Weekly Readings #159 (02/17/25-02/23/25)

not interested

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

This week I posted “Catharsis, Ecstasy” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. I hadn’t done a free episode in a while, so this one, the last in the Ancient Greek sequence, comes gratis in its more-than-two-hour entirety, as an enticement to all to offer a paid subscription. With two ancient treatises as its topic, Aristotle’s Poetics and Longinus’s On the Sublime, the episode is about a foundational dispositional distinction in criticism and aesthetics between those who favor structure and those who favor sublimity in literature. Ironically, these two ancient texts all but disappeared for over a millennium and a half until they were translated in the Renaissance. Their impact, therefore, was on the modern: Aristotle inaugurated Neoclassicism in European literature and Longinus inspired Romanticism.¹ I mention this fact here to demonstrate the power of paying attention to old ideas, old texts, and old works of art, not because we revere the past, but because they may alter the present and future.

Next week in the The Invisible College, we leap ahead in time for a sequence on modern western world literature in translation. We begin with Goethe’s Faust, a work one of whose ambitious cultural aims is to synthesize the Classic and the Romantic. I announce here a change to the schedule: it’s impossible to cover the whole of Faust (which has plausibly been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses) in a single week, as I’d previously planned, so I am going to do two episodes on Goethe. Everything else will get pushed back by a week, and I will just skip one of the planned breaks later in the year to fit everything in. I’m not altering the actual pdf schedule yet, in case I make further changes.² Thanks to all my paid subscribers and encourage the rest of you to join them in this experiment in independent education.

Demonstrating the dizzying range of my audience, Major Arcana, a novel I am now trying to sell inside the famously libbed-out independent bookstores of America, received its first review on YouTube by a commentor among what one of you once called the “groyper-adjacent” anons who stalk my super-secret Tumblr. For the full effect, I recommend the text linked in the YouTube description. It’s a hilariously mixed review. The concept of Major Arcana as “ungraphic novel”—as replicating a series of popular spectacular movie and comics genres in a high literary register—is basically right, even if it was not my conscious intent. And I love the deflating description of Jacob Morrow and Ash del Greco’s not-quite-a-love-story as “Dostoevsky’s idiot going insane from trying to treat a BPD victim”—though, in my defense, this is almost also the plot (though I would not be so unkind to Nastasya Filippovna, nor, come to think of it, to Ash del Greco) of Dostoevsky’s Idiot. Please note—though they may revoke my modernist card—how even the less stellar reviews acknowledge that it’s an addictive and immersive novel you will have fun reading.

Anyway, one of the worst features of the 2010s was artists’ and authors’ frequent proclamations, symptomatic of the “fandomization” of all culture, that they didn’t want certain kinds of people to attend to their works, people who don’t already agree with them (the artists and authors) about everything. It’s a perverse idea. I can’t think of anyone who needs to read my work more than the people who don’t already agree with me about everything. Literally everyone on the planet should read Major Arcana. If you would like to read it, and to encourage distinguished small presses like Belt to take chances on risky and ambitious independent fiction, you can pre-order it here.

For today, as much (and as little) of this week’s literary discourse as I can stand. Please enjoy, or whatever!

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Small World: Why (Not) Read Contemporary Translated Literature

Johannes Vermeer, The Geographer (c. 1669)

The discourse is dire around here. Too much gender war. I had my last word on that last year and don’t want to revisit the subject, especially since the stakes seem to be the representation of courtship rituals in indifferently written novels, whether they are indifferently written by men or by women—and this in a moment when the courtship rituals are very, very far downstream of our era’s radical alteration in the very ontology of the human being, surely a grander subject for the ambitious writer than dating. (What is this? Gidget?) Please let me know if there are any Jane Austens or Philip Roths around the place vis-à-vis literary merit and the course of true love, but in the meantime, I am reminded of what Lana Del Rey said when they asked her about feminism in 2014 (the specifics are extraordinary in retrospect, but I mainly quote the remark for its spirit):

For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept. I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested.

