If there's anything I've learned from the IC lectures is that it's preferable to have a small audience that cares than a larger one that's indifferent. I know for a fact that there are big 5 titles you can walk into a neighborhood bookstore and buy that have received far less critical engagement and care (and very probably sold less) than some of the work produced by this loose archipelago of readers. And I do think really good work tends to float to the top, even if sometimes the author doesn't live to see it. With that in mind, all you can do is write for a small circle and whatever happens happens, right? Who wants to be received with polite indifference? (this applies especially to the (even worse) "male novelist" discourse -- like if you really think culture is controlled by HR church ladies stop looking for their approval!)
Thanks, yes, this is definitely the way I have come to think about it, except in the moments when I pine for my movie deal. Agreed on the male novelist discourse, from which I have officially resigned for life. It's becoming a bit unseemly!
Clearing the statist underbrush to deregulate and uh... fight the corporate systems that poison us??? Idk how the Harold Bloom Emersonian crackpipe Gasda's hitting inspires visions of Trump-as-neoReagan punishing corporations with tax-cuts but it's certainly a "poetic" vision of politics!
Hey, if American Affairs is happy to have you both, I'm happy to have you both! More seriously...I won't speak for our dramatist, but I said when Vance was announced and Musk went all in that (in reality, not in poetry) this was elite vs. elite and not elite vs. masses or however MAGA explains itself to itself. "Both sides" are opportunistically blaring out mixed ideological signals (I wouldn't be surprised if Kamala personally patrolled the border with her glock this week), and pundits are opportunistically choosing which to claim to believe. But I still don't think it's insane—for poets, anyway—to want to send a message on the poetic level.
It's a belabored point, but I really do believe that when it comes to these claims about culture 'dying,' hindsight is forever 20/20.
Then of course people are also reluctant to admit they're aging, falling out of touch with the avant-garde or simply running out of the energy to keep track of them, and so there's a tendency for some critics to project. "It's not the fact that I'm nearing the grave, it's [insert technology-based criticism here]."
laawol indeed! Let's be honest, Brother Lin has never heard a conspiracy theory he doesn't like - it's more comforting than the chaos of true awareness. 90s movies is a good reference point for how the internet has not been good for stoner culture (but then stoner culture hasn't exactly been good for literature, so maybe it's a wash). PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch seems prophetic.
Yes, but I'm more like Brother Lin than I like to let on to the increasingly normie lib Substack audience! Haven't read that particular PKD but I definitely see what you mean re: stoner culture. 90s movies may themselves have been a decline from 60s novels, speaking of Dick, and were certainly a derivation.
Yes, I think it's a sort of insoluble problem at the heart of liberalism. The "empire coming home" phenomenon may be a recurring one. I think of how much inspiration radical postcolonial/African-American novelists got from Faulkner, when the dominated marginal peripheral colonized zone he was writing from was the defeated South. As someone who has been the beneficiary of "cultural imperialism," or "assimilation" as it's called in the immigrant group's case, I've never been against that, and think arguing too strenuously against it is where the far left tips into the far right. In that sense, I'm a current-year lib. On the other hand, I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that this should be imposed at gunpoint except in cases of absolute necessity, and even the law usually strikes me as too coarse and blunt. In that sense I'm a 1968-2008 lib and (I guess) current-year reactionary. This contradictory response to the contradictions of liberalism also does seem, as you say, to be the Joycean position, so if it's good enough for him it's good enough for me, unless I ever come up with anything better.
If there's anything I've learned from the IC lectures is that it's preferable to have a small audience that cares than a larger one that's indifferent. I know for a fact that there are big 5 titles you can walk into a neighborhood bookstore and buy that have received far less critical engagement and care (and very probably sold less) than some of the work produced by this loose archipelago of readers. And I do think really good work tends to float to the top, even if sometimes the author doesn't live to see it. With that in mind, all you can do is write for a small circle and whatever happens happens, right? Who wants to be received with polite indifference? (this applies especially to the (even worse) "male novelist" discourse -- like if you really think culture is controlled by HR church ladies stop looking for their approval!)
Thanks, yes, this is definitely the way I have come to think about it, except in the moments when I pine for my movie deal. Agreed on the male novelist discourse, from which I have officially resigned for life. It's becoming a bit unseemly!
Clearing the statist underbrush to deregulate and uh... fight the corporate systems that poison us??? Idk how the Harold Bloom Emersonian crackpipe Gasda's hitting inspires visions of Trump-as-neoReagan punishing corporations with tax-cuts but it's certainly a "poetic" vision of politics!
Hey, if American Affairs is happy to have you both, I'm happy to have you both! More seriously...I won't speak for our dramatist, but I said when Vance was announced and Musk went all in that (in reality, not in poetry) this was elite vs. elite and not elite vs. masses or however MAGA explains itself to itself. "Both sides" are opportunistically blaring out mixed ideological signals (I wouldn't be surprised if Kamala personally patrolled the border with her glock this week), and pundits are opportunistically choosing which to claim to believe. But I still don't think it's insane—for poets, anyway—to want to send a message on the poetic level.
It's a belabored point, but I really do believe that when it comes to these claims about culture 'dying,' hindsight is forever 20/20.
Then of course people are also reluctant to admit they're aging, falling out of touch with the avant-garde or simply running out of the energy to keep track of them, and so there's a tendency for some critics to project. "It's not the fact that I'm nearing the grave, it's [insert technology-based criticism here]."
laawol indeed! Let's be honest, Brother Lin has never heard a conspiracy theory he doesn't like - it's more comforting than the chaos of true awareness. 90s movies is a good reference point for how the internet has not been good for stoner culture (but then stoner culture hasn't exactly been good for literature, so maybe it's a wash). PKD's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch seems prophetic.
Yes, but I'm more like Brother Lin than I like to let on to the increasingly normie lib Substack audience! Haven't read that particular PKD but I definitely see what you mean re: stoner culture. 90s movies may themselves have been a decline from 60s novels, speaking of Dick, and were certainly a derivation.
Your non-fiction prose for these weekly readings is so effortlessly smooth and tightly composed, it makes me wonder what your books are like.
Thank you!
Yes, I think it's a sort of insoluble problem at the heart of liberalism. The "empire coming home" phenomenon may be a recurring one. I think of how much inspiration radical postcolonial/African-American novelists got from Faulkner, when the dominated marginal peripheral colonized zone he was writing from was the defeated South. As someone who has been the beneficiary of "cultural imperialism," or "assimilation" as it's called in the immigrant group's case, I've never been against that, and think arguing too strenuously against it is where the far left tips into the far right. In that sense, I'm a current-year lib. On the other hand, I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that this should be imposed at gunpoint except in cases of absolute necessity, and even the law usually strikes me as too coarse and blunt. In that sense I'm a 1968-2008 lib and (I guess) current-year reactionary. This contradictory response to the contradictions of liberalism also does seem, as you say, to be the Joycean position, so if it's good enough for him it's good enough for me, unless I ever come up with anything better.