Thrilled to achieve the hallowed rank of "friend of the blog!" I should clarify that I don't mean to indict the 19th century novel. I'm more inclined to the visionary tradition myself but obviously we need both Blake and Tolstoy. Language should be both the bricks that build the house and the house itself. Of course Tolstoy was also a mystic and Blake was a realist social critic in his way, so what the hell do I know about these dichotomies anyway.
(Also - I hadn't even started it when I wrote that but 150 pages into my second read of Moby-Dick I find myself even more stunned than I was the first time, did Melville achieve the perfect synthesis of the two traditions and write the best book ever written by anyone? It certainly feels that way sometimes.)
Agreed, the dichotomies are intellectually productive until they're not, and then they need to be adjusted or replaced.
I think all three of the big books we read—Ulysses, Middlemarch, and Moby-Dick—accomplish some version of this synthesis, but it's so subtle in Eliot and so ironic in Joyce that only Melville seems to have the balance just right. (I'd probably throw Dickens in, too, but more for his whole "thing" than any one book. Maybe also Woolf and Faulkner.) I once heard an academic say, "Moby-Dick has everything...except women." For that reason I'd probably ultimately award Ulysses the best-book-ever laurel.
For the record, some of my best friends are bourgeois!
Last week I was blessed to hear A.N. Wilson talk about his new book on Goethe at the British Library. A big theme was the great Romantic's ability to play the cheerful diplomat while his inner life kept on evolving as he revised Faust right into his eighties. Make Art Messy Again!
Thanks! "MAMA" as a slogan takes my interpretation of Trump-as-androgyne to a new level. I definitely need to read a book about Goethe. (Also Wilhelm Meister.) But my understanding is that he was the type and pattern of living an ordered respectable life while making free and sometimes demented art. (Ordered and respectable give or take an elderly obsession with a teenage girl, but nobody's perfect.)
Apparently not too respectable to drunkenly berate his audience if they didn’t show adequate appreciation for his plays or to endorse Napoleon’s liberal imperialism over German nationalism. The European nostalgia we need?
This is why I need to read a book; I didn't know those stories. (I knew about the teenage girl from his own novella, The Man of Fifty.) Sounds like Macron was trying to do the Napoleonic liberal imperialism thing, if I understand Euro-politics correctly.
Well he's still at it, having survived four British PMs. And I take it he would have been happy to send French troops to the Ukrainian front if le peuple weren't so decadent. I still think of this old piece by Blake: https://unherd.com/2021/12/why-macron-is-a-superman/
I remember that one, in hindsight explains the political shifts in Spencer, Hanania, etc. in U.S. politics and reminds me of Christian Lorentzen's review of Bronze Age Pervert saying that the likes of Biden and Obama (and Macron by extension, perhaps even Trudeau!) actually *were* the Nietzschean supermen BAP calls for.
Indeed. Although I’d say that the difference in the European and American cases lies in what the will to power amounts to. In Europe, technocracy is almost synonymous with managing decline: you get to play king of Disneyland fighting far-right ogres. In America, as you’ve discussed in previous Weekly Readings, behind the Integralists and white nationalists, there is a rising Tech Right which is getting increasingly impatient with well-meaning degrowth distributionist liberals, who in turn are feeling increasing beleaguered, despite their hegemonic control over the cultural means of production. But on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond), it seems to me that the actual problem that liberalism needs to address is the prevailing ethos of Nietzscheanism for me but not for thee.
Oh please, let’s hear how “censorship happy” the Democratic Party has become, and how whatever stupid tech obsession this refers to absolutely exceeds and renders merely equal the concerted effort to annihilate liberal arts instruction/exposure at the K-college levels. Please tell me how Rufo and Moms for Liberty are the same as being fine with tech companies being able to moderate content on the algorithm they control because they are not the government and are under no restriction when it comes to speech.
Then you can also explain how right wing censorship of libraries, school districts, and even lawsuits against bookstores are all totally in line with the 1st amendment protections that gave rise to section 230 in the first place. Honestly that you can think the two merely equivalent is a sign of terminal substack ass-head insertion.
Until Rufo’s brains are being lapped up by stray cats and Richard Corcoran has been strangled with the entrails of Bridget Ziegler you can shut the fuck up with this both sides swill.
Your thoughtful integration of my comment into your reflection has truly made my week. Thank you sincerely, John!
