Weekly Readings #151 (12/23/24-12/29/24)
as a stranger give it welcome
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week, I released “The Mausoleum of All Hope and Desire” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers to this Substack. It’s about The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. 1 Symphonically drawing together many a previous Invisible College theme—the metaphysics of literary form especially in its relation to time, the writer’s negotiation with the men and women who live inside her or him, the startling and counterintuitive alliance of classes often proposed by novels in excess of conventional left/right distinctions, and more—it makes a fitting conclusion to our 2024 “season” or “school year.” I will release the 2025 schedule on January 1; I will release the first episode of the New Year, on a topic to be determined, on January 17. If you haven’t already done so, please offer a paid subscription today so you don’t miss a minute.
For today, predictably, I offer a little year-in-review, with glimpses of what’s coming next. I put some controversial discourse into the footnotes, as usual, though; we don’t want it getting too safe and comfortable around here, not even in the holiday season. Contrarianism never rests, and so neither do I. Please enjoy!
Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot: 2024 in Review at Grand Hotel Abyss
The Invisible College was my big project in 2024, as Major Arcana had been in 2023. I’m proud of what I managed to achieve: an immense archive of 46 episodes, each (save one) two hours or more, on the major modern British and American writers, with single entries on most of the important poets and multi-part sequences on great novels like Ulysses, Middlemarch, and Moby-Dick.
I believe I have not only encouraged more people to read this crucial canon—the immediate precursor to our own cultural condition—but have also produced usefully daring interpretations of these texts, interpretations fit to explain who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going. I am not a historian or a historicist; I have not an antiquarian bone in my body; the past qua past has never interested me; and the dead can bury the dead. Works of art are either still alive or they aren’t, and I am interested only in what Baudelaire called the “modernity” of all true classics.
As with Major Arcana, if I’d understood the scale of the task before I started, I never would have started. The Invisible College hasn’t left me time to do much else besides this newsletter and my IRL responsibilities.2 Luckily, more people than I expected have been willing to pay for this service—and the more people who sign up to pay, the less I mind treating it like an almost full-time job. At some point, I may have to quit so I can write more fiction—I didn’t get around to writing the two narratives I projected in 2023’s New Year’s post—but for now I’m happy to keep going into 2025 with another slate of permanently modern old books. I want to thank Daniel Oppenheimer, who reviewed the project about halfway through the 2024 run, and Henry Begler, who reviewed it more recently in his own year-end post.
I said I wanted to write more book reviews for “venues” in 2024. I only managed one, my lengthy essay on Honor Levy’s My First Book and Madeline Cash’s Earth Angel for editor Noah Kumin’s increasingly indispensable Mars Review of Books. The merit of that piece, if I may say so myself, is in its refusal either to dismiss haughtily or to revere uncritically the productions of our youthful vanguard. I am currently writing another such piece, even bigger and more NYRB/LRB in character for a new venue; at my most grandiose, I hope this new essay will do for its subject what Malcolm Cowley did in the introduction to The Portable Faulkner, a canonizing gesture toward a writer—in this case, my elder rather than my junior— otherwise too strange to have yet been fully comprehended by the grandees of our culture.
HORATIO. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange. HAMLET. And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
I did pledge to review some books here on Substack and admit I am in serious arrears to about five people who graciously sent me their works to consider. I started strong in the spring and early summer with reviews of three surpassingly good novels—Udith Dematagoda’s Agonist, Naomi Kanakia’s The Default World, and Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne—and then became much too busy with The Invisible College to continue. I resolve to correct this fault in the new year.
I also said in my 2023 New Year’s post that I wanted to appear on more podcasts, a resolution fulfilled on the aforementioned Dan Oppenheimer’s Eminent Americans, where I discussed the New Romanticism with Dan and Ross Barkan, and on Joshua Doležal’s Recovering Academic, where we discussed independent vs. traditional publishing, leaving academia, and Major Arcana.
