Weekly Readings #171 (05/12/25-05/18/25)

the machine war

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

My novel Major Arcana continues to progress through the labyrinth of contemporary literary reception. You can order the print or ebook here—the print book should also be available wherever else books are sold online—and please note that the audio book will be released this week (on May 20) and can be pre-ordered here. Ross Barkan has called it “perhaps the elusive great American novel for the twenty-first century,” Bruce Wagner has said that “to read it is to hold the heart of the world in one’s hands,” Henry Oliver has pronounced it a definitive novel of our time, Denise S. Robbins has deemed it “a freewheeling, deeply moving narrative with intellectual and artistic debates,” and Booklist has judged it “[a] deliriously creative tour-de-force [and] a breathtakingly imaginative and enjoyable novel.” Even The New Yorker “can imagine it finding a passionate readership,” and I for one don’t see why you, too, would not like to join that happy few. Other than that, I will go easy on the self-promotion this week since I believe I should have news of reviews, interviews, and podcast appearances to share in the coming weeks, but I would like to encourage anyone who loves the novel or hates it in an illuminating way to leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or other public forum. Thanks to all my readers!

This week I posted at long last an episode on Marcel Proust to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s called “Actual Ideas of Another World” and primarily concerns what I in my amateurish way have characterized as Proust’s Platonist Aestheticism. I think I promised last week to release the Rilke episode by this weekend, but that was obviously premature; I am still rifling through the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, let alone the Duino Elegies. We have plenty of time in the fall to take up slack, so we should be fine if the Rilke episode comes out sometime next week, the normal day and hour (Friday 6:00 AM) at the latest. Then we will conclude our modern western world literature sequence with Kafka and Borges before enjoying a summer of Shakespeare and Milton. Thanks to all my paid subscribers! If you’re not sure whether or not to join them, please consider an ever-expanding archive of over 60 episodes so far of over two hours each on great writers from Homer to Joyce.

For today, Substack Summer¹ continues its inexorable approach with some thoughts from me on a shortly forthcoming novel by perhaps the most reticent and sibylline, the least self-promoting and graphomaniacal, of all the writers who have leapt from notoriety on this platform to mainstream publishing. Please enjoy!

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A Soul That Existed: Poetry and the Machine in Noah Kumin’s Stop All the Clocks

Among Noah Kumin’s influences, or so goes his rather meager online “lore,” is Robert Silvers, the famed co-founder and longtime co-editor of The New York Review of Books. Kumin cited the NYRB as an inspiration for his own founding in 2022 of the Mars Review of Books.² The NYRB is now a respectable establishment institution (sometimes accordingly called The New York Review of Each Other’s Books to evoke an atmosphere of logrolling and backslapping³) but was at its inception a brash and revolutionary critical organ of the 1960s. The Mars Review—for which, full disclosure, I have written—was founded, like that early iteration of the NYRB, to give voice to a new critical generation and to shatter ossified pieties.⁴ Bob Silvers, however, famously expressed himself solely through his editing; he never wrote a book, whereas Kumin’s debut novel, Stop All the Clocks, will be published on June 3.⁵

Stop All the Clocks is on its surface a brisk and timely techno-thriller. The heroine, a lonely and poetry-obsessed genius programmer named Mona Veigh, has invented a large-language model, Hildegard 2.0, trained on the literary canon’s greatest poems and capable of composing credibly sophisticated poetry in turn. After selling her AI company to the mysterious tech-utopian (and poetry-averse) Avram Parr’s own company Proserpina for a staggering sum, she retires from the world of technology to seclusion with her poetry books on Roosevelt Island⁶—that is, until Parr’s mysterious and suspicious “suicide” draws her into a labyrinth of intricate corruption and nefarious plans for world domination by elitist would-be tech overlords.⁷

Kumin handles the genre elements with aplomb and without condescension, giving us chases, murders, twists, and cliffhangers, not to mention a cast of comic grotesques, amid the glamor of the lonely city. Serious writers have always used this type of genre fiction, though, as a vehicle for something else: usually style, as in the gritty prose-poetry of Raymond Chandler’s noir or William Gibson’s cyberpunk (Library Journal compared Kumin’s novel to Neuromancer).

