Yes, do keep us posted about NYC or other northeastern events! I think there’s something of what Freud said about Dostoevsky to someone like Anna K: it’s disappointing somehow ( this disappointment has somehow outlived my own commitment to the sort of leftism she pretended) to see an examining mind come full circle to parochial prejudices (wanting good things for one’s community first is one thing, but there is a particular form of it that feels very connected to the race realism she’s engaged in and the suburban sense that there are barbarians at the gates.) Freud was wrong about Dostoevsky of course, but has Anna K written a Sisters Karamazov or an Underground Woman? Agreed that she needs a project. I have very mixed feelings about the library as community center phenomenon myself, but I think it’s first and foremost downstream of the decline in public literacy.
Yes, it's an art form of its own not to become parochial if one is primarily a commenter, which is why we honor the greatest essayists! Maybe her visual art career will go somewhere. (She's talented, but it's not my style, to say the least. I like beauty, not ugliness—I like what her and Nabokov would call poshlust!)
About the library, the one in Minneapolis is enormous, has four huge floors, plus lower and higher levels the public doesn't access. They should just turn one of the floors into a shelter, maybe with someplace to sleep, shower, and wash clothes, and leave the rest of the building for library purposes, for people who want to read and study, and for people to bring their kids. I admit that's maybe problematic from certain pragmatic angles, but commenters, who don't have to set budgets, should be a little quixotic or utopian, to prevent the parochialism from setting in, and to give the pragmatists ideas.
(Btw, since you read it, the library in Portraits and Ashes, whose patrons jump to their deaths-of-despair from the mezzanine, is the Minneapolis Central Library. Nobody actually killed themselves in that one, I don't think, but there's a similar one in Utah or Montana or somewhere where they did; I read articles about it when I was writing the novel.)
Great post. I get that I am on the outside bemusedly looking in on a psychodrama that I never signed up for—having no original opinion about Red Scare, I don't feel the need to have an opinion now—but there are other people "capable of addressing such a quandary," without the more brutal style, while still pillorying the "moralistic blather" of progressives who make things worse. Boring centrist liberals, who maybe care about cities and want public order. It doesn't take that much to just say these developments are bad, this policy is bad, why don't we stop it. I don't know who these people would be in the Flaubertian universe. [I feel like a digressive footnote should go here explaining why they're not quite Homais figures or need not be.] I think they probably exist mostly in the vicinity of George Eliot. [Maybe Doctor Prance from The Bostonians. In the face of overreach, one doesn't have to go full Ransom.] The new right can recoil from the analogy or not but their hated foils the neocons were originally (also rightly) responding to the same increasing social disorder and the same progressive overreach and groupthink that ignored and justified these problems, while covering their tracks with moralistic invective. We don't have to replay this futile dialectic. At least Tom Wolfe gave us a useful document out of it about the general mechanisms involved, not just shitposts and retroactive (self-)recriminations. I'll take my answer off the air.
Thanks! I'm invested in the psychodrama (or in the podcast) because I have similarities of background and sensibilities with the hostesses, especially the rearing in a Reagan Democrat milieu and then a schooling in the Marxist-pomo academy, two drastically different environments with only one thing in common: a withering hatred of the centrist liberal. (I am not justifying or defending this, only describing it! But it's also why I'm not simply repulsed by the brutal style the way some people are, even though I did eventually temper the Nietzsche and Paglia with George Eliot.) You're entirely right about not repeating the dialectic, which they are in some danger of doing.
Not sure if we mean the same thing by centrist liberalism here (too many flavors) because for me it doesn't necessarily exclude the Reagan Democrat, but now I can see how historically that it connotes the Clintons and that's not what I meant to refer to. (I think the Nation-style progressive always occupied this place in my trajectory, at one time to my right and at other times to my left.)
But anyway I didn't mean their brutal style as style so much as the need to push the buttons of those who find that style brutal, if that makes sense. Or maybe that's what you meant too.
Yes, definitely the latter—the need always to provoke, to scandalize the imagined bourgeoisie (not that various forms of "bourgeoisie" don't sometimes slot themselves into the scandalizable position).
