Weekly Readings #174 (06/02/25-06/08/25)

dressed in anarchic tones

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

My new novel, Major Arcana, continues to circulate in all sorts of strange and unlikely places. Has any recent literary novel been reviewed in such a bewildering array of venues? If you’d like to form your own impression of this most talked-about text you can order it in all formats (print, Kindle, and audio) here and in print wherever books are sold online.

This week, the world of speculative fiction turned its attention to my saga about the creation of a pop-culture masterpiece and its magical effect on the world. First, Ian Mond wrote one of the most comprehensive, nuanced, and sensitive reviews the novel has yet received in the new issue of Locus magazine. (He prefaces the review with a brief survey of the Substack literary scene, by the way, and some of you are in it.) While gently dissenting from the novel’s implicit theses on the politics of gender,¹ Mond nevertheless comes down on the side of praise:

Instead, like Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, he frames the American comic book as an expression of outsider art – initially pioneered by Jewish creators in response to fascism and later transformed by subversive auteurs like Moore and Morrison to meet the needs of disaffected Gen-Xers (myself included). In telling this story, Pistelli’s portrayal of Simon Magnus and Cohen’s difficult birth of the nine issues that make up Overman (‘‘Superman’’) 3000 crackles with creativity, radicalism and a sort of transcendental nihilism. It’s so vividly imagined that I’m left bereft that I can’t purchase the graphic novel from my local comic book store.

[…]

Above all, Major Arcana is never too cynical or cruel; even at its bleakest, it is unmistakably a novel about love.

And then novelist Nick Mamatas has contributed a characteristically witty review, more mixed and acerbic,² but also ultimately an endorsement:

Major Arcana is a major hit in the minor league of the Substack crowd, particularly those in the Bernie Bro-to-cultural conservative pipeline. Makes sense; the book is about gods that fail, and one that succeeds.

[…]

The whole novel is like this, by the way. Maximalism, but one page short of 350. Almost every character gets the childhood, the puberty, the arrival in that or that city with the comic book nickname, the encounter with art and death and creation and destiny, the downwardly mobile lifestyle of the bookish set. (Hello!) Should you read Major Arcana? If you read this Patreon regularly, you should, because you’re probably in it somewhere.

Both reviewers remark on certain somatic effects induced by the novel, perhaps what Aristotle had in mind when he spoke of tragedy’s power to MAHA (Make Athens Healthy Again) through catharsis: Mond was “fighting back tears” by the end of the book, while Mamatas reports that the narrative’s “incredible turn toward the supernatural…made me gasp aloud when I read it.” Purge your pity and terror by ordering Major Arcana today—and please leave a review and a rating on Goodreads, Amazon, and everywhere else.

I also note with gratitude that my name was dropped somewhere on North Doheny Drive just below Sunset Boulevard when Ross Barkan appeared on the new episode of the Bret Easton Ellis podcast. It’s a compelling episode all around, with many a comment on the issues that obsess us here; I’m glad I kept my BEE paid subscription from back when I was researching my Bruce Wagner essay. In my magical-thinking master-manifestor way, I assume that when you’re mentioned on BEE’s pod, the movie/TV deal follows in short order. Book the Chateau Marmont and call me, baby!³

All this and infinity, too: this week I also released “The Library Is Total” to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. It’s an episode on the dizzying philosophical fictions of Borges. As bookish Borges arguably closes the literary canon, so this episode concludes the spring sequence on modern western world literature in translation. Next week, we return to the English language but drop back a few centuries for 12 weeks on Shakespeare and Milton. My ambition is to make the summer Shakespeare episodes at least as delirious and insane as last summer’s Ulysses sequence,⁴ the crazed divagations of which you can find in the College’s ever-expanding archive. Thanks to all my paid subscribers!

For this week, oh, you know, the usual. Please enjoy!

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The Voice Is a Performance: Prose Artifice and Its Makers

“Ai-Da Robot Painting Sells for Over $1 Million”

The discourse around here alternates but does not change. The fall of men, the rise of AI; the rise of AI, the fall of men. What the hell, let’s do AI again.

