Weekly Readings #152 (12/30/24-01/05/25)

the present palpable-intimate

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

Welcome to 2025 here at Grand Hotel Abyss. I especially welcome the new readers lured in by this week’s post, an Introduction to year two of The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers, or by Ross Barkan’s recommendation in his interview at Embedded. I especially thank those who became new paid subscribers this week. The influx made me wonder if I should have made clearer in the intro post that I like to make shocking and offensive remarks behind the paywall (and in the footnotes of this free weekly newsletter), but I suppose you’ll find out soon enough.¹ To repeat this week’s announcement for anyone who missed it:

In four seasons, The Invisible College in 2025 will be exploring Ancient Greek literature (winter), modern western world literature (spring), Shakespeare and Milton (summer), and the modern American novel (fall), all in all amounting to a vast survey moving from Homer to Toni Morrison. If you haven’t joined yet, I humbly suggest that today would be a good day to use whatever Christmas money you haven’t burned through yet. This will almost give you enough time to listen to the extensive 2024 archive on modern British and American literature before The College—I explain its title in the Introduction to year one—reconvenes for a session on Homer’s Odyssey on January 17.

I am also, I inform new readers, a novelist, somewhere between an old hand at the trade and a new writer on the scene. My most recent novel, Major Arcana, is my first to be traditionally published. It was first serialized on Substack in 2023-24 and is now forthcoming from the distinguished independent press Belt Publishing on April 22, 2025—the day before Shakespeare’s birthday. You can pre-order this decades-spanning and coast-to-coast epic of art, love, death, and magic here if you would like to support free writing in America. If you absolutely can’t wait, a paid subscription purchases you access to the original Substack serial, including my audio rendition of each chapter.²

And if you’re obsessed with me,³ I also independently published three previous novels, all of them still available for purchase: Portraits and Ashes (2017), about art-world death cults and the difficult integrity of the aesthetic vocation; The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House (2020), the first long-form work of literary fiction about the pandemic, a chamber thriller on love and justice; and The Class of 2000 (2021), the last novel of suburban American realism, a Millennial setting-fire to the “green-lawn dream.”

For today, we start the year gently with a brief rumination on canonical prophecies and predictions for the year. As usual, see (or don’t!) the footnotes. Please enjoy!

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Telling Fortunes: Canonical and Cultural Futures

Andrew Wyeth, Winter Carnival (1985)

Friend-of-the-blog Henry Begler wrote a great review of Gore Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest this week. I haven’t read Palimpsest yet, just Vidal’s essays and his two best-known non-historical novels but was duly fascinated by Henry’s description of Vidal’s politics:

Will his work endure? He certainly is a capable writer, with a finely tuned style, but one can’t help but feel, reading Palimpsest, that he was catapulted to pre-eminence because of his status as a provocateur in his social set of wealthy WASPs. He could be trusted to say outrageous things precisely because he was to the manor born. You can feel something of the naughty child in him; he’ll venture far outwards to the edge of acceptable opinion for his social set, and make many real enemies but never say anything that would get him permanently disinvited from the Kennedy compound. At its best it is a bracing forthrightness and candor but at its worst it is a kind of court jesterism.

We see this in his politics; a curious amalgamation that seems to anticipate certain modern strands of what is sometimes called the post-left. He makes much of his idea that same-sex attraction is common and normal, but disdains “queens” and “fairies,” and he is fiercely anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, but in a very pre-WWI America-first way. Though I imagine he would have been a Bernie supporter, he reads as more of a Compact than a Jacobin type today.

I made a self-deprecating joke about this on Substack Notes, since Vidal was one of the writers from whom I learned politics my teens and early 20s and accounts for the slightly Compact-ish tendencies in my work some of you no doubt find obnoxious.