Speaking (again!) of Major Arcana, I have to end this post with the saga that is the novel and the saga of the novel. If you’re new here—a lot of you are new here, thanks, I suppose, to the algorithm—Major Arcana is a novel I began serializing on Substack in March of 2023. I intended to revive the slightly moribund American novel with an infusion of anti-autofictional magic realism and the Dickensian energy of popular serialization. I also wanted to leave my literary mark on two major phenomena of our time—the cultural hegemony of the superhero and the lability of gender—not without risking controversy in my approach to both subjects.
The serial was a modest success on Substack, ending in February 2024. I then independently published the novel, after which it caught the attention of the novelist and political commentator3 Ross Barkan. Ross hosted a conversation with me on his Substack, which is a good place to start if you’re curious about the book and my motivations in writing it. Ross also wrote a better one-paragraph summary of the complex narrative than I’ve ever managed to produce, and I gratefully quote it here:
Major Arcana opens with a suicide: a college student, in the 2020s, shoots himself in the face as his friend, Ash del Greco, films away. Ash is an online occultist. Her father might be Simon Magnus, one of the acclaimed comic book writers of the last century, a curious individual who has rejected all genders—he has no pronouns—and teaches at the very university where the suicide takes place. Simon is the author who richly reimagined Ratman (the world’s Batman stand-in) and Overman (the world’s Superman stand-in) for darker times, and he has courted controversy since. Pistelli roves between the 1970s and the present, telling the story of Simon’s evolution—and the century’s progression—through the eyes of his old editor and lover, Ellen Chandler, and the doomed pairing of Diane del Greco and Marco Cohen; Cohen is Simon’s deeply left-wing and frustrated artist. Politics, art, gender identity, magic, and the meaning of suicide are all grist for Major Arcana, which is both a novel of ideas and compulsively readable.
Ross’s generous choice to spotlight Major Arcana caused the broad-minded Anne Trubek of the distinguished Belt Publishing to take an interest in the book. The result: in June, Major Arcana became the first novel first serialized on Substack to garner a book deal. You can read Anne’s account of the deal here and mine here. The novel is now forthcoming in April 2025 and can be pre-ordered, for all who want to encourage literary independence in America, here.
Amid these events, Mary Jane Eyre provided the first and still the most probing and comprehensive review of the novel almost immediately after the serial concluded, for which I will be eternally gratefully. Mary Jane cared enough to provide the first hints of the full-dress ideological critique the novel will someday receive, perhaps by some aggrieved youth on Goodreads, though I hope other friends of the blog, such as Gnocchic Apocryphon or Blake Smith, will also come through in this area. I further want to thank Julianne Werlin and Scott Spires for offering reviews here and here (respectively) on Substack, and I thank as well all those who reviewed it on the aforementioned Goodreads and on NetGalley, even those who didn’t like it. Haters are fans, too. I finally thank the great Bruce Wagner, about whom more in the New Year, for his endorsement:
Major Arcana is a bravura, hallucinatory tarot of art, madness, and the fatal poignance of being alive. To read it is to hold the heart of the world in one’s hands
I hope to have even more to announce about Major Arcana in coming weeks, but for now, that concludes my tour of the year that has almost passed here at Grand Hotel Abyss. I offer no summary or review of these Weekly Readings; they are written in haste, to the moment, and are perhaps best forgotten. I’ve forgotten them myself.4
Please stay tuned for the many developments of 2025, beginning on the first of January with the next Invisible College syllabus. Happy New Year!
I am sometimes acclaimed for being in advance of the news. Listeners to this episode, then, will not have been surprised to see, one day after its release, liberal African-American commentators on MSNBC commiserating with American whites about Elon Musk and his fellow tech-right barons’ approval of high-skilled immigrants from India. At an earlier moment of American diversification, Faulkner hints at the underlying logic of an alliance between even racist whites and black Americans—adversaries within a common culture, we might say—against those Italian and Jewish interlopers, some of them my ancestors, disparaged by the Compson brothers.
