Weekly Readings #179 (07/07/25-07/12/25)

the profession of my fingers

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

Danke schön

Over on Goodreads, a German reader has weighed in on my new novel, Major Arcana, which you can order in all formats—print, ebook, and audio—here and in print wherever books are sold online. Google translate¹ provides this for the last paragraph:

A worthwhile, extremely well-written book with a wealth of detail. This is someone who truly knows how to write about complex emotions and people.

Meanwhile, yet another prominent publication has dropped a review. We’re running out of magazines! At this rate, Major Arcana will be reviewed in Field & Stream, Modern Cat, and Yoga Journal. In this case, it’s cartoonist Andy Hartzell with an insightful rave in a critical alma mater of mine, Rain Taxi:

The novel is liberally seasoned with allusions to writers of transcendental yearning: Dostoyevsky, Melville, and especially that great-granddaddy of the graphic novel, William Blake. More than two hundred years ago, at a time when Enlightenment rationalism claimed to have settled all the great questions, Blake proclaimed the idea that human nature could never be defined—that human beings would always strain toward the infinite. His prophetic works ultimately helped usher in the Romantic counterrevolution. Major Arcana hints that we might be living through a similar moment: The metanarratives may have all been deconstructed, but metaphysical desire lives on.²

Finally, Ian Mond’s comprehensive and circumspect review from the most recent print edition of Locus has just gone online, so you can finally read the whole thing:

If I was fighting back tears by the end of Major Arcana, it’s because Pistelli, a sentimentalist at heart, had earned those moments.³

Pittsburgh, July 10

Elsewhere in the Paralleluniversum, you’d better hope they legalize crying before you listen to “Never, Never, Never, Never, Never,” the latest episode of The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers: three hours on King Lear, Shakespeare’s own Book of Job, wherein I explain why and how the play demotes sight, amends nature, negates humanity, and exalts pity as it stages the domestic drama of age against youth and the cosmic drama of God at war with his own heart. Next week: from the blasted heath to the fertile Nile as Shakespeare Summer continues with Antony and Cleopatra. For episodes on literary topics ranging from Homer to Joyce, please see the the College’s ever-expanding archive. Thanks to all current and future paid subscribers!

For today, some thoughts on old media and new. Please enjoy!

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Standing Under Media: Reverse Skeuomorphism in Contemporary Literature

Skeuomorph

Alexander Sorondo provides another profile in The Metropolitan Review of a fallen or forgotten Gen-Xish literary icon. First it was William T. Vollmann; now it’s Mark Z. Danielewski. For symmetry’s sake, to complete a trilogy, as three is the minimal number of instances to establish a pattern, he will need to write one more, likely about someone with “U” or “X” as a middle initial.

Sorondo has been criticized for not discussing his subjects’ work in these profiles, but this is to mistake their genre. The pieces are not criticism, which does require explication de texte.⁴ Instead, we might borrow Lawrence Weschler’s phrase from the subtitle of Calamities of Exile: nonfiction novellas. A novella or novel about a writer usually sketches or implies the work rather than quoting it or explicating it. (Pale Fire need not apply.) This is relevant to Danielewski’s case, because he has arguably been victimized by his own too-literal approach to media. I base this on my reading of House of Leaves. I gave that cult book of my college years a mixed review because it was itself too mixed, too mixed-media, too committed to putting the reader through the paces of a textual labyrinth rather than telling—or even truly complicating rather than mechanically complexifying—its story. A similar drive appears, in Soronodo’s account, to have harmed Danielewski’s later projects, which I haven’t read, e.g., The Familiar, a prestige TV show in the form of a roman-fleuve.

It’d be sprawling and brainy and challenging like his first two novels except this time he’d be doubling down on narrative. He wanted to make something propulsive. Almost addictive. Like a TV series! The sort of prestige show that seemed to be blowing up into something of a phenomenon at the time, 2006-08ish.

But why do we need a novel that is also a TV series? The prestige TV series was parasitic upon the novel in the first place; the serialized Victorian novel was read aloud en famille just as parents and children used to gather around the television to watch each new installment of their favorite series. The modernist or prestige novel privatized novel-reading as the prestige series privatized viewing. Now we all watch and read everything on individual little rectangles.

