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 kicked off the cruellest month, also National Poetry Month, and in the centenary of modernism’s annus mirabilis to boot, with an essay on T. S. Eliot, focused on his two long masterpieces, The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). These poems will also be the subject of a forthcoming episode of Grand Podcast Abyss. An excerpt from my essay on The Waste Land as epic of modern media:
The Waste Land pictures itself at its beginning and its end: “A heap of broken images,” “These fragments I have shored against my ruin.” It’s very 1922, very much like turning a radio dial and hearing this voice and then that, stately Shakespearean pentameters giving way to jazz, Wagner, a couple quarreling, fragments of old poems, Latin, German, French, Sanskrit, the chaos of voices in a pub. McLuhan placed the origin of such poetics in the 19th century: not the radio but the telegraph-age newspaper. It’s just as similar to what we do today, with 50 tabs open in a laptop browser as we surf the algorithms of Twitter or TikTok on our phones. The keynote of modern media for almost two centuries has been the fragmentation and dispersal of attention, and The Waste Land would be immortal even if it were only—which it still is—the best poem in English to represent, embody, and comment on this experience.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I quoted literary criticism I found fascinating but didn’t have space to discuss in my essay on Eliot: Michael North complicating the left/right political binary by systematically comparing the royalist reactionary Eliot to the Leninist revolutionary Lukács; Peter Dale Scott, better known as a theorist of the deep state’s machinations from 11/22/63 to 09/11/01, placing Eliot in a visionary tradition of “cultural politics” where poets wield the spiritual authority of the canon against the reigning powers of their time; and Gabriel Josipovici locating Eliot among fellow modernist despairers of the human condition like Kafka, even as he disparages more cheerful and prodigious modernists like Joyce;
I replied to a frankly absurd essay in the New Republic that proposes to set up “academic freedom committees” (Orwellian appellation!) by which professorial speech would be peer-policed in the event that it is “false” or “morally repellent” (no way these vague criteria could ever be abused in a setting of such probity as academe!)—an essay that, in its hysterical faith in expertise and its managerial contempt for free thought, testifies eloquently if embarrassingly to the intellectual and ethical decay of current hegemonic left-liberalism in America;
I reflected on a controversial polemic (since expanded to a video) by renegade para-academic Justin Murphy about just who is the audience for independent intellectual production and how this audience should be reached and served; my summary of Murphy’s thesis that our options are “to found a cult” or “to advise the prince” will be explored further, including its digression on the ideology of Peter Thiel, in the next episode of Grand Podcast Abyss.
Elsewhere online, and speaking of the overlapping milieux in which Murphy and Thiel operate, I would be remiss as an observer of what I’ve called “The New Conservatism” not to recommend Jacob Siegel’s judicious profile of neoreactionary guru Curtis Yarvin. I took the profile’s message to be this: if we don’t want Yarvin’s solutions, we had best be sure to acknowledge where he is right about the problems so we can correct them ourselves.
For further evidence that academe has decayed, creating space for such frighteningly novel intellects as Yarvin’s to emerge, see Jennifer Wilson’s subtly, sharply damning New Yorker profile of the fashion-conscious Duke UP editor Ken Wissoker, the man who “moves theory into the mainstream.”
Another institution in moral freefall is of course journalism. Right here on Substack, I recommend Glenn Greenwald’s cutting critique of how elite media grossly exploits sentimentality to forestall criticism of its power-serving agenda. This is another context for the warm reception brutal hard-right thinkers like Yarvin sometimes receive, especially among the young: a populace made so cynical by weepy propaganda that it hardens its heart permanently.
An antidote to these corruptions may be literature. To return to the theme of Russia’s place in world culture in the age of Putin’s war, I recommend Tolstoy and Bakhtin scholar Gary Saul Morson’s tribute to the timely moral complexity of the Russian realist novel:
My students dwell in a world where moral truth is supposed to be clear, simple, and well known, and where any disagreement marks one as an enemy of social justice. They are therefore struck by Tolstoy’s belief—shared by all great realist novelists, even if they do not explicitly state it—that individuality is an essential fact of life. Each person’s life belongs to that person alone and no individual exactly coincides with any other. What can be generalized about me is not the real me; “I” begins where “we” ends.
Likewise, I enjoyed this analysis of W. H. Auden’s poem “In Praise of Limestone” by Stephanie Yue Duhem. Duhem’s article is the third (and best) piece on Auden to appear in non-academic media in the last month, so it’s clear that this poetic witness to the last century’s terrors, no less than Eliot, is newly relevant to our own violent, chaotic time.
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