Yes, but what would Baudelaire think of a bourgeoisie that could be scandalized by God and country, the nuclear family, and law and order, by centrist liberalism? I mean it’s been bourgeois on bourgeois scandalizing for a century now but this is really bringing it full circle.
Really enjoyed this one. Juvenescence was just very warmly recommended to me as potentially helpful for thinking about generations, so now I think I HAVE to check it out.
Thanks! Yes, I love that book. It's more a "slim poetic treatise" than any kind of more empirical study, as I recall, but really beautifully done, and his framing of the issue, kin to Eliot on Tradition and Bloom on Influence but broader, has stayed with me since I read it.
A delight as always. I've also been wondering lately if I should feel guilty for having enjoyed Red Scare at their prime, but let myself off the hook because I stopped listening long ago (not out of any moral objection, but they simply felt less relevant as the woke stranglehold on acceptable cultural output began to loosen). I agree with you that Anna K. should take some time off and write a book, because I do feel she has stagnated in the cultivation of her moral imagination.
Thanks! I don't feel guilty since I still listen and my own ideological journey (unsurprising from a certain demographic standpoint) hasn't been *that* different from theirs, though they, or Anna, are in danger of becoming caricatures. In a book she'd have to think things through more carefully. Even in that post I linked, she allows the state (or some agency) would have to do more, not less, to solve the homeless problem in any way beyond neglect (the current left's solution) or brute policing (the perennial right's).
When it comes to the problematic unhoused, it seems to be an emblematic American problem (the inevitable consequence of a dynamic society? freedom to rise is also freedom to fall?) In London, even the substance-dependent unhoused are relatively civil.
Interesting, I'd assumed the problem was the drugs. Though it's possible the drugs are different here. I wrote a review of a book on this subject once, when I was starting down the pundit road a few years ago, before I came to my senses:
I enjoyed Quinones's Dreamland. Yes, we definitely don't have the fentanyl problem here, but the social factors he mentions are probably important as well, as is the overall level of violence and lawlessness in a society.
You cover the waterfront pretty thoroughly here, John. My two bits would add that literature - all art for that matter - has been the one human preserve that pretends to transcendence - even if the transcendence doesn't reach all the way to heaven - it might be a lateral transcendence permits a man to embody a woman and vice versa. Or imagine a man turning into a bug, a butterfly a - whatever. Imagination is a gift from god, a kind of transcendence that tells us we can be more than what we are born with and born into. The Woke revolutionists in the arts would fasten our imaginations - our art - to the world of our body and first family. Art simply has other plans than politics.
Lol, never watched it, but the guy who wrote the comic book it's based on started out as a standard-issue anti-PC bad boy Bill Maher type Reddit atheist centrist lib in the mid-'90s!
Oh yes. I haven’t read “The Boys” comics but I did read “Preacher” which was really what Garth Ennis was famous for before “The Boys” came to Amazon. Same type of shock value (if to a slightly lesser extent), but ironically leaning very hard into Christian redemptionism (and with startlingly genuine warmth) despite its “lolgayrapistskydaddy” humor. As if embarrassed by the former, Ennis seemed to double down on the latter for the remainder of his career.
The problem with the Amazon show is it tries so hard to be that anti-PC Bad Boy while still being deeply entrenched in the strictures and histrionics of the 2010s #resist era. The result is, well, what you just described lol
Same! I read Preacher too, when it was coming out, and really enjoy it before that tone became a dire cliche—and you're totally right, it had a warmth I never saw anywhere else in his work and I dropped him after that.
Yes, he seems to have settled into self-caricature, to recur to a theme from above. His early Hellblazer work was pretty heartfelt too, including the beautiful Troubles one-shot Heartland. Which reminds me, I should also say in fairness that someone who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles can be forgiven for Reddit atheism!
Lol "the reason i'm not writing the intros to sontag reissues is bc her son is a chud"... really, that's the ONLY reason?
Btw I've been reading Craig Raine's essays off and on since your Salinger post—thanks for the recommendation!