Designers speak of skeuomorphism, new media ornamentally mimicking the old, as when light bulbs are made to imitate the candle flame they replaced or when electric cars sport supererogatory grilles or when the “save” icon on a computer desktop is shaped like an obsolete disk. (I borrow all my examples, and the image accompanying this post, from the wiki.)

Sometimes writers, embarrassed by the relative agelessness of their vocation, perform a reverse skeuomorphism, imitating the new media in the old, not making a website look like a page of print but making a page of print look like a website. It’s tempting. I almost did it myself in Major Arcana, almost had chapters in the form of comic-book scripts, YouTube dialogues, message-board threads, and social-media feeds. But I decided instead to accompany the reader through a continuous narrative that encompassed all these items rather than seeking to resemble them. I thought it might give us both, writer and reader, the relief of commanding the feed rather than being commanded by it. The novel not as imitation new media but as new media ekphrasis. House of Leaves’s heart is its ekphrasis of the central fictional film. Less compelling, or so it seems to me, is its meta-typography pushed past print, even though “book” answers the title’s riddle, to the point of mock-hypertext, or so we understood it at the time, every occasion of the word “house” link-blue. (In many cases, though perhaps not the case of a military junta’s ruling your country, you might well ask yourself: what would Borges do?) Of Danielewski’s education, Sorondo observes:

Not to dwell on his background, Danielewski went to Yale and got his English degree (class of 1988). Harold Bloom was teaching there at the time, long-established by his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, about how certain canonical authors are shaped by an eagerness to conceal or break from their greatest influences.⁵

In Sorondo’s own design as author of a nonfiction novella, this observation first leads to a narrative about Danielewski’s neglect of Bloom and greater influence by a media-theorizing professor of composition. This serves as a decoy for the profile’s real subject, Danielewski’s anxiety of mediatic influence caused not by any poetic father but by his actual father, a Holocaust survivor and filmmaker, this jewel of a psycho-drama set within the foil of Sorondo’s elaborate media histories. I provide this structural diagram of the profile to demonstrate that Sorondo reproves even as he explains Danielewski’s reverse-skeuomorphic media mimesis by circumscribing it within a literary performance, albeit one crafted to live its first if not its every life online.⁶

We are tempted to think the intelligence of literary form will always look like an experimental surface, like a book that makes us turn it over and over in our hands, but sometimes it looks like a narrative so seductive we read its 15,000 words in an hour even on a screen that’s lighting our eye sockets on fire.

1. The Neo-Passéists, manifesto-slingers and provocateurs of Substack Notes, list the three “Self-Imposed Limitations Making You a Mediocre Writer,” a list they begin with monolingualism.

As a number of respondents have already said, passionate ployglottery has misled more writers than the opposite and more usual case where Anglophone authors are mostly monolingual with perhaps the sophisticate’s smattering of French or some half-remembered school Latin. Better this than Finnegans Wake and The Cantos. I discussed these modernist follies here—writing literature in a dead language—in contrast to Shakespeare, who was mocked for his “small Latin, and less Greek.” I agree with the Neo-Passéists’ other points, however, within reason. Their recommendation that the writer read widely across periods is especially important; one wants the whole scope of literary possibility and achievement in one’s mind. The literary agents now crawling all over this website along with celebrities and journalists and political candidates say we should be reading all the books published within the last three years so we can make “comps” for the purpose of marketing our work—if writers are obligated to do this, then what are literary agents, editors, and marketing departments even for?—but one can’t live that way, as if subsisting on a diet of frozen chicken nuggets. I also agree with the Neo-Passéists that we shouldn’t lose ourselves in pop culture, though surely we can range across art forms and not merely be bookish. In a little treatise on Emerson as the fount for better and worse of the “creative writing” mentality—I reviewed it here—Robert D. Richardson summarizes our sage’s case against the fetishism of reading, a case made in similar terms by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in the 19th century:

The logic behind Emerson’s apparent disparaging of reading is the logic of a person who expects his reading to be useful above all. “Do not attempt to be a great reader,” Emerson tells Woodbury. “And read for facts and not only by the bookful. You must know about ownership in facts. What another sees and tells you is not yours, but his.” The reader is take only what really suits him. Emerson tells Woodbury that he ought to “learn to divine books, to feel those that you want without wasting much time over them. Remember you must know only the excellent of all that has been presented. But often a chapter is enough. The glance reveals what the gaze obscures.”

