A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
On this week’s episode of Grand Podcast Abyss, “Crossfire,” Sam and I discussed Russia’s war in Ukraine, as matters stood last Saturday. Only after the episode was released, did I find an apt characterization of the positions Sam and I staked out. Intercept journalist Murtaza Hussain recently Tweeted:
What's the distinct far-left position on global events now? Russia latest conflict that suggests there really isn't one anymore and in the 21st century people effectively have a choice between being realists, liberal-internationalists or ethnic/religious nationalists.
Our conversation might be described as conversation about ethnic/religious nationalists between two ex-far-leftists, one more sympathetic to realism, one more sympathetic to liberal internationalism.
To give more context to the liberal internationalist and realist perspectives, let me recommend two documents where exponents of these traditions voice their views. On the Liberties journal podcast, there is Leon Wieseltier in discussion with Celeste Marcus for the liberal internationalist perspective of a proud Cold Warrior, and in a video conversation hosted by Tablet magazine (for which I’ve written), we have Glenn Greenwald and Lee Smith making a case against escalation or intervention. Obviously neither Sam nor I endorse everything said in either forum.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I didn’t manage a post this week, but I’d like to recommend two from my eight-year archive. Wieseltier’s remark in the Liberties podcast above that he felt exhilaration when the war broke out—here at last was moral clarity—reminded me of something Christopher Hitchens said after 9/11:
Watching the towers fall in New York, with civilians incinerated on the planes and in the buildings, I felt something that I couldn’t analyze at first and didn't fully grasp…until the day itself was nearly over. I am only slightly embarrassed to tell you that this was a feeling of exhilaration. Here we are then, I was thinking, in a war to the finish between everything I love and everything I hate. Fine. We will win and they will lose.
In that light, I recommend my essay on Martin Amis’s most recent novel, Inside Story, an autofictional account of the author’s friendship with Hitchens. In my piece I confront my (and in fact Amis’s) misgivings about Hitchens’s exhilarated bellicosity:
I remember quarreling in about 2007 with a friend who was lustily denouncing Hawthorne’s skepticism about the Civil War. I asked him if he opposed the Iraq War. “Of course!” What did I think he was—a rube, some kind of Republican? And yet. Which of Hawthorne’s objections to the Civil War—to the Republicans—did not recur in our objections to Iraq? I remember coming back to my dorm from an anti-war protest in the winter of 2003 and turning on the TV to hear Bill Kristol smugly exclaim, “The left sounds like Henry Kissinger now!”
Plus ça change, n’est-ce pas? And to put those years and their relationship to our time in an even broader context, I recommend my essay on the late Australian journalist, critic, and poet Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. There I wrestle with what is living and what is dead in James’s passionately Hitchensian liberal interventionist ideology, his bright insistence that
The world is turning into one big liberal democracy anyway. […] Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.
My own preferred Hegel quotation can be found in the subtitle of this entry. Whatever position we take, we shouldn’t forget that.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I addressed Michael Millerman, the exegete of Putinist philosopher Alexandr Dugin, mentioned in our last podcast episode, and considered the possibility that the west’s moralism might be costing it irreplaceable expertise:
The Tolkien/Marvel approach to conflict—where the enemy is absolutely metaphysically evil, an animalistic madman without human motivation—degrades the mind and soul, fully as much as Dugin-style ethno-philosophy. I admire Jack Kirby to a point, but it was a disaster for the liberal imagination when it put Kirby’s intellectual legacy in place of Lionel Trilling’s. Read the Iliad, read Simone Weil on the Iliad. There is evil, I’m sure, but it’s a force, not a person.
I quoted Benjamin Teitelbaum’s War for Eternity, a recent book about Steve Bannon’s ties to Dugin and other devotees of Traditionalist philosophy, to note that Bannon’s and Dugin’s interpretations of world politics are in fact diametrically opposed, since the Russian mage supports China while the American one opposes it; I also couldn’t help but note Bannon’s newfound affection for 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones as the pressure of the war breaks down the old woke vs. anti-woke alliances;
I argued against boycotts of Russian culture—removing Dostoevsky from syllabi, banning Russian nationals from athletic competitions, etc.—on the grounds that if the west undermines its own liberalism it abandons the distinction it wishes to draw between itself and authoritarian and totalitarian powers it opposes;
and I mounted a defense of the novel, despite or because of its longstanding untimeliness in a moment of absolute tech-acceleration:
The novel always was meant to slow the march of progress, from the 18th-century sentimental novel’s tearful protagonist as heart of a heartless world to the 19th-century realist novel’s canvas of a dehumanized society to the 20th-century psychological novel’s rescue of the ghost in the machine. Or even Plato’s dialogic reliquary of his master. In mundane terms, the novel is the petite bourgeoisie, the class that holds back history; in theological terms—one in particular I confess I just learned—it is the katechon, the one who prevents apocalypse. Twitter’s uncontrollable but highly manipulated preference cascades, meanwhile, now literally threaten to turn the world to dust and ash.
Elsewhere online, I recommend poet and translator Michael Hofmann’s introduction to Chinese poet Bei Dao, heretofore unfamiliar to me:
The poems seem to hang or float in a single, simplified, unidentifiable, almost abstract landscape. The feeling is rural, specifically coastal, generally solitary: trees, boats, birds, morning or night, moon, stars; some weather; interiors and exteriors. The poems are almost all short and in short lines, jagged, concentrated. It is rare for one to go over a page. They are mainly unpunctuated and lower-case. Fifteen or twenty lines—a hundred words—is maybe the average. There is something persistently pictorial about them, and at the same time there are no scenes one can disappear into, places where one can stroll to the horizon. Objects and bearings are put there, like stage props. The poems stare back at the reader, unflinchingly, confrontingly. One can feel the energy that has gone into their making, the hard masking-tape edges, the chips and curds of unmixed color applied with a palette knife. There is no empty space, no wash, no contextualizing, no aspic. No throat-clearing, no storytelling, little paraphrasable content. No photographic scenes, no subordinate detail.
When I think of Hofmann—whose translation of Döblin’s great modernist novel Berlin Alexanderplatz I reviewed here—I think first of his contention that Ted Hughes is the greatest English-language poet since Shakespeare. Not Milton or Blake, not Wordsworth or Keats, not Whitman or Dickinson, not Hopkins or Yeats, not even, in Hughes’s own generation, the Nobel laureates Heaney or Walcott! (If I were to restrict myself only to that generation for a Shakespearean salutatorian, I would choose the author of Omeros myself; but then I am more of a novel reader than a lyric poetry reader, and Omeros is among other things nearly a novel.) I love those kinds of counterintuitive provocations, because they force me to defend my intuitions.
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