Weekly Readings #211 (02/16/26-02/22/26)

what it means to be human

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

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Welcome back to Grand Hotel Abyss! This week the journal Romanticon released “Opposite of Good: Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell from Page to Screen,” my essay on Emerald Fennell’s controversial Wuthering Heights adaptation. If you can’t get enough of classic 19th-century novels, there’s also The Invisible College, my literature podcast for paid subscribers to this Substack. This week I posted “What Do I Know? What Do I Want? What Do I Love?,” two hours on the middle third of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Next week, we wrap up Tolstoy and prepare ourselves to move on to Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. You can peruse the 2026 schedule and consult the ever-expanding two-year archive, with almost 100 two- to three-hour episodes on subjects from Homer to Joyce, and from ancient to contemporary literature. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers! Finally, if you haven’t read my acclaimed Major Arcana, which has been called “the elusive great American novel for the 21st century,” you can get in all formats (print, ebook, audio) here; you can also find it in print wherever books are sold online. You can buy it directly from Anne Trubek’s distinguished Belt Publishing, too—we receive more of a profit that way—or you might also suggest that your local library or independent bookstore acquire a copy. Please also leave a Goodreads, Amazon, or other rating and review. Thanks to all my readers!

As for today: you know what Oscar said the only thing worse than not being talked about was. I saw some people complaining that certain writers on this platform promote each other too much. This reminded me how far behind I’ve fallen recently when it comes to reading my peers’ new and forthcoming works. I’m one book behind on Barkan—I actually did sit in the library and read the Verso nonfiction release a few months ago but saw no need to hash out political agreements and disagreements on here; our affinities are literary—not to mention that Gasda has written two more books when I wasn’t looking (and that doesn’t include plays). I’m not living up to this place’s reputation as a self-impressed coterie, am I? I’d be more assiduous about my logrolling task, but I somehow got it in my head at the end of December that it would be reasonable to cover The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, the Aeneid, and the entire Divine Comedy in 15 weeks in The Invisible College. (This is not reasonable. It might be if I were an academic expert on any of these or had taught them before, but I’m not, and I haven’t. Why didn’t one of you say something? Luckily, I can sound like an expert in a hurry if I need to, so you can’t tell me you’re not getting your money’s worth!) Still, that’s no excuse. So, what with this week’s big news about Naomi Kanakia’s Random House book deal, I decided to pick up my advance copy of her forthcoming What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) and finally read it.

This week’s post, then, is a little semi-review of Naomi’s book,¹ alongside some further thoughts on a new release by a writer who doesn’t need my logrolling and back-slapping. She doesn’t need it first because she’s dead and second because she’s immortal: I refer to Toni Morrison and her posthumous Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon. Two books, then, on the merits of the canon by critics who were by virtue of their identities mostly (let us say) not that canon’s imagined addressees. Please enjoy!

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In the Household of Greatness: Naomi Kanakia and Toni Morrison on the Canon

I begin with a telling moment from the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Morrison recounts how she had to ask her white male boss for a raise equal to her white male colleagues’ raises when she, as a single mother of two young boys, was first starting out as a book editor. “I want to tell you something,” she said to him. “I am head of household, just like you. You may think I’m colored or a woman, [but] I am head of household. Just. Like. You.” In this equal claim to authority and desert we find the key to Morrison’s misunderstood attitude toward her white male forerunners in the literary canon.

A similarly brisk command animates Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books?: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You), forthcoming in May from Princeton UP. It’s true, however, that Naomi disclaims either a posture or a tone of mastery. She is forthcoming about having come to what she calls the Great Books relatively late in life, i.e., after her formal education; she preferred science fiction and fantasy as a teenager despite her highbrow Catholic secondary education, and she was put off by the inexplicit and therefore functionally exclusionary protocols of the English department in her college literature courses.² Starting after college, she put herself through a rigorous course of study, guided by Mortimer J. Adler’s midcentury Great Books curriculum, because she thought it was a necessary perquisite to her goal of becoming a writer; only later did she discover that the various elite populisms of the American literati actually rendered being a well-read writer somewhat eccentric, if not politically suspect. The average MFA-holding novelist, she points out, probably hasn’t read any Balzac, let alone Kant or Cicero.