As I elaborated in that social-media venue in colloquy with one Secret Squirrel, who deemed Vidal a typical American liberal rather than a real conservative, I think Vidla’s conservatism is more obvious in retrospect, precisely because of the way aspects of his thought and aesthetic anticipated the reactionary currents of the last decade, largely inspiring disaffected petit-bourgeois outcasts of the expert class who empower themselves by identifying with his aloof aristocratic radicalism—the point of my little joke at my own expense—but in his lifetime, he was being published almost up to the end by The Nation. Something like Marxism didn’t really seem to register to him, not even to oppose. His genuine non-liberal strain, I suspect, was an identification with a deep nihilism he associated with non-Judeo-Christian cultures. This is probably explored in those historical novels of his I still need to read…

I place this discourse here as a reminder to read at least one of those historical novels⁴ this year, since I have a persistent interest in Vidal. I believe Myra Breckinridge will last, though, as the sensationalist but highly-wrought Dorian Gray befitting Vidal to be our American Wilde.⁵ My 2019 essay on Myra Breckinridge, which puts the novel into conservation with neoreactionary-accelerationist gender theory, may be regarded as a theoretical prelude to Major Arcana as well as a tribute to Vidal’s memorable narrative. My 2018 essay on The City and the Pillar elaborates further on Vidal’s curious politics and on his proudly nihilistic vision of queer life.⁶

These canonical prophecies are appropriate for the beginning of the year, when everyone is making their predictions and in-and-out lists. I won’t make any myself; I will just appreciate those of others. The perspicacious Katherine Dee, for example, offers the most persuasive in/out list I’ve seen:

I agree with almost all of that.⁷ (Major Arcana, in fact, will be the novelistic monument to the culture-war salience of “gender ideology”—though not to “transgender identity,” which is not the novel’s topic—as it will be the literary monument to the hegemony of the superhero.) Maybe not the part about podcasts—but that’s admittedly self-serving. The “political hang-out” pod is probably on its way out as we exit the hyper-politicized era, but the podcast per se is just a medium on the media landscape. I believe other kinds of education and/or entertainment pods (like, just to take a random example, The Invisible College!) will continue to be successful and relevant.

I am similarly skeptical that we will all be leaving the internet, because the social and cultural infrastructure the internet displaced remains absent. Social media will take the hit, not the internet at large, which will be increasingly, where it is not overwhelmed with fake content, curated for the discerning consumer. I think the new attitude can be summed up as: “X, Instagram, and TikTok are bad; YouTube, Substack, and (yes) podcasts are good.”

As for the idea of “[t]rying to connect physical objects to online worlds,” have I mentioned my print novel is available for pre-order?

1. Like (I shouldn’t write this footnote, but I can’t help myself) the person who at the very least shares a name with a well-known English writer: said person became a paid subscriber one day this week and became an unsubscriber the very next day! And who can blame this Briton? The American Revolution rolls on.

2. It’s possible—only possible, I say—that I may have something to announce later in the year about further audio, this time professionally produced, in the matter of Major Arcana. Let us, as the manifestation coaches say—one of the novel’s characters, if you don’t know, is a manifestation coach—affirm for this together.

3. Friend-of-the-blog Mary Jane Eyre wrote a brilliant self-interviewing self-introduction this week, an auto-Platonic dialogue. It included the following call and response:

why are you so obsessed with john pistelli?

This blog, or whatever, really got going when I wrote what is still the first review of John’s novel Major Arcana (it was a Substack miracle!) As I mention in the review, John persuaded me that taking gender (and one might add other categories of self-ID) a little less seriously may sometimes be to the benefit of all involved. Adopting a more playful attitude to gender has, I believe, prevented me from going down a Wesley Yang-style rabbit hole (as has reading Naomi Kanakia and other trans writers on Substack).

4. As Harold Bloom recounts somewhere in The Western Canon, Vidal complained to Bloom privately that he (Vidal) would not be canonized due to homophobia. But, said Bloom, he would in fact not be canonized because after modernism the straightforward historical novel (as opposed to “historiographic metafiction” à la Pynchon or Doctorow or Morrison) was not available for canonization. Just see any James Wood review where our severe critic complains about the ventures back into the past of contemporary novelists like A. S. Byatt or David Mitchell or Hilary Mantel. The modernist mistrust of historical fiction—again except in highly mediated and “meta” forms, as for instance in Orlando or Absalom, Absalom!—begins with Henry James’s counsel to Sarah Orne Jewett, which I myself quote all the time, that the novelist’s proper subject matter is not the past but “the present palpable-intimate.” The postmodern fantasia-on-the-present Myra escapes this censure, however.

