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 revisited Virginia Woolf’s great modernist-feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own (1929). From my perhaps excessively rollicking first sentence forward—the essay begins, “Feminism and misogyny are the same: both aim to abolish female flesh”—I consider the aesthete Woolf’s sometimes counterintuitive relationships to modern sex-and-gender ideology from Mary Wollstonecraft to Andrea Long Chu.
If we stand back far enough, we can see the undercurrent that churns up the surface of this modern gendered discourse: the old Platonic and gnostic dream in the west’s theological unconscious of attaining oneness with the alien god outside the corrupt material world. As the Gospel of Thomas concludes, “For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” Saying with Chu that every man must make himself female because we don’t believe in heaven anymore amounts to the same conviction, only inverted. Either way, believer or un-, feminist or misogynist, woman is flesh and death, but man is the life of the mind.
I begin an essay on the 20th century’s most influential work of feminist literary theory with the above unpleasantness because Virginia Woolf is so substantially free of it.
Also significant are Woolf’s high literary standards (the greatest writers had minds that “consumed all impediments”; Charlotte Brontë doesn’t make the grade) and her frankness, often derided as elitism and snobbery, about class.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I considered Justin Murphy’s political investment advice to short democracy, authoritarianism, liberalism, and conservatism and to long anarcho-monarchism; I proposed the latter ideology’s similarity to “Tory Anarchy,” a concept I trace through an incongruous company of writers across the centuries and the political spectrum—Jonathan Swift, W. B. Yeats, George Orwell, and Edward Said—and which I etymologically link to anti-colonial rebellion against progressive empire; finally, I suggest that Tory Anarchy’s drive for freedom makes it more akin to liberalism than it may sound;
I amended a viral Tweet thread about the CIA’s funding of modern art with a less paranoid and more comprehensive account of aesthetic modernity; I recalled my own early awe at Abstract Expressionism and my more vexed relationship with my fellow Pittsburgh Catholic immigrant’s child Andy Warhol; in conclusion, I quoted Songs for Drella;
I linked to Darren Staloff’s recently posted 1990s Great Books lecture on “outlaw Marxist” Alvin Gouldner and his sociology of intellectuals; I summarized Staloff’s gloss on Gouldner’s Marxist critique of Marxism, an ideology representing the interests less of the proletariat than of the intelligentsia and whose blind spots (willful or otherwise) doom it to the abuse of state power; I coupled these ideas with a doleful survey of today’s increasingly inhumane intellectual left and a recollection of my own ideological trajectory under the guidance of an intellectual who shared Gouldner’s critique but extended it to art, less persuasively, in my view, since art “does away with classes”;
I assessed the news now trickling out about the forthcoming Mars Review of Books, a literary journal at the intersection of the New York literati and the Silicon Valley (and its diaspora) technorati that signals the emergent post-Boomer high culture; I was especially interested to see that the first issue will feature a critique of self-published ideological renegades Bronze Age Pervert and Logo Daedalus by the distinguished critic Christian Lorentzen, since it seems to me that, by analogy with the modernism of a century ago, serious critics shouldn’t be peremptorily writing off outcast extremists, no matter how deplorable or dubious their politics, lest such critics miss a Pound, Yeats, or Eliot;
and I addressed the growing archaeological evidence that civilization is older than we thought and not dependent on agriculture but religion, which implies (to my mind) the autonomy of the human imagination, even as the 13000-year-old sites being excavated in Turkey suggest not pacific goddess-worship reigning prior to agriculture but rather phallic death-cults potentially built on human sacrifice; I connected this information to my recent re-viewing of the brilliant psychedelic film Altered States (1980), which, despite the feud between director Ken Russell and writer Paddy Chayefsky, representing in Pauline Kael’s insulting words “show-biz-Catholic glitz mysticism” and “show-biz-Jewish ponderousness” respectively, manages to communicate an ecumenical warning against a mindless, loveless romance with the supposedly primordial chaos.
Elsewhere online, but right here on SubStack, I recommend, Zohar Atkins on art’s bridging of religion and secularism, with a further reflection on his own Heideggerean struggle to break out of the stultifying confines of academic writing.
These objections all come down to the same thing: art is something fearful, because it is not easily categorized, understood. Art is not explicit. Poetry is that which cannot be paraphrased. If it were it would be kitsch or propaganda or mere decoration. But art is a way of being in the world. Heidegger says art contains the struggle between the push towards revelation and the push towards concealment. Art is ambiguous, tense.
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