Weekly Readings #133 (08/19/24-08/25/24)

this way of things coming together

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

This week I posted “What Everything Costs,” the last in a four-part series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch in The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers to this Substack. The Invisible College now boasts 31 episodes of two hours or more. In addition to the Middlemarch sequence, there are 19 episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett (encompassing such favorites as Keats, Austen, Dickens, Wilde, Yeats, Woolf and more) and eight episodes on the work of James Joyce, with a focus on Ulysses. This week, we will begin a sequence on American literature, starting with Emerson and the Transcendentalists and continuing through Poe, Hawthorne, Melville,¹ Whitman, Dickinson, James, Frost, Pound, Stevens, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. Prominent figures on Substack like Ted Gioia and Henry Oliver often advocate the preservation of the arts and humanities outside the corporate or academic institutions that have corrupted them. With its extensive and guided readings of canonical works, The Invisible College may be the most ambitious and extensive project devoted to such preservation—to “the drama of thought”—on this platform. Please offer a paid subscription today!

I usually promote my fiction in this paragraph—you can pre-order my forthcoming novel Major Arcana here; it has been called “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the 21st century”—but I think today’s post will double as such self-promotion, at the risk of self-indulgence, as it considers the relation of film to literature through my own work. Please enjoy!

---

Crazy Visions of Me in L.A.: Screening My Oeuvre

I’m resurrecting my old vision board for this post. Imagine stickers on each cover: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE.

For some reason, an anon recently asked me about Chappell Roan. (Do I seem like someone with opinions about Chappell Roan?) In response, I made a quip—vis-à-vis our chanteuse’s eponymous drag-bar-as-stardom-synecdoche “Pink Pony Club”—about waiting for my ship to come in from Hollywood. This led to two further anon inquiries (I assume these are from two separate people): “Which of your books would make the best movie?” and “What’s the movie pitch?”

Since I have four viable narratives already written, I will stick with them for the pitch(es). It might be fun to think through not only which of these novels might work best onscreen but also what this tells us about their respective forms and maybe even about form today.

You will chide me that cinema is dead, but that’s all right, because the novel is dead, too. Soon the only living art will the synesthesiac pulsation of the AI implant across the insides of our eyelids, a lightshow bypassing narrative and drama to create pure affect. (This is, let us not forget, art’s origin and destiny: all else is, as it were, drag.)² In the meantime, fiction and cinema.

Since all my works could be productively adapted, I will proceed chronologically. Major Arcana doesn’t come out until April 2025, so you might pass the time by reading its three precursors; I have helpfully supplied Amazon links for purchase, as well as links to the free sample chapters I’ve made available on Substack.

—Portraits and Ashes, which I have mythologically designated the first true work in my oeuvre, not coincidentally begins with a somewhat polemical defense of working in bygone art forms:

“Can I ask you something that might annoy you?” she said.

The artist now smiled broadly with his old-world courtliness and said, “Yes, of course, but if you are too annoying I will not answer.”

“Isn’t painting finished?” she said. “Museums, galleries, and art schools are all about installations, performance, multimedia, various kinds of street art, new forms of interactive art. There have even been defenses on these grounds of The Last Café.”³

He grunted in disgust at her allusion.

“Then there’s film, video, photography, the Internet. Whatever technological function the canvas served as a way of producing images has been entirely superseded. But even leaving that aside, didn’t art considered in and of itself run its course? Didn’t artists themselves bring it to an end with abstraction and pastiche and collage and blank canvases and soup cans and all of that? They took it to its logical conclusion. There’s not another development anyone can imagine. What reason is there to go on making pictures of people and things after that?”

He nodded as she spoke, his chin bouncing off the top of every word, no doubt because he had already heard every word before, probably in more than one language. Then he painted in silence for long enough to discomfort her. The hairs of the brush scratched against the canvas like a whisper that echoed under the high ceiling of the church.

