A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
My new novel, Major Arcana, continued to circulate this week after last week’s conversation with Ross Barkan. A new review has appeared on Goodreads; I will quote, blurb-style, only the first two paragraphs, with gratitude:
The author promised that we would all read this book in a week, and that’s exactly what I did. I honestly don’t think I’ve read a novel this long so fast in my life. It’s one thing to whip through a slim novella like Child of God or CoL49 in two days. But somehow sustaining that focus over a week or two just seemed impossible. This is the first 600+ page novel I’ve finished since 2666, in late autumn of last year. Between that masterpiece and this one lies several disappointing (more so in myself than in the books) DNFs.
I’m not nearly as skilled a critic as Dr. Pistelli so I will just come out and say, this book is excellent. Between the subject matter, the depth of the characters, the beautiful language, and the engrossing narrative, I couldn’t put it down. I will be sure to revisit it and more of his work soon.1
See? I told you you’d read it in a week. I simply refuse to believe there’s any reason a novel can’t be beautiful, profound, serious, and a page-turner. That we’ve abandoned this potential of the form is perhaps one problem our literary culture faces.2
A classic novelist who answers this mandate to unite seriousness with suspense is Joseph Conrad, and nowhere more than in his still timely 1907 thriller about anarchism and terrorism, The Secret Agent. Author and novel were topic of this week’s Invisible College episode, “Agent Provocateur.” After Conrad, we will confront high modernism directly over the next few weeks, in the figures of Yeats,3 Lawrence, and Woolf, not to mention our summer reading of Joyce’s Ulysses. If that’s not worth a paid subscription, please tell me what is.
Finally, I want to repeat what I said last week: I am open to reviewing new and forthcoming books, both on here or for various venues, provided they align with my interests. Please contact me at johnppistelli@gmail.com or DM on here to inquire about sending review copies (I prefer print). You can contact me the same way for review copies of Major Arcana (I will give free pdfs to literally anyone who wants to write a review anywhere and will send print copies to anyone who wants to write a review in a prominent publication).
For this week, I repurpose an old “auto-ethnography” I wrote on Tumblr to think about what the young are and ought to be reading. Please enjoy!
The Child Is Father of the Man: On New and Old Curricula
One of my inquisitive Tumblr anons has wondered several times about what children ought to be reading or viewing and about the potential danger to children of reading or viewing dark cultural content.
It’s not that I don’t share this concern—Major Arcana explores this among other themes—but I finally hesitate to render childhood an intellectual and emotional prison, so long as we allow the absolute ethical necessity of protecting children from certain obvious kinds of directly experiential encroachment, chiefly the sexual and the physically violent.
My answer to a recent question in this vein was sufficiently tough-minded that an otherwise sympathetic reader pronounced it “Chu-adjacent”!4 I think based on that answer, and on the Substack post about my perhaps startlingly adult childhood reading linked within it, an anon (another or the same) recently asked, “How many books had you read by age 18?”
I can’t give a number. Probably fewer than you might think. I’ve always started more books than I’ve finished. I have a bad attention span—before TikTok, there was MTV—and I don’t read all that quickly. Book critic and BookTube maven Steve Donoghue claims to read 150 pages an hour (it’s more like 20 pages an hour in my case) and says we can all do so if we don’t sub-vocalize—if we learn to read, that is, with our eyes only. This, to my mind, is not really reading. Sometimes I super-vocalize! Literature, for me, remains partly within the realm it displaced: the realm of orature.
The question, however, along with remarks I’ve made in recent Invisible College episodes about how I was assigned a surprising number of IC authors in high school, brought to mind an old Tumblr post of mine I’d like to rescue from oblivion.
The post’s initial context was the ever-ongoing debate over what books should be assigned in high-school English. People engaged in such debates often make imprecise and de-contextualized remarks about what they were assigned. Since I have a pretty good memory for what I read—I remember everything except facts and the plots of novels!—I decided I would make a concerted effort to recall exactly what I was assigned in my high-school English classes. I had no documentation, so I used my memory alone to come up with an archive of full-length works. There were plenty of short stories and poems, too—a great deal of Edgar Allan Poe in both categories, I believe—but I decided only to list book-length works.
