A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This is the time, this is the book, and nothing can stop what’s coming: my new novel Major Arcana will be released in two days. This is your last chance to pre-order it here in print or ebook formats (the audiobook will be released on May 20). Thanks to everyone who came to the local release here in Pittsburgh on Thursday (and thanks to Riverstone Books for hosting and to Belt Publishing’s own Anne Trubek for introducing me)—it was wonderful to meet my readers in real life! Illustrating the comeback of the book in our time after its diminution in the last decade, we filled to standing capacity the small room dedicated to the event. Further pursuant to real life, I will be making a New York appearance next month with a few other metropolitan luminaries; details to follow soon, but please mark May 8th on your calendars. Online, I will be going live on Substack on release day (April 22) at 3PM EST for a conversation with Mary Jane Eyre, who wrote the first and best review of Major Arcana back when the Substack serial concluded. By next week, I should have several other reviews and interviews to share. Thanks to everyone who supported this project in any way from its beginning as a paid serial on Substack two years ago! If we don’t carry American literature into the 21st century, who else will?
Meanwhile, my other project continues: The Invisible College, a series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The most recent episode, “In Place of Death There Was Light,” is among the most controversial, both for its case against Tolstoy as death-worshiping master of didacticism rather than the Homeric bard of vitality we thought we knew, and for its conjugation of this idea with his most notorious novella, The Kreutzer Sonata, and its supposedly misogynistic thesis, actually congruent with radical feminism from Wollstonecraft to Dworkin,1 that to liberate men and woman from gender is to liberate them from sex, which in turn is to bring human life to its conclusion.2 I also consider The Death of Ivan Ilyich, who (I conclude) secretly had to die for his parvenu’s bad taste in interior decoration in Tolstoy’s incorrigibly aristocratic eye, and Hadji Murad, whose also death-tending Noble Savagery testifies to the compensatory imperial nostalgia of our author’s own perishing might. Ask me again in a year and I might change my mind, of course, but I think there is value in taking canonical works seriously enough to be affronted by them rather than reducing them to decorations in a well-appointed library (now who’s criticizing interior decoration?). Next week: Ibsen and Chekhov.3 Thanks to all my paid subscribers!
For today, a few timely remarks. Please enjoy!
Tribe Shift: Forecasting New Hegemonies
If you’re a new subscriber—and thanks to Ross Barkan for the recommendation in his most recent essay, “The Trials of Anti-Woke”—the lifeblood of these Weekly Readings has been the incendiary footnotes I attach to whatever old-school Buzzfeed-level listicle “content” I throw almost at random into the main text. On this pious Easter morn, however, I will just go straight at the discourse up here in the large print. Ross groups me with others who “may be classified, in an extremely broad way, as holding anti-woke sensibilities,” but, while this is accurate enough, it’s a characterization jeopardized by the nascent ideologies of the near future. I told someone privately that we would learn to miss wokeness, just as we are learning to miss the older form of oppositional (rather than regnant) MAGA. As the political air grows more and more frigid, we will remember both as having been extremely flawed vessels for (respectively) humane concern and human freedom.4 Another “vibe shift” is foretold in the wake of the one’s defeat and the other’s victory. Such shifts move in almost decade-long cycles, though, as the adoption curve passes through the whole social order. I predicted the last “vibe shift” (I dislike this term; must we all speak in babytalk?) in 2019 and stared observing it in the cultural vanguard in 2021; by 2025, we are still in the “early majority” phase of the new right, with brands just now starting to post Nietzsche quotes on social media and liberal Harvard professors to debate Curtis Yarvin at events sponsored by right-wing avant-garde presses. As the last impressionable schoolgirl in Peoria has adopted they/them pronouns this very month, so new-right fashion has a few more years to cycle through the culture, until the last impressionable schoolgirl in Peoria goes on a tradwife crusade against whatever seed oils may still be on the menu in 2030. But all signs point to a shift toward new oppositions and new configurations, toward hegemonies of the future, with which I am going to find it difficult to sympathize at all. I did sympathize with elements of both woke and MAGA (having been educated into the class that supports the former and born into the class that supports the latter), which led me to the impossible position of trying, as I’ve tried over the last decade, to criticize both from within.5 The rough beasts on the horizon, though—a Luigi-loving openly terrorist-totalitarian far left and a techno-centrism6 piloted by the Kleins and Ygelsiases of liberalism and by what the reliably perspicacious Katherine Dee calls the “post-right”7 of MAGA defectors hymned in the New York Times—are not really in my imaginative menagerie. I’ll work on it! Nothing human can be alien to me, as the poet said, not even inhuman dreams. Everybody keeps asking me what I’m writing next. Probably something science-fictional, I’ve been telling them. I guess it will have to be.