For new readers, my longstanding claim, first articulated here and here, is this: the various anti-humanisms prevailing in elite literary and philosophical culture for the last two centuries have left us without a coherent argument against AI. We’ve deconstructed the subject, popularly called the self, with a thoroughness that’s left it no competitive advantage against any machine. The reason it’s called the subject is its subjection to linguistic and social codes; it is always already a machine, programmed by discourse. I don’t understand why radical academics seem to be the demographic most hostile to AI. If you have a hatred of patriarchy and the family, a complicated relationship to your felt sense of gender, and a bookshelf full of Marx-Nietzsche-Freud and their sequelae, you don’t get to draw the line in so arbitrary a place as your students’ seeking technical assistance with the end-of-semester busywork. I am not criticizing this hypothetical person, some of whose imputed traits could be applied to me; I am only asking this hypothetical person to accept the logical conclusion of their commitments, which long ago flattened the vaunted human individual and his (sic) oppressively high-flying agency along a humble horizontal line with all the other inhabitants, animal and artificial, of our socially constructed planet. All this hypocrisy to defend the supposed honor of the term paper?⁵ Please.

People attribute “techno-optimism” to me because I suspect the rise of AI and its supplanting of much human agency is both now inevitable⁶ and was long pre-scripted in the cultural logic of the west’s endless self-critique, not to mention the gnostic current churning persistently beneath the official Christian and then Enlightenment paradigms. But I am neither pessimistic nor optimistic; I am trying to be realistic; I have even realistically described the near-future as an omni-surveillant dystopia, and equally dystopian no matter which corps of ideologue-engineers get to program the AI, whether “woke” or “based” or whatever they come up with next. Now, dystopia aside, when it comes to literature in particular, such as it is, I admit I am not that worried about my own fortunes. I believe artists can make legitimate use of AI, but I also write for the experience of writing’s own sake. I largely write for an audience that values a primarily human artistic vision; if anything, the rise of AI will expand and entrench this artisanal market. At the same time, however, I think the literati’s strained insistence that AI writing is both identifiably artificial and obviously bad is so much wishful thinking. Consider James Marriott’s now notorious post on both X and Substack Notes of a capsule review from Chat GPT.

In response, out came the motivatedly malicious close reading from insecure and imperiled writers, who never bother to criticize the bad prose by humans in their preferred journals and magazines with such attention. “Look at those mixed metaphors!” (Tell it to Shakespeare.) “And the em-dashes!” (Tell it to Dickinson.) “It’s like the work of a pompous undergraduate!” (Yes, and any time before 2022 we’d have been happy to receive such a lively, personable paper during finals week.) Some rested their case on human inarticulacy: “this is ass writing,” one author posted, to which inertia of the vernacular I prefer the bot’s more ambitious prose, even if its ambition doesn’t always succeed. (Self-conscious about their own artificiality, their academic or metropolitan distance from the earth and its putative “salt,” the literati have overrated the vernacular and its trash-heap of commonplaces at least since the days of Mark Twain. I prefer purple prose, but the machine does, too.)

More illuminatingly, Max Read notes the AI review’s kinship to a certain bygone style of fizzy, poppy half-press-release magazine writing. But such stylings had a presence in the higher reaches of culture, too, back in the print era. I always loved John Leonard, for instance, but he was known to write that way on occasion—and in Harper’s and the NYRB, no less. (You’ll pry the em-dash out of my cold, dead hands.) Try this paragraph from his review of The Corrections in the latter organ and prove to me Chat-GPT didn’t mix its metaphors (sinews, space, teeth, cats) or hallucinate its nonsense (“the baby private life”):

Full of understatement and overreaction, irony and anger, anthropology and surrealism, glut and glee—the rising gorge, the falling tear, politics, parody, pratfall, and prophetic snit—The Corrections is the whole package, as if nobody ever told Franzen that the social novel is dead and straight white males vestigial.⁷ You will laugh, wince, groan, weep, leave the table and maybe the country, promise never to go home again, and be reminded of why you read serious fiction in the first place: to console and complicate the extreme self with the beauty and truth of sinewy sentences and the manners and mystery of characters from outer space, to see the shadow, and then the teeth, of social context and momentous history coming like cats into the crib where the baby private life is sleeping.

