn’t get good until about the middle 19th century, admirable as Cervantes may be. I believe it was George Bernard Shaw who said that the later entrants in any genre tend to be the best, not the earlier.7 (Shakespeare, whom Shaw disliked, might be an exception, unless we consider him the epilogue to classical rather than the prologue to modern drama.)
Here, then, is my admittedly idiosyncratic list, in chronological order. The favorites are crowded into a 30-year period, possibly the high point of the art form; as announced in last week’s Weekly Reading, I’m in my middlebrow era, so I tried to avoid both wholly personal “comfort-watch” choices of a trashy nature (sorry, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) and extremely high-minded selections I am “supposed” to admire (I do admire Tarkovsky, but do I love him?). I didn’t put anything very recent on the list because the test of time is a real test.
Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, Maya Deren
Breathless, 1960, Jean-Luc Godard
The Exorcist, 1973, William Friedkin
Blade Runner, 1982, Ridley Scott
Videodrome, 1983, David Cronenberg
Wings of Desire, 1987, Wim Wenders
Nixon, 1995, Oliver Stone
Magnolia, 1999, Paul Thomas Anderson
Mulholland Drive, 2001, David Lynch
Lost in Translation, 2002, Sofia Coppola8
Like a once-great civilization that has lost the intellectual infrastructure to fashion a wheel or to build a fire, leftists have forgotten how to do immanent critique. This is why popular leftist criticism has been so bad over the last decade, demanding stark didacticism from every kind of work, ruling out certain subject matter tout court or else prescribing how it must be treated in every case, and judging artists and authors on one-dimensional grounds of social identity.
You might be wondering—while being too polite to ask—if it’s not both rude and pointless to arraign an 86-year-old man for his old-fashioned opinions. When Hitchens criticized Bellow, Amis scolded him: “Don’t cheek your elders.” The objection might be fair in general—that is, if it’s not patronizing—but not in this case. I’ve been reading Epstein for years. I could have paid generous tribute to him the way William Giraldi does in his American Audacity, but a bad review is its own kind of offering to a masterful bad reviewer. Epstein is a great artist of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger hatchet-job, so I felt no qualm about hoisting him on his own petard. About a decade ago, I read one of his earliest collections of reviews, Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing, published in 1985 when he was not much older than I am now, so I know his attitudes have not changed considerably since his earlier adulthood. He was more entertainingly mean back then, though. I will take the occasion of this footnote to quote my two favorite of that book’s zingers. First is his ironical labeling of the gloomy Renata Adler and Joan Didion as “The Sunshine Girls.” Second, I give you the conclusion of an essay on García Márquez:
Thus, to return to where I set out, a short answer to my question—how good is Gabriel García Márquez?—is that he is, in the strict sense of the word, marvelous. The pity is that he is not better.
This is why, even though I’m your proverbial free-speech fundamentalist, I can’t take seriously either the left or the right in the great “banned book” library wars. Publicly elected school and library boards have the right to run the libraries they oversee as they like—if you accept democracy, you have to accept this—but at the same time they’re plugging a tiny crack in the great ship of culture while a volcanic gout of seawater erupts behind them from a gaping breach of the hull. I view those who directly target political speech—i.e., “misinformation”—on internet platforms as a much more serious threat to our fundamental rights, not to mention whatever subsumption into the machine our emerging “collective consciousness” will require of us in the future before we have any right to speak at all. Compared to this technocratic governance, what’s in the local library is of little concern.
In my Pittsburgh suburb, the public pool and the public library were adjacent, a set-up I borrowed for a couple of scenes in my novel, The Class of 2000. My private conceit for The Class of 2000 was that I would write a completely non-autobiographical novel set only in locales from my childhood and adolescence and consisting mostly of stories borrowed from other people I knew as a child and adolescent. The idea was to turn autofiction inside out: to tell the story of everybody and everything in my life but me. In this context, though, I have to insist that the scene where the protagonist ejaculates on Jowett’s Plato in the public library is wholly original, not taken from any real-life story I’ve ever heard. I probably had that other dirty book of 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint, in mind. I’m sure, even so, that this scene ruins the novel’s chances of being stocked in the public library of Columbia-Marion County. Luckily, a paid subscription to this Substack grants you access to a free pdf of The Class of 2000 in addition to my other two previous novels.
I entered college as an English major in the year 2000. The previous year was the filmic annus mirabilis of 1999 (The Matrix, Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, The Virgin Suicides, etc.) We were sure film had defeated literature forever, even as I stubbornly persisted in my goal to write great novels, with a bit of resentment against cinema no doubt rattling somewhere in my soul. Then the internet fragmented both the national audience and the very form of film; film is now relegated to the “second screen,” while my writing, if it appears at all, appears on the first. You never know how things will work out. The formal regress of the Sight and Sound poll itself—it celebrates in succession the technical bravura of Citizen Kane, then the gorgeously anxious meta-cinema of Vertigo, and finally the punitive anti-cinema of Jeanne Dielman—testifies to film’s decline in our era.
Among other reasons for this: later works contain earlier ones. Citizen Kane should be on my list, but it’s inside of Stone’s Nixon; likewise with Vertigo, Persona, and Sunset Boulevard vis-à-vis Mulholland Drive. There’s a problem with this perspective: it leads to the terminus of art in mere archivism, the dead-end of a certain “postmodernism” or what Nietzsche would scorn as the cultural inertia of “Alexandrian man.” But a cult of the primordial, an exaltation of bloody vitality, has the opposite problem, that of mindlessness. Whatever is done with conviction, done out of love, will prevail, however, whether it pursues an aesthetic of the early or an aesthetic of the late.
I hesitated over this one. Its ugly Americanism is definitely ugly. Japan, however, is now so hegemonic over youth and popular culture in America that a little ribbing doesn’t strike me as so problematic anymore; it’s like making fun of the French. Plus, what Paglia would celebrate as Coppola’s Italianate aestheticism lurking behind Charlotte’s neurotic white-womanism (think of Woolf being tutored in Greek and Latin by Pater’s sister) instructed a generation for better and for worse how to romanticize our urban vagabondage.
Good piece on Nietzsche, and I think that movie list could do more to sell you as middlebrow than anything you wrote last week lol! In all seriousness, I get your qualifications – and I do tend to think a kind of philistine local authoritarianism is too centrally part of American life to get monstrously worked up about library book bans-but I still have to disagree about their being no great shakes for loads of reasons that I won't bore you with. That said I do think that sort of fight is useful in that it reminds left-libs of what they should be: defenders of books and freedom of expression, rather than what they often seemed to want to be over the last decade: petty bureaucrats concerned only with some perceived instrumental purpose of the text.
The only pick that surprised me here is Magnolia but if you see it as the culmination of a certain Altman/Scorsese line of style I can see it. I think about lines from that film a lot. Per Paul Schrader’s little chart, I take it you’re more Mandala than Surveillance Camera; have you ever tried any Weerasethakul? He’s the only modern, strictly highbrow slow movie guy I’ve ever gotten hyped about. (I share your anxiety about having my time wasted on these things, one of my favorite things to say when picking movies is I refuse to watch a movie called “Bicycle Thieves.” “What’s it even about? They just steal bikes?”)