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 Thomas Mann’s great novella Death in Venice (1912). It was a difficult essay to write, especially in the present political and social climate, challenging to my own and maybe to my audience’s assumptions about ethics and aesthetics. It will be elaborated upon in a forthcoming episode of Grand Podcast Abyss. Here is how it begins:
The real boy was not 14. He was 10. The real fantasy, then, does not even have the romanticizing sanction of classical pederasty, but was the daydream of what the average person might imagine to have been a common pedophile, a prowler at the periphery of playgrounds, the type of person one speaks of putting not in but under the jail rather than awarding the Nobel Prize. Yet here we are, rereading perhaps the 20th century’s greatest novella, Thomas Mann’s masterpiece of 1912.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I addressed the controversy about the new post-left journal Compact, concluding that current hegemonic left-liberalism is too compromised by its witting or unwitting collaboration with anti-democratic corporatist movements to persuasively repulse attacks from either the new right or old left;
I attempted to characterize the type of “contrarian” drawn to such politics as those of Compact’s, a type in my experience often typified by divided class loyalties (and don’t miss in this post my reminiscence of my time long ago in the mid-2000s with a radical left-wing group blog, one of whose members now writes for Compact):
So the contrarian, an outsider in two classes, still tied by communal loyalty to one and by intellectual affinity to the other, seeks some synthesis and often tries to recuperate early values and experiences in expert language so that these ways of life cannot be so easily dismissed as mere backwardness. And like Camus—along with Orwell, the most famous early example of the type—we may end up choosing our mothers over justice.
I responded to two Catholic conservatives’ laments for 21st-century literature and cinema with my own sense that the 1990s really were a literary and cinematic golden age but also my more optimistic appraisal of the possibilities for the cultural cycle today:
This development put the old artistic forms on the defensive, even as the new forms had not yet matured, which, I suspect, is why the last two decades have felt like a cultural trough. You know how it goes: the old is dying, the new cannot be born, etc. But the perennial art forms—narrative prose, for one—will adjust, and the new ones will consolidate their powers. Looking back to the literature of the last century, I think of the 1890s and the 1920s as artistic peaks, the decades in between scanter (though hardly bare) of achievement. We’ll figure it out.
Elsewhere online, it seemed like most of the attention this week in my wing of the literary-political world was taken up by the aforementioned Compact; and though it became immediately identified with intense provocations like “Why We Need the Patriarchy” and “The Case Against Aesthetic Castration,” a less incendiary piece like David Rieff’s thoughtful assessment of the old left’s hopeful prospects in an identitarian-left world is well worth reading (though Compact’s relatively soft landing in the New York Times hints that at least one faction of the elite is hedging its bets on current hegemonic left-liberalism).
Speaking of the old left, I also enjoyed Rob Madole’s critical introduction to Neal Stephenson, a libertarian “Grey Tribe” science-fiction novelist I’ve never been tempted to read, a man who has the ear of Bezos, Musk, and Thiel. And speaking of science fiction, I recommend on the podcast front the perspicacious Default Friend in conversation with Emmet Penney about Philip K. Dick’s 1972 speech, “The Android and the Human.”
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