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 added, as promised, two big pieces on major dramatists.
First is an essay on George Bernard Shaw, the leading English-language dramatist of his time, considered second only to Shakespeare in the early 20th century. If he seems less renowned these days, it no doubt stems from his conviction that art should be topical and didactic, even propagandistic. My essay covers five of his big plays: the Ibsenite prostitution drama Mrs. Warren’s Profession, the battle-of-the-sexes comedy Man and Superman with its surreal fantasia interlude Don Juan in Hell, the brilliant study in idealism vs. realism Major Barbara, the Irish satire John Bull’s Other Island, and the famous class-themed mythic comedy Pygmalion. I consider Shaw’s attempt to write “the drama of thought,” his eminence vis-à-vis his counterpart and contemporary Oscar Wilde, his idiosyncratic view of literature (elevating visionary polemicist-prophets like Blake and Tolstoy over mere aesthete-entertainers like Shakespeare and Dickens), and what we have to learn today from his then-influential and now-outdated versions of socialism and feminism. (Not to mention which editions you might want to read of his dispersed oeuvre.) I just found in a used bookstore an old hardcover of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, a cycle of five plays spanning the years from 4004 B.C. to 31920 A.D. (the Cloud Atlas formula avant la lettre and to the max), but I’ll have to save it for a rainy day.
Next, as a companion piece to the latest episode of Grand Podcast Abyss, “Rough Magic,” I have an essay on The Tempest for Shakespeare’s birthday, with thoughts on Robert Browning’s, Aimé Césaire’s, and W. H. Auden’s later interpretations of the drama. My main thematic concern, inspired by Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror: are art and magic the same?
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I reflected on James Pogue’s critical but heartfelt canvass in Vanity Fair of the new right or post-left—the overlapping worlds of Silicon Valley would-be philosopher-kings like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin, MAGA populist politicians like J. D. Vance and Blake Masters, and artist-bohemians like Dasha Nekrasova and Honor Levy—and what my relation to these cultural politics might be, as something of an exile from current hegemonic left-liberalism—a question that brought me quickly to the third rail of today’s identity politics;
and I speculated, speaking of which, about why reinterpreting major 19th-century and early-20th-century English and American writers as transgender has become a popular pastime on social media.
Also, please don’t miss our new YouTube channel, where you can find choice clips from Grand Podcast Abyss episodes:
Elsewhere online, I must send you back to Tyler Cowen—honestly, he’s only been on my radar in the last few weeks. This time, I recommend his excellent podcast with the Irish historian and biographer Roy Foster, a good companion to Shaw or (looking ahead to Bloomsday 2022) to Joyce. And right here on SubStack, the perspicacious Default Friend AKA Katherine Dee contributes a thoughtful rumination (not quite captured in what she admits is its clickbait title) on the aforementioned third rail of today’s identity politics; plus, I’m down in the comments section with some memories of the pre-social-media comics counterculture.
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