Weekly Readings #104 (01/29/24-02/04/24)

get in, aesthete

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

This week I published “Et in Arcadia Egirl,” the latest chapter in my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. (Astonishingly, I am the first person online ever to use the phrase that is the chapter’s title. So much for traditional culture!) Major Arcana has three chapters and an epilogue to go. On Wednesday, we will bring Ellen Chandler and Diane del Greco to their final reconciliation. Then, in the coming weeks, we will conclude the saga of Simon Magnus and Ash del Greco. Please subscribe today to read a novel like no other!¹

I note that some mixed-to-positive Goodreads reviews of my previous books have been posted in the last two weeks as well. A reader of Portraits and Ashes, before listing a few of the novel’s possible flaws,² continues,

As a reader of Pistelli’s critical writing I was a little surprised that this novel, which I expected to be a cutting, witty affair, is more of a grotesque horror-comedy (although it does shift in tone to art-world satire at times). I liked it, liked the various down-and-out characters, the way it captures the sense of decay and stagnation in the modern city, and the redeeming sense that art and literature is not just for an expert class of moralist academics but for any and all. I thought I could detect the influence of the old Doom Patrol comics where the ideas of people like Artaud and Duchamp are brought quite naturally into these phantasmagorical pop fiction situations.

Likewise, a reader of The Class of 2000, while chiding me for some possible grammatical errors³ (the reviewer was not Ann Manov), “was generally and genuinely very impressed by the story.” If you would like to be impressed by these two novels, along with my novella The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, you can either order print copies from most online retailers or acquire pdf copies with a paid subscription to this Substack. A reader also shares with me the happy information that I have, after over two decades on the internet, at last been rendered into a meme:⁴

MeMePLEX

Finally, I also released the latest lecture for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, “A Sight to Dream of, Not to Tell,” on the life and work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, complete with an explication of Immanuel Kant, a speculation on Coleridge’s dueling gender-models for the Romantic poet, and a prophecy of World War III. This Friday, we will assay Shelley’s revolutionary poetry. Please subscribe today!

For today: a response to a question I received on Tumblr, original to Substack, about literature in translation; and then, since people seem to enjoy my academic memoirs for some reason, I repost (with added footnotes) one I wrote this week on Tumblr in answer to a query about what I would say if (big “if”!) I were invited to give a commencement address at an Ivy League school. Please enjoy!

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Tasking the Translator: Literature Beyond Language

Constance Garnett Translating Dostoevsky Outdoors in England in 1910 (Bing AI)

A reader, wonderfully poeticizing my linguistic inadequacy, inquires: “Do you ever fear that you are limited by your lack of mastery of other languages when exploring the vast world of literature, as if a diver who can only see through a tiny hole in his metal helmet?” I respond:

Partly yes, partly no. Literature can be enjoyed and analyzed on more than one level and for more than one quality. Epics, novels, plays—these can and do cross borders on the strength of emplotment and image, and they can be analyzed and enjoyed on the level of emplotment and image even if you can’t appreciate or investigate on the micro-level of the word. I’m sure I’m missing something by not reading them (The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Anna Karenina) in the original, but by no means everything.

Lyric poetry, especially modern lyric poetry with its meta-textual obsession, is a different matter. There I barely ever bother with translations. Happily, I have enough French to read the modern lyric poets (Baudelaire, for example, or Rimbaud) with some comprehension, because I’ve tended to find the translations I have checked inadequate.⁵ I also have just enough Italian to want to read Dante in an original-on-facing-page translation and just enough Spanish that I’ve looked into Neruda and Borges in a dilettantish way. I accept that much of lyric poetry is simply closed to people who don't read any given lyric poet’s original language; I can’t imagine getting across what matters in Gerard Manley Hopkins or Emily Dickinson, for example, in any other language than English, given the total precision of their words and the way they use rhythm as meaning.⁶

On the other hand, I’ve read a bit of Voltaire, Stendhal, Flaubert in the original and didn’t feel an enormous amount of their magic was getting lost in the work of major translators like Moncrieff or Howard. As Virginia Woolf once said, writing a novel has nothing to do with words—and she, might I add, read and was inspired by Tolstoy and Proust in translation.

In short, it is a genre-dependent concern for me. I worry more about poetry and lyric than about prose and narrative. We have the right to read in translation, however, so I wouldn’t put off Dante or Dostoevsky until you’ve learned Italian or Russian! The purists in these matters are too pure for their own good—or for ours, anyway—and even old Constance Garnett⁷ will be your friend.