For context, I attended a massive suburban public high school from 1996 to 2000; these were advanced English classes. Titles are listed in no particular order until 12th grade, which was, if I recall correctly, structured as a (an?) historical survey. The benefit of such an archive is to compare and contrast with the present. Here, then, is my list, with comments and recollections to follow.
9th GRADE
Rinehart, The Bat
Frank, Alas, Babylon
Steinbeck, The Pearl
Orwell, Animal Farm
Wilder, Our Town
Du Maurier, Rebecca
Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident
Stevenson, Treasure Island
Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Homer, The Odyssey
10th GRADE
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Shaw, Arms and the Man
Wilder, The Matchmaker
Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Golding, Lord of the Flies
Knowles, A Separate Peace
Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
Lawrence and Lee, Inherit the Wind
Dickens, Great Expectations
Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
Assignments for Multicultural Literature Project:
Conroy, The Water Is Wide
Tan, The Joy Luck Club
11th GRADE (AMERICAN LITERATURE FOCUS)
Miller, The Crucible
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Edwards and Stone, 1776
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
Wharton, Ethan Frome
Miller, Death of a Salesman
Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Selections for Book Reports on Fiction and Biography:
Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent
Donald, Lincoln
Selection for Research Paper:
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
12th GRADE (WORLD LITERATURE FOCUS)
Sophocles, Antigone
Beowulf
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (excerpts of Coghill’s trans.)
Shakespeare, Macbeth
Shakespeare, Hamlet
Shakespeare, King Lear
Congreve, The Way of the World
Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer
Ibsen, The Doll’s House
Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country
Selection for Presentation and Essay on English Poetry:
Keats, Odes
Selection for Research Paper:
Milton, Paradise Lost
Observations and Reminiscences:
—Strange omissions compared to other people in my generation: no Catcher in the Rye, no Frankenstein, no Brave New World. I read Catcher extracurricularly and with disappointment, in about the 10th grade, finding it a tiresome mass of outdated slang (a friend who read it around the same time, thinking of Mark David Chapman, said with exasperation, “It’s really boring—I thought it would make me want to assassinate someone!”); I read Frankenstein in college, also extracurricularly, with no disappointment at all, given its sublimity, and have read it and even taught it three or four times since; and I didn’t read Brave New World, embarrassingly enough, until I was in my 30s, with, yet again, disappointment at what I interpreted as its cheap satire (though conspiracy theorists fixated on Huxley’s new-world-order Darwinist lineage prefer to call it “the revelation of the method”).
—Many, many, many plays, including some that must have fallen out of the teaching repertoire, and even the performance repertoire, by now. (Before entering high school, I’d read, probably in Steranko’s History of Comics, that Mary Roberts Rinehart’s once-popular The Bat had helped to inspire Batman, so I took it up with enthusiasm in the 9th grade, but it was, as I recall, some kind of utterly dull drawing-room mystery.) There are good reasons to teach so many plays—the performance element gets students interested who might otherwise fall asleep—but also one slightly cynical reason: they’re shorter than novels!
—The 10th grade multicultural project: we had to read two books from two of five minority cultures (African-American, Asian, Jewish, Native American, Latino) and do an oral report about one of the cultures (not the specific texts—the cultures!) and a research paper on the other. The teacher hauled a dusty box of books out of the closet and randomly distributed them. Even back in benighted 1998, I knew it was ironic that my “African-American” selection was a white man’s memoir of teaching English to an isolated community of Gullah children, though The Water Is Wide isn’t a terrible book as such, and it inspired me to read, extracurricularly, Conroy’s exquisite and unforgettable middlebrow extravaganza The Prince of Tides (“Lowenstein, Lowenstein”). My other assigned text was originally a Chaim Potok novel, I don’t remember which one, but the jock next to me got The Joy Luck Club and wanted to trade with me since he knew they’d made that into a “chick flick.” I’d already seen and enjoyed the movie—my mother rented it from Blockbuster—so I readily agreed; Tan’s novel is also excellently middlebrow, and I have nothing but fond memories of it. I’ve still never read Chaim Potok, alas.