We might expect Kumin to take the path of style, too, since another part of his “lore,” duly relayed in the bio on the novel’s jacket copy, is that he studied with Martin Amis at NYU, as he recounts in his own movingly personal review of what would prove to be his mentor’s last novel. Only a poor student merely repeats the teacher, however, rather than seeking a new point of departure. Kumin’s review reveals how often Amis himself falls short of fidelity to his own master Nabokov’s quest for the Flaubertian mot juste, how often he tastes defeat in his self-styled modernist “war against cliché.” But Kumin has had second thoughts about the Flaubertian-Nabokovian influence on literary fiction overall, as the late Amis never did: is it the valid standard it had seemed in the second half of the 20th century? In lieu of the mandarin aesthete Nabokov, Kumin has followed the popular occultist Colin Wilson in reconceiving the novel not as an exquisitely made objet d’art but rather as a technology for personal exploration and the conveyance of philosophy.⁸

Stop All the Clocks, then, is a novel of ideas, written in a style of arch intelligence rather than textured lyricism. Kumin anchors his narrative on passages tracing the arguments and philosophies of his characters. As a philosophical mystery, Stop All the Clocks is less Neuromancer and more The Man Who Was Thursday. For a flavor of the novel’s bewitchingly discursive prose, I give at length the passage where the title is explained:⁹

At the heart of Stop All the Clocks is a quarrel about poetry and its relation to technology. Poetry is personal to Mona—it saved her from the lonely childhood that serves as the novel’s Nabokovian animating emotional secret—and it stands in her mind for the possibility of divine inspiration, for the permanent possibility of some transformation uncapturable by the world’s control systems. Avram Parr, however, the master of techno-control, sees poetry as only a minor instance of language and narrative that corporations and governments can fully dominate in the form of predictably iterative codes and therefore ensnare the populace. At this moment in the debate, though, Kumin swerves from the anticipated humanist argument that AI is on the side of power and against poetry, that AI belongs to the clockmakers rather than to the visionaries who see eternity in a grain of sand. Giving us selections of Hildegard 2.0’s poetry throughout the novel,¹⁰ Kumin instead allows the possibility that AI, as long as it doesn’t fall into the hands of small-minded tyrants, may itself prove capable of harboring the “divine spark” of true poetry.¹¹ And yet a distinctly novelistic (as opposed to poetic) sentimentalism¹² prevails in Kumin’s final pages, when a paternal detective’s humane concern for Mona’s well-being—

Mona noticed the sensation of sympathy surge within her. Namely, an event was taking place that had occurred only rarely before in her life—someone was showing genuine concern for her. Aldo’s concern, she knew, was not because she was a great programmer or scholar, or because she was of use to him in any way. It was simply for her as a soul that existed.

—testifies to our need for uniquely human relationships and the acts of care that sustain them. How this sentimentalism comports with the novel’s otherwise icy exaltation of poetry as the carrier of inhuman vision is left unclear by the conclusion.

I call this “subtlety” and “ambiguity” a success not only for Yeats’s definition of poetry as a quarrel with ourselves—a definition rather at odds with his own supernatural inspiration—but also for the form of the novel. Many of the greatest novelists divide the quarrel in their minds into distinct characters conveying distinct worldviews rooted in distinct experiences. By this standard, to which Kumin recently pledged himself in an essay on Russia’s tradition of dialogic fiction, Stop All the Clocks can be counted a success.