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College on a Hill: A Fictional Commencement Address

Paolo S. Abbate, Bust of Dante Alighieri (c.1900), Brown University

A reader writes to me wondering, “If asked to give a commencement speech at an Ivy, what would you say?” I respond:

I’ve never gone to an Ivy, so I’m not sure. I was only ever even on the campus of one once, 12 years ago, for a conference at Brown—the ACLA, I think—where I co-chaired a panel with a friend of mine on love or affect or something in contemporary fiction. Somebody did a Heideggerean reading of Fight Club. I was later chided by my colleagues for letting a scholar who’d come from Istanbul present a dazzling and incomprehensibly intelligent neo-structuralist reading of Orhan Pamuk for 45 minutes, despite the 15-minute limit on papers. She’d devised a rose-shaped diagram to represent the structure of love and narrative in Pamuk and passed out photocopies for us to study. She’d given the diagram her own first name, a scientific discovery: “The Çiğdem Rose.” “You just let her talk because she was hot!” a fellow graduate student accused. (He had presented on Louise Erdrich. The refrain of his paper was, “Techne determines ethnos.” Does it?) She was hot, but I let her talk because I dislike confrontation, and I was hoping the structuralism might come clear. I had already decided I had no future in academe, so I mostly skipped the conference, mostly skipped Brown, and just wandered the steep hills of that cloud-hung city under gray March drizzle, alone. Or sometimes in the company of an academic friend who’d written something on Erich Auerbach: another Turkish connection, Istanbul double-exposed upon Providence. I stared at monuments of Lovecraft, of Dante—Auerbach’s beloved Dante, the first modern poet, now banished to the other side of an ocean he hadn’t known existed, well beyond the Pillars of Hercules, another fragment (like me) of that “Italo-Semitic mob” Lovecraft would not have wished to see walking up and down his dream city and eating the salt bread of exile. In an Italian restaurant, where I considered ordering the clams casino but decided against, my colleagues and I debated the ethical propriety of criticizing Mitt Romney’s Mormonism in the upcoming general election. The question arose because a scholar from Brigham Young had presented on Never Let Me Go, a paper written in the style of Kathy H’s ingenuous narration. “I don’t know how it was where you were,” he began. My colleagues, with the semi-ironic earnestness of poptimism’s early hegemony, discussed Santigold on the damp nighttime streets, cobbled and smelling of the sea. Santigold: “I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up / If I could stand up mean for all the things that I believe…”

Anyway, that was the closest I ever came to the Ivies. Another memory, this one from 2006. On my first day of graduate school at my humble R1 alma mater, the Director of Graduate Studies, who would later be the supervisor of my dissertation, though I didn’t know that then, made a speech to us. “Go over to St. Paul,” she said, “and see the agricultural campus—see those grain silos. That’s the money that will get turned into culture here.” She told us, “You are the stewards of capital.” A jejune leftist, I was scandalized at the time; I’d gone to graduate school to work for the vanguard of the revolution, not to be the steward of capital. The little speech turned out to be a repurposed bit from the end of her book on gender, capitalism, expertise, and modernism. She’d written it in a more critical tone than she’d said it in:⁸

Thus this book carries traces, both material and ideological, of those telltale marks of complicity I have taken pains to uncover in the modernists of this study and in the expert copies they made. Yet this conformation offers all the more reason to engage the subject and to gauge our involvement in such a way that, as descendants of these expert modernists, we see ourselves for the stewards and parvenus we decidedly are.

Now, would-be parvenu that I decidedly am, I only wish I had more capital to be the steward of. So “money gets turned into culture” and “you are the stewards of capital” are therefore probably the two things I would tell the assembled graduates of the Ivy Leagues, what I would say if I ever found myself back in Providence, way up on top of College Hill some fine day in May.⁹ “Go together, you precious winners all.”

1. Admirers of the novel may also be interested in this provisional rumination on its characters’ psychologies in the light of Paglia’s theory of “psychic transsexualism.” (I wrote it in response to a reader’s inquiry; I wouldn’t elaborately interpret my own book otherwise!)

2. Proust once advised budding writers to do more of what the critics criticize them for doing, since this is the mark of their originality. It’s a dangerous line of thinking! And yet: while I take my critic’s point about the potential melodrama of my plotting, I still pride myself on being a writer who can construct a plot for a serious novel rather than having the characters wander around aimlessly for 300 pages before they arrive at some portentously understated epiphany: “She looked up at the stars. The rain began to fall.” I know my climactic bridge-collapses, arsons, and explosions aren’t for everyone—but shouldn’t novels be fun? (In this respect, I am taking Proust’s advice to justify my own un-Proustian aesthetic. Unless he suicide-bombs the madeleine factory or something at the end of the Recherche. I don’t know; I only read Swann’s Way.) Major Arcana features slightly less of this type of explosive event than my other books: the violently melodramatic climax occurs in the prologue.