I usually don’t engage with the Neo-Passéists because I imagine they’ll get around to making fun of me someday. They may be too devoted to negating what they hate rather than elevating what they love. What we pay attention to increases. The unconscious, as Freud said, does not understand the word “no”: it assumes you must love whatever you’re thinking about all the time. We give power to whatever we attack by attacking it. If you want something to disappear, just turn your back on it.

2. I need a year off just to immerse myself in the various things critics have said must have influenced Major Arcana even though I’ve never read them, from The Last Samurai to Berserk to John Crowley’s Ægypt sequence. Hartzell points to Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, which, characteristically, I haven’t read. I’m so enlightened and progressive that the only Canadian writers of fiction and poetry I have read are women and people of color: Atwood, Munro, Carson, Ondaatje. Not as enlightened or progressive as I may seem, I have reservations about every member of that quartet—see here for Carson, my favorite of the four, and here for Atwood—though I have not yet revisited Munro with the knowledge that she was absolutely evil, which in my experience usually improves a writer. (Sure, The Cantos are totally unreadable, but think how much more unreadable they’d be if we couldn’t enjoy the frisson, the forbidden thrill, of reading a monster.) Canada, as I once said somewhere, seems to have discharged its capacity for genius in world-historical humanistic intellectuals—Frye, McLuhan, Kenner—and perhaps my favorite living director—Cronenberg—rather than in novelists or poets. But what do I know?

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Still, I’ll try Davies. The Davies connection, if there is one, would be through his influence on John Irving, my middle-school model of the literary novel and the distant source of Major Arcana’s commercial aspiration: The World According to Simon Magnus, A Prayer for Ash del Greco, An Enby for One Year. Re: John Crowley, I did read the epic-lyric fairy tale family saga Little, Big, but not the later magical tetralogy. I started The Last Samurai and put it aside after 30 pages, as I did with another novel beloved of the same demographic, Mating, finding both as if narrated by a too-precocious teen. Surely I was mistaken and will have to revisit both. Berserk? I’m still recovering from Goodnight Punpun. Anyway, once I do read these things, they will become the sources of Major Arcana through the magic of retrocausation, influencing it from the future—or, as the novel calls it, revision.

3. Mary Jane Eyre challenges the cozy fetishization of literature per se on this platform using the example of Major Arcana’s post-cancel-culture inability to rouse much ire or inspire much change with its provocation on gender:

Mond is a good example of a critic dismayed by the novel’s implicit politics while admiring its artistry:

My issue with Pistelli’s take then is less about intent (though I disagree with his views on pronouns) and more to do with timing – the environment in which Major Arcana has now been published. Simply put, the kind of nuanced, layered conversation Pistelli wants to have about gender identity (views he elegantly expresses in several interviews) feels out of step when the Su­preme Court of the United Kingdom has recently defined “woman” solely on biological grounds, and in Trump’s America, where the trans and queer community are fighting for their existence.

As I replied to MJE on Notes, I assume critics who were noncommittally appreciative of the provocation as provocation agreed with what they took to be the point but didn’t feel they could say so in the present context, not so much because of the conservatives’ advance but rather because the liberals haven’t yet decided whether to retreat. As Mond perceives, the novel’s point is so far to the left of the liberals that you could easily read it as coming out on the right: on the grand scale, a metaphysical anarchism too total to concern itself with political reform; on the small scale, a psychic pluralism too absolute to concern itself with grammatical or surgical fixes. But I leave this for the reader to decide; Major Arcana also provides countervailing ideas and images; it’s all in how they’re weighed. I don’t know if the novel as such is obsolete, as MJE claims, but the Uncle Tom’s Cabin model of the novel certainly is: one doesn’t write a long book as if it were just a larger newspaper editorial.

