Weekly Readings #24 (07/18/22-07/24/22)
lost leaders
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
While this has been a slow week, the next seven days will hold both a new Scroll column and a new literary essay at johnpistelli.com, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, since Substack is very excited about its new poll feature, I would like to poll my subscribers: do you want me to cross-post my critical essays from johnpistelli.com here on Substack too as they’re published from now on? That way, subscribers on this platform don’t have to follow me elsewhere if they don’t want. I may also charge you to read a serialized novel on here at some point, but that will probably have to wait until the fall. (In the meantime, if you’re just dying to remunerate me for my insights, I remind regular readers and inform new ones that I have three novels for sale, which are more fun and interesting than mainstream fare: Portraits and Ashes, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, and The Class of 2000.)
Over at Grand Hotel Abyss, my more casual blog—I would consider posting those contents here too, but sending those thoughts out as emails would interfere with their provisional notebook-like nature—I wrote the following:
—some thoughts about Christopher Hitchens, occasioned by a Christian Lorentzen review of Hitchens’s London Review of Books essays; if you’ve never read it, though, my most extensive argument about Hitch and his political metamorphosis (from a butterfly back into a slug, as George Galloway once rather strangely remarked) came in my review of Martin Amis’s autofictional Inside Story; I will copy the gravamen—good Hitchensian word!—of the piece here:
For my generation, Hitchens was what Wordsworth was for Browning, “The Lost Leader,” as a few clever quoters have preceded me in saying: “Just for a handful of silver he left us, / Just for a riband to stick in his coat.” But Amis wouldn’t think this is fair, and neither do I. Hitch didn’t do it for money or to be on TV. Read more of Browning for the difference:
Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us,
Burns, Shelley, were with us,—they watch from their graves!
He alone breaks from the van and the freemen,
—He alone sinks to the rear and the slaves!So much for the tolerant left! “Slaves” there connotes, I assume, not the literally enslaved and oppressed, but rather conservatives, whom Browning saw as mindlessly enthralled to custom and tradition. Hitchens never stopped seeing himself in the vanguard, as the people’s crusader. Amis accurately captures Hitchens’s position on Iraq as “a neocon experiment that he supported (no, championed) from the standpoint of the hard left,” in contrast to his own role as a “quietly constant ameliorative gradualist of the centre-left.” To wax auto- myself: my own break with Marxism came with the understanding that Hitchens was right. He was no turncoat, no Judas: there is a solid Marxist case for the Iraq War. Why else, as I’ve asked here before, did Marx praise the British in India? You have to bring about—you even have to complete—the bourgeois revolution before socialism is possible, and the bourgeois revolutions of old, as much as any other revolutions, were made by force of arms, sometimes the arms of invaders.
I remember quarreling in about 2007 with a friend who was lustily denouncing Hawthorne’s skepticism about the Civil War. I asked him if he opposed the Iraq War. “Of course!” What did I think he was—a rube, some kind of Republican? And yet. Which of Hawthorne’s objections to the Civil War—to the Republicans—did not recur in our objections to Iraq? I remember coming back to my dorm from an anti-war protest in the winter of 2003 and turning on the TV to hear Bill Kristol smugly exclaim, “The left sounds like Henry Kissinger now!” Talk of imperialism just clouds the issue, as if “imperialism” is not how the Southern gentry saw “Northern aggression.” Throughout history conservatives warn against democratic violence, while radicals cry freedom over the bomb-blasts. With this Gordian Knot seen in its proper intricacy—I hope you don’t think I will loosen or sever it: no political punditry from novelists, remember?—I can stop berating the shade of Hitchens.
—some invective about why “no sensible person is on ‘the left’ in 2022”;
—and some notes on a Dave Chappelle protest that happened a few blocks from my apartment (eggs were thrown) and the general aesthetics of radical demonstrations.
Elsewhere online: for Thiel-watchers, reactionary feminist Mary Harrington profiles the man himself for UnHerd, herself prophesying a new world of princes and diminishing returns. Princely Peter demurs at the eco-doomerism, however, which, if nothing else, I find refreshing, even if the sectarian basis of his polemical optimism—as in his master, Girard, we are enjoined to take up the cross and follow Christ—is not proper to the breadth and complexity of today’s world:
Thiel characterises this stagnation as a long, slow victory of the Club of Rome, a nonprofit founded in 1968 to drive political change premised on the belief that infinite growth is impossible. As Thiel sees it, this tacit postwar abandonment of the growth aspiration has resulted in “something like a societal and cultural lockdown; not just the last two years but in many ways the last 40 or 50”. There’s “a cultural version, a demographic version, and a technological version of this stagnant or decadent society,” he suggests. And the upshot of this paralysis has been “a world of technological stagnation and demographic collapse”, along with “sclerosis in government and banal repetition in culture”.
And if you’re not subscribed to the prolific and perspicacious Default Friend by now, what are you waiting for? She’s being recognized more and more, as the poet said. She appeared on the currently-hiatus’d Grand Podcast Abyss in back May to talk about the new right, among other topics, and she follows up right here on Substack with a piece on Alexes Jones and Lee Moyers and the “de facto right wing”:
Finally, Ben Hickman, in the inimitable Compact, touches the third rail of literary identity politics by assailing the legacy of Audre Lorde as the source of academic and professional-managerial pseudo-radicalism:
Lorde’s most famous essay, first delivered at a feminist conference in 1979, is “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” It is about a conference line-up. Whether universities are really like slave plantations or not, I will leave for others to decide. The broader question is why Lorde’s politics was so singularly and uncritically obsessed with the university in the first place. A very small minority of people inhabit academe, and even fewer new ideas emerge from there, and yet it is the front line. Today, almost no public discussion exists outside of its frameworks.
I once wrote, thinking about Gillian Rose’s Mourning Becomes the Law, “Marxism is the theory that only the master’s tools can dismantle the master’s house; that is what the dialectic means”—though it occurs to me now that this is not nearly dialectical enough, and that living in (and also redecorating, I’m sure) the master’s house is more to the point. I included a passage from Lorde’s “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” in my Contemporary American Literature lectures:
I placed Lorde in the company of Adrienne Rich and Lucille Clifton, and in the dour Lorde and Rich—but by no means in the lucid and ludic Clifton—I find a killing lack of playfulness, of the luxury that poetry so beautifully is, whatever else it is.