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 the Odyssey as a prelude to my upcoming reread of Ulysses for its centenary. Counting middle-school redactions, this is about my fourth or fifth time through the epic. As with my essay on the Iliad last year, I was preoccupied with the great paradox of poems that are at once so foundational to our literary tradition and also so offensive to ethical and political pedagogues from Socrates and Plato to the celebrity classicists of Twitter today. We will also discuss this question on a forthcoming episode of Grand Podcast Abyss.
Like Odysseus’s bed, with its root in nature, the poet’s first material, the epic is built sturdily and to last, so that humanity may dream over it in perpetuity. And like Penelope’s art, which both weaves the text and unweaves it—and the formal name for “unweaving the text” is criticism—the poem is so self-contained it contains the undoing of all its own certainties. Here, in this celebration of craft from bed to tapestry to epic, from litter to literature, from textile to text, and in this artifact of a perpetual present containing the past, the present, and eternity, we can locate the modern Homer par excellence: the Homer—and the Ulysses—of Joyce, “the man of twists and turns” whose art of involution and interrelation is finally an art of peace.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I assessed Curtis Yarvin’s attempt to define the “deep right” in politics and concluded, with a digression on Thomas Carlyle’s influence on American literature and the “Condition of England” novel, that Yarvin himself might be a “deep liberal” despite the more menacing pose he prefers to strike;
I replied to John Ganz’s lament over the threat Elon Musk poses to professional-managerial class control of popular speech with a long quotation about the left-liberal intellectual’s political pretense from Lionel Trilling’s E. M. Forster;
I linked Theodor Adorno’s world-historical melancholy to another social-media-famous left intellectual’s bizarre quasi-endorsement of a recent climate-change protest suicide and wondered if this worldview has become an unfit, unethical tutor to those it wishes to instruct and organize;
I reacted to the founding of the Disinformation Governance Board by an expert who believes that Americans are “too…um, free-spirited” and concluded that discussions and applications of Orwell are warranted in this context;
I shared a poem I wrote at age 18 about Penelope (and even more juvenilia than that) as an introduction to my Odyssey essay as linked above;
I supplied a cutting passage (notorious in leftist academe) from Edward Said’s Orientalism about Karl Marx’s “Romantic and even messianic” concept of the Orient and consequent lack of “human sympathy” in response to Andrew Sullivan’s question, “When Will They Cancel Karl Marx?”;
and I sympathized with Tanner Greer’s warning to illiberal artists and intellectuals that they will regret the regime they claim to want if they ever get it, even as I cautioned liberals, with a quote from Hannah Arendt, that they are recklessly provoking this reaction with their increasingly monstrous contempt for any ideal of human freedom from machinic surveillance and discipline.
Elsewhere online, Blake Smith remembers the late Richard Howard. I knew Howard only as the translator of Barthes and Baudelaire—and also, if this isn’t too crass, as Benjamin Moser’s sole credited source in Sontag: Her Life and Work for the claim that Sontag slept with Bobby Kennedy—but Smith explicates in memoriam Howard’s study of postwar American poetry, Alone in America (1969), as well as the translator’s own poems:
The poet is, or ought to be, Howard wrote, “that emblematic man, who … must stand, in particulars, for the generality.” The task of poetry is to discover in what seems like the originalities of peculiar selves the hidden originals of human nature, to ask of what seems to befall us, singly and exclusively, of our apparently incommunicable idiosyncrasies, “what does it mean—for humanity—that this can happen in a human life?” The decline of traditional poetic forms therefore poses a danger to the identity of the poet. Without a repertoire of flexible but familiar rhythms of language through which to communicate experiences to the reader, the “emblematic” status of the writer’s personal experiences became problematic, something either asserted, willfully and hysterically or ironically and chattily, but not demonstrated in the writing—not produced in the consciousness of the reader.
And since everybody and their mother (except for me) is reading James Burnham under the influence of the aforementioned and now-respectable Yarvin—the Red Scare girls even devoted most of an episode semi-seriously to The Machiavellians before they fell to referring to Gaetano Mosca as “Gaytardo”—I did look again at the also aforementioned Orwell’s essay both summarizing and criticizing the theorist’s work:
Fortunately the ‘managers’ are not so invincible as Burnham believes. It is curious how persistently, in The Managerial Revolution, he ignores the advantages, military as well as social, enjoyed by a democratic country. At every point the evidence is squeezed in order to show the strength, vitality, and durability of Hitler’s crazy régime. Germany is expanding rapidly, and ‘rapid territorial expansion has always been a sign, not of decadence . . . but of renewal’. Germany makes war successfully, and ‘the ability to make war well is never a sign of decadence but of its opposite’. Germany also ‘inspires in millions of persons a fanatical loyalty. This, too, never accompanies decadence’. Even the cruelty and dishonesty of the Nazi régime are cited in its favour, since ‘the young, new, rising social order is, as against the old, more likely to resort on a large scale to lies, terror, persecution’. Yet, within only five years this young, new, rising social order had smashed itself to pieces and become, in Burnham’s usage of the word, decadent. And this had happened quite largely because of the ‘managerial’ (i.e. undemocratic) structure which Burnham admires. The immediate cause of the German defeat was the unheard-of folly of attacking the U.S.S.R. while Britain was still undefeated and America was manifestly getting ready to fight. Mistakes of this magnitude can only be made, or at any rate they are most likely to be made, in countries where public opinion has no power. So long as the common man can get a hearing, such elementary rules as not fighting all your enemies simultaneously are less likely to be violated.
From your lips to the Disinformation Governance Board’s ears, George. Anyway, thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and try not to be so, um, free-spirited.