Yes, do keep us posted about NYC or other northeastern events! I think there’s something of what Freud said about Dostoevsky to someone like Anna K: it’s disappointing somehow ( this disappointment has somehow outlived my own commitment to the sort of leftism she pretended) to see an examining mind come full circle to parochial prejudices (wanting good things for one’s community first is one thing, but there is a particular form of it that feels very connected to the race realism she’s engaged in and the suburban sense that there are barbarians at the gates.) Freud was wrong about Dostoevsky of course, but has Anna K written a Sisters Karamazov or an Underground Woman? Agreed that she needs a project. I have very mixed feelings about the library as community center phenomenon myself, but I think it’s first and foremost downstream of the decline in public literacy.
Yes, it's an art form of its own not to become parochial if one is primarily a commenter, which is why we honor the greatest essayists! Maybe her visual art career will go somewhere. (She's talented, but it's not my style, to say the least. I like beauty, not ugliness—I like what her and Nabokov would call poshlust!)
About the library, the one in Minneapolis is enormous, has four huge floors, plus lower and higher levels the public doesn't access. They should just turn one of the floors into a shelter, maybe with someplace to sleep, shower, and wash clothes, and leave the rest of the building for library purposes, for people who want to read and study, and for people to bring their kids. I admit that's maybe problematic from certain pragmatic angles, but commenters, who don't have to set budgets, should be a little quixotic or utopian, to prevent the parochialism from setting in, and to give the pragmatists ideas.
(Btw, since you read it, the library in Portraits and Ashes, whose patrons jump to their deaths-of-despair from the mezzanine, is the Minneapolis Central Library. Nobody actually killed themselves in that one, I don't think, but there's a similar one in Utah or Montana or somewhere where they did; I read articles about it when I was writing the novel.)
Once again the casually accepted (incorrect) use of “autistic” because I guess everyone is doing it both grates and obscures meaning.
Great post. I get that I am on the outside bemusedly looking in on a psychodrama that I never signed up for—having no original opinion about Red Scare, I don't feel the need to have an opinion now—but there are other people "capable of addressing such a quandary," without the more brutal style, while still pillorying the "moralistic blather" of progressives who make things worse. Boring centrist liberals, who maybe care about cities and want public order. It doesn't take that much to just say these developments are bad, this policy is bad, why don't we stop it. I don't know who these people would be in the Flaubertian universe. [I feel like a digressive footnote should go here explaining why they're not quite Homais figures or need not be.] I think they probably exist mostly in the vicinity of George Eliot. [Maybe Doctor Prance from The Bostonians. In the face of overreach, one doesn't have to go full Ransom.] The new right can recoil from the analogy or not but their hated foils the neocons were originally (also rightly) responding to the same increasing social disorder and the same progressive overreach and groupthink that ignored and justified these problems, while covering their tracks with moralistic invective. We don't have to replay this futile dialectic. At least Tom Wolfe gave us a useful document out of it about the general mechanisms involved, not just shitposts and retroactive (self-)recriminations. I'll take my answer off the air.
Thanks! I'm invested in the psychodrama (or in the podcast) because I have similarities of background and sensibilities with the hostesses, especially the rearing in a Reagan Democrat milieu and then a schooling in the Marxist-pomo academy, two drastically different environments with only one thing in common: a withering hatred of the centrist liberal. (I am not justifying or defending this, only describing it! But it's also why I'm not simply repulsed by the brutal style the way some people are, even though I did eventually temper the Nietzsche and Paglia with George Eliot.) You're entirely right about not repeating the dialectic, which they are in some danger of doing.
Not sure if we mean the same thing by centrist liberalism here (too many flavors) because for me it doesn't necessarily exclude the Reagan Democrat, but now I can see how historically that it connotes the Clintons and that's not what I meant to refer to. (I think the Nation-style progressive always occupied this place in my trajectory, at one time to my right and at other times to my left.)
But anyway I didn't mean their brutal style as style so much as the need to push the buttons of those who find that style brutal, if that makes sense. Or maybe that's what you meant too.
Yes, definitely the latter—the need always to provoke, to scandalize the imagined bourgeoisie (not that various forms of "bourgeoisie" don't sometimes slot themselves into the scandalizable position).
Yes, but what would Baudelaire think of a bourgeoisie that could be scandalized by God and country, the nuclear family, and law and order, by centrist liberalism? I mean it’s been bourgeois on bourgeois scandalizing for a century now but this is really bringing it full circle.