5. Wilde in essence (and more even than Nietzsche) invented the political position we are here discussing, as Invisible College listeners know: the aristocratic radical or Tory Anarchist high-low strategy paradoxically adopted by disaffected members of the middle class combining a liberatory queer-aestheticist assault on bourgeois values with a “decolonial” defense of tradition and hierarchy. Wilde, for instance, wished to visit Jefferson Davis when he toured the U.S. on the grounds that the Confederacy had been colonized by a deadening Anglo rationalism just as Ireland had, but he also visited Walt Whitman, whose anarchic literary and sexual revolution he likewise admired. See also friend-of-the-blog Paul Franz’s latest essay on D. H. Lawrence, which slightly recasts the same modernist contradiction we are heir to:

In Lawrence’s delineation of the problem of Apocalypse, we begin to glimpse the basis of his revulsion from Fascism as concretely manifested, though also why he so often found himself drawn into illicit commerce with it. Fearing the destructive passions of the multitude, Lawrence could not but recoil from expressions of such brutality when they manifested themselves in militarized, political form. At the same time, however, believing the distinction between aristocrat and mass to be eternal, rather than temporary and contingent, Lawrence’s interest in preserving some space for the peaceable saw some need of at least rechanneling such “unappeased” rage, like an upward funneling flame.

This brings us to the dangerous topic of the post-left, as addressed in a recent Eminent Americans podcast conversation between friend-of-the-blog Dan Oppenheimer and Compact editor Geoff Shullenberger, in which the post-left is defined as a political tendency marked by the belief that the left-wing project is a fraud all the way down, a stalking-horse for the the professional class’s totalitarian statist will-to-power. I am attracted to this idea, to say the least, though friend-of-the-blog Gnocchic Apocryphon offers a useful caution:

The post left (I know some of you that I respect claim that label so if you’re reading this I'm not talking about you) does often seem nihilistic to me, drawn either to Caesarism or accelerationist thinking, and sometimes unwittingly throwing their truck in with a very “ban this sick filth, down with sex, down with art, RETVRN to before Ulysses and Lady Chattersley” turn on the right that they ironically sometimes see Trumpism as a defense against.

I would say “down with sex, down with art” has left, right, and center variants, which means, depending on the circumstances, one has to oppose it sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right, and sometimes from the center. Feminism, for example, because it was in its inception a Puritan-Spartan offshoot in Wollstonecraft’s quarrel with Milton and Rousseau, seems always drawn back to the “down with sex, down with art” attitude. It’s hardest to oppose when it’s on the left because the left is more persuasive than right or center when it redefines “down with sex, down with art” as sex and art themselves. But then I also think the left tends to self-servingly mistranslate when it equates “liberties” with “rights,” which is the whole difference between GA and myself, perhaps, and why I am in the main, yes, kind of a post-leftist as defined in the episode. That’s why this thing is called “Grand Hotel Abyss” in the first place:

The socio-philosophical basis of such theories is the philosophically as well as politically uncertain attitude of romantic anti-capitalism. […] A considerable part of the leading German intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ which I described in connection with my critique of Schopenhauer as ‘a beautiful hotel, equipped with every comfort, on the edge of an abyss, of nothingness, of absurdity. And the daily contemplation of the abyss between excellent meals or artistic entertainments, can only heighten the enjoyment of the subtle comforts offered.’

But only “kind of” because I still like, for example, Camus’s The Rebel, a book that strangely never arises in these conversations because Comp-Lit sophisticates think it’s YA, which is about how one can come to this dire conclusion about the left—that the project of the left is to “kill God and build a church”—while still retaining ideas about and hopes for some kind of universal human emancipation.

In any case, the question with which the new year presents us is where the emergent tech elite fits into this picture. A different wing of the expert class with a different but still totalitarian design? Or a genuinely new force requiring a novel explanatory paradigm? If we’re still rooting around in the 1890s for the origin of the present, it may be time to put down Wilde and pick up Wells.

6. For the further benefit of obsessed new readers, I also direct you to an eight-year archive of literary essays on fiction, nonfiction, drama, poetry, and comics available at the REVIEW INDEX on johnpistelli.com.

7. Not the first time I have agreed with Katherine Dee: I was touched to see her link to our 2021 conversation on “hipster reactionaries” (what was not yet quite denominated as “Dimes Square” in the popular imagination) in her last post of 2024. It was my first-ever podcast appearance and also the only time I ever have revealed or ever will reveal my mysterious connection to the highly-placed Satanist and psyopper Michael Aquino (discussed here), a connection that will be of special interest to devoted Invisible College listeners. I’m also loving Kat’s dolphin religion arc:

Water speaks. Fill a cup with water and sleep next to it. Listen and you will hear something. If you don’t hear it, do this every night until you can.