She further allows that no one needs to do this reading if they have any more pressing work in hand—she gives her wife, a busy scientist laboring on the cure for HIV, as an example— and in the early pages she assures us that she is not issuing an Allan Bloom-style cultural jeremiad over declining educational standards. She’s not talking about what should be taught in colleges, since she’s not a professor, only about why might benefit the lives of individual readers. She doesn’t think reading canonized works of often very old literature and philosophy offers the only road to moral deliberation or to aesthetic fulfillment (religion and pop culture, respectively, she allows, might do a better job). She even claims that an excessive focus on the humanities, as opposed to the natural and social sciences, deludes its pupils by “teaching them to rely too much on manipulating text as a solution to problems,” a problem that has beset 21st-century liberals and leftists in her view, with their endless demands for verbal correctness.

Nonetheless, Naomi argues, reading the Great Books can help readers to refine both their taste and their ability to reflect on the ambiguity and complexity of personal experience; Great Books have this beneficial effect by exposing their present-day audience to the rigorously developed and expressed worldviews of extremely intelligent individuals, themselves the products of usually distant or alien cultures. (As Naomi points out, castigating or lauding Classical Greek culture as “white,” as if to say normative or hegemonic, while deeming Classical Chinese or Indian culture “diverse” or “other” is foolish when all three are almost immeasurably different from the lives lived by people today the world over. A city-dweller in the contemporary U.S. and a city-dweller in contemporary China probably have more in common with each other than either has with Plato or Confucius.)

As in her Substack Woman of Letters, Naomi writes in a conversational style for the proverbial common reader—probably an educated reader, yes, but one educated in a non-humanities field (I think of all the tech workers in the Bay Area, where Naomi lives, suddenly turning to the humanities to answer the questions posed by the age of AI,³ for example).

Naomi devotes most of What’s So Great to refuting the common charges against the Great Books, especially those from liberals and leftists, such as, “Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?,” “Weren’t some of the Great Books written by reprehensible people?,” and so on. I will leave you to discover those arguments for yourself. (Much as I often feel that reviews of novels go too far out of their way to avoid spoilers, I sometimes also think, conversely, that nonfiction reviewers summarize too much, so much you feel you don’t need to read the book.) The upshot, we find, is a classic liberal defense of everyone’s right (“These books are the birthright of every human being”) to think through the complications of individual human existence as worked through by some of history’s most articulate thinkers, especially when their thought challenges our presumptions and habits. The following quotation, part of her answer to the question of the canon’s illiberal disposition, characterizes Naomi’s argument and style:

We read these books because of the things in them that seem like bad politics. Which is to say, the moral and ideological content of the Great Books cannot be easily categorized; as with Socrates—who could be read either as a Sophist or a philosopher—many Great Books seem to support both sides of a position. The complexity and ambiguity of the Great Books make them uniquely suited for helping the reader to elaborate their own thoughts. These are the quintessential “writerly texts” (as Roland Barthes would phrase it)—containing a broad range of potential meanings. The Great Books are never as false as we’d like to think they are.

That last sentence explains the most tantalizing promise of the subtitle: to explain why the Great Books might “destroy you.” Naomi candidly discloses, on the one hand, her anguish as a trans woman that so many exponents of the Great Books today are on the political right and hostile to trans people (though she also points out that the conservatism of the Great Books is pretty overstated, and that even “right-coded” figures like Nietzsche offer little cultural ammunition to contemporary American Christian conservatives). On the other hand, she reveals her essential conversion to Hindu spiritual belief inspired by a reading of the Mahabharata, even though she can’t bring the fatalist, idealist metaphysics into alignment with her liberal politics. Life is strange; why should the books we read be any less strange?

All in all, What’s So Great About the Great Books? is a handy, lucid, and persuasive primer on serious reading. It will add books to your shelf and arm you with arguments against anyone who disparages the relevance, merit, or benefit of a self-education in the best that’s been thought and said.

Toni Morrison comes up a lot in What’s So Great About the Great Books? Naomi seems slightly bewildered that Morrison fits with such extraordinary ease into the Great Books paradigm when other female authors and authors of color do not, even if the latter’s durable exclusion seems palpably unjust. Naomi quotes those who believed and continue to believe that Morrison’s stature, attained in her lifetime and in fact fairly early in her career, is a contrivance of white liberal guilt and political correctness. But no, enough time has passed to cast doubt on such suspicions; this is like saying people just pretend to like Joyce to seem intelligent.

(People do say this, even on Substack; it’s a stupid thing to say, though. I direct you to Naomi’s pages on the reality and objectivity—contingent objectivity, i.e., the product of judgment, but objectivity nonetheless—of aesthetic taste. You or I may personally dislike this or that canonical author, and we have every right to decide for ourselves, as when Naomi quotes a number of big names from Lawrence to Ishiguro who were bored to tears by Proust. But several generations’ collective judgment is unlikely to be either straightforwardly wrong or evidence of a self-interested conspiracy.)

