Weekly Readings #149 (12/03/24-12/15/24)
the planet on the table
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I released “A War Between the Mind and Sky” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers to this Substack. It surveys the poetry of Wallace Stevens, with its eponymous conflict between subject and object, its latter-day Romantic1 conviction that “God and the imagination are one… / How high that highest candle lights the dark,” its rendezvous with the poet’s “interior paramour,” its libertarian contrast with a High Modernist poetry seeking new and total forms of social order, its preference for the more provisional and beautiful “idea of order” that is the imaginative re-arrangement of reality. It’s a pretty fun episode, where I revisit the themes of the earliest lectures from this year on the Romantic poets. I even make another classic joke about my ignorance of Kant.2
After a pre-holiday time-to-read-difficult-modernist-novel break this week, the 2024 “season” or “school year” of the Invisible College concludes on 12/27 with an episode on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. On the first of next year, I’ll announce the 2025 schedule; the next “season” or “school year” will begin, after a little winter break, on 01/17. Please offer a paid subscription today for access to the 2024 archive of what will soon be the 46 two-plus-hour episodes on 19th- and 20th-century British and American literature—including treatments of most of the major poets (Blake, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, etc.) and such great novels as Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and more—and for access to whatever plans for next year I am currently keeping super-secret.
It would be a Weekly Reading if I didn’t remind you (though I’ll keep it short this week!) of my novel Major Arcana, forthcoming from Belt Publishing in April, which you can pre-order here, get from NetGalley here, and access in its original Substack serial format (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here.
After the laborious Hugh Kenner posting of the last few weeks—ideas by the veritable Pound!—I will also keep this week’s missive light and short, or as light as possible considering the circumstances,3 merely a digest of responses to some items I’ve read this week with whatever comments I may muster. Please enjoy!
Parasocial World: The Writer as Persona and Planet
Friend-of-the-blog Henry Begler contributed this week an intriguing rumination on the life, work, and legacy of Martin Amis. Henry’s analysis is based on a reading of this criticism-memoir-novel triad in the author’s vast oeuvre: The War Against Cliché, Experience, and The Information. I’ve read a different criticism-memoir-novel triad by Amis (in my case, The War Against Cliché, Inside Story, and London Fields) but I came away with the exact same impression:
[H]e is an example of someone for whom the novel is one part of a project of personality crafting that includes the critical writing, the interviews, the podcast appearances. The novels are there insofar as they are necessary to the real artistic project, which is Martin Amis: literary man. He needed to write his odd, flawed novels to write his brilliant criticism and memoir, and the world needed to go along saying they were major instead of minor works, otherwise, from whence would come his authority?
This kind of self-fashioning through fiction has its precedents—in Byron, Wilde, Kerouac—but it surely sped up in the telegenic, glitzy-80s era of Amis and his contemporaries (when I picture him, I picture him on Charlie Rose). Now it has entered its full flower in our own time, in an emerging mode of argumentative, philosophical, opinionated theory-fiction by prickly online personalities (as recently and expertly taxonomized by Julianne Werlin) and in various cutting-edge scenesters who are engaged in making large-scale performance pieces out of their own lives (What is My First Book if not just one part of the Honor Levy Multimedia Experience?). There is perhaps a shift in the manner in which we read these figures; we read less to be transported into a new world and more to make intimate contact with another mind.
The late Amis turns out to be a paradigmatic figure of authorship in our parasocial age. Isn’t why Henry (or Begler or Professor-Doctor Begler or Brother Begler) feels himself on a first-name basis, even in the diminutive, with Marty?4 As Henry implies, and as I’ve argued before, this parasociality-as-aesthetic has long been a latent potential of modern authorship, going back, yes, to the Romantic era, with its auto-fictionalizing and auto-theorizing poets dragging their scandalous or legendary lives before the more-and-more mass public in a more-and-more universal print culture. Such parasociality has now become an almost unavoidable fact of the writer’s life if the writer wants any audience—or any audience beyond those, if they’re still out there, still devoted solely to television and newsprint. Thus the sudden and ongoing appearance of those who were once consummate insiders5 on this very (and formerly very “outsider”) website, as I was gently complaining last week.