“The answer is very simple,” he finally said. “I do it only so that it will not be finished. What you say seems as if it is true, but if I am doing it, how can it be finished? Logical conclusion, you say, but we do not live in logic. There is a way of being, of meeting, in this act that does not exist in these others that you mention. On this canvas comes together myself, yourself, this church. All are touching, which cannot happen in the machine, not even in photographs, where the apparatus comes between the mind and the mark and does its work by itself, no human touch. The apparatus itself is some other man’s creation. My rival, so to say. But here is no rival, only my hand, my tool, my mind, your body, your mind, this room, this hour. All touching. This way of things coming together I do not want to see finished, so I do it if nobody else will.”

“And if nobody sees it?”

“You see it, I see it. Are we nothing? You and I are not nothing.”

In that spirit—the spirit of Old World courtliness, the spirit of the painterly—Portraits and Ashes should be a monumental art film of the Tarkovsky type, endless pans across the gray wasted cityscape where its gnostic ash-cult wanders barefoot in their rags, this in contrast to the hot passion of the heroes tempted in the very fire of their desires to throw away their humanity and join the new faith. This style of film can perhaps not sustain what has been described as the narrative’s “grotesque horror-comedy” elements—might be too solemn and grave for its American violence—but if you think of the way Kubrick punctures the otherwise unruffled painterliness of Barry Lyndon with scenes of passionate conflict, or of the more austere Cronenberg of something like Eastern Promises, you will have an idea of the right tone. Plus, the kind of expansive texture appropriate to a novel does not always work onscreen and could here be considerably pared back for the sake of a two-hour film. If called upon to adapt (Hollywood: call me, baby!), I would counterintuitively abandon the novel’s three-act structure and re-orient the entire narrative around the third act’s heroine, my first or second favorite of my own characters, the radical artist and art theorist Alice Nicchio-Strand. Her mini-Bildungsroman is the subject of the novel’s partly L.A.-set seventh chapter, “Xeriscapes of the Heart,” which you can read in its almost self-sufficient entirety here.

—The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, the first longform literary work about the pandemic, published in May 2020, is basically already a screenplay and is therefore the most obvious answer to the question of which of my books is most filmmable. A chamber drama about lockdown, a Platonic dialogue about the health of the polity, I wrote it from late March to early April 2020 in real-time with the events it describes. I usually write caffeinated during the day in libraries or cafés, but, considering the real-life quarantine, I deliberately wrote this late at night in a chocolate-melatonin haze, right at the edge of sleep and dream, to disinhibit my own response to the crisis. Readers have remarked with relief at the absence of overt political polemic in the novel—I wouldn’t fully understand what the global totalitarian⁴ response to the pandemic meant for the politics of this century until 2021—but the closest thing to such a passage comes, ironically, when a minor character defends the art of cinema (and the art of cinema-going) against the lockdown:

“We can’t lose cinema, man. We were already going to lose it to home streaming, but this pandemic’s going to kill it off for good. And then we’ll be the first society in the history of the planet that sets aside no place to come together in the flesh and deliberate over a drama or let ourselves feel awe together in the presence of a myth. The 20th century! Cinema! It was the triumph, the fulfillment of all art—a collective dream in light and sound. It made the churches obsolete. Don’t you think it’s everything Aeschylus and Sophocles would have wanted? The highest art. A real theophany. Humanity at prayer. And we’re going to lose it, man? No way. So the Royal is staying open, plague or shine.”

If one were willing to indulge the always-risky practice of voiceover to include the fairly sparse first-person narration, the novella could almost be transformed into a 90-minute screenplay without edits. Quarantine would have to be a performance-driven indie movie filmed with a shaky vérité camera—or, if that sounds nauseating, maybe just filmed in a transparent style the better to focus on the dialogue. I imagine the dialogue delivered at a too-fast pace in a slightly stylized or heightened tone without any naturalistic touches, no hemming and stammering and mumbling or anything like that. Half-screwball, half-Brecht—perhaps a demented Whit Stillman film. Re: nausea, it would take a Tarantino or maybe a Rob Zombie to handle this narrative’s central scene of “Pynchon-meets-Saw” body horror, where an accident in the deep state—I didn’t say it contained no political polemic—leads to a woman’s very literal bisection. For a sample of Quarantine’s Platonic dialogue, please see the third chapter, “The Critique of Everything,” available for free here.