—In 11th and 12th grades, we were given some freedom to choose our own reading. In 11th grade we had to do two books reports, one on an American novel and one on a biography of a famous American. Showing no imagination, I first leaned in to the curriculum’s prevailing Steinbeck fixation and chose The Winter of Our Discontent (I’d already read The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden on my own) and plucked the then-newest biography of the most famous American of them all from my local branch library’s shelves (in my defense, Lincoln lived a hell of a life). I don’t know what made me choose Hemingway instead of Faulkner for the research paper, which had to be on a great American novel or play picked from a badly photocopied list originally banged out on a manual typewriter probably in the ’70s. I was never assigned Faulkner in school but read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury in the magic summer between 11th and 12 grades, when, loosed into literature as never before, I read masterpiece after masterpiece for three months in a heated daze (Hamlet, Billy Budd, The Sun Also Rises, Underworld, A Streetcar Named Desire, Beloved, Paradise, The Satanic Verses…). By that time, I was into Harold Bloom—I’d bought The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human at Borders Books: when the corporate chain stores came to the suburbs, we greeted them as liberators—which also explains the Keats and Milton selections in 12th grade. I wrote about how Keats sought transcendence in nature (“Ode to a Nightingale”), art (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), and, finally and counterintuitively, sorrow itself (“Ode on Melancholy”). The AP English teacher disliked Milton even though he was on the approved list of research-paper authors. Fearing he was too difficult for high-school students, she tried to discourage me from writing my research paper on Paradise Lost, but she ended up liking the essay, saying it showed that (I quote her marginal remarks from memory) “Freud and Jung would’ve had a field day with Milton,” though also commenting on my explication of the poet’s view that women must be subordinate to men as men are subordinate to God, “Are you trying to get my goat?”
In sum, if you throw out some of the plays and genre fiction—though not Rebecca; I love Rebecca—add a couple more older classics (Dante, Virgil), and, yes, diversify (at least swap in Morrison or Hurston or Soyinka or Achebe for the weepy white liberals Alan Paton and Harper Lee), it wasn’t a bad education at all.
I leave it to others to make the aforementioned comparison and contrast with present curricula. My impression is that the Common Core reforms added a lot of relatively uninteresting nonfiction, and that difficult-to-read pre-20th-century literature, with its ante-Hemingway bias toward the hypotactic sentence, is being dropped as too hard to read.
I used to ask college students their favorite books from high school. I got some answers that suggest continuity with the late 20th century: Romeo and Juliet, The Great Gatsby, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Lord of the Flies. I also got some that suggested the new priorities: a lot of them said Into the Wild—I’ve only seen the movie, with the Eddie Vedder soundtrack—and The Kite Runner, which smells ineffably, or perhaps libelously, of intelligence agencies to me, not that I ever did more than flip through it. Shakespeare appears to reign alone before the 20th century, and I wonder how long that will last.