None of this is either good or bad in itself as a development, but I believe the parasocial aesthetic will be better the nearer one can make’s one’s authorial projection of “mind” into a “world”: to collapse the mind/world distinction.
First, one doesn’t want to excuse oneself, if one insists on continuing to write novels, from writing novels that work as novels rather than as paper supplements to the online reality show. Martin Amis is a better word-by-word and sentence-by-sentence writer than I am or ever will be—what’s a few clichés between friends?—but if London Fields is anything to go by, with its central scenario lifted from Muriel Spark and its sparse attempts even to tell that stolen story, I can plot rings around him. Plotting is more consequential than the word-and-sentence obsessives believe, because it separates the novel-as-world from the rest of the world, from all the world that is not the novel’s world, the novel’s heterocosm. Plot gives the novel its integrity, its discrete self-completion, beyond the author’s life. But one doesn’t expect the elective son of Saul Bellow to agree.6 Bellow, like Amis, more than Amis, wrote great prose—in Bellow’s case, the greatest prose!—without always leaving us with the sensation that we’d just read a great novel qua novel. We’d certainly read some of the best pages anyone ever wrote, but not a novel with the centripetal force of a Dreiser or Dostoevsky, for all that these latter’s sentences were less impressive.
But the poets more than the novelists provide an example of how to project a mind into a world as a public act of literature.7 Henry’s first example of the celebrity author—and we are all celebrity authors now—is Byron, lyrical publicist of his own misadventures.8 But in a more recondite way, did not Wallace Stevens also live his truest, his passional, life in his Collected Poems, which incidentally, he thought of as “The Planet on the Table”? Why else did Whitman call himself a “kosmos”? The collected poems of the major poets—Shelley, Dickinson, Yeats, Eliot, and more—have the boundedness, the shape, the force, of great novels, the same structure of theme-and-variation, the same gathering of a limited set of motifs, the motifs of the poets’ very (inner or outer) life, set to an improvised dance from youth to age. We are all poets now, however consciously or un- we enact the poetic process.
How to age gracefully: another question raised by Amis’s lifework, this time in conjunction with his great friend Christopher Hitchens, as observed of Henry’s post in the comments by Dan Oppenheimer, who wrote the book (or the book chapter) on Hitchens’s infamous right turn as example of calcified thinking. “It must change,” Wallace Stevens injuncted of the supreme fiction, and Hitchens’s mind never did.9 There is an art to changing one’s mind along with one’s circumstances without also violating the aesthetic integrity of one’s persona, even one’s psyche. In our revolutionary times, in our airborne oncoming Age of Aquarius, this, too, is an art we will all, celebrity author-poets as we are, have to practice.10
Speaking of latter-day Romantics, an Invisible College matriculate, Kate Alexandra, released this week an excellent YouTube video on the New Romanticism, with appearances from luminaries like Ross Barkan, Ted Gioia, and Dean Kissick. I share Kate’s astutely observed hopes and fears for the New Romanticism. Great visuals, too. (I was happy to see The Love Witch. Anna Biller might be a directorial match for me, I think, if it wouldn’t be too much of a trespass on her female gaze, and I need to find time to read her novel; but I digress.) Anyway, observers of different online platforms’ attention economies might note that this five-day-old YouTube video already has 54,000 views. Substack eat your heart out!
As Dr. Johnson did not say, “Clear your mind of Kant.” I’ve never needed this advice.
Today’s astrology, courtesy of Cosmographia:
It’s not a good day to make declarations, give a false pretense of authority or knowledge, or, really, to speak at all. It might not feel the most intuitive to stay quiet during the frenzy of a Full Moon, but contemplation is the best strategy.
Do you notice that young people call artists, authors, philosophers, etc. by their first names now? Feminists used to complain that only famous women got called by their first names, but now it’s everybody. We are all women in online-parasocial space, a topic for another day.
Amis and his friend Hitchens, about whom more in a moment, were consummate insiders—hence, among the title’s other meaning, Inside Story—but Amis was to the manor born whereas Hitchens had to invite himself, a parvenu whose petit-bourgeois mother vowed, as he recounted in his memoir, “As long as there is a ruling class in this country, Christopher will belong to it.”
