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 Francis Fukuyama’s much-discussed and little-read The End of History and the Last Man (1992). While my conclusion isn’t quite, “Fukuyama was right!” I do think he has more of a point than his detractors are willing to credit. I’ll let you read my post—and listen to a forthcoming Fukuyama-focused Grand Podcast Abyss episode—to discover what this point might be, but in the meantime, to whet your readerly appetite, here’s the first paragraph of my essay:
For the good democrat, it’s an unpleasant fact: the best minds are often those least able to reconcile themselves to liberalism. We know the roll-call of great modern thinkers and artists, whether of the extreme right or the extreme left, who held liberalism in contempt and sought to build some utopia beyond it. Nietzsche and Shaw, Pound and Eliot, Yeats and Heidegger, Sartre and Lukács—allowing for the wide divergences among their perspectives, all condemned liberal civilization as an unheroic affair where cunning mediocrities lorded mere wealth and a spurious notion of universal equality over their moral or intellectual superiors. While the good democrat might be tempted to expel these fascist, theocratic, or totalitarian voices from the canon, the strongest version of liberalism might rather be the one that assimilates their critique and answers their challenge. Francis Fukuyama’s much-misunderstood 1992 book heralding the end of history attempts just this philosophical feat.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I responded to the news that Fuccboi author Sean Thor Conroe went on the Red Scare podcast by trying to sell at least one of the ladies on my own novel Portraits and Ashes:
Now, if you’ll indulge me, I unironically think Anna (probably not so much Dasha) would like Portraits and Ashes. It’s about avant-garde art and socio-cultural nihilism—what’s not to love? Also, the main heroine, the anti-feminist feminist artist and theorist Alice Nicchio-Strand, is partially based on Paglia. I wrote it just before the Trump/Bernie moment and it is, in retrospect, redolent of that Laschian left-conservative despair early Red Scare conveyed so well before it became more predictably right-wing.
I reflected on why I find W. H. Auden’s classic poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” annoying, in response to Lee Siegel’s controversial City Journal riposte to Elisa Gabbert’s (not Elizabeth Gilbert’s) New York Times tribute to the poem, with help from Adam Kirsch and John Dolan;
I recalled, in answer to Wesley Yang’s Tweeted query about his readers’ awareness of transgender politics, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics and Samuel R. Delany’s critique of those comics about just such identities in the early and middle 1990s and what their implication might be for the present.
Elsewhere online, though right here on SubStack: in a week when the New York Times editorial board roused itself from its dogmatic slumber to defend liberal norms of free speech, I preferred Peter Maguire’s posting his teacher Mary McCarthy’s much more robust and forthright defense of the same value:
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