3. I sampled a few non-consecutive pages of the novel and didn’t see any grammatical errors. But then we don’t know what we don’t know, as a U.S. official once famously and tortuously explained. It’s possible I don’t know English grammar at all. How far does this nescience extend? What if I have been wholly illiterate this entire time and have only gotten by on sheer confidence? (Is it “gotten”? Is it “got”? Have I ever known? Did I ever know? How does one find out if one is literate? Is there an online test you can take?)

4. Memorandum: idea for Yorgos Lanthimos’s next film. Like Milton in Blake’s Milton, Blake returns to life to atone for the imaginative lapses of his life. The setting is a deceptively utopian solarpunk charter-city dystopia on the moon in the 22nd century, requiring for its needed social critique the shrewdness of Blake’s prophetic intellect, even as Blake must learn to reconcile himself to nature and the flesh. To accomplish this double remediation, his spirit enters into the body of a futuristic performance-poet, a dancer in and of light. She will be played, of course, by Amanda Seyfried. Seyfried will win the Oscar not only on the strength of the scene where she is possessed by Blake during a shattering private earthrise dance for the lunar utopia/dystopia’s princely bioengineered archoness, but also for her double performance later in the film as both the poetess and Blake in a single-body mental and physical colloquy between tender lyricism and ferocious prophecy, between lunar and solar sensibilities. I think the title should be Burning Gold, but I’m open to other ideas. Innocence and Experience also seems right but is perhaps too literal.

5. This will doubly annoy friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith, who is both an admirer of Richard Howard and an anti-admirer of NYRB Classics, but I’m happy to see that the latter is soon reprinting George Dillon and Edna St. Vincent Millay’s translation of Les Fleurs du Mal, my first and favorite Baudelaire. I’m no scholar of French literature or even a totally fluent reader-speaker, but it still seems to my amateur eye that Howard’s Baudelaire is a bit ponderous in an English blank-verse kind of style, whereas Dillon and Millay capture the Satanic Frenchman’s sheer velocity. Let me use this footnote to correct an error in the Coleridge lecture, where I said I wasn’t sure if Baudelaire had read Coleridge. Not only am I illiterate in several languages, including my own, but I also forgot about “L’Albatros,” which I give here in Dillon’s translation. Obviously he had read Coleridge cannily (or uncannily) enough to transform the bird, rather than the bird’s killer, into his image of the outcast poet.

Sometimes, to entertain themselves, the men of the crew
Lure upon deck an unlucky albatross, one of those vast
Birds of the sea that follow unwearied the voyage through,
Flying in slow and elegant circles above the mast.

No sooner have they disentangled him from their nets
Than this aerial colossus, shorn of his pride,
Goes hobbling pitiably across the planks and lets
His great wings hang like heavy, useless oars at his side.

How droll is the poor floundering creature, how limp and weak—
He, but a moment past so lordly, flying in state!
They tease him: One of them tries to stick a pipe in his beak;
Another mimics with laughter his odd lurching gait.

The Poet is like that wild inheritor of the cloud,
A rider of storms, above the range of arrows and slings;
Exiled on earth, at bay amid the jeering crowd,
He cannot walk for his unmanageable wings.

6. Paul Celan, however, translated Dickinson into German. If anyone could do it, he could, but I don’t have the German to know.

7. One of the most-read posts in the eight-year archive of johnpistelli.com is my defense of Richard Pevear and Linda Volokhonsky’s popular but controversial translations from the Russian. I am careful to note, however, that I admire Pevear and Volokhonsky mostly because of the way their jittery, estranging translations opened up Dostoevsky to me as older translations had not. Sometimes you need the right translator, as Keats discovered when he first looked into Chapman’s Homer, according to the most beautiful of Romantic sonnets. But I am happy to defend Constance Garnett from the condescension of critics such as the tiresomely purist Nabokov, especially her versions of Tolstoy and Chekhov. I read Garnett’s War and Peace, as I say in the post, and would recommend that to anyone.

8. I forgot to note in the original post that the book in question was based on a doctoral dissertation written while she was a graduate student at—Brown University! “Everything is connected” is not just the tag line of the Cloud Atlas movie or something people say when they’re stoned.

9. You have to tell them something tough-minded like this. If you just lay the “This Is Water” rigamarole on them, they’ll walk out thinking they’re the nicest people in the world—or that they will be as soon as they get the chance, as soon as Consuela doesn’t clean the toilet to their satisfaction and they don’t threaten to have her and her entire family deported. They will forget that they wield great power if all you tell them is to be kind. It’s fine to tell them not to misuse that power, but you have to remind them that they have it. Our power is the very first thing we are likely to forget about ourselves—even those of us at the foot of College Hill rather than on top.