1. But not so fast! We now hear that Substack is not cool, that gatekeepers are back. It’s probably true, if a bit premature. Substack will stop being cool when it fully becomes popular; “cool” and “popular” are perpetually at odds. I disagree that institutions never stopped being cool—they did from about 2014 to 2024: the era of poptimism, which is definitionally uncool—but they are showing an ability to learn and to correct themselves. Substack will be the vanishing mediator between a defunct and an emergent mainstream. As Katherine Dee frequently says, the mission of the ambitious artist or thinker or writer now is to “get acquired.” Substack Summer—i.e., the summer of much-discussed traditionally published novels by Substack-prominent authors—actually signifies this return of the gatekeeper rather than the gatekeepers’ permanent usurpation. Hence my mystification that some critics have made me, with my traditionally published novel, not to mention my Ph.D. in English and doctoral dissertation defending that most putatively elitist of positions known as l’art pour l’art, the avatar of some populist revolt I never claimed to lead. (Not that those art-for-art’s-sake modernists didn’t have to start with some renegade self-publishing before they ended up on the cover of Time and then on the syllabus. The day Woolf effectively self-published Mrs. Dalloway exactly a century ago, there was a veritable run on red pencils among the gatekeepers of literary London.) When I re-launched my super secret Tumblr in 2022, I gave it this subtitle: Notes for the True Mainstream in Exile. On the other hand, I do love the experiments with language and structure Substack encourages in writing, which have little place in the sometimes staid magazine and newspaper world, as exemplified by my addiction to the footnote.

2. See an earlier Weekly Reading post on Darryl Pinckney’s enchanting memoir of his apprenticeship to Elizabeth Hardwick and—through her—to the whole NYRB ethos. Why our later journal’s move from Manhattan to Mars, from a blue city to a red planet? Originally, the MRB was hosted on Urbit, a tech platform founded by the controversial neoreactionary political theorist Curtis Yarvin as an infrastructural correlate to his ideal of decentralized sovereignty; one of Urbit’s features is a system of “planets,” or user identities, and I believe (but am not totally sure) that the “Mars” conceit originated there. The MRB has since relocated to Substack itself, perhaps illustrating the failure of the ever-inexplicable Urbit as a libertarian utopia, even though Yarvin himself has gone on to prominence in the cultural mainstream. I note also that the villain of Stop All the Clocks, when he speaks politically, which is to say when he speaks of eugenic and scientific dictatorship, sounds like a parody of Yarvin:

Whereas great men of the past were made great by their fame, great men of the future must exist in the shadows. Under democracy, to be exceptional is to be a threat. One is meant to exist only within the parameters of the hive mind.

3. We’re ones to talk on here! Noah himself—I’ll call him “Kumin” up there, “Noah” down here, as MJE did with me in the first Major Arcana review—worries about “boosterism” among ourselves, like that in the literary aboveground we purport to challenge. No doubt I ought to allay his fears with a bad review of his novel, but, as the hacks instruct Lucien de Rubempré when he arrives in Paris in Balzac’s Lost Illusions, the professional literary journalist should be able to write convincingly on any side of any issue at will. Bad and good reviews are irrelevant. More seriously, if you take a novel as an integral whole and explain how it works, explicit judgment becomes unnecessary, and readers can make up their own minds. Ideally, writing a review of a novel is like portraying a character in a novel: a dispassionate act of observation, not a stern handing-down of judgment. Which shouldn’t be taken to imply I didn’t enjoy Stop All the Clocks as a page-turning thriller or a novel of ideas, since it operates effectively as both; I just happen to be more interested in the ideas.

