Weekly Readings #20 (06/20/22-06/26/22)

call me nothing at all

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

It’s admittedly been quiet on my corner of the internet, but I am working on what’s called “fresh content” of all sorts for the next two weeks. In the meantime, there are some items in the archive that might be worth revisiting or (in case you missed them) visiting for the first time, especially in light of the news here in America.

First, Grand Podcast Abyss Episode 16, “Body Politic,” released a little over a month ago, was recorded shortly after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade back on May 3. The ostensible topic of the episode is Toni Morrison’s classic novel Beloved, but the first half hour contains a perhaps surprisingly complicated and heartfelt reading of Morrison’s neglected essay on the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearing, “Friday on the Potomac.” Sam and I made an earnest attempt to cross the dense thicket of race and religion, gender and class, individual and collective, in the abortion debate.

Second, at johnpistelli.com, where I post weekly to biweekly essays on classic books in all genres, I can’t help but notice from the stats that my three-year-old essay on Joan Didion’s beautifully harrowing novel Play It as It Lays is receiving renewed attention. There I wrote:

Didion’s comparison of abortion to Nazism and her affirmation of capitalism both remind me of Clarence Thomas, and this novel also recalls Corey Robin’s analysis of the arch-conservative Supreme Court justice. According to Robin, Thomas was and remains a black nationalist, convinced that white racism is so omnipresent and insoluble that only the most ferocious, despairing, and enterprising individualism, combined with a focus on the family, can possibly answer it; the gender politics of Play It as It Lays are comparable.

At my daily blog, Grand Hotel Abyss,

• I seconded controversialist Anna Khachiyan’s characteristically iconoclastic case against Andrzej Żuławski’s cult 1981 film Possession and recommended Donald Cammell’s underrated thriller White of the Eye in its stead;

• I answered an opinion piece on the Joshua Katz affair in Inside Higher Ed claiming that Socrates had it coming with a reminder of left-wing journalist I. F. Stone’s popular nonfiction classic The Trial of Socrates—disgraced former Democratic Presidential candidate, the strenuously Kennedyesque John Edwards, used to tell reporters that this was his favorite book—and I linked to my own essay from a few years back on Stone’s work, which I put in precisely the Inside High Ed article’s context of cancel culture and the cultural politics of democracy, back when these topics were a bit fresher;

• I considered the apparently declining fortunes of “they/them” as both an identity and a linguistic intervention by resurfacing a fragment of fiction I published last year whose protagonist, like a recent New York mag editorialist, decided against the personal pronoun of whatever variety as a sufficient tool to invoke the singular individual’s absolute ineffability:

  In the course of composing this transformative work, however, Vi Aster came to understand that Vi Aster had not gone nearly far enough when Vi Aster eliminated the gender pronoun. Vi Aster had an unyielding, never-resting mind. Vi Aster was Vi Aster’s own best interlocutor and adversary. Vi Aster was the person least suited to win an institutional victory, because Vi Aster would inevitably assault the very citadel Vi Aster had captured. And, to vary my metaphor, like a sailor squinting in the forecastle, Vi Aster sighted a new horizon: the abolition of the pronoun per se. Vi Aster became aware of a contradiction in the very argument Vi Aster had used to win the argument for “they/them,” a logic which redefined the human as at once an aggregate plural mass and a teeming and inwardly diverse individual. “Well, which was it?” Vi Aster asked Vi Aster’s self. In theory, it could be both—anything can be true in theory—but which was more authentic to experience? If the individual was already a “them,” then the crowd could only oversimplify and reduce this aggregate. Just because the aggregate could be disassembled by analysis, which was what Vi Aster argued of those peculiar individuals called literary works, did not mean it should be assumed prematurely into an abstract whole. Analysis proved only that—here Vi Aster quoted Adorno—“the whole is the false.” What right had we to generalize at all? Consequently, why should there be pronouns at all? They—and “they”—only accentuated language’s already brutal tendency toward abstraction. They assimilated you to some category or other. People should have to say your name every time, and your name moreover should be some unutterable aggregate of multisensory stimulants. When they said your name they should have to dance and paint, to belch and compose a cantata, Vi Aster argued. But rectifying names would come later; the personal pronoun as such had to be annihilated first. My pronouns are the insides of my cheeks gripped between my teeth and the flanges of flesh between my toes, the tingling sensation in my perineum when I look out from a great height and the languid heat of my head on an endless winter weekend afternoon reading abed. There are no pronouns. Call me Vi Aster or call me nothing at all.

• and I finally reviewed, if you can call it a review, Robert Eggers’s The Northman, which I liked better than The Witch and The Lighthouse but not as much as Hamlet; I judge it in the end less reactionary than has been claimed—more Eggers’s least uneasy tribute yet to the divine feminine.

Elsewhere online, while the whole scene appears a bit weary—summer doldrums, I’m sure—I can’t fail to recommend my fellow Daily Scroll writer Zineb Riboua’s provocative “Case for Bioconservatism”:

Human Beings Are More than Just Antique Vibrators

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