A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “The Lemniscate,” the latest chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. This was a return to the novel’s paranoid mode—it’s a long book with many modes—and friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre captured it best in the comment, “C I Slay.”1 Major Arcana is coming to an end sooner than you think: there are four chapters and an epilogue left in which to answer all the novel’s outstanding questions (plot-wise, I mean, not thematically: the thematic questions are for you to work out). Please subscribe today to read the whole thing before it gets too popular to be cool!
This week I also released my latest lecture in my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, The Invisible College, “Trailing Clouds of Glory,” on the life and work of William Wordsworth. The first 10 minutes are freely available to all, but you won’t want to miss the whole, with its measured defense of the literary canon,2 its prehistory of neoconservatism, its continuing emphasis (all the more urgent given the unfortunate presence in western society of such freaks and reprobates as this) on Romanticism’s counterintuitive hostility to nature, its speculation on the Wordsworth-to-Instagram-poetry pipeline, and more. Next week: Coleridge’s Eolian harps, pleasure domes, polar voyages, and lesbian vampires. Please subscribe today! And if you won’t take it from me, please take it from friends-of-the-pod Alice Gribbin and Noah Kumin:3
For this week, I repurpose a long response to one of the many questions I receive on Tumblr. You can let me know if my practice of reposting some Tumblr answers on the Weekly Readings annoys you. I regard the Tumblr as completely ephemeral—I keep expecting the company to go out of business and the archive to disappear overnight—and I’m not sure that my Substack readers even keep up with it. This is why I feel it’s appropriate to place anything I’d like to keep and to share more widely on here on Sundays. The action, now more than ever, is in the footnotes. Please enjoy!
A Winding Stair in a Cathedral: Toward the Ideal University
A reader writes in to ask me, “What would be the place of the university in an ideal society? and what would this ideal university look like, in your opinion?” I respond:
The modern secular university was an artifact of the modern secular nation-state and will not survive the latter’s obsolescence.4 It existed to train the newly adult citizenry in the responsibilities of their citizenship. Now that this citizenship has decomposed, variously, into transnational or subnational identity categories and castes, such that the husk of the modern secular nation-state can no longer even field an army in its own defense, the university has neither addressee nor reason for being. Many of the disciplines it brought under its aegis long pre-existed it and will find some other refuge after its demise—physics, philosophy, poetry—while many of the disciplines it brought into being may well die (unregretted) with it—sociology, psychology, anthropology.
In an ideal society, though I never expect to see one, all education should be rigorous but non-compulsory. If it’s compulsory, then it can’t be rigorous. The curriculum will be lowered to the level of the most belligerently uninterested person forced to be in the room. I don’t criticize this hypothetical unruly student: a belligerent lack of interest is a reasonable response to being compelled. As Blake said, one law for the lion and ox is oppression. In such a free society, the university’s purpose is the uncalculated, uncoerced diffusion of knowledge and beauty.
A university should, therefore, ideally be an open-ended, ever-ongoing series of lectures, demonstrations, and performances by adepts and lunatics, orderly and rigorous according to the inner logics of their arts or sciences, which anyone of any age may attend at will, either for a modest fee or by public subsidy. There will be time for questions and discussions after each lecture, demonstration, or performance, but there will be no required “coursework,” “homework,” etc., since this is mostly an artifice unrelated to the arts and sciences, existing only to prepare the ephebe for office drudgery and deadlines. Anyone who wants actually to enter one of the arts or sciences as practitioner—as adept or lunatic—will be apprenticed to members of the faculty and undergo a more private or small-group tutelage. The faculty will recruit for itself; there will be no administration, no bureaucracy. There will be no campus; the university will loosely occupy a city neighborhood, the way the University of Pittsburgh “campus” loosely occupies the neighborhood of Oakland, still my own beau ideal in these matters.