4. The so-called “normie lib”—once almost absent from but now seemingly the majority on this very platform—would no doubt judge some of the MRB’s interventions complicit in the prevailing “vibe shift” of the last several years, but only those most complacently enamored of the 2010s status quo ante could doubt that we needed its wide-ranging mix of media, generations, and ideologies to begin a long-delayed dialogue between liberalism and its critics amid the end of history’s many disasters. Only Noah would have overseen Christian Lorentzen’s critique of Bronze Age Mindset, for example, perhaps the most persuasive, prescient critique that book and persona have yet received because undertaken from within the rant-treatise’s own logic to prove its bad faith as an objection to American empire, already plenty barbarous even in its liberal incarnation:

His opponents might have reasons to be wary of a movement of his followers if it included compulsory training in ancient Greek and Latin (as well as another dead language, like Sanskrit, and a few modern ones), actual comprehensive history rather than great warrior highlight reels that leave out bloody or pathetic endings, the hard sciences, and physical training oriented to competitive team sports rather than cosmetic weight lifting. That’s something like what many of the Ivy League elites who go on to be “bugmen” endure, and that’s why they’re actually the most efficient killers on a global scale that the earth has ever known. It’s no coincidence that the narrator makes only one mention of Obama as one among those who are “entirely creations of this or that faction within the security system.” This estimate is not wrong. As Obama himself said, “It turns out I’m really good at killing people.”

5. It’s not his first book, however. That honor belongs to The Machine War, a 2023 Urbit-affiliated “philosophical history of the computer from Archimedes to today,” which I confess I didn’t read for fear it would be over my head (in a bad way). Another nonfiction book, which promises to be over my head in a good way, is The Mystagogues, forthcoming in 2026, a study of esoteric religious perennialism (i.e., the idea that “all religions are one”) in five 20th-century authors: Robert Graves, Vladimir Nabokov, Colin Wilson, Ioan Culianu, and Roberto Calasso. I will say more about Nabokov and Wilson in relation to Noah’s poetics in the post above; meanwhile, you can read Noah on Calasso here. We await clarification on Graves and Culianu.

6. The novel opens by retelling Roosevelt Island’s history as the location of a prison and a madhouse before its latter-day gentrification:

Roosevelt Island, a narrow strip of land just a mile off the shore of Manhattan, was leased for private development in 1969. Prior to that it had been a hub for insanity and government-sponsored torture. New York City’s penitentiary once occupied the island’s southern end, and its premier lunatic asylum was built to complement it in the north. Neither of these institutions remain, except as entries in the records of a few historians and urbanists, who might still call to mind all the violence and degradation of the city’s past, its ingrained hysteria, its lawlessness, its frenzies, the squalor of its streets and the ruthlessness of its architects—in short, all that is meant to be banished from sight over the course of its glittering, sanitized future.

The suggestion is the inadequacy of all utopias, the obduracy of the violence and oppression the utopians’ would-be enlightenment seeks to cleanse. I am reminded of Hawthorne’s ironic observation at the beginning of The Scarlet Letter:

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Lowering the tone a bit, I was primed to find Roosevelt Island an apt setting for a thriller by the underrated 2005 Jennifer Connelly vehicle and J-horror remake Dark Water—a film scripted, speaking of technocrats, by Matthew Yglesias’s father.

7. We need a treatise on the names of persons and entities in this novel. I haven’t even mentioned the minor character named Christian Rosencrans, an allusion to the founder of the Rosicrucians. This is Substack Summer’s second protagonistic Mona, after Ross Barkan’s heroine of Glass Century, and the name means, among other things, “the moon” in Old English and “alone or solitary” in Ancient Greek—a good appellation, then, for an independent avatar of the feminine in both novels. I plead ignorance on Veigh, though the Latin vehere (root, for example, of “inveigh”) means “to carry,” intimating that our heroine guards and bears what she thinks of as poetry’s “divine spark.” Avram is of course a variant on Abraham, a play on the idea that the builders of AI are “building God,” that the God of Abraham waits for us in the heretical future rather than languishing in the biblical past. Hildegard is glossed in the text:

Hildegard of Bingen, a.k.a. St. Hildegard, was a hero to Mona. This twelfth century woman was a nun, a poet, a musician, a mystic, and, when she had a little spare time, the first practitioner of modern biology in Europe. Polymath was an understatement. And beyond all her officially recognized accomplishments, Hildegard also had a more mysterious notch in her belt. Namely, something she called Lingua Ignota, or, “the unknown language.”