Or E. M. Forster’s remark in a letter about his intention in writing his neglectedly cosmic and overratedly political final novel:

When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between East and West, but this conception had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so comfortable. I think that most Indians, like most English people, are shits, and I am not interested whether they sympathize with one another or not. Not interested as an artist…

This is how I have come to feel about male and female novelists: “not interested.” Truly, bring on the AI authors. I only mention this Los Angeles Review of Books essay on “high brodernism,” then, to point out that I’ve been making its very same argument for years, and had, I think, almost begun to convince some people, without the irritating gender slur.³ (Irritating and irrelevant, since the veritable queen of the “brodernists,” in the sense in which I would mean such a coinage in an alternate universe where I had the bad taste to use such a coinage, is surely Clarice Lispector, whom I seem to be alone in finding completely unreadable.⁴)

Yes, certain cliques treat contemporary “translated literature” as a peculiar genre of late modernism and as an occasion for the athletic performance of reading long and/or deliberately alienating works (Schattolardologynoid, etc.); and yes, this whole sick crew deracinates this literature from its context when they adopt it as a fashion symbol, sometimes with a stultifying political effect, I suppose.⁵ And now that I have a bit of experience with what goes on behind the scenes in publishing, I can tell you that the exoticist fetish sometimes comes at the literal expense of homegrown independent writing, often as part of the proverbial hicklib’s auto-anti-Americanism, the literary equivalent of the histrionic way he watches fútbol instead of football to differentiate himself from his MAGA-hatted neighbors.

And we could extend the argument back into modernism itself. It’s not as if certain misprisions weren’t involved in Kafka’s reception in the first place. The contextualizers have corrected these misprisions now, however; they have so thoroughly nailed Kafka back down to his context as a peculiar kind of documentary realist that one almost begins to regret having read him in the first place. “It’s not about God, it’s about Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy.” Maybe so, but I don’t have any real feelings about Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy—I could work myself up about it if I tried; I can work myself up about anything; but not, for example, first thing in the morning—whereas I do have real feelings, or sometimes lack thereof, about God. So maybe I should just read something else, something the historicists and contextualists haven’t caught up with yet, something I’m still free to refer to my own experience without a debilitating guilt trip about how I’m mistreating “the other.”

As you can tell, I would actually defend, on selfish grounds, the deracination of world literature, its becoming-our-own, except that, if we are mostly interested in the literary refraction of our own experience, then maybe we should just read the people writing directly about that, or their immediate ancestors, though they should have the bad taste to be our fellow Americans or users of English.⁶

At the risk of philosophizing,⁷ we should remind ourselves from time to time why we do what we habitually do, just to make sure the explanation retains its relevance and validity. We read literature in translation to enjoy a literary experience unavailable in texts written originally in English. This was an urgent task during the initial breakdown of the walled-off national literatures famously discussed by Goethe and Marx, in the period running from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries, from Dostoevsky to García Márquez, perhaps the first and last of the modern writers who truly hit our literature like a bomb. Now, however, when major literature in English is itself written for translation, when tech has leveled the planet and obsolesced the idea of the exotic, I wonder what difference per se exists between our increasingly similar cultures. The rise of the global middle class creates a global culture, even in our period of national-populist retrenchment, itself ironically a global phenomenon, an aspect of the very globalizing process it proposes to reject.

(The YouTube reviewer of my own novel, you’ll note, is, I believe, an Eastern European, yet he is completely conversant with both American and Japanese pop and contemporary culture, while also ballasted by a familiarity with western canonical literature. Plus or minus the latter, whose cultural complement doesn’t that describe anymore? BookTube is depressing in general because it features people in every country on the planet talking into the camera about the same hyped-up novels. In other moods, however, we might regard this as exhilarating rather than depressing, a previously unimaginable utopia of world union. Our moods do not believe each other, as the poet said.)

My initial charge against “translated literature,” which I directed ironically against one of the few Anglophone “brodernist” works our author arraigns, is that it hasn’t seemed to offer novelty in decades, is still essentially running some version of the old modernist script, the Joyce/Beckett binary, and endless retreads of Kafka. Not that there aren’t great “world” writers; I have issued the same breathless “brodernist” acclamation of Bolaño as everyone else, richly merited in his case. If it’s good, then it’s good. On balance, though, given a choice of pharmaka, I’d rather read something that might innovate on the language I actually speak or intervene in the polis where I actually live. Austro-Hungarian managerialism aside, the real moral of the story about waking up a bug in your own bed is that otherness begins at home.