My point is not that the Chat-GPT passage is good, only that we wouldn’t have blinked to read it, that we wouldn’t have hesitated to take it as the product (however flawed) of a human writer, any time before 2022. As in Frankenstein and Blade Runner, we’re going to have a harder time than we think when we try to tell the difference between organism and artifice, especially if we use what is already the high and alien artifice of language as our only proof.

The next literary trend, I predict, the one to catch on among proud humanist-speciesists in their war against the tech lords’ machine army,⁸ will be books scanned from handwritten manuscripts, as if you held the author’s secret, scribbled notebook in your own organic fingers. I’m glad the nuns drilled me in penmanship back in Catholic school. Buy shares in paper! Invest in pens! Let floods of ink wash the inhuman into the sea!

1. Vincenzo Barney, of all the critics, has to my mind best understood and most generously expressed these theses in his review from last week, despite the controversy caused by his style. But then the novelist, having written, is just another reader of the novel with just another opinion about what it means. I encourage you to judge for yourself.

2. It’s amusing how many critics refer to Major Arcana as my debut or as exhibiting “first novel” errors. I wrote my first novel when I was a teenager; I am now 43 years old. It took a lot of practice to learn to write this artlessly! If you need proof, however, that I can produce a conventionally structured piece of fiction when I want to, I recommend my pandemic novella, The Quarantine of St. Sebastian House. It’s a short sharp shock of a linear narrative whose nine chapters fall naturally into three acts; it would take an afternoon to turn it into a screenplay. (Call me, baby!) Someone once said Quarantine is like a Batman comic written by Lois Lowry; this was meant to be an insult, but if Lois Lowry wrote a Batman comic, people would lose their minds. (I’ve never read Lois Lowry.)

3. Speaking of travel, please don’t miss Adam Pearson’s New York literary travelogue—an account of some of the same events covered in mine, but from a different POV—with intriguing cameos by half the writers on this platform, including a number I didn’t meet on my own journey. (Though I did in fact meet the author of Sexodus, which I regret omitting from my piece.) We’re turning the parasocial into the just-plain social.

4. A badly screenshotted preview of some of the strange places we might go—though not on the first episode—courtesy of Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being:

5. “Bring back the blue-book exam!” is the new battle-cry. But we stopped giving blue-book exams in the last decade because we received the unmistakable message from the bureaucracy—in the form of sometimes straightforward majorities of our classes arriving with a testing accommodation from the disability services office—that they were unworkably inequitable in a world of unequal capacities. Does anyone care to revisit this argument? I am more hippie than martinet, by the way, and don’t think it matters, certainly not in the humanities, if people take tests or write papers. The inventive reading outside the classroom and the spontaneous conversation within it are the point of education, not semi-arbitrary bureaucratic proofs of comprehension, which have always in various ways been faked and then forgotten anyway. (As Pound said, culture is whatever’s left when you no longer remember what you’ve read.) I am just pointing out that our new-minted humanists used to place their pedagogical emphases elsewhere before they found their own jobs on the line. Also, any call on social media to proscribe AI in the classroom already gets the immediate reply that this will unfairly limit accessibility, the same argument made against banning laptops and phones in the classroom; this argument will carry the day with administrators unless we let Rufo and company repeal the last half-century’s worth of civil rights legislation.

6. I will say the growing prospect of AI-powered drone war is the one thing that might incite the proverbial Butlerian Jihad, far more than AI-caused mass unemployment or solipsistic delirium. (Speaking of delirium, some of the manifestation coaches I watched on YouTube and TikTok to research Major Arcana have either ascended or entered spiritual psychosis—it depends on your perspective—from collaborating with AI in the discovery of their true will. No reviewer has mentioned it yet, but an evil AI does show up at the end of Major Arcana; I didn’t foresee this aspect of the issue, however.) The 21st-century drone swarm is worse than the 20th century’s prospect of nuclear annihilation somehow. Nuclear annihilation was just a secularized update on myth and religion’s crack of doom; it was therefore imaginatively acceptable, even a comfortable bedtime story inasmuch as we might pray it away. But the black and implacable tessellation on the horizon, the ever nearer chittering of the mindless gunners’ collective carapace in its inerrant flight: this comes out of a deeper nightmare than merely religious apocalypse, from a time, perhaps, when we warred with arthropods in the primal sea or with bough-coiled chilopoda clicking in the humid canopy.