Proserpina is better known to us by her Greek name, Persephone; her mythic katabasis anticipates Mona’s novelistic one. This takes us, via the Eleusinian Mysteries, to Robert Graves’s theory of poetry as goddess-worship, otherwise unaddressed in the novel—or perhaps contested in it by the example of the aforementioned Hildegard, since Graves’s conceit tends to give us woman as inert muse rather than innovative poet. Mona, however, does not write poetry, except through the proxy of her golem Hildegard. I take this as a statement less about gender than about technology: the true poets of our era, the authors of our unacknowledged legislation, are programmers. In that way, Mona is an innovative poet.

8. I discuss these different models of the novel at length in earlier engagements with Noah’s thinking (and that of Nabokov and Wilson) here and here. Differing with Nabokov’s literary theory, however, is not the same thing—in Noah’s case or my own—as not feeling his influence. The exilic Russian master, for that matter, also wrote page-turning thrillers, as did Martin Amis. What renders Lolita as much postmodernist as modernist is that, for all its symbolic intricacy and verbal gamesmanship, it is pulp fiction, as its precursors by Joyce and Proust are not.

9. The movie referenced in the excerpt is Four Weddings and a Funeral, not a Hollywood but a British production, now an intriguing artifact of the “Cool Britannia” by which Tony Blair would later come to power with a transformed Labour Party. I mention it only because this week the Labour Party has taken a surprisingly hard rhetorical turn against immigration in response to the populist challenge. Refer to footnote 1 above: in politics as in the arts, the triumph of the counterculture comes when it is absorbed into a renovated dominant culture. The victory of right-wing ideology is assured not by the perpetual election of right-wing parties but by left-wing parties’ victory on the strength of right-wing rhetoric—and vice versa at other moments in history, e.g., conservative parties’ temporary acceptance of social democracy after the Depression and World War II.

10. I hope an interviewer asks Noah if he used AI to compose Hildegard 2.0’s poetry. I can’t tell one way or the other. Hildegard 2.0 works in many poetic modes, but my favorite of her/its achievements is a ballad about St. Paul—to whom the novel’s kind-hearted Chestertonian Detective Aldo compares Mona’s poetic ability to become “all things to all men”—somewhat in the ironic mode of Pound’s “Ballad of the Goodly Fere”:

Strange Uncle Saul, he’s still a Jew
but says there is no law—
just do to him as he’d to you
and see the light he saw.

11. This techno-optimism about the bots’ poetic capability comports with Noah’s (again Audenesque) anti-Romantic stance according to which the online world, in addition to instituting a social condition of universal lower-middle-class small-business ownership, also disabuses us of our presumptuous and overweening individualism. Following Girard, Noah associates this insight with the novel as a form (I quote from the first link):

Our collective Romantic Lie is that human beings are autonomous, rational subjects who are in and of themselves vastly important and interesting. The novelistic truth is that we are important only as sporadically useful vessels of the divine. That this is the most important element of humanity is a fact stated with violent emphasis by every culture that has ever existed.

12. I don’t use this word in the pejorative—and neither, for what it’s worth, did Nabokov. From the Dickens chapter in Lectures on Literature:

I should not like to hear the charge of sentimentality made against this strain that runs through Bleak House. I want to submit that people who denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is. […] For instance, how different is the world of Dickens from the world of Homer or the world of Cervantes. Does a hero of Homer’s really feel the divine throb of pity? Horror, yes—and a kind of generalized routinized compassion—but is the keen sense of specialized pity as we understand it today, as it were, in the dactyllic past? For let us nurse no doubt about it: despite all our hideous reversions to the wild state, modern man is on the whole a better man than Homer’s man, homo homericus, or than medieval man. In the imaginary battle of americus versus homericus, the first wins humanity’s prize.