People who think the most important thing in the world is whether one is “left-wing” or “right-wing,” also an artifact of the secular nation-state, accordingly think it matters enormously if the ideal university’s funding source will be public or private. I don’t think it matters. The important thing is for the funding source to be benignly indifferent to what it’s funding—benignly indifferent because it understands what it’s funding (i.e., the arts and sciences) to have an autonomous value that would only be degraded by the exercise of extrinsic influence. If anything, private funders, as long as we can convince them that in some ineffable way culture will eventually turn into money, might be more reliably indifferent than the state, whether nation-state or world-state, with the latter’s interest in manufacturing loyal and docile citizens. My imagined adepts and lunatics can, of course, also market their wares if they want more money than the stipend their funders will grant; even an ideal society will still have a market, but then I, as an American, would say that.
As for the architecture of the ideal university, let’s first consider the most contemptible passage in my otherwise beloved Virginia Woolf, for which I forgive her since she was after all a descendant of Evangelical activists: her proposal in Three Guineas, a 2014-Tumblr-style screed far inferior to A Room of One’s Own, for the ideal university that it
must be built not of carved stone and stained glass, but of some cheap, easily combustible material which does not hoard dust and perpetrate traditions…
This is exactly wrong, almost unbelievably misguided from what was otherwise so fine a mind. She unwittingly here proposes extreme dehumanization in a typically patronizing gesture from the left-wing intelligentsia who can’t imagine that the public or the poor might ever concern itself with magnificence. And wherever they burn traditions, they’ll be burning people next. The mind can only soar from a solid foundation, and not only a solid but also a glorious one. The architecture, then, should be sublime, in any extant or nascent mode of sublimity. It doesn’t have to be Gothic—in fact it shouldn’t be, because that’s mere nostalgia—but the point of making it Gothic in the first place was to appropriate for uses of the free mind what Ruskin, defying his own native Evangelical plain-style, had hailed as the Gothic style’s savagery and abundance. In such new uses of sublime old forms, tradition renews itself, avoiding both childishness and senility in its juvenescence, or as it said above the Gothic gate in the Cathedral5 where I went to school: “for you the very stars of heaven are new.” And this, too, this winding stair from the ancient to the hitherto unimaginable, is an ideal purpose for the university.
Don’t miss Mary’s serialized meta/theory fiction-series, The Iris Murdoch Book Club, both a send-up of bien-pensant culture—
‘The only thing in this book that’s not white is the title.’
‘Sorry, ma’am, The Angela Davis Book Club is across the street.’
—and a serious variation for the present century on Murdochian and Weilian themes of art, selfhood, otherness, and ethics. Speaking of bien-pensant culture, provocateur Adam Lehrer, right here on Substack, satirizes “The Many Pronouns of the 2024 Whitney Biennal.” As Flaubert is supposed to have said that the Franco-Prussian War might have been avoided had the authorities read his Sentimental Education, so this calamitous imprisonment of art, even of the soul, in self-stuck labels, too, might have been forestalled if only Major Arcana enjoyed wider circulation. Mary captures the thèse of my particular roman in admirably epigrammatic dialogue, dialogue worthy of Dame Iris her/themself:
‘Do you think Murdoch was non-binary avant la lettre?
‘We were all non-binary avant la lettre. La lettre ruined everything.’
By the way, the pod also attempts in general to defend-by-complicating that much-bruited concept of “the Romantic genius.” Even friend Noah, for example, welcomes this genius’s evanescence. I think people have this idea backward, however, even if “people” admittedly includes some of its formulators in figures like Wordsworth and Shelley. This genius is not some super-special individual whose maximal (or even “overwhelming”) intention subordinates us all, but rather stands for the fact of and the potential for any individual to be taken possession of by the truth and thereby transmit it to redeem the polity. (I assume this is part of what friend Alice is getting at with her thesis on the Muse.) The true genius, in the act of genius, experiences what the mystics call “ego-death,” though it’s possible, opposites being identical on the highest level, for this to appear as the ego’s apotheosis. Note the inadvertently ironic way this article, looking forward to the Romantic genius’s potential obsolescence by ChatGPT, trades on the image of William S. Burroughs, whose proto-algorithmically impersonal composition methods only made him all the more an icon and culture-hero. (And friend Noah, if I may, is more fun when he’s reading the Romantic ironist Calasso than when he’s reading the Catholic moralist Girard!—though I also must read more Calasso.) I do agree with Wordsworth—and others, see below—that the Romantic genius probably shouldn’t have to work a day job.