I began to worry that favourably comparing your works to the film* might require a prospective viewer to be a bedlam cinema sicko—or at least possess the objective correlative to imagine oneself into such a mind—to attune oneself to its inharmonious wavelength. The emerging consensus on Megalopolis seems to range from [censored] to [????????].
I'm glad you highlighted the Emersonian mind... “quip” doesn't feel right? “Assertion.” Other phonaesthetic “cellar door” phrases have flung through my mind all week, as if on my wise shoulders Coppola cast spangles, dancing coins: “Dingbat News.” “Auntie Wow.” “Great Debate.” While it might have struck you as too goofball Pynchonian, I nearly fell out of my chair at the reveal of Voight and his virile arrow.
*I should note, for the record—lest anyone, after seeing Megalopolis, be discouraged from buying one of your novels, for which I would feel honour-bound to walk into the sea—that my comparison strictly concerns your odic, visionary, and romantic register, the unbridled freedom of the artist, the metamorphosis of medium into matter itself, and so on. You've written so compellingly on the supremacy of genius over intellect that I won’t invoke the latter, but everything you write is so inexhaustibly... sharper and more meticulously wrought than the Megalopolis script. I suspect you've spent decades absorbing books so closely and lovingly that you hardly need to articulate what you’ve learned. It’s reported that Coppola, on the other hand, “researched” Roman history for forty years, only to have one of the two or three verbatim Aurelius lines misattributed from BrainyQuote.
You're welcome! Don't worry, I remain flattered. I'm cautiously betting this will slowly attain at least cult status if not critical eminence. The emerging consensus seems very herd-like and peer-pressure-driven and Chapo-style dead-end irony-mongering. Even among great directorial follies, Megalopolis is more immediately entertaining than Mother! or Inland Empire (or Southland Tales, to cite another frequent reference point, and in my opinion a lapse below the level of its director's cellar door). And I think a lot of the Pynchonian elements worked...I wish I'd thought of Wow Platinum. And Voight's great '80s action-movie line in that scene, "Consider this your closing bell!" I have a higher tolerance for that style in films than novels.
(It's funny, I know practically nothing about Roman history. There was that now-ancient meme about how often men think of Rome...aside from my having appointed the Abbruzese Ovid my distant ancestor in the maternal line, almost never in my case.)
Thrilled to achieve the hallowed rank of "friend of the blog!" I should clarify that I don't mean to indict the 19th century novel. I'm more inclined to the visionary tradition myself but obviously we need both Blake and Tolstoy. Language should be both the bricks that build the house and the house itself. Of course Tolstoy was also a mystic and Blake was a realist social critic in his way, so what the hell do I know about these dichotomies anyway.
(Also - I hadn't even started it when I wrote that but 150 pages into my second read of Moby-Dick I find myself even more stunned than I was the first time, did Melville achieve the perfect synthesis of the two traditions and write the best book ever written by anyone? It certainly feels that way sometimes.)
Agreed, the dichotomies are intellectually productive until they're not, and then they need to be adjusted or replaced.
I think all three of the big books we read—Ulysses, Middlemarch, and Moby-Dick—accomplish some version of this synthesis, but it's so subtle in Eliot and so ironic in Joyce that only Melville seems to have the balance just right. (I'd probably throw Dickens in, too, but more for his whole "thing" than any one book. Maybe also Woolf and Faulkner.) I once heard an academic say, "Moby-Dick has everything...except women." For that reason I'd probably ultimately award Ulysses the best-book-ever laurel.
For the record, some of my best friends are bourgeois!
Last week I was blessed to hear A.N. Wilson talk about his new book on Goethe at the British Library. A big theme was the great Romantic's ability to play the cheerful diplomat while his inner life kept on evolving as he revised Faust right into his eighties. Make Art Messy Again!
Thanks! "MAMA" as a slogan takes my interpretation of Trump-as-androgyne to a new level. I definitely need to read a book about Goethe. (Also Wilhelm Meister.) But my understanding is that he was the type and pattern of living an ordered respectable life while making free and sometimes demented art. (Ordered and respectable give or take an elderly obsession with a teenage girl, but nobody's perfect.)
Apparently not too respectable to drunkenly berate his audience if they didn’t show adequate appreciation for his plays or to endorse Napoleon’s liberal imperialism over German nationalism. The European nostalgia we need?
This is why I need to read a book; I didn't know those stories. (I knew about the teenage girl from his own novella, The Man of Fifty.) Sounds like Macron was trying to do the Napoleonic liberal imperialism thing, if I understand Euro-politics correctly.
