A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
The next episode of Grand Podcast Abyss will drop within a day or two—and you won’t want to miss it, because we’ll be talking about culture, politics, and technology with a special guest who will need no introduction to the SubStack audience.
At johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I didn’t manage an update last week, but you can look forward to my take on one of modernism’s great banned books sometime within the next seven days. (Hint: it will pick up where I left off here about 11 months ago, wondering about what Marianna Torgovnick pronounced “Our D. H. Lawrence Moment.”)
Meanwhile, a piece from the archive I’ve returned to a few times recently in the midst of our ongoing cultural debate about whether the intelligentsia and their master-theorists (AKA the professional-managerial class) should rule the polis is my rather insane, but I think true, essay on Plato’s Republic. You can take it with two grains of salt: 1. I don’t read Greek; 2. I wrote it in urban Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 in a real and fancied miasma of virions, sweat, and tear gas. But I still think the argument holds up. As I boasted to an imagined political philosopher just the other day on Tumblr, “The Republic sits at the head of my tradition, not yours.”
Plato’s Republic is an ironic novel of ideas, a satire designed to mock the pretensions of reason, and an ingenious exposure of its narrator’s unreliability, with intermittent flights of utopian lyricism that make its critique of utopian thought all the more poignant. It is usually seen as the foundational text of political philosophy in the west, and many subsequent canonical political concepts can be found somewhere in this book, from Hobbes’s social contract to Rousseau’s general will to Wollstonecraft’s feminism to Hegel’s statism, not to mention that the whole argument might be read as a reply to Nietzsche avant la lettre. But what if we can’t understand the Republic until we learn to see it as the ancestor not of any later political treatise, but rather of Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, of Moby-Dick and The Magic Mountain, of Lolita and Herzog?
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I defended apolitical art against the politics-is-downstream-from-culture right-wingers, just as I always had to defend it from the everything-is-ideology left-wingers, with help from Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joan Didion, and more, including, yes, Plato, this in reply to Alex Perez’s lament that “anti-woke literary writers” are just as crude, polemical, and all-around philistine as the identitarian left they assail;
I replied to an article demanding that men read more literary fiction (“literary” here connoting psychological realism) with a long view of gender and the novel, a moderate defense of certain dispositions and commitments (pride, universalism) wrongly stigmatized as masculine, and a reminder that mainstream literary publishing is in decline and that its professionals and partisans are therefore not in any position to issue peremptory moral demands rather than, say, interest and pleasure;
I extrapolated from a very amusing Twitter thread that the deep-state freakout following the 2016 election delayed the present right-wing turn in counterculture by half a decade or more, since something like it was underway already in the late Obama years, for which thesis I cite as evidence an essay I published in The Millions in 2014 defending Lana del Rey and Shakespeare from their moral detractors;
I responded to Erik Hoel’s very good SubStack essay “AI-Art Isn’t Art” with an argument that even human-made art has always been partially inhuman, and that this is all the more reason to value and valorize the human touch, rather than identifying art entirely with humanity, an immensely attractive but perhaps untenable position;
I reasserted a defense of an aesthetic—and specifically a literary—education as the necessary complement to liberalism to prevents its moral decay into the Hobbesian technocratic nightmare that has weighed on us all for the past two years and more;
and I examined the Mars Review of Books, which I heard about only last week and the first issue of which has now materialized in its entirety on Urbit, whatever that may be exactly; I focused particularly on Christian Lorentzen’s mixed appraisal of independently-published books by Bronze Age Pervert and Logo Daedalus, Anika Jade Levy’s introduction to the esoteric Angelicism01, and an impressively wide-ranging and heartfelt philippic against the aforementioned professional-managerial class at least partially on behalf of “romantic conservatism” by it-playwright Matthew Gasda.
Elsewhere online, an interesting Politico survey of Generation X conservatism through the lens of a Republican Congresswoman who used to play in The Rentals (I vaguely recall their “Friends of P.” from alternative radio). Reporter Ben Jacobs allows that this development is not exactly new and comes as no surprise, citing Alex P. Keaton, and the literary-minded can furnish their own examples: didn’t the youthful DFW vote for Reagan? and what is the real conflict at the heart of The Secret History but two conservatisms—the Dionysian frenzy of high tragedy, the Victorian morality of the realist novel—squaring off?
A good bad right-wing Gen X movie I watched recently—I literally found the DVD in a Little Free Library—is Running on Empty (1988), in which a brooding piano prodigy discovers love, art, and individualism apart from his left-wing terrorist-on-the-run Ayers-and-Dohrn Boomer parents; you can watch the whole thing here, though it’s a bit soporific and mainly notable as an episode in the doomed onscreen/offscreen late-adolescent romance of River Phoenix and Martha Plimpton.
As an elderly and nearly senescent Millennial, I’m a shade too young to be caught up in this generational phenomenon, though those long summer afternoons watching MTV’s Kennedy introduce music videos had perhaps a subliminal effect. My first-ever publication was this letter to the editor, evincing at least an early libertarianism:
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