If you already bought Major Arcana and don’t what to do with yourself, there’s always my earlier novel, Portraits and Ashes, which I now realize emerged in its entirety, albeit unconsciously, from my earlier reading of The Kreutzer Sonata. And special thanks to the reader who brought a copy of Portraits and Ashes for me to sign at the Major Arcana release.
Don’t worry, I’ve always loved Ibsen, and I spent yesterday reading The Sea Gull and have entirely forgotten whatever problem I was supposed to have had with Chekhov:
A young girl grows up on the shores of a lake, as you have. She loves the lake as the gulls do, and is as happy and free as they. But a man sees her who chances to come that way, and he destroys her out of idleness, as this gull here has been destroyed.
I sympathize more than you might imagine, for example, with Hari Nef’s comments on this subject toward the end of the new Nymphet Alumni episode.
You can read Major Arcana for this as well as my critical writing. With its present-day setting implicitly late 2023—I began writing in early 2023—it begins with a satire of wokeness and ends with a satire of anti-wokeness, but its keynote is not satire, and it sympathetically portrays characters of every ideology under the sun, from Marxist revolutionaries to gender activists to suburban Republicans. This is what the novel as a form is for. For my rather extended critique of woke from within, I spent the years 2018 to 2021 teaching a course called “Introduction to Multicultural Literatures of the U.S.” the complete pandemic-era archive of which is on YouTube here. My more scattered and less systematic critique of MAGA from within can be found in the Weekly Readings footnotes, since I started this Substack in 2022 as an intervention into the emergence of the post-left.
See here for the problem of a technocratic worldview. Years ago, one of these types counterposed to the “blue tribe” and the “red tribe” of partisan politics an independent “gray tribe” of Silicon Valley programmers and their fellow travelers. I have quietly been trying to make explicit the existence of another autonomous counterforce, not reducible to the “blue tribe” with which it has pretty disastrously affiliated, of artists and those of artistic sensibility. We might call it the “black tribe” for its Hamlet-inspired bohemian suit of mourning, mourning the life that might have been and still might be, were it not for the misleading racial connotation of “black,” except that the racial connotation may not actually be as misleading as it seems (see here, here, and here), especially when contrasted with our emergent new western-exceptionalist liberal centrism for which even Nazism itself was a woke decolonial Third-Worldist irrationalist indigenism. But that’s a story for another day.
On the model of the aforementioned post-left, a label I have mostly accepted for myself, though I turn over to Geoff Shullenberger any ambition toward the role of the post-left’s conscience, as in his essay on the persistent relevance of Agamben as a critic of state-of-exception totalitarianism from Bush’s War on Terror to Biden’s War on Covid to Trump’s War on Terror Redux, and his chastening obituary for Mario Vargas Llosa, whose novels I would spend the next two or three months reading if only I had nothing else to do:
Vargas Llosa was fascinated by the lure of transgression and the delirious excesses of human desire and imagination; Sade and Bataille were among his favorite philosophers. He defined the task of the great novelist, in his academic study of his frenemy García Márquez, as “deicide,” in that the writer’s demiurgic conjuring up of a total reality amounted to an unseating of God. In this way, the novelist was the twin of the revolutionary, as well as of the dictator who sought to impose total control on a nation (hence García Márquez’s sense of kinship with Castro). For Vargas Llosa, however, literature offered a space for the sort of radical experimentation that would bring catastrophe if transformed into a political program—a way to pursue, as he called in his book on Victor Hugo, “the temptation of the impossible,” but with less collateral damage.