—The Class of 2000 is also a good candidate for adaptation since it sits comfortably in an established cinematic as well as a novelistic genre. My attempt to write the last realist novel of American suburbia, this story about a high-school senior caught up amid the sex and violence hidden behind the pastel façade of the “green-lawn dream” is the least insane and perhaps the most readable of my works, one I pieced together painstakingly over five years instead of writing over a few weeks or months in a visionary trance, like the others. Since the anti-heroine is an actress, one chapter is even written in the form of a play, albeit not a screenplay. As far as cinema style goes, I envision a more operatic version of something like, let’s see, The Ice Storm. What if the Noah Baumbach of Margot at the Wedding hadn’t spliced himself to Spielberg to become the Noah Baumbach of White Noise—but rather to Coppola? Actually, let’s just let Sofia Coppola do it: a spiritual sequel to The Virgin Suicides. Kirsten Dunst is even a reasonable choice to play my middle-aged heroine, as she was to play the earlier film’s teenaged heroine. (The novel’s heroine is supposed to be tall and dark—rather like Sofia Coppola, in fact—but I’m confident the Dunst of Melancholia could catch the proper spirit, which is what’s most important. Lars von Trier, speaking of, might be another stylistically reference point: think Breaking the Waves.) A period piece set in 1999, The Class of 2000 requires a period soundtrack, though some of the one-hit wonders subtly referenced in the novel, if they’re not to come off as comic music cues onscreen, will need to be covered in a slower and more plangent style by today’s artists. (Chappell Roan, I trust, can sing “You Get What You Give” with the requisite elegaism.) For a sample of this suburban apocalypse, you can read its most controversial chapter, a study of rape and revenge, “The Talking Cure,” here.

—Major Arcana, despite my general presumption against the televisual, will almost certainly have to be a show. I’ve already speculated on the proper structure for this multi-generational saga on television vs. in print here. Reversing the priority in the two forms, I think it might be better to make the TV version more defamiliarizing and difficult than the novel is. I wrote the novel to counteract American literary fiction’s Euro-induced loss of narrative⁵ even at the risk of making it too suspenseful, too thrilling, too seductive, whereas television could by contrast stand a dose of severe and alienating modernism. Accordingly, the visual innovation here should involve filming the past (1970s-90s) and present scenes in two distinct styles, with perhaps the past being neon and dreamy, a post-vaporwave nostalgic sleepscape of the last free decades and the cost of their freedom, almost as if it were something the more documentary present were having a reverie about—and maybe the hallucinatory moments of the present-day sequence could use the same visual style in which the past is shot. The main challenge to adapting Major Arcana is difficult to discuss politely but must be discussed: the central love story is between a “beautiful boy” and an “ugly girl” (or whatever), the other favorite of my own characters, which works on the page but not on the screen. Screens only permit us the beautiful—e.g., the epochally striking Kristen Stewart was famously Hollywood’s idea of a Plain Jane for Twilight’s reformed rake to dote upon in that commercial version of the archetypal story Major Arcana intends largely to subvert, since my hero and heroine are also at least in part Christ and the Devil. Still, the phone screen may be changing all that. The erotic charisma of the ugly man is almost a byword of online discourse, the stuff of a million Serge-and-Jane memes, but the cognate erotic charisma of the ugly woman, even when it’s staring us with mesmerizing homelyness in the face (for example), is greeted with guffaws of disbelief. Maybe Major Arcana could be the series that alters this for good. A novel that has been gently accused of reactionary gender politics becomes a TV show that accomplishes a revolution in sexual aesthetics: now that is what I call a Hollywood ending.