Facts and lists are interesting for their own sakes, however, and so that is my list and those are my facts, my inventory of pre-college literary exposures and influences. Did I ever fail to finish anything assigned? I finished all mandatory English and history readings—even the appallingly boring Ox-Bow Incident—and was also devoted to my studio art classes, but please bear in mind that I never did my math and science homework and remain about as ignorant as a five-year-old on those subjects. Something’s got to give somewhere, and, as Lord of the Flies taught us, humanity is far from perfect! We may, in fact, have overlearned that particular lesson: learned it so well from those Cold-War dystopias that we think children can only swallow intellectual pap lest they turn brutal on that island called “childhood” where we’ve stranded them alone.5
Later in the piece, the reviewer speculates about what real-life graphic novels influenced Simon Magnus’s masterpiece, Overman 3000. It lacks an obvious cognate in actual Dark Age comics, unlike Marsh Man (based on Moore’s Swamp Thing) and Ratman: Fools’ Errand (based on various elements from Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Moore’s Killing Joke, and Morrison’s Arkham Asylum). The reviewer suggests Millar’s Superman: Red Son as Overman 3000’s inspiration, and that was certainly in the mix, as was Morrison’s All-Star Superman. The main influences, though, were the Kryptonian reveries in Moore’s Superman classic, “For the Man Who Has Everything,” as well as Morrison’s portrayal of the Phoenix force in New X-Men, insufficiently appreciated as among his-her-their-its-our best works. I want to emphasize again, however, that readers do not need to be familiar with such texts to appreciate Major Arcana—that I worked hard, even at the risk of a certain expository tendency, to make the novel accessible to those without any background in comics.
I just discovered this week an article by Melina Moe in the LARB about the rejection letters Toni Morrison wrote when she worked at Random House. Not without certain qualms about corporate consolidation and consequent cultural de-sophistication—I have them, too—she might agree with the sentence to which I’ve attached this footnote:
In 1975, she described one manuscript as “put together in a way that made it difficult to enjoy. The scenes are too short and packed too tightly. Motives were lacking.” She forestalled any possible rejoinders about the virtues of avant-garde abstraction by professing her awareness that “the subject itself is about disorder and confusion” but maintaining that “the book should create order for the reader, to help him understand more than simply what happened. He needs to know why.” In other words: Attempts to capture the condition of modern life are no excuse for leaving readers miserable, directionless, or bored.
On the other hand, one arch-experimentalist about whom Morrison and I both have our doubts is Gertrude Stein. She is being resurrected even as I type by a three-day readathon of The Making of Americans in New York, an event that mainly attracted my attention as a culture-watcher for its astonishing omnium gatherum of participants, everyone from Dasha and Sotce to Vivian Gornick and Lydia Davis, all literally united under an American flag tacked up on the wall of the performance space (I watched some of the livestream), this in an era when the mavens of American culture have been flying any and all standards—Progress, Ukrainian, Israeli, Palestinian, even Russian, Chinese, and Iranian—except Old Glory. Stein, I suspect, lends herself better to this kind of performance than she does to private reading; like Beckett after her, she was probably more an avant-garde artist than she was a novelist, more a creature of the modern museum than of the bookshelf. Even she, however, wrote a popular and supremely entertaining book, without loss of high modernist interest, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. On balance, whatever reservations one has about modernist Stein or about metropolitan “scenes,” this event probably bodes well—suggests a determination across lines of high and popular art and across all ideological divisions (Stein, you’ll recall, her Jewish lesbianism notwithstanding, was a fascist sympathizer) that American culture in its most ambitious avatars will not be vanquished despite the challenges of our era.
Paul Franz talked me into reading Yeats’s occult testament A Vision last fall; I’m halfway through it now in preparation for next week’s Yeats episode. Not to dispute the spiritual couriers who brought Yeats the book, and its new spiritual myth based on the phases of the moon, through the medium of his wife, but I’m not sure we need another overly convoluted occult system when we already have astrology, Kabbalah, Tarot, and more. Paul was correct to note in my comments section that the book’s main interest is as a psychology of the artist. The book A Vision wants to be is Bloom’s Genius, itself more humbly modeled on the Kabbalah. In that book, Bloom shrewdly places Yeats alongside Balzac and Browning in Malkuth, i.e., down here on earth, since Yeats’s greatness rests finally on his unflinching awareness of “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” “the desolation of reality,” “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” and not on any occult flights. Transcoding Bloom’s Kabbalistic interpretation into the terms of Yeats’s system, that makes Yeats “The Concrete Man” of his own Phase 20—alongside not only Balzac but also Shakespeare and Napoleon! I am tempted to place myself among Yeats’s lunar phases. I’m not very humble, but I’m too humble to put myself directly in the same category as Shakespeare. I vote instead for Phase 22, “Balance Between Ambition and Contemplation,” where I will be in the same company as Flaubert and Dostoevsky—and Darwin and Herbert Spencer. It’s a strange book. I could go on—I now believe Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God is based directly on a passage in A Vision, the explication of Phase 28, “The Fool,” though a cursory internet search suggests no McCarthy scholar has yet claimed this—but the footnote is already too niche even for this Substack, so I will desist.