In his final years, though, Vargas Llosa expressed increasing enthusiasm for the charismatic populist mode of politics he had long presented as mortally dangerous. He supported Jair Bolsonaro over Lula in Brazil, even though he had qualms about the former’s vulgarity and had praised the latter’s market reforms in the 2000s; he also endorsed Argentina’s Javier Milei, and in 2021, he even backed Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of his detested nemesis.
This evolution was also perhaps inevitable. For most of Vargas Llosa’s career, the sort of elitist politics he espoused was the only game in town when it came to neoliberal economics. The Latin American masses may have been wary of left-wing utopias, but they have often also been hostile to the abstracting, deracinating forces unleashed by pro-market reformers. That is no longer so clearly the case. After decades of urbanization and atomization, younger generations of Latin Americans who have never known the warm embrace of traditional community or the social-democratic state are more likely to identify their pursuit of freedom with the market, opening a path to electoral success for neoliberal rabble-rousers like Milei, Bolsonaro, the younger Fujimori, and Chile’s José Antonio Kast.
Faced with these developments, the octogenarian Vargas Llosa finally acceded to the indiscriminate mixing of the realms he had long sought to keep separate: the libidinal excesses he identified with literature and the harsh market discipline he had hoped to impose in the political sphere.
Professor John, those of us who revere Literature - let's clear the decks and say Art - do not fare well with any tribe, Right or Left. On the Right: how many more essays by Roger Kimball do we need to read about how Western Civ was knocked off its axis because Marcel Duchamp mounted a urinal in the Armory Show? Shame, shame on all those decadent Modern Artists, Picasso, Pollock, et al., (the same revulsion towards Modern Art, by the way, that became Art-Policy under Stalin and Hitler)! I always want to say, "Roger, maybe the destruction of millions of young men across Europe during WWI had something to do with gutting Western Civ?"
On the Left: Sheesh, where do we start? Your Art (novelstorypaintingmusicplaydancesculpture) sucks because it neither excludes the over represented, nor includes the underserved while over marginalizing the marginalized clearly identified by the 46 letters of the alphabet ....
Woke: Creation of beautiful art can only come about when material conditions allow the luxury of time for superficialities built upon the backs of the working class.
Non-Woke: What about the beautiful cave paintings of Lascaux - when virtually everyone - man woman child - was involved in the foundation of survival? How did such beautiful painting come about?
Woke: [Something incomprehensible]
Both Right and Left conveniently forget that one of the projects of Art is to give us new eyes wherewithal to see, or reimagine, reality. The urinal, taken from its usual place and set in an art show does turn out to be pleasing in shape and design. The crucifixion bathed in urine -- keeping with the Left's exaltation of bodily egress -- turns out to affirm Christian Theology: Yes, Christ inhabited every aspect of man's bio-cycle -- hunger, thirst, sex, urine, poo, heck, he even died -- but he overcame death - speaking of Easter - thanks for the reminder Bob Mapplethorpe.
With this gift of Art the imagination flourishes, madness retreats; in politics, the reverse is true ...
While congratulations on the book coming out are of first order (after wishing you, and all, a Happy Easter) it's a combination of odd and troubling to see you--and Shullenberger--rather taking the unrelenting awfulness of Trump 2 as a sign of having been vindicated in your predictions/prescience/vibecasting.
As someone who was sympathetic to what I understood to be y'all's whole thing a few years ago, much of it seemed (and I thought reasonably so, in 2020-22) to be about articulating a critique of the contemporary left's excesses that was routed through, and thus in its own way a defense of, previously (culturally) left-coded 'grad school Theory'... a critique premised, as it turns out wrongly, on the percetion that the Trumpist right had been knocked out of action, and had never been as 'fascist' or threatening as it had been made out to be in the late 2010s. Now it seems rather that the most prescient people were the screeching MSNBC libs of 2015-6! Our awful political moment is strange stuff out of which to make a victory lap for the 2020-22 'Theory-against-the-libs'.
Not that I think the validity or interestingness of a thinker/writer depends on their being 'right' or able to correctly forecast (or call into existence) trends--if anything, the opposite. I think there's a risk too of narrating oneself as the one who knows the shape of the moment, or who know how the previous moment would produce this one. This seems, ultimately, to be the same kind of cultural criticism as the one that the vanishing Marxists used to practice, in which texts as 'interesting' insofar as the disclose the contradictions about to break open into the next stage of history...