Weekly Readings #167 (04/14/25-04/20/25)

diffusion of innovation

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!

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Tribe Shift: Forecasting New Hegemonies

“Diffusion of Innovation” (adjusted)

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.

1. Jokes about the most recent Red Scare episode aside, see my essay on A Room of One’s Own for the thesis that “feminism and misogyny are the same: both aim to abolish female flesh.” Have I said welcome to all my new subscribers yet? Are you sure you’re in the right place?

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.