For a somewhat less appreciative take on, well, me, please also don’t miss Blake Smith’s superb celebration of Susan Sontag’s 1992 novel, The Volcano Lover in Tablet this week, where, opposition being true friendship, I am contested in passing as a politicized presentist critic, just what I myself was assailing in my Wordsworth lecture. (We contain multitudes. Not only that, we censure in others what we reprehend in ourselves.) Anyway, Sontag’s bravura romance deserves the laurel with which Blake eloquently crowns it:
The greatness of The Volcano Lover is that, more deeply than any of Sontag’s previous emaciated pseudo-fictions, it is riven by the violence of thinking that alternately rejoices in the richness of the world and condemns its inadequacy. Here Sontag, because she is a genius, whose seriousness wrestles with love of others and contempt for itself, reaches a pitch unimaginable to present-day humanist liberal essayists-novelists who would be her heirs.
This imperious prophecy-as-hex sounds like the kind of thing I was attacking Sam Kriss for last week! In the previous Weekly Reading, I tried to direct you to the contretemps on Tumblr but put the wrong link in the version of the post that went out by email. (You should probably not be reading the email versions of these; I only see the typos and mistakes once they’re published.) Anyway, Kriss and I reconciled, and I no longer think he’s “obscurely evil.” Speaking of dubious prognostication, somebody asked me after I posted the university rumination to Tumblr, “What’s your prediction of the future? Postnational, ancap or?” I replied:
It looks like the immediate future will be a conflict between empire (America, Russia, China and their allies and spheres of influence) and the decentralized “network state,” sometimes guised as the old nation-state, and this complicated by the empires’ potentially apocalyptic quarrels among themselves. (As of now, the empire-network war appears to have just been declared.) Speaking impersonally and pragmatically, my bet’s on empire only because it seems to have bigger guns, but you never know what will come out of the chaos. I have somewhat notoriously turned in our post-rational, post-secular, post-university situation to the mystics and occultists, and the astrologers tell us that Pluto’s now-commenced 20-year sojourn in Aquarius means we should bet on decentralization instead, as we prepare to recapitulate-with-a-difference the revolutionary period beginning in the 1770s that created our modern politics.
The Cathedral appears in Major Arcana, but here, in case you missed it, is the long somewhat Balzacian description of it from my earlier novel, The Class of 2000:
She had brought a pack of strawberry-flavored clove cigarettes—I don’t know where she got them—and we smoked them to try to blend in with the students from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon. Despite the massing clouds, some of them still lounged on the lawn of the Cathedral of Learning, asleep with Plato or Marx propped open on their faces. We circled the Cathedral and stared up at its sooty limestone mass rearing into the clouds— the tallest building for miles.
We put out our cigarettes and walked through the high dim vault of its first floor. Students at weighty wooden study tables, strangely unaffected by the anachronistic grandeur that rose around them, sighed in frustration over chemistry or French textbooks; their sweatshirts and jeans affronted the solemn Gothic atmosphere.
Between classes, we ducked in and out of the nationality rooms. To promote cultural understanding and civic investment in the university while this vast structure was under construction in the 1920s—I quote from memory the brochure we read that day—the Chancellor had invited the participation of the many immigrant communities who’d raised this city, and the University continued its outreach since then, from the 18th-century English who’d fought off their brethren at Fort Pitt to those who came from Eastern and Southern Europe at the turn of the century seeking work in the factories that made the world’s steel to the recent arrivals from Africa and Asia who wished to compete in the global economy. Representatives of said communities were tasked with proposing, planning, and funding the construction of classrooms to commemorate the nations they’d left and the cultures they carried. We saw samovars, stained glass, calligraphic screens, menorahs, nationalist liberators, bodhisattvas, and Yoruba gods. We discussed the glory of studying human achievement in a vast tower consecrated to the genius of all the world’s cultures.
