A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
New episodes of Grand Podcast Abyss will be forthcoming shortly, as will be new material at johnpistelli.com. The latter may have to wait until Bloomsday, though, since I’m currently completely immersed in my centenary rereading of Ulysses, my first in 10 years, with obligatory detours into the academic criticism that Joyce thought (rightly) would guarantee his immortality.
In the meantime, to satisfy the internet’s endless desire for new content, I cleared out the iCloud by putting up on my YouTube channel the last of my pandemic-era video lectures from when I was still adjuncting in the English department. These four hour-long videos represent the last quarter of an Introduction to Literature class from the ill-fated Spring 2020 semester.
The first three videos are an introduction to poetry, with examples from Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and John Keats. Highlights include an ethical inquiry into Plath’s controversial appropriation of Holocaust imagery in “Daddy” (first video); a guided tour through Hopkins, Dickinson, and Stevens to see how poets express faith, doubt, and atheism, respectively, in poetic form (second video); and a polemic on why Yeats uses symbolism wrongly, while Keats uses it rightly (third video).
The fourth video, embedded below, may be the most fun. There I invited students to submit on the course site any final questions they had about the subject. I answer such queries as: is literature superior to other media? is older literature better than contemporary literature? are Shakespeare’s borrowed plots a stain on his achievement? should we read “problematic” (racist, etc.) books? what makes a classic? what’s my favorite Jane Austen novel? and more.
At my blog, Grand Hotel Abyss, where I write esoteric shitposts that will often form the basis of Grand Podcast Abyss,
I wrote two posts (one, two) in response to a Tweet speculating that Catholicism, as a syncretic universal religion, could incorporate Nietzsche and Crowley in the future as it had already absorbed the pagan corpus of Plato and Aristotle; I proposed that in the works of the Catholic convert Wilde and the Catholic renegade Joyce, both of them quasi-anarchists with occult ties and interests, we find hints toward such a synthesis, if such a synthesis is desirable;
I quoted from an essay on Ulysses by the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson; I observed first Jameson’s rather un-Joycean endorsement of armed struggle on behalf of sectarian nationalism; then I expanded on his sharp but patronizing argument that the novel is the epic of the petite bourgeoisie by suggesting (with links to various texts for evidence) that modern high literature is, to an unexpected degree, “the paradise of the lower middle class”;
I revisited the New Conservatism question now that we see widening fissures in this emergent counterculture, as the libertines begin an open quarrel with the pious; then I made a perhaps controversial suggestion that artists, cultural critics, and even politicians would do well to begin by accepting the libertarian premise of the American polity rather than expending all their strength resisting it on behalf of inapplicably collectivist ideologies (Catholic social thought, social democracy, etc.) developed in “the crowded, dark warrens of Europe”; I also invited readers to pay me to review the Matthew Gasda play at the center of this controversy now that he has made it available for purchase, an invitation so far wisely declined; though surely a critic without a political axe to grind or anxiety about being ostracized at scenester parties should lay eyes on the text of this drama—I’m just not going to do it for free);
I replied to a Tweet inquiring, “What’s a book every 17 year old should read?” the only way I knew how, with a recollection of what I read at that age and what it meant to me then and means to me now:
If the modernists from Melville to DeLillo shaped my commitments and concerns as a writer, I would say Paglia in concert with Morrison determined my social and political sensibility. They assured that I would never properly be right-wing or left-wing: the one side consisting of metaphysicians who would bar whole categories of person from the universe, the other side cultists of the demiurge who believe there is no limit whatsoever to reason’s design on nature and the spirit.
and I found with relief that a recent SubStack post, mainly about that great cult film of my undergraduate days, Donnie Darko, did not apply to me when it chided “stupid hoes” for misunderstanding the Crashes of Ballard and Cronenberg; I revisited my own eight-year-old essay on Ballard’s pornographic novel and saw that my own reading accords with our young critic’s assertion that it dramatizes not the “death drive” but an “unbirthing” fetish; as I wrote, “the most modern forms of desire return us in orgasmic cataclysm to the womb/tomb of raw nature.”
Elsewhere online, there is Geoff Shullenberger’s fascinating and disturbing Compact essay, “The Faith of Mass Shooters,” which links this grisly postmodern phenomenon to the boredom at the end of history foretold by Francis Fukuyama and to French philosopher Georges Bataille’s theory of ritual sacrifice by which a society evades nihilism by offering what is precious (i.e., life) unconditionally to a higher power. My hesitation to agree with this compelling thesis, even if we leave more pragmatic explanations for the school-shooter trend aside, can be measured by my response from 2016 to Bataille’s most famous novel, The Story of the Eye, which, like Ballard’s Crash, is a work of violent pornography, admittedly the only book-length work of Bataille’s I ever read, and which, I judge, “does not rise to the level of literature”:
Mothers and sisters—that is, female blood relations—are presumably sickening for Bataille because, like eggs, they stand for generation and their menstrual blood for the processes that generate life. The eye, on the other hand, stands for visionary perception, but it too must be debased because the eye’s idealism has in the western tradition also upheld life by associating it with a higher ideal, God or the Platonic forms or, simply, the truth. Bataille and his heroes are inverted Platonists, no less in love with an ideal, but a dark and negative ideal, an upside-down sublime, a mountain standing on its head, a photo-negative of the good, an anti-truth of the rapture of torture.
[…]
All in all, Story of the Eye is a typical piece of “French extremity,” to cite the film genre, a narrative tradition almost unchanged since the days of Sade, whose books I have never succeeded in finishing, and which continues onscreen today. Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe.
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