4. Professions, said Shaw, are conspiracies against the laity. Insisting that only explication de texte counts as real reading is how the literary critic-pedagogue conspires against the laity, how we arrogate literary authority to ourselves alone and deem the rest of you unqualified to pronounce on what you’ve read or (as the case may be) listened to on audiobook. Some days I believe it myself—call it déformation professionnelle—but it does me no credit. Still, you should become a paid subscriber to my podcast. Professionals have to eat, too, especially when they turn amateur. In times like these, as the poet said, it’s how it has to be.

5. Though Bloom appears to mostly comic effect alongside Paglia, Derrida, Sontag, and more in House of Leaves. Relatedly, Blake Smith concludes his collaboration with Tablet magazine in a comprehensive essay on Harold Bloom as truant student of Hart Crane. Blake both avoids the most simplistic criticisms Bloom tends to draw while performing an immanent critique, a demonstration of his thought’s self-contradiction, Bloom’s weak misreading of his own ideas:

If Bloom, transformed to defender of the Literary Canon and lamenter of our barbarism, betrayed Crane by adopting the outlook of the poet’s Teutonic bogeyman [Spengler], we can nevertheless still read Bloom against himself, and take heart from his own re-writing of Crane.

For Invisible College listeners, Blake’s description of how Bloom handles lyric poets in his criticism—

Bloom reads a particular poem as a ‘response’ to a poem by another poet, occasionally acknowledging that he is unconcerned with whether the author of the former would have even heard of the latter. This sort of criticism can be exciting, although it can just as often have something of the feel of a party game or an amateurish exercise in improvisational comedy (what if Wallace Stevens wrote to Christopher Marlowe? I think it would go something like this…).

—will recall my description of how Bloom handles Shakespearean character in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, a polemical intensification of the A. C. Bradley Hegelian approach to Shakespeare’s characters as “free artists of themselves.” In the most recent IC episode, I suggested this habit of treating Shakespeare characters as if they were real people allows Bloom to produce almost an experimental novel with Shakespearean figures, a parallel creation of his own, but not one that helped me much as criticism when preparing Shakespeare Summer, cf. Blake’s description of Bloomean poetics’ Satanic over-individualism. (Not that we aren’t individuals, free artists of ourselves, but this doesn’t mean we are also obligated to be solipsists, obsessed with a quest for a primacy that also becomes a drive toward isolation, to which Blake counterposes a Whitmanian queer democratic camaraderie.) Instead of Bradley or Bloom, I have turned this summer to the modernist critic G. Wilson Knight. He understood Shakespeare’s plays as dramatic poems united by imagery and symbolism, ideogrammatic spatial arrangements of the temporal narratives provided by his source material, to create new visions and new worlds for humanity: infernos, purgatorios, and paradisos. I take this power of poetic inspiration, of cosmic modeling, not any kind of immediate political or social influence, to be art’s beneficial effect, however indirectly or slowly it may operate, thus even the dialectical blessing accomplished by the evil genius, as invoked in footnote 2 above, a spirit of evil who works only good.

6. Isn’t this just plain old ordinary skeuomorphism, online text acting like print? (This points to a flaw in the concept, a reason not to deploy it uncritically even if one is writing one’s once-a-week newsletter in some haste: it’s a one-word design-modernist acquiescence not only to the irrelevance of ornament but even to the planned-obsolescence model of creativity, a fancy way to imply we need a new update every year or else we’re just wearily imitating what came before.) Or does new media leave its mark on the old form? Does platform prose differ from print prose? Sorondo’s casualness of phrasing (e.g., three instances of “kinda”) suggests it might, but this began in print with New Journalist nonfiction, and goes back further in fiction to 19th-century poets’ and novelists’ experiments in vernacular, e.g., Song of Myself or Huckleberry Finn. I’m not really a fan myself. I tend to prefer Dickinson to Whitman, James to Twain. From print culture’s last great class climbers (Sontag, Hitchens, the aforementioned Bloom), I learned an almost campily exaggerated mimesis of aristocratic rhetoric, leavened not by an attempt to appear casual (modernism’s radical functionalism) but rather by the irony of its own occasion (postmodernism’s recontextualized ornamentalism). Why the fuck are you talking like that, bro? Or in good Italian-American idiom: You think youah bettah than me? Rival versions of literary or even non-literary democracy are implied here. In one, even an aristocrat is a commoner; in the other, even a commoner is an aristocrat.