Debates about the validity of institutions, about the validity of the insider as against the outsider, still roil Substack—see here, for example. There will always be institutions, always insiders and outsiders. The real questions are: do the extant institutions retain enough flexibility to incorporate energy from the outside? and do the present outsiders retain enough capacity to be civilized and thus to operate in—or even at the head of—the institutions when the call comes? It’s too early to tell. I am reminded that friend-of-the-blog Nancy Armstrong, in an essay I’ve cited before, derides Jane Eyre and her creator for wishing to be co-opted rather than wishing to start The Revolution. Whereas I’m not perfectly sure Jane/Charlotte, if more ruthless than their Christian coloration suggests, are actually wrong in their wish for singular primacy rather than, well, for communism:
The critical tradition divides over the issue of whether the novel endorses imperialism or launches an assault on patriarchalism. Jane can be both an agent of imperialism, albeit a brand of imperialism that operates close to home, while taking the dominant order to task for its sexism, precisely because she is the anointed critic of that order who is simply fulfilling her assigned task as a woman empowered to write her story. Her claim that “this social order is bad, because it excludes me” is perfectly compatible, I would suggest, with the claim that “this social order is good insofar as it includes me.” Where the first claim launches a critique, the second claim limits that critique to a demand that never threatens but, indeed, updates the status quo and imbues it with a sense of adequacy.
Of course this liberalism of the updated status quo may not be worth preserving—ARX-Han, Mo_Diggs, and Udith Dematagoda have all recently suggested as much—but, as I do not know how to live outside it any more than I know how to breathe underwater, even if I myself sometimes dream of the exterior and of the ocean floor, I am also not sure what I am obligated to do about it or even could do about it if I wanted to. Which is just to say, again: I’m not a communist. But this social order is bad, insofar as it excludes meeeee.
Also, there are institutions and then again institutions. A victim of historicist déformation professionnelle, Armstrong thinks “literature” began in the 17th or 18th century, but this is too literal. It began in the west when Homer refused to take the Greek part over the Trojan and when whoever wrote the Bible set its characters quarreling with God. The institutions we fight over today—the barely 300-year-old Enlightenment adjustment of the medieval university, the barely 100-year-old “objective” newspaper—are, even in their perhaps terminal senescence, comparatively infantine.
Vincenzo Barney—yes, Vincenzo Barney—is also down in Henry’s comments with an almost essay-length, eloquent, and perfectly persuasive defense of Amis the novelist, one I’m sure all of us who have only read three books by the man ought to heed. I wrote a little about London Fields here, by the way (scroll to the end of the post).
Whither, however, the short story? In the turnover from print to digital culture, this form appears to have gone astray. The aforementioned Ross Barkan considers the problem in a recent essay, “Pity the Short Story Writer.” The literary journal is deader than a Dickensian doornail, along with the career path it abetted, so Ross suggests publishing short fiction straight to Substack. I wonder if the short story is the right form for the moment, though. Superficially, as a phone-sized form, it should be right, and poetry, after all, has survived, but somehow the short story doesn’t have enough of what I was calling “world” above. You can’t get lost in a short story. Maybe I am just trying to explain to myself why I no longer feel willing or able to write short stories. For new readers, I wrote more about this topic the last time it came up here, complete with an index to every short story I ever wrote, most of which were originally published in literary journals and almost all of which I re-published for free on Substack unless they were freely available elsewhere. My Collected Stories, as it were, are at your fingertips, no charge.
Speaking of the Old Romanticism, I loved The Last Man by Mary Shelley when I read it last year because, despite its longueurs, it perfectly combines total fiction with total parasociality. Shelley took her famous circle and their famously tragic amours and transformed them into an end-of-the-world u/dystopian novel: personal life as apocalyptic romance, autofiction as science fiction. Admirably audacious! More writers should do this. What if you, as a self-insert fictional character, were suffering from writer’s block, were vaping, were considering converting to Catholicism, were doing ketamine, were having an affair with an egirl, etc.—but on Mars? Call it The Martian Self-Chronicles. Or The Meeeee-tian Chronicles. I suspect our own Tao Lin is headed this way, and I coined “science-autofiction” to describe his Leave Society.