Well he's still at it, having survived four British PMs. And I take it he would have been happy to send French troops to the Ukrainian front if le peuple weren't so decadent. I still think of this old piece by Blake: https://unherd.com/2021/12/why-macron-is-a-superman/
I remember that one, in hindsight explains the political shifts in Spencer, Hanania, etc. in U.S. politics and reminds me of Christian Lorentzen's review of Bronze Age Pervert saying that the likes of Biden and Obama (and Macron by extension, perhaps even Trudeau!) actually *were* the Nietzschean supermen BAP calls for.
Indeed. Although I’d say that the difference in the European and American cases lies in what the will to power amounts to. In Europe, technocracy is almost synonymous with managing decline: you get to play king of Disneyland fighting far-right ogres. In America, as you’ve discussed in previous Weekly Readings, behind the Integralists and white nationalists, there is a rising Tech Right which is getting increasingly impatient with well-meaning degrowth distributionist liberals, who in turn are feeling increasing beleaguered, despite their hegemonic control over the cultural means of production. But on both sides of the Atlantic (and beyond), it seems to me that the actual problem that liberalism needs to address is the prevailing ethos of Nietzscheanism for me but not for thee.
Excellent Chappell Roan commentary
Thank you!
Oh please, let’s hear how “censorship happy” the Democratic Party has become, and how whatever stupid tech obsession this refers to absolutely exceeds and renders merely equal the concerted effort to annihilate liberal arts instruction/exposure at the K-college levels. Please tell me how Rufo and Moms for Liberty are the same as being fine with tech companies being able to moderate content on the algorithm they control because they are not the government and are under no restriction when it comes to speech.
Then you can also explain how right wing censorship of libraries, school districts, and even lawsuits against bookstores are all totally in line with the 1st amendment protections that gave rise to section 230 in the first place. Honestly that you can think the two merely equivalent is a sign of terminal substack ass-head insertion.
Until Rufo’s brains are being lapped up by stray cats and Richard Corcoran has been strangled with the entrails of Bridget Ziegler you can shut the fuck up with this both sides swill.
Your thoughtful integration of my comment into your reflection has truly made my week. Thank you sincerely, John!
I began to worry that favourably comparing your works to the film* might require a prospective viewer to be a bedlam cinema sicko—or at least possess the objective correlative to imagine oneself into such a mind—to attune oneself to its inharmonious wavelength. The emerging consensus on Megalopolis seems to range from [censored] to [????????].
I'm glad you highlighted the Emersonian mind... “quip” doesn't feel right? “Assertion.” Other phonaesthetic “cellar door” phrases have flung through my mind all week, as if on my wise shoulders Coppola cast spangles, dancing coins: “Dingbat News.” “Auntie Wow.” “Great Debate.” While it might have struck you as too goofball Pynchonian, I nearly fell out of my chair at the reveal of Voight and his virile arrow.
*I should note, for the record—lest anyone, after seeing Megalopolis, be discouraged from buying one of your novels, for which I would feel honour-bound to walk into the sea—that my comparison strictly concerns your odic, visionary, and romantic register, the unbridled freedom of the artist, the metamorphosis of medium into matter itself, and so on. You've written so compellingly on the supremacy of genius over intellect that I won’t invoke the latter, but everything you write is so inexhaustibly... sharper and more meticulously wrought than the Megalopolis script. I suspect you've spent decades absorbing books so closely and lovingly that you hardly need to articulate what you’ve learned. It’s reported that Coppola, on the other hand, “researched” Roman history for forty years, only to have one of the two or three verbatim Aurelius lines misattributed from BrainyQuote.
You're welcome! Don't worry, I remain flattered. I'm cautiously betting this will slowly attain at least cult status if not critical eminence. The emerging consensus seems very herd-like and peer-pressure-driven and Chapo-style dead-end irony-mongering. Even among great directorial follies, Megalopolis is more immediately entertaining than Mother! or Inland Empire (or Southland Tales, to cite another frequent reference point, and in my opinion a lapse below the level of its director's cellar door). And I think a lot of the Pynchonian elements worked...I wish I'd thought of Wow Platinum. And Voight's great '80s action-movie line in that scene, "Consider this your closing bell!" I have a higher tolerance for that style in films than novels.
(It's funny, I know practically nothing about Roman history. There was that now-ancient meme about how often men think of Rome...aside from my having appointed the Abbruzese Ovid my distant ancestor in the maternal line, almost never in my case.)