The professors always seemed to dislike having to teach in the nationality rooms, as if they felt upstaged by the grand scenery. The acoustics weren’t always good, to be sure.
I sat behind a pillar in the Indian Room—it was Buddhist-themed as a compromise between Hindu and Muslim members of the local diaspora—and consequently heard very little of the distinguished South African philosopher John McDowell’s sotto voce lectures on Wittgenstein, except that he seemed to endorse his repeated paraphrase of Wittgenstein that we should repair motorcycles rather than practicing philosophy, though I personally would rather do neither. I read Disgrace that semester, no doubt playing truant from the Philosophical Investigations. McDowell, like Coetzee, is a trim, abstemious, carefully spoken man with a soft voice and gentle manners. He tended to lecture in questions. “These words, it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language,” Wittgenstein begins. “Do we need a particular picture of the essence of human language?” McDowell asked us in turn. Had I discovered, I wondered, the type and pattern of the white South African intellectual?
An exception was the Croatian philosopher Heda Segvic, who loved teaching in the Italian Room, she said, because when she was a girl she’d look across the Adriatic—perhaps to the stony hills from which my maternal forebears took flight—and dream of Italy. When our Plato class’s slovenliness got us kicked out of the fragile Italian Room and into some normal gray-carpeted hole in the wall, she told us she hated us. She wore a long pink scarf and black clothes and would sling the scarf over her shoulder or stretch it out before her like a ribbon, working it through her fingers, as she lectured. I don’t know if she knew Iris Murdoch. She once tried to tell us that a friend had called her to say that Joyce Carol Oates had told her (the friend) that some renowned philosopher (I believe it was Murdoch’s onetime roommate, Philippa Foot) had finally, privately concluded that Socrates had it coming, hemlock and all. (When I say she tried to tell us, I mean she told us, but she couldn’t get Oates’s three names in the right order. That’s mainly the detail I recall, so it might not have been Philippa Foot.) She emphasized that when Hippocrates wakes Socrates up to tell him he’s just come from visiting the Sophist Protagoras in the dialogue of that title, Socrates asks him, “Has Protagoras harmed you in any way?” Sophism harms; sophism kills. I think she thought it had killed Yugoslavia. On a sultry spring day I brought my final paper to her office—I don’t remember what it was about; maybe Socrates’s contention that weakness of the will does not exist, error being a lapse in knowledge rather than volition—and told her fumblingly how moved I’d been by her lectures, though I hated philosophy then as I hate it now, though I as a poet am necessarily allied to the Sophists across the millennia. (And yet: “Is there in truth no beauty? / Is all good structure in a winding stair?”) She thanked me with a wondering smile, her eyes wide, her lips just parted. She died about six months later, when she was four years older than I am as I write this.
On the note about Coleridge and the architecture thought: I sometimes wonder if there shouldn’t be a category of something like romantic or aesthetic neoconservatism which could be separated from the “bombs and advocacy for literary censorship” of the tendency as it exists in of-this-world politics. Bloom & Paglia have it, and there’s a vein of it in your criticism to be sure.
Truly honoured to be counted among the friends of the Invisible College! I particularly enjoyed the reminiscences about the nationality rooms and your philosophy lecturers (in the particular is contained the universal, I believe Joyce said). On the topic of humanistic education, you deserve all the praise you get for not being simply another disillusioned academic pointing fingers at those who left the barn door ajar, but venturing worth to find a new horse (to belabour the metaphor). I think survey courses (like yours on modern British literature) which emphasise the lineage and development of ideas are especially important in this era of everything, everywhere all at once!