1. Having completed what are often considered the greatest English novel (Middlemarch) and the greatest Irish novel (Ulysses), we will also read what is often considered the greatest American novel, Moby-Dick, over the course of three weeks. Other novels in the American sequence will include Hawthorne’s and James’s studies of radical politics, The Blithedale Romance and The Bostonians, and that unholy trinity of great American modernist novels, The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, and The Sound and the Fury. As always, I remind anyone who finds The Invisible College’s American selections too white and too male that my YouTube channel, collecting pandemic-era content I recorded for a former employer, contains 60 free lectures on multicultural American literature and contemporary American literature, featuring Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, Louise Erdrich, Gloria Anzaldúa, August Wilson, and many more.

2. Please see Sam Kahn’s essay from this week on “How the Intellectuals Lost (Many Times Over).” I’ve been trying to think for a decade, though, about what it means that artists are not exactly intellectuals, and that art’s alliance with the intelligentsia may have been a temporary expedient of the modern period, even of the modern university, now rapidly approaching its conclusion. In lieu of fresh thoughts, please let me quote what I wrote almost a decade ago in an essay on Cynthia Ozick and her Arnoldian precepts about high culture. And if you take this as an apologia for today’s Hollywood dreaming, all the better:

Nor does Ozick quarrel with Sontag’s early aestheticism: she understands well enough that literature is the realm of the imagination’s autonomy, which makes it automatically inimical to the normative claims of high culture. In a related vein, again sympathetic to aestheticism, she is generally dismissive of writers’ biographies, journals, and memoirs as inessential to the understanding of literary works (see her essay on Plath).

Ozick believes that tradition gives literature backbone; that literature without tradition is a mere revel—or, as she more severely and religiously has it elsewhere, an idol. Nevertheless, she also maintains that tradition cannot be willed: one must be supported by one’s context or not supported at all. For this reason, her skepticism about pop culture is not expressed on behalf of art itself—for art has no internal defense against the sensational—but rather on behalf of the enabling civilizational matrix that makes for the best art, whether artists like it or not. (my emphases)

3. A fictional and legendarily lethal art installation within the novel’s world.

4. Two opposed views of literary and aesthetic culture from two prominent essays released in the last week. First, Mark Greif on Fredric Jameson in Harper’s, “Glimmers of Totality”:

Jameson, not incidentally, is a Marxist literary critic, again in a conspicuously uncompromising way. He is not simply influenced by Marx, by downstream traditions of the left, old or new, or of Marxisms West or East. He is not concerned with economics and material life and their manifestations in literature as explicit themes, or with working-class characters, or overt class conflict, or injustice. He is not just sympathetic or loosely committed to socialism. All these things are thick on the ground in literature departments, and none would surprise. Jameson is, by his own declaration, first and last a Marxist critic, in a direct line of genealogy from Marx and Engels through Plekhanov and Lukács. This is an aspiration, an existential commitment, and an identity. Beyond the issues of style or temperament, it may also help explain why his books are so refusing, rebarbative, even somewhat notably aggressive in their confrontation with any reader not already supine. For, as he writes, “Marxism returns against cultural activity in general to devalue it and to lay bare the class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment.”

Second, Matthew Gasda in American Affairs, “Toward the Recovery of American Culture”:

The only precondition for personal triumph is under­standing that we might be capable of developing truths with intrinsic and binding and yet unexchangeable value. We may realize that, actually, pride and passion count for everything, for these emotions call forth that spontaneous, primal willingness to defend the few things that are truly one’s own. These may be the only things we can really be sure of. And once armed with such conviction, the only way to exorcize the shame of having tapped out the dance of a dying, middle-class, consumerist culture may be to embrace the uncertainty and fear of whatever comes afterwards, as if to say, “well, I’m willing to face it, whatever it is, a war, a pandemic, the breakdown of the grid, a stolen election, a dra­conian new law, social instability. . . .”