Really enjoyed this one. Juvenescence was just very warmly recommended to me as potentially helpful for thinking about generations, so now I think I HAVE to check it out.
Thanks! Yes, I love that book. It's more a "slim poetic treatise" than any kind of more empirical study, as I recall, but really beautifully done, and his framing of the issue, kin to Eliot on Tradition and Bloom on Influence but broader, has stayed with me since I read it.
A delight as always. I've also been wondering lately if I should feel guilty for having enjoyed Red Scare at their prime, but let myself off the hook because I stopped listening long ago (not out of any moral objection, but they simply felt less relevant as the woke stranglehold on acceptable cultural output began to loosen). I agree with you that Anna K. should take some time off and write a book, because I do feel she has stagnated in the cultivation of her moral imagination.
Thanks! I don't feel guilty since I still listen and my own ideological journey (unsurprising from a certain demographic standpoint) hasn't been *that* different from theirs, though they, or Anna, are in danger of becoming caricatures. In a book she'd have to think things through more carefully. Even in that post I linked, she allows the state (or some agency) would have to do more, not less, to solve the homeless problem in any way beyond neglect (the current left's solution) or brute policing (the perennial right's).
When it comes to the problematic unhoused, it seems to be an emblematic American problem (the inevitable consequence of a dynamic society? freedom to rise is also freedom to fall?) In London, even the substance-dependent unhoused are relatively civil.
Interesting, I'd assumed the problem was the drugs. Though it's possible the drugs are different here. I wrote a review of a book on this subject once, when I was starting down the pundit road a few years ago, before I came to my senses:
https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/i/52104981/scroll-critic-john-pistelli-reviews-sam-quinones-the-least-of-us-true-tales-of-america-and-hope-in-the-time-of-fentanyl-and-meth
I enjoyed Quinones's Dreamland. Yes, we definitely don't have the fentanyl problem here, but the social factors he mentions are probably important as well, as is the overall level of violence and lawlessness in a society.
Waiting eagerly for more info on the New York release event!
Thanks, will definitely keep everyone updated!
You cover the waterfront pretty thoroughly here, John. My two bits would add that literature - all art for that matter - has been the one human preserve that pretends to transcendence - even if the transcendence doesn't reach all the way to heaven - it might be a lateral transcendence permits a man to embody a woman and vice versa. Or imagine a man turning into a bug, a butterfly a - whatever. Imagination is a gift from god, a kind of transcendence that tells us we can be more than what we are born with and born into. The Woke revolutionists in the arts would fasten our imaginations - our art - to the world of our body and first family. Art simply has other plans than politics.
Thank you, very well said!
“This style of remark—“transphobes are faggots,” “misogynists are pussies,” etc.—seems to be the near-term aesthetic future of the left”
Please no. I cannot take another season of Amazon Prime’s “The Boys.”
Lol, never watched it, but the guy who wrote the comic book it's based on started out as a standard-issue anti-PC bad boy Bill Maher type Reddit atheist centrist lib in the mid-'90s!
Oh yes. I haven’t read “The Boys” comics but I did read “Preacher” which was really what Garth Ennis was famous for before “The Boys” came to Amazon. Same type of shock value (if to a slightly lesser extent), but ironically leaning very hard into Christian redemptionism (and with startlingly genuine warmth) despite its “lolgayrapistskydaddy” humor. As if embarrassed by the former, Ennis seemed to double down on the latter for the remainder of his career.
The problem with the Amazon show is it tries so hard to be that anti-PC Bad Boy while still being deeply entrenched in the strictures and histrionics of the 2010s #resist era. The result is, well, what you just described lol
Same! I read Preacher too, when it was coming out, and really enjoy it before that tone became a dire cliche—and you're totally right, it had a warmth I never saw anywhere else in his work and I dropped him after that.
For what it’s worth I don’t recommend the boys comic. “Watchman for people who don’t read” was the way a friend described it, and I basically concur.
Yes, he seems to have settled into self-caricature, to recur to a theme from above. His early Hellblazer work was pretty heartfelt too, including the beautiful Troubles one-shot Heartland. Which reminds me, I should also say in fairness that someone who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles can be forgiven for Reddit atheism!