7. I also obviously picked this paragraph because it proves our arguments are cyclical and immemorial; it could have come out of one of the more enthusiastic reviews of Glass Century or Major Arcana. Leonard, almost the first critic to praise Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston in print, was no resentful elegist of the straight white male, but he also had an old leftist’s mistrust of identity politics pure and simple.

8. Much talk this week about the Curtis Yarvin profile by Ava Kofman in The New Yorker. Since I recently spent days worrying about how I would be portrayed in The New Yorker, I took a special interest. (I wasn’t profiled, but my novel was reviewed, inter alia, in a piece about Substack vis-à-vis legacy publishing.) My publisher Anne Trubek wisely cautions against treating institutions and trends as agents rather than people, but I think it’s fair to define the task of The New Yorker as policing the boundaries of what we might call the metropolitan middlebrow. The characteristic irony deployed in so many of their profiles—the superficially neutral informative tone mixed with a subliminally cutting selection of detail and arrangement of imagery—is the constable’s weapon of choice. Sometimes we take an aesthetic pleasure in the spectacle, as when Blake Smith used to praise Rachel Aviv for dealing the death of a thousand papercuts to academics who’d gotten a bit above themselves, at least according to the magazine’s institutional worldview. This is an odd treatment for someone like Yarvin, though, even if Ava Kofman wields the stiletto with a bit more mean-girl brutality in his case. Kofman’s thesis, in continuity with the Harris/Walz campaign’s use of “weird” against Trump and Vance, is roughly this: “Yarvin is a dork. Furthermore, he’s a spaz and a sperg. Finally, he cries a lot, so he’s a fag, too.” Which, while certainly insulting, seems incommensurate with the idea that he threatens the civic order. Is not a graver and more detailed consideration and rebuttal of his ideas called for? With apologies to Dan Oppenheimer, here we see the problem with elevating psychology over politics, as if explaining the root of a person’s politics (or indeed aesthetics) in banal personal insecurities or “traumas” shared by everybody gave one actual power over these views. We all know by now that the left hates daddy and the right hates mommy, but so what? Now, as a one-time connoisseur of extremist blogs, I’ve been reading Yarvin off and on since 2010, so I’m incapable of being shocked by anything he writes, though I am startled he’s reached the pages of The New Yorker (this is probably also how some people feel about me). He’s so old-fashioned a racist that he even taught me much of what I know about racism against my own ethnos; it was from Yarvin, for instance, that I learned the phrase, “Garibaldi didn’t unite Italy, he divided Africa.” I haven’t kept up with his voluminous and grating prose. I’m only the most amateur of political theorists, but I tend to interpret him as a “deep liberal.” I mean this neutrally, not in mitigation. Neither racism nor oligarchic technocracy seem to me incompatible with all strains of liberalism. I take literature qua institution, or art more broadly, to be the necessary inner critic of these proto-totalitarian strains in liberalism. (We are both Late Victorians, but Yarvin derives his cultural politics from an idiosyncratic reading of Carlyle, while I derive mine from a straightforward reading of Arnold.) Anyway, while the right complained about the magazine’s character assassination of their thought-leader, I was struck rather by the gentle handling, all things considered, of our self-styled dark elf. What explains this, beyond any single writer’s inability to trespass on a magazine’s house style? I suspect the metropolitan middlebrow is more ambivalent about present political realities than it lets on. (Now I am psychologizing!) The punctum of the profile, in Barthes’s sense of emotional key, comes when Kofman pauses to observe, “In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum.” And so we get the finally rather sororal teasing that Yarvin is too uncool for the lunch table rather than any more potent critique of what is after all his mission to incapacitate the institutions of the left. By the end of the week, the feud between Trump and Musk, the crack-up of the coalition between the populists and the tech right Yarvin’s ascent symbolized, quickly usurped attention from Yarvin himself. Now the technocrat center is openly trying to woo the neoreactionaries back into the liberal fold, even, indeed, to the lunch table; it’s not as if they have very far to travel.