We must be able to hold on to our inwardness in the face of History, while remembering that inwardness can’t be an outcome of leisure, or career mobility—but of action, survival, fortitude, a capacity for creating order within and around oneself. That is true culture.

For Jameson and his dimmer academic epigoni—see my critique here—culture is inherently unjust except insofar as it gestures mutely toward the utopian horizon of communism, the eventually immanent eschaton, which had always been the deep truth culture was struggling to express during the long nightmare of history. This, Jameson argues, is not a Marxist secularization of the Christian promise, as Cold War liberals once charged, but rather the Marxist truth of Christian eschatology no less than of culture. Gasda, on the other hand, apprehends culture not as history’s consolatory epiphenomenon on the way to utopia, but as what’s left to us of our soul once history is through with it: the last inch of eternity in us that history cannot subsume. Gadsa, not coincidentally, refers to Kierkegaard; Jameson’s master by contrast is Hegel, whom Kierkegaard threatened to send a young man in need of advice, the idea being that the idolization of world-historical progress gives the individual no guide to living. (Now it appears to be young women who are bootlessly seeking Hegel’s advice.) Gasda also cites Emerson, “the first and maybe best American writer,” who said that there is no history, only biography. Can we detect anything in common between the two positions, any higher unity in their opposition? I can appreciate Jameson’s defense of the Anthropocene as a phenomenon worth celebrating, not lamenting, as quoted by Greif—nothing less than the humanization of earth—and I suspect it rhymes inadvertently with Gasda’s perhaps quixotic hope for a serious art patronized by the sovereign:

A populist cultural program, for instance, ought to commission artists to stay offline, away from advertising and the algorithm, away from academia—and shield them, at least temporarily, from the truly endless hustle of the big city, or the demoralizing groupthink of established institutions. In a healthy society, a robust patron class would exercise taste and discernment.

Both thinkers envision our collective life as a realm of fruition rather than alienation, foresee a time when artists will not have to cast themselves anymore in the role of outsider and rebel but can finally, after more than two centuries, be welcomed home: an ethos I have elsewhere called that of “the true mainstream in exile.” Part of not succumbing to ressentiment is to prepare even one’s most outré commitments for universal adoption. And yet I might get into trouble if I extrapolated from that precept to contemporary practical politics: if I even speculated about what it might mean for someone like me, who came of age in what we might call “the old weird Democratic Party” of 2004, represented 20 years later by RFK, Jr., that those commitments have ended up (electorally) somewhere else, and yet still somehow in opposition to the party of Bill Kristol and David Frum—yes, even to the party of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Strange days.

5. Speaking of a crisis in narrative, I respect people on both sides of the escalating war on Byung-Chul Han, so I maintain a posture of neutrality; also, I’ve only sampled his work in online format and have never even held one of his sleek vatic volumes in my hand. DC Miller’s complaint from the spring in the Mars Review that our philosopher essentially failed the pandemic—in common with many an intellectual—I take seriously; less serious is the suggestion that the thinker is too rootless a cosmopolitan to serve as our guide. Friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith’s new critique in the aforementioned American Affairs persuades on the score that Han’s work is excessively ahistorical and oversimplified, thus complicit with what it appears to decry; less persuasive to me, though this may just be a matter of taste, is the arraignment of a prophetic stance per se for the philosopher. On the “pro” side, I literally discovered friend-of-the-blog Emmalea Russo—whose brilliant forthcoming novel Vivienne you should pre-order; please read my review here—when she appeared on a podcast hailing Han’s work, observing en passant, if I rightly recall, that the philosopher’s favorite film is Wings of Desire, also a favorite of mine. In the film, a mournful Jewish philosopher (who is metempsychotically and syncretically Homer) laments that the epic of peace has not yet been sung. Whether or not one finds this too saccharine—in theory it is; in practice I am always moved by that scene—might predict one’s stance on such a philosopher.