I am aware I have committed a paradox: how did he turn right if his mind never changed? For Amis—and, as I wrote in my review of Inside Story, I agree—Hitchens did not really turn right. He would in fact have been better off if he had turned right, wary on Burkean grounds of supposedly redemptive mass violence. This would have been more graceful aging. But he remained an ideologist of permanent revolution to the end, a partisan of Paine over Burke, like Aschenbach tarted up on the beach at the end of time trying to attract his beautiful lost youth. Whether or not you believe in your bones in the beneficently transformative effect of war—Hitchens always did; I never will; we have each been described as “turning right” in the pursuit of these divergent convictions—is surely more important than the seating arrangements of the French National Assembly in the late 18th century. With a revolutionary gun to my head, though, I suppose I would take Burke over Paine, if it’s a contest, and it probably is: a contest between the revolutionary iconoclast and the counter-revolutionary aesthete. Paine never wrote a treatise on aesthetics, after all. This curious fact is of course symptomatic of the whole difficulty, the whole impasse of the modern, though who has the symptom and of what malady I am not sure.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be too consciously practiced an art. We will trip over ourselves if we do not improvise. Still, it is always fascinating to overhear one’s sensibility described. In some moods, we might jump over our lives for a chance to hear the eulogy. Mary Jane Eyre, or rather Mary Jane Eyre’s little sister mary jane austen, for example, appoints meeeee screenwriter for America’s latest celebrity killer:
i’m not suggesting that any of this was scripted, only that it will be, and that in a just world, that job would go to john pistelli, with luca guadagnino directing. i’m also not insinuating that the good doctor pistelli’s esoteric practices have anything to do with this tragic case, although it will surely contribute to a favourable media environment for an italian-american bad boy.
What with Luigi Mangione and Vincenzo Barney and, well, meeeee, as well as Luca Guadagnino’s new film, which I haven’t seen yet, not to speak of the belated re-election of our first Italian-American president (in the precise Toni Morrisonian sense), it’s shaping up to be a real Wop Boy Winter.
Unfortunately, nothing about Luigi’s story, or Luigi’s psyop, or whatever it is, grips me. I have mostly (I’m sorry) not read your commentaries. No real ethical issue arises here. Perhaps our slain insurance executive was a sinner, or perhaps the whole system he oversaw is a sin, but “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,” my emphasis; the Lord didn’t say anything about Luigi. Nor does our anti-hero seem to have very many depths to plumb. I’m not sure what I would do with Luigi as a literary character; being at once a normie and a nut, he seems unpromising. Gore Vidal:
Also, wise Henry James had always warned writers against the use of a mad person as central to a narrative on the ground that as he was not morally responsible, there was no true tale to tell.
Then again, Vidal wrote that (in Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace) about Timothy McVeigh only to dismiss the premise, since he thought McVeigh was not crazy and actually had a point about the over-extension of governmental authority. So he may have—Vidal also hinted that he might have been a patsy, too—but the good old injunction remains, despite Vidal’s Hellenic impatience with the Hebraic testament: Thou shalt not kill.
Too bad he’s (Vidal’s) not around to write the Luigi movie. High in his Amalfi villa, he might have taken the angle suggested here by Stephen G. Adubato, that of the Wildean or Paglian “beautiful (Italian) boy as destroyer.” There’s Italian and then there’s Italian, though. As Adubato hints when he invokes the Latinidad, Luigi is a bit, well, dark for the role of kouros or ephebe Wilde and Paglia were imagining. Today’s aesthetico-intellectual right wing, with its interest in “selective breeding,” knows exactly where to draw the line; I believe it was from Curtis Yarvin that I first learned the phrase “Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy; he divided Africa.” Here is their intellectual ancestor and our own favorite immoralist:
In the Latin malus (beside which I place melas), the common man could be characterized as the dark-colored, above all as the black-haired (“hic niger est—”), as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil, who by his color stood out most clearly from the blonds who had become the rulers, namely the Aryan conqueror-race; at any rate Gaelic offered me an exactly corresponding case—fin (for example in the name Fin-Gal), the distinguishing word of the nobility, in the end, the good, noble, pure one, originally the blondheaded one, in contrast to the dark, black-haired original inhabitants. The Celts, incidentally, were by all means a blond race; it is wrong to associate those tracts of an essentially dark-haired population, which are noticeable on the more careful ethnographic maps of Germany, with any Celtic origins or blood mixtures, as even Virchow does: rather it is the pre-Aryan population of Germany that comes to the fore in these places. (The same is true for almost all of Europe: in essence, the subjected race has in the end regained the upper hand there, in color, shortness of skull, perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts—who will guarantee us that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and in particular that inclination toward the “commune,” the most primitive form of society—an inclination now common to all of Europe’s socialists—does not signify, on the whole, a tremendous atavism—and that the race of lords and conquerors, that of the Aryans, is not in the process of succumbing physiologically as well?…) (On The Genealogy of Morality, trans. Clark and Swensen)
Genealogy, indeed. Somewhat controversially, though this is what a dark-haired (albeit silvering) short-skulled scion of the Afro-Latin rabble would say, we here at Grand Hotel Abyss consider race and ethnicity the most deadening topics in the known universe—at least the most deadening topics that drive people starkly insane—and thus, unless there’s a lot of money in it, I must pass on (re)scripting our comely assassin’s tragedy. If there is a lot of money involved, I repeat my invitation from Substack Notes: Luca, call me, baby!
