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 Cynthia Ozick’s 2010 novel Foreign Bodies, inspired by her beloved Henry James’s The Ambassadors (subject of a recent essay of mine and of the most recent episode of Grand Podcast Abyss). I’ve written about Ozick often over the years. I think no living writer and very few dead writers wrestle more strenuously with the questions that underlie the making of art and therefore of humanity’s whole relationship to nature and the divine. As I write:
Not many great novelists are also equally great essayists. When it does happen—Woolf might be the 20th-century paradigm case, at least in the Anglophone world—the novelistic and essayistic visions tend to agree, as, say, when Orlando narrativizes A Room of One’s Own or A Room of One’s Own codifies Orlando. With Ozick the great essayist—the great moralist!—and the great novelist—the great sensualist!—are at odds, a conflict she herself pictures as Jerusalem vs. Athens with the “after Auschwitz” stakes as high as they could possibly be.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss, I’ve primarily been concerned, as the tag indicates, with war—more precisely with the public responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on social media, particularly as these touch, often spuriously, on American obsessions with cultural questions of race, gender, and anti-imperialism:
And yes, I am electing to spend this war, about which I have nothing concretely useful to say, policing abuses of humanist generalism by people who don’t even have anything abstractly useful to say.
But I also wrote about other things only tangentially related or not related at all to the war:
I speculated about “who psyops the psyoppers” upon learning from social media (the most reliable source, as we know) about the Ford Foundation’s role in Tumblr, the vector of so much of the last decade’s cultural damage;
I appreciated a Twitter thread defining literature as the “suspension of Mimesis outside time” and attempted to explicate this definition with my own understanding of mimesis deriving from René Girard, Aristotle, and (though I fail to mention him) Erich Auerbach;
I related an anecdote about academe from a friend, demonstrating the paradoxes of a progressive politics premised on the total avoidance of supposed psychic harm;
and I explored, in a post that I hope reads as properly anguished rather than as some kind of gotcha game, the question of cultural and linguistic difference by putting into dialogue the European individualism and irony of Milan Kundera, the subaltern multiculturalism (or as we’d now say “diversity and equity”) of Toni Morrison, and the multipolar ethnophilosophy of Alexander Dugin (AKA “Putin’s Brain” and the “Russian Heidegger”), with an implicit suggestion that the emergent worldview of western institutions, what Wesley Yang calls “the successor ideology,” has far more in common with Dugin than with Kundera even if Morrison is its public face, proving we are certainly no longer in the world of the postwar liberal consensus.
Elsewhere online, and right here on SubStack, Justin E. H. Smith makes another appearance here at Grand Hotel Abyss, essaying “The Paradoxes of Pacifism,” where he wonders if there are any successor ideologists in foxholes:
Among baboons we know that there is an obscenely high rate of mortality among young males who fight each other to the death in order to establish their place in the social hierarchy, but that there is also some sizeable minority of males who just opt out altogether, laze about with the females, engage in mutual grooming with them as at a beauty salon. These wily fellows are not so much “beta” as “sigma”, to use the internet lingo: they tend to do fairly well, reproductively, and the males who by contrast advance through aggression do not tend to see them as competitors, but rather as belonging to an altogether different class of beings. That had always been somewhat my ambition in this life.
But violence under the mass mobilizations of nation states is different from one-on-one violence in primate social groups. You can try to weasel your way out of it with draft deferrals, like Trump and Cheney and so many others, but one thing you can’t do is face the enemy and say: “I’m a sigma, actually”, or “Hold on, now, my pronouns are ‘they/them’”. Many Ukraine independentists may well be trying to position themselves within a sphere of values shared with those countries now pioneering post-biological conceptions of gender identity, but still, for President Zelenskyy, when it comes to fighting the Russians, a male is a male.
I like the description of the sigma baboon since it resembles my life story in so many particulars. I really did spend the summer days of my childhood in a beauty salon, Francine’s Hair Emporium, where my mother worked as an “aesthetician” (so it said on her business card; so it might say on mine, if I had one). I would read the ladies Superman and Batman comics as the hair was styled. Later, in middle and high school, though many and at times most of my friends were girls, I always got along perfectly well with the jocks, and counted them too among my friends, though to this day I could not tell you the rules of a single sport. But even if it had been available to me then, I would not personally have reached for the language of “they/them.” Why should I agree with the schoolyard bully (usually in my experience not a jock but an asocial brute) that my tastes and interests mean I am not a man? My idea was and remains: I am a man; therefore whatever I do is what a man does and whatever I am is what a man is.
On the podcast front, I recommend the most recent episode of Contain, which identifies the danger of technocracy east and west; though you can take it with this particular grain of salt, also on SubStack, the reminiscence of a Canadian conservative politician who has seen the World Economic Forum up close and concluded it was bathetic rather than menacing, even as she holds some of its inflammatory rhetoric responsible for its becoming an object of conspiracy theories.
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So…not to fall victim to “virtue signaling,” but the website or blog you linked to as a source on Alexander Dugin in a previous post is unabashedly shilling for an impoverished vision of even the most tentative liberalism…they cheekily promote posts as utterly racist and offensive to the barest intellectual as: https://www.countere.com/home/cuckold-simulator-life-as-beta-male-cuck-review An extended meditation on a pornographic fantasy where brutish Afro-Americans replace sweet, professionally-oriented white men in their suburban homes. No sense in pursuing guilt by association, but that outlet seems sub-rosa invested in incel culture. I’ve been following your Tumblr for a while. I expect better. (And for Dugin, there are so many sources.)