There’s also my super-secret Tumblr, where I am increasingly uncomfortable acting as a kind of advice columnist. (Do you people think I live a perfect life? No one lives a perfect life.) I should put Miss Lonelyhearts on the 2025 IC syllabus, but I won’t; I find it too unpleasant. For example, someone recently asked,
If you had a disgusting emberassing fetish would you just ignore it, or feel suicidal despair over it? Or feel proud cause you are in good company with all the famous artist and leader peverts through history?
Not without finding something quite poignant and innocent in the “if,” I replied: Assuming you’re not talking about anything that in itself poses an ethical and legal problem or exposes you and/or others to danger (pedophilia, necrophilia, zoophilia, hybristophilia…), then the latter. In his essay on fetishism, Freud said the fetish object is the male child’s substitute for the penis he (generalizing from his own experience) expects to find when he peeks at his mother’s privates. This, Freud further speculated, accounts for the prevalence of things like garters, stockings, shoes, legs, and feet among fetish objects—these of the mother’s body parts or items of clothing are what the male child looks at when he turns his affronted gaze away from her “lack,” which he believes to portend his own castration. I take this theory to be poetically correct but too literal. The issue is not the mother’s “missing” phallus—women are perverts, too—but the world’s missing perfection or completeness. With our disgusting, embarrassing fetishes we honor the world’s inability fully to cohere. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud also reminds us that, strictly speaking, reproduction requires only that we eroticize the genitals; thus, even components of “normal” sexuality, like an interest in kissing, or the male’s famous doting upon the female’s breasts, are no less fetishistic than anything more commonly stigmatized as a fetish. I actually write a lot about this topic, but only in my fiction, and I try to encompass a wide range of disgusting, embarrassing fetishes, not all of them my own. The bottom line might be a character’s musing in Major Arcana about her need to feel disgust if she is also to feel desire. Fetishes, in that sense, are almost a gift: they allow us to desire what is disgusting and therefore to extend the range of beauty far beyond what anybody ever expected.
Political punditry in my case is a tragic and sickening addiction, especially combined with my incorrigible contrarian impulse. Every year I tell myself I will quit entirely, and every year I fall off the wagon. I could write millions of words of the stuff if I let myself. At least I’ve now quarantined it in the footnotes of these posts and on that Tumblr no one reads. For example, someone wrote in and asked on that Tumblr,
Thoughts on Steve Sailer?
I was going to say I had no such thoughts, but after a moment’s reflection, it occurred to me—this is a sickness—that I had four long paragraphs’ worth of thoughts. So I replied:
I’m old enough to remember when you could read Sam Francis’s weekly column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, so Sailer, as a moderate paleocon of proudly middling cultural tastes, a pure golfing product of Reagan’s California, and a business-school quant with an interest in race-and-IQ, does not for me rise to the level of a figure so startlingly transgressive as to possess the glow of the forbidden.
Why, then, beyond this sense of the “forbidden,” has Sailer in particular become an icon to the reactionary avant-garde? If we disaggregate the component parts of his persona as I’ve listed them above, then it must be because his persona manages to associate a human-capital view of the world—which we would otherwise link to soulless bureaucracies public and private, to the death of culture and art and thought as bearers of unquantifiable inspiration, and which worldview seems obviously despicable even when expressed by left-of-center thinkers who disclaim racism, like Matthew Yglesias—instead with the bygone sun-washed glamor of the American Century, lowered sunglasses and the ripple of pool-light across a tanned thigh, just as Costin Alamariu affiliates the same unpropitious ideology with the solar glint of a Mediterranean dawn across the colonnade of the Acropolis.