(A footnote within a footnote: of our maestro’s filmography, I somehow haven’t seen Call Me By Your Name; I more deliberately avoided Challengers [no sports, please]. Bones and All was fine, I guess, and I guess we are doomed to see Timothée Chalamet as Luigi someday, but that middlingly grotesque duet for cannibals for me subsists solely on—Mary Jane Eyre also once referred to my “noted” [perhaps because unexpected] heterosexuality—its heroine’s charm and charisma. On the other hand, I am a champion of Luca’s phantasmagoric Suspiria. I like it better than the original. In its themes and tone and genre-bending and mise en scène it is [dare I say this?] almost Pistellian, veritably John-esque, very meeeee. For more on the cinematic potential of my corpus, please see here.)
re: challengers, if i, noted homosexual, could face my sports related trauma, our gracious host should not deny himself the pleasure of seeing, through Luca’s queerwashing lens, zendaya serving pure c**t.
Thanks, just Henry will do nicely! (Though 'Brother Begler' has a nice ring to it). You're totally right about plot, though I think in Bellow's case the plot is often there, it just happens to be in illustrating the movement of the soul from one state to another. By the end of Herzog you feel like you've been on a comparable journey to Pierre's in War and Peace, it just happens to have taken place in some very quotidian interactions. Where Amis fails is that by the end of The Information at least, I didn't feel as if I were in a very different place from where I started, for all the fireworks in between.
Re your footnote's footnote: I'm surprised I haven't seen much talk about Queer in the public sphere: maybe Challengers exhausted all the discourse (also, I expect better than sportsballisms from you! -- pro tennis at its height is the supreme clash of wills, like watching an hours-long dissection of someone's soul in public -- DFW for all his faults knew this).
Anyway it's a rather awkward marriage between, if you'll permit some broad white ethnic stereotyping, Luca's operatic sad boy passion vs the icy, categorizing WASP sensibilities of Burroughs, who only hints at the melancholy soul within after you've read pages and pages of pretty sick stuff. But it has stuck with me, there is some unforgettable imagery, like Death In Venice meets Altered States, and Daniel Craig, who initially seems so wrong, gives a strange, sweaty, speed-addled performance. Burroughs was a very important writer for me and I expect he will be back on trend at some point but it hasn't happened yet. I think he's a victim of his last period of prominence having been being big in the 2005-2014 or so Mark Fisher-JG Ballard-"we're surrounded by the totalizing machines of capital" circles, which is a valid reading of his work I suppose but misses the pain and loneliness and utopian longing that you find in something as superficially shocking as Cities of the Red Night.
There's also another instance of high Mediterranean passion in theaters that also seems to have passed by the critics: Maria, the Angelina Jolie last-days-of-Maria Callas biopic. Another strange film anchored by a strange performance, though Jolie is barred out rather than sped up. In both cases, I spent the first 30 minutes in profound skepticism -- in Maria's case I was convinced I was witnessing a disaster, one of the worst movies and performances I've ever seen in a theater -- but by the end of both films I found myself quite moved. Although burying Maria on Netflix is a huge disservice, I expect half my reaction just came from hearing Callas's voice through some big theater speakers. I think there's lots to chew on in both, if you get around to them I hope to hear your thoughts!