1. With all eyes on the New Romanticism, then, we might read Longinus’s On the Sublime as the first example of the Old Romanticism, the Oldest Romanticism. What bearing might the Old Romanticism have on the New? While the text is incomplete, the fragmentary form in which we have it breaks off after a discourse on the relation between literary aesthetics and politics. Longinus, writing (probably in the first century AD) long after the high period of Classical Greece from which he takes so many of his exemplary sublime texts from Sophocles to Sappho to Plato, wonders if literature in his time is in decline. He recognizes declinism as a temptation to be resisted, a curmudgeonly form of self-congratulation, but he also understands his own period to be a valley rather than a peak. Is is because he lives in an un-democratic time, as opposed to the democratic era of the city-states? Doesn’t democracy, with its civic contests of rhetoric and theater, encourage sublimity in art? He considers this idea and then rejects it. Democracy, he implies, somehow encourages warfare, whereas the imperial and monarchical structures succeeding the city-states in the Hellenistic era produced peace, and he does not want to seem ungrateful for the blessing of pacific times. No, the problem, he concludes, is the love of money apparently rife in his own time and place. Such avarice makes people base, lowers their sights, and prevents them from attaining the great heights of thought and feeling sublime writers like Sappho and Plato could mount. I risk anachronism, then, to say that Old Romanticism was at once prototypically anti-capitalist and anti-democratic, reminiscent of the new political alliances Ross Barkan anticipates in his New Romanticism piece linked in my first sentence above between socialists and nationalists. The most sublime and Longinean of 19th-century Romantic writers, however, Shelley and Emerson, would, if forced, probably have taken the other side of that bet: an alliance, we might say, between anarchists and capitalists. (There has always been a left and a right wing of Romanticism, often traversed by the same figures, as with Wordsworth and Coleridge’s journey from youthful sympathy for the French Revolution to elderly support for the British establishment. In our time, I just don’t know, given a conflict between nationalists-socialists on the one hand and capitalists-anarchists on the other, which side counts as the left and which the right.) Another reason to attend to old ideas, old texts, old works of art—to clarify the choices we ourselves face in the present.

2. Such as? I enjoyed this pod conversation between Brian Chau and Henry Oliver on the role of classic literature in our time. I enjoyed it not only because I was pleasantly startled to hear my own name entered as evidence that the novel is not dead, but also because it reminded me I desperately need to reread Coriolanus, since I only read it once, and that was 20 years ago. (It was T. S. Eliot’s favorite Shakespeare play; he pronounced it superior to Hamlet, probably for political reasons.) So I may try to work Coriolanus into the summer Shakespeare section somehow. Right-wing-watchers may also want to listen that show’s previous episode, an interview with Lomez of Passage Press. I draw particular attention to the moment when Lomez makes a great show of using a slur against transgender women just before he concludes that, in the right-wing civil war between the conservative nationalists and the transhumanists, he pragmatically sides with the latter. I will keep recommending the gender accelerationist blackpaper—I’ve been recommending it since 2019!—until people figure out what’s going on. These confused conservatives (I include much of the left at this point) are trying to “accelerate” three wheels of the car while imagining they can send the fourth wheel alone into reverse at the same time. (The left and right just disagree about which wheels to accelerate and which to reverse.) Good luck!

3. Who is the “imagined tribunal” of censorious women male novelists supposedly fear if they are not in fact the personnel of the publishing companies, someone inquired on Substack Notes. (They may be the personnel of the publishing companies; we’re just not sure.) It’s a good question, and I believe the answer is 2010s Twitter, with its #killallmen omni-stigmatization of all things literary male, the “guy in your MFA,” the “litbro,” Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, etc. At the time I found this more sad than objectionable—if you can’t make yourself feel big without cutting me down, then you’re the one with the problem, not me—but, now that the time has passed, with only occasional “bro”-slinging reminders of its atmosphere, we forget how much bad blood it really did create, and not to any constructive effect that I can detect.