Sailer has expressed his admiration-since-boyhood for Robert A. Heinlein, on whose novels I also grew up; but, when I was a boy, I mostly skipped the libertarian and Californian-by-adoption author’s boys’-own-adventure tales, culminating in the Spartan Starship Troopers, in preference to sexy philosophical novels of the 1960s and ‘70s, from the free-love cultus of Stranger in a Strange Land to the autogynophile extravaganza I Will Fear No Evil to the proto-cyberpunk femme heroism of Friday, all of which tend to overrun and overwhelm, if only in tone, Heinlein’s own literary sources in the social comedy and utopianism of Twain and Shaw, a culturally sterile intellectual satirism become a richer and more novelistic satyriasis. I doubt Sailer has this or anything like it in his repertoire, and it limits how fascinating a writer he can ultimately be—though, with his modesty, he would almost certainly disavow any such ambition.
If you’re asking because of the present schism between the tech right and the American cultural nationalists over the question of high-skilled immigration, with Sailer taking the part of the latter, albeit defining himself as a patriot rather than a nationalist, well, I do suspect his vision of America is not ambitious enough, and, applying novelistic perception, I find something poignant in an adopted child’s obsession with lineage. Now, precisely because I am an immigrant’s child reared in part in an only half-assimilated immigrant milieu, I am a moderate on this subject. I consider myself an American without hyphenation, and I don’t believe in open borders, except as a distant utopian horizon for a more fully matured humanity. It probably is too disruptive to the polity, any polity, to bring in too many new people too fast, and it is, as Bernie used to say, a corporate scheme for cheap labor. In that sense, quantity does bear some relation to quality. But if needful borders become an excuse for the human-capital worldview to police everyone with biometric surveillance or to reduce everyone to gene and lineage, then this, too, is America getting away from itself, from what it is and was meant to be, perhaps not in the eyes of its somewhat too-Enlightened founding figures, like the life-hacking self-optimizing Franklin or the plantation CEO Jefferson, but in the eyes of those Romantics who took over its definition from the Deists: Crèvecœur and Emerson and Cather, for all of whom America was an aspiration with the power to transfigure the merely given, the wearily biological. America enjoins both its native sons and its recent arrivals to transcend their origin, or else what’s the point of America?
I wonder if the film commentary I hide in the footnotes is the best part. With the relative collapse of legacy media, we distribute the different parts of the old newspaper to separate sections of each Substack post: here the political op-ed, there the movie review, etc. No sports page here, but the tennis-heads will be happy to know I did watch Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s ménage à court from earlier this year. (Not “ménage à tennis,” I note for prior reviewers: when you perform a humorous verbal substitution, the new word should syllabically match the word being replaced.) I’m still trying to decide what it means. Maybe it has no greater cultural or political significance other than as a rumination on whether or not a polycule can function as a goad to and an engine of high achievement, the ménage’s multiple planes and vectors of attraction and repulsion adding up to a libidinal war machine, as our heroine’s concluding war cry implies. That, and as bait dangled to various audiences (male, female, gay, straight) titillated by various of the film’s potential erotic configurations. (Mary Jane Eyre said that Zendaya would be “serving cunt” in the film; I assume this phrase is the technical tennis term for the move the men do when they put the ball in the hole of the racket to signal to one another that they’ve slept with Zendaya.) In its relation to the rest of Guadagnino’s filmography, Challengers is the closest to Suspiria in its exploration of ethical and sexual relations within a sequestered social setting hotly and fanatically devoted to a specific art.
