Weekly Readings #2 (02/12/22-02/18/22)
where the vibe shift is, there too grows the saving power
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 about The Age of Innocence. I begin with a provocation: “Is Edith Wharton an American novelist?” This query was inspired not only by the hesitation about Wharton’s eminence found in major American critics like Edmund Wilson and Cynthia Ozick or by Gilles Deleuze’s contrast between “too human” French writers and “superior” American ones, but also by Wharton’s own excellent 1925 work The Writing of Fiction—you can read the whole thing for free on Google Books—where she traces her own literary lineage mainly to the French masters of the realist novel, especially Balzac. By contrast, the main tradition of the American novel, from Brockden Brown to Beloved, has never been realist but romantic. Even so, The Age of Innocence, supernally eloquent and perfectly poised between social and psychological fiction, is as close to a perfect novel as you’ll ever read (this itself is a French trait!), and I highly recommend it. Personally, I’ll always be grateful to Wharton for the unseasonably hot night in May of 1999 when, alone in a suburban house, I dutifully, grudgingly took up my 11th-grade reading assignment—Ethan Frome, of course—and emerged two hours later in a sweat-soaked daze from my breathless immersion in that frigid tragedy of thwarted love, my adolescent pity and terror duly purged.
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:
I linked Joseph M. Keegin’s critique of Fred Moten to my thoughts on Ulysses of the previous week, tracing the bad-faith insider/outsider dynamic Keegin deplores in Moten’s academic radicalism to Joyce’s similar subaltern experimentalism; I too dislike it as a social phenomenon, but, as I write in that post, the literary classic almost has to live this double life to be a classic:
The Matthew Arnold view, as adapted by Du Bois and Adler and others, is right that the classic has to see life steadily and see it whole, to participate in universal culture; but the Walter Pater attitude, upheld by Moten and today’s culture radicals, is also right that the classic, to remain too much of an irritant to ignore, needs considerable anti-social energies.
I quoted Alex Perez quoting David Samuels—from the prelude to a superb interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy—on the decline of mainstream literature today (“They would never dream of publishing right-wing cranks like Joan Didion”) and advocated small-press and independently published writing (like my own) as an alternative; then I quoted Justin E. H. Smith’s excellent “After Literacy” on the responsibility of the real writer before defending writing per se, and on paper, against rival media:
Writing is not one medium among many, but the meta-medium organizing all others. The future belongs to those who show up, and if we’re not writing, we’re not showing up.
I revisited my brief essay on Brandon Cronenberg’s thriller Possessor to try to understand Canada’s present turn to what I perhaps euphemistically called “the post-national post-civic,” which a more excitable temperament might label “tyranny”;
I recalled the way political positions on the pandemic reversed themselves between January and March of 2020 and tried to account for how the left ended up on the side of totalizing corporatist biopolitics, as well as the disadvantages of what I take to be the merely reactive right-wing sensibility and the possible role art might play in saving us from technocratic totalitarianism: “As the poet said: where the danger is, there too grows the saving power”;
I tried to explain why someone wrote in the New York Times or Washington Post or one of those rags that “freedom is a key component of White [sic] supremacy” with a little lineage of liberationist politics and quotes from Ralph Ellison and Gillian Rose;
and I explored the so-called “vibe shift”—roughly speaking, metropolitan bohemia turning nihilist-apolitical-reactionary, which I’ve been writing about on Tumblr since 2019 under the rubric “The New Conservatism”—with a quotation from its own mysterious and controversial SubStack exponent Angelicism01, a recollection of academic literary personality in the waning days of deconstructive hegemony, and a discussion of the legitimate and illegitimate uses of esotericism in writing.
On my YouTube channel, I continue to convert my fiction to audio. This time it’s my 2015 flash fiction/prose poem “Iconoclasm,” about zealots destroying a museum and learning (or not) to love abstract art:
Elsewhere online, don’t miss John Gray on eugenics in The New Statesman, with this disturbing incitement to thought:
The discovery that six million European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, along with hundreds of thousands of people with physical disabilities, mental illnesses or other characteristics – such as simply being gay – that supposedly made their lives “unworthy of living”, was a rupture in history. Ideas and policies that had been regarded by an entire generation of thinkers as guides to improving the species were seen to be moral abominations. Eugenics had enabled an unparalleled crime. An earlier generation’s understanding of progress was not just revised. It was rejected, and something more like its opposite accepted.
This reversal should be unsettling for progressive thinkers today. How can they be sure that their current understanding will not also be found wanting?
And right here on SubStack is N. S. Lyons with an analysis of current events in light of the contrast between physical and virtual labor (with the orthodox/gnostic conflict in the theological background):
There is an obvious irony here in the fact that ostensibly left-wing parties, like Trudeau’s Liberals, have everywhere turned viciously on the working class…but this is merely the culmination of a long, inevitable political realignment that’s occured across the West as the “left” became the party of the Virtuals, the socialist revolution became a revolution against fixed reality, and the Physicals became the backwards, reactionary others standing in the way of Progress.
As a member of the physical class by birth and the virtual one by training, I can sympathize with aspects of both politics (the old left/new right vs. the new left/old right). You don’t have to idealize some propaganda-poster image of “The Worker,” though, to understand that the expert class has become (my apologies to Susan Sontag) a cancer in the body politic, and that some balance needs somehow to be restored before we all die and go to the metaverse. Maybe we virtualists could take a page from Edith Wharton—literally—and try to write perfect prose by hand for a bit, if only to restore some relation to the world of obdurate things and (Wharton’s own preferred theme) immoveable realities.
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