4. Well, me and Anna K. Speaking of, my Tumblr anons think what I would most like to write is an ongoing phenomenological review of the Red Scare podcast. I am usually happy to oblige, to wit, someone asked:

What do you think of 2025 r*d sc*re (and ig heterodoxy’s regime turn more broadly idk)

I repost my reply here, in case anyone may be amused by it: To avow a political stance and therefore take responsibility for the exercise of power shows more honor than, for example, the dirtbag left ever has, who resentfully carp and sneer in their permanent exile. If Anna and Dasha had tried to appear aloof and above it all after Trump won, if they’d pled the case that they only supported him for the aesthetic, it would have been disreputable. They’re not political pundits, though; they tend not to weigh policies on the merits or to think through their effects “dialectically,” as their old comrades would say, or even to do what I do, which is to attempt an exhaustive and exhausting examination of my own divided loyalties and conflicting desires. They’re just loyalists, which doesn’t make for a good podcast, exacerbated by the paradoxically ultra-democratic un-democratic nature of new-right politics, where the Caesar figure is supposed to channel the will of his constituents directly, thus obviating any need on their part to question or cavil. (I could criticize the memecoins, but it’s possible—probable!—we will all be shilling memecoins within five years.) Our heroines are also mismatched as types on this score: Anna is a true ideologue and moralist, Dasha an artist and ironist. Committed to truth and therefore able to lie, Anna said she hid her conservatism before, was only pretending to be a leftist, but now proclaims it openly; Dasha, on the other hand, is a chameleon poet, incapable of truth on that level, committed only to the higher or lower truth that is the emotional reality of time and place. She recently returned from the Caribbean saying “praise Jah,” whereas Anna might have come back from the same trip with a distanced and acerbic political analysis. In that respect, Dasha is closer to the non-ideologue Trump, hence she said she voted for him but would not have voted for a generic Republican, whereas Anna said she would have voted for any Republican. Anna also recently conceded that truly winning against the left would be a disappointment because one would have to go back (I quote from memory) to “writing poems” and “going to parties,” presumably non-ideological parties, since they do go to ideological ones, and non-ideological poems, too, since she could write political poetry if she pleased. (What’s the MAGA version, I wonder, of “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”? MAGA’s resident poet laureate, Joseph Massey, tends to write apolitical religion-and-nature lyrics in the Imagist style, not any kind of right-wing Brechtian satire or invective—Brecht, who was himself inspired by the right, by Kipling. But I digress.) Despite this admission, their podcast, to retain vitality, should return to its cultural roots and deal with the politics inter alia. Why did they review the dire Nosferatu, for example, other than as an excuse for their customary discourse on sex and gender, and not the much more Red-Scare-coded Anora and The Brutalist, films about which I am sure they would have had surprising and expert things to say?

5. While the “high brodernist” coinage is profoundly annoying, I will say in its defense (has anyone preceded me in this point?) that it surely alludes in its political thrust to the old left-lib pejorative for centrists, “High Broderism,” which renders it no less rebarbative but slightly more sophisticated.

6. This isn’t a new argument either. Tim Parks writing in the NYRB over a decade ago:

One of the functions of a canon or a national tradition has been to provide a familiar group of texts, stretching from past to present, constitutive of one’s own community and within which a writer could establish his position, signalling his similarity and difference from authors around and before him. Nuance is more telling than absolute novelty; the more the similarities, the more what difference there is will count. Hence, it might be more useful for a young English writer to be building up a knowledge of, say, Evelyn Waugh, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell, Barbara Pym, along with the writers they drew on and the later generation they inspired, than to be mixing Chinua Achebe with Primo Levi. This is not of course a reflection on the stature of these writers—it’s simply an observation that many of my students have read so disparately that they have little awareness of a body of texts tackling their own culture and within which they can place their writing.

We could understand Major Arcana as arguing, on balance, that you should read George Eliot before you read Georges Bataille. But perhaps it could also be interpreted the other way, I’m not sure; I’m only the writer.

7. I, too, dislike it. For the most part, we should just do what we do. We’re going to anyway, with or without explanation. Blake Smith:

When you’re explaining you’re losing; when you’re philosophizing you’ve lost. […] Free people do not respond to questions about cause, purpose, and essence—these are for Aristotelians, Catholics, Kantians, Marxists and other losers enslaved by mindghosts.