Because I don’t really care for Robert Eggers and because Nosferatu wasn’t playing at my local theater anyway, I also saw Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. Here is the specifically gendered and sexed complement to my 2022 essay on Fukuyama’s End of History and the Last Man. The continued survival of public liberalism, argues our philosopher, requires illiberalism in the private sphere. For Babygirl, this means feminism can only be preserved in the boardroom if there is fascism in the bedroom. Especially if the boardroom is pledged, as it is in the film, to robotics and automation. Sexual fascism then becomes synonymous with humanity itself. An intriguing post-election fable for an America which has seen its second phallic woman lose an election to President Babygirl themself, as this fable suggests these archetypes can only function in tandem. Babygirl is also a reverse Anora. Anora moves from facing-away sex to facing-toward sex in its trajectory of erotic ethics, teaching us to know one another as equals. Babygirl’s erotic tendency goes the other way, from our heroine’s unsatisfying sex—face-to-face, her on top—with her sensitive Latin artist husband (who spends the film directing a production of Hedda Gabler, no less) to her culminating orgasm, delivered by the same husband, digitally and from behind after he has learned to cover her eyes and mash her face into the pillow. This sexual tutelage is delivered in the film to both its aging Gen-X characters by the well-observed Zoomer characters—not only the heroine’s young paramour, at once dominant and vulnerable, but also by her sarcastic yet kind-hearted lesbian daughter, both of whom mingle a therapeutic sensibility with a brisk amoralism. The husband protests to the lover that female masochism is a male fantasy, only to be told by his young rival that this is “dated” thinking. What if Anora’s more conventional feminist morality is the male fantasy? Such is the Ibsenite problem play in the third decade of the 21st century. A passage of Major Arcana I intended as shockingly offensive—Simon Magnus’s answer to the Tiresias question in the penultimate chapter of Part Four—is almost overtly stated as this film’s thesis. That Anora was made without an “intimacy coordinator” and Babygirl proudly made with one just crowns the irony. (If it is irony, if it’s not just what we ought to expect: amorality requires rules and bureaucracy, while morality requires, by contrast, the risk of trust.) This all makes the film sound more coarse and didactic than it is, but it’s a perfectly paced and tenderly acted heterocosm, a world it was a real pleasure to live inside, a spectacle adequate to all its characters’ interiorities and to their literally rich world. A very good movie. As feminist, woman-directed vehicles for older female stars in 2024 go, it more than makes up for the loathsome Substance. Indeed, my only complaint—here I echo Maggie of DeepFocusLens, my go-to YouTube movie reviewer—is that it doesn’t go far enough. Our heroine insists several times that consensual BDSM is not enough to get her off, that she requires actual danger to be satisfied. The film never confronts this fact about its protagonist, nor the challenge this fact poses to the drama’s mild quality of ideological fabulism. Does the husband’s literally climatic act, a performed brutality, answer her condition of authentic danger? At the risk of a Žižek-level provocation, I suggest a more apt final scene: her husband, having over-learned his lesson, accidentally-on-purpose strangles her to death. (He would have had, then, to have been directing not Hedda Gabler but Othello.) Both misogynists and feminists—I follow Susan Gubar in seeing the misogynist and the feminist in tacit alliance—might find this more persuasive. Would it even be an unhappy ending for our heroine? Why settle for la petite mort when you could have the big one?
Congratulations on a very productive year: no shortage of human capital at the Grand Hotel Abyss!
Regarding unquantifiable inspiration, I was interested to see Christopher Beha defend genius in the NYT recently, putting an egalitarian spin on it by invoking "the old Socratic-mystic idea that genius might visit any of us at any time". Most jobs, however, do not require genius, but competence and diligence, which can be measured rather accurately, so while I understand that reducing the human person to an input into a production process might offend the committed aesthete, it doesn't seem obviously despicable to me to use economic logic when considering the merits of a particular economic policy. This is what I understand by "the human capital worldview", which I don't think is helpful to conflate with the racist worldview of "reducing everyone to gene and lineage", especially because they are on opposite sides of the current immigration debate on the Right.
Talking about cross-cultural interaction, reading Queer after seeing it revealed why the first two chapters (which hewed very close to the novella, minus references to Lee's interest in younger boys) was so much better than the third (which differed wildly from the tale's admittedly unsatisfying unravelling).
And I echo Henry's enthusiasm for The Invisible College 2.0!
Happy holidays! I'm waiting for the 2025 syllabus like people wait for Taylor Swift albums.
BTW while I completely agree that political punditry is a disease, I do think it was in part encountering your writing that helped me chart a path through and take a longer view of the dispiriting excesses of the political scene without becoming some sort of mealy-mouthed Atlantic style centrist. It is helpful to see views that don't easily map onto the usual crude binary. It is present in the lit crit and in Major Arcana too ofc but expressed more subtly. So maybe keep it up, in moderation.