The historicist critic a century hence will observe that Andrea Long Chu and I received essentially the same quaternary education, though we took it in different directions, hence certain underlying unavoidable similarities, even if she’d think I’m roughly the same kind of reactionary she thinks Moshfegh is—I mean, I probably am!—and I judge her pitiably credulous before the putative benefits of technology’s alliance with the state and the state’s with any notion of justice. (We also, perhaps needless to say, find different aspects of the feminine intriguing and appealing: her analyst is Lacan; mine, increasingly, is Jung.) For new readers, my deepest engagement with Chu came in an essay on Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge, where I put her and Vidal in conversation with Camille Paglia, Cynthia Ozick, and a pseudonymous neoreactionary accelerationist trans female author.
I am thinking of Hannah Arendt’s refreshingly skeptical remarks about “the child’s world” from her 1954 essay “The Crisis in Education,” the titular crisis being the very diminution in children’s learning under discussion above:
Therefore by being emancipated from the authority of adults the child has not been freed but has been subjected to a much more terrifying and truly tyrannical authority, the tyranny of the majority. In any case the result is that the children have been so to speak banished from the world of grown-ups. They are either thrown back upon themselves or handed over to the tyranny of their own group, against which, because of its numerical superiority, they cannot rebel, with which, because they are children, they cannot reason, and out of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of adults is barred to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is frequently a mixture of both.
Raised (until the age of 12) an only child, half in my parents’ atomized suburban world and half in the remnant of the urban immigrant milieu of my grandparents, I was substantially less “banished from the world of grown-ups” than many of my peers. Not everything you learn in this world comes from a book. Readers of my fiction have sometimes wondered at my persistent interest in the figure Nancy Armstrong calls “the domestic woman,” whom she also labels “the first modern individual,” and the most typical novelistic protagonist—even, to judge from that Making of Americans livestream, for a novelist as otherwise outré as Gertrude Stein. If you’d spent your summers at ages six and seven and eight and nine in your mother’s beauty shop the way I did, you would, I believe, share this aesthetic and intellectual interest as well. My eyes hooked to my dark and “adult” Batman and Superman comics, my ears attentive to the middle-aged women as they told their life stories in the beautician’s chair: what were those summers but the matrix of Major Arcana? All that’s missing from the picture, the paternal bequest, is the time spent next to the drawing board where my father, a commercial artist, did his work, with a panoply of pre-digital tools—from T-square and professional-grade mechanical pencils to a whole over-stuffed binder of rub-on letter transfers in every font and a whole rattling box of pen nibs of every size—that held an inexorable fascination for my infantine hands and eyes. But these are enough notes toward that autofiction I promise I will never write!
By the time I was in hs the turn to young adult and popular stuff was already underway, and yet still we read a lot of classics: Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, Melville etc. I did take a 101 AP lit course, but didn’t score high enough on the exam for the college credit (I was sort of temperamentally unsuited for literary criticism at that point in my life – I thought it was overly formal and structural and ruined the beauty of its subject of analysis. I have a memory of writing a sonnet protesting sonnet form as part of an assignment) so I wound up taking English 101 again in sophomore(?) year of undergrad. The high school level syllabus was definitely more traditionalist, although still looking back the college syllabus was structured rather differently than I think it would be today (DFW and Hemingway! Morrison maybe the only female author!)
Bloom is being very mischievous there, but also characteristically astute (as you shrewdly point out). One might have thought this would be the esoteric Balzac of Seraphita (still unread by me, I hasten to confess). But apparently not...