Weekly Readings #1 (02/05/22-02/11/22)
responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I wrote a skeptical account of The Ambassadors by Henry James, one of the major novels of the author’s notoriously difficult late period. I conclude that James is, in this book, caught between moral realism and amoral modernism and unable to satisfy the demands of either mode.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss, I’ve contributed the following:
an appreciation of Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which I finally watched and, somewhat to my surprise, enjoyed as “a legitimately—not cheaply—uplifting movie, intensely anti-postmodern”;
a rejoinder to Roxane Gay’s “I would never support censorship” call for censorship in the New York Times;
a riposte to a Tweet denouncing Giorgio Agamben, where I argue that Agamben’s controversial attack on pandemic measures, and his no doubt reckless Holocaust comparisons, are (if an amateur is permitted to weigh in) consistent with his philosophical tradition, and that those who espouse this tradition while cancelling Agamben may therefore be in bad faith;
and a commentary on Merve Emre’s lyrical New Yorker appreciation of Ulysses on its centenary, in which I compare two of my own professors’ wildly divergent assessments of Joyce’s classic novel—one saw it as the bible of postmodern liberation, especially sexual liberation, the other as the book that sentenced us (especially women) to languish under the rule of a cosmopolitan expertise telling us at all hours what we think and desire—and what it means for our tech-liberated or tech-addled present.
On my YouTube channel, I’m experimenting with audio fiction. This week I’ve posted a reading of perhaps my favorite of my own short stories, one that breaks all the ethical rules of fiction-writing in our present moment, “Sweet Angry God”:
Elsewhere online, it’s been a great week for hatchet jobs, as Becca Rothfeld fells To Paradise in the TLS and Esther Manov, at UnHerd, leaves a stain on the floor where Fuccboi once stood:
The problem is that this book, like so many others in its milieu, values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot). Fuccboi does accurately represent the cretinous depravity of the Millennial generation, as well as the self-aggrandising cult of martyrdom — increasingly by self-diagnosed mental or physical illness — with which my generation shirks the responsibilities historically incumbent upon the civilised mind. But that does not make Fuccboi a work of art.
I couldn’t resist borrowing this paragraph’s stateliest phrase for the present entry’s subtitle. On the podcast front, I enjoyed Manifesto! on Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic grotesques contra the managed sentimentality (“best practices for writing trauma”) of our own literary epoch. Finally, right here on SubStack, I recommend Alice Gribbin on “Art for Art’s Sake in the 21st Century” (l’art pour l’art and its paradoxes was partially the topic—along with James Joyce!—of my doctoral dissertation Modernism’s Critique du Coeur, not to mention my novel Portraits and Ashes, both completed nearly a decade ago).
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and, as Henry James’s hero in The Ambassadors famously advises, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”