Somehow it makes intuitive sense to put Morrison next to Homer or Shakespeare, not just next to Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as we do with Joyce. How did she do it? As both a partisan of Morrison’s work and a bad person who feels no obligation whatever (in my capacity as a writer) to advance the political interests of any culture or class or constituency, I believe I can explain. Morrison probably, if I had to guess, took the idea from Ralph Ellison, who himself took it from Joyce,⁴ but the idea in Joyce led to the dead end of vanguardist incommunicability (Finnegans Wake) and in Ellison to the dead end of abashed silence before its magnitude (no second novel), while she was able to sustain it for half a century as a literary project that still commands the interest of both casual or beginning readers and the most advanced scholars—a nigh-Shakespearean feat.

The idea is this: begin with the local marginalized culture to which you belong, not with some supposedly “universal” or “neutral” subject matter, and tell its story and stage its personae in the elevated register and with the hieratic symbolism usually associated with (if not reserved for) the monuments of the tradition from which you have been excluded. (These monuments themselves—yes, even Homer and Shakespeare—began in and with local if not marginalized cultures, but that’s another story.) All the better if you can make it appear that this whole tradition, which previously seemed to exclude you, in fact leads directly to your doorstep, as if it could have had no other terminus but your own achievement. When John Leonard said he couldn’t imagine American literature without Beloved—that reading Beloved makes us think inescapably of Beloved whenever we read The Scarlet Letter or Moby-Dick or Huckleberry Finn or The Sound and the Fury—just as we think of Ulysses whenever we read The Odyssey and Hamlet, he testified to the intended effect.

In other words, Morrison said to Melville and Faulkner, as Joyce said to Homer and Shakespeare, or rather to their latter-day critical or cultural exponents, not “please apologize for excluding me” or “please consider including me,” which pitiful pleas, even if briefly effective, would keep them in the dominated position, but rather: I am head of household. Just. Like. You. And by the time she got to Paradise, she was re-writing the Bible, flinging her “just like you” right at the Lord, like the Captain Ahab whose challenge to “whiteness” she so admired. And if you don’t admire the almost scriptural audacity of her goal, and the lightsome grace with which she accomplished it in books almost everyone likes to read (as they don’t always like to read Joyce or Faulkner or, yes, the Bible), then I don’t know what to tell you.

The above concerns Morrison’s fiction. Of Morrison’s fiction, some white critics used to say, “But Toni, when are you going to write a novel about white people?” She dismissed the question as racist—as if white people were inherently a nobler subject than black people⁵—and yet she might have objected that the bulk of her nonfiction, i.e., critical studies of canonical American literature, in a sense comprised her “novel” about white people.

This strange or perhaps inappropriate idea came to me when perusing Language as Liberation, this month’s posthumous release of her lectures—sometimes her lecture notes—for a class she often taught at Princeton on what she called the “Africanist” presence in (white) American literature. That premise should sound familiar, because it’s also the topic of her most famous and widely read critical texts, the essay “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” and the book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Frankly, with a handful of exceptions I’ll explain in a moment, if you’ve read that essay and that book, plus the pages on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in The Origin of Others and the essay on Gertrude Stein in The Source of Self-Regard, then you’ve read in a more polished form most of what Language as Liberation has to offer. Morrison obviously quarried her teaching for her criticism and vice versa, as many of us who both write and teach often do.

Her argument about (white) American literature’s shadowing by an unfree black population that cast free white writers’ optimistic claims for individualism into skeptical darkness, or else (white) American literature’s enlivening by the creativity and humanity of black archetypes that serve as the white author’s double and surrogate—all this from Language as Liberation will be familiar to readers of Morrison’s other nonfiction, as will this “new” book’s readings of Poe, Melville, Cather, Twain, Hemingway, and others. Furthermore, Morrison did not prepare her teaching notes for publication; while some are full-fledged lectures, others are little better than notes. As a trade book, then, suitable for the proverbial common reader, Language as Liberation disappoints, and one even doubts whether Morrison would have published when she was an editor at Random House. An academic version with a proper scholarly apparatus that allows us to examine the full scope of her teaching documents and their context would almost certainly have been preferable to this incomplete-feeling collection.

Which isn’t to say there’s nothing genuinely revelatory in Language as Liberation. The brilliant reading of a Flannery O’Connor story—whose title, which Morrison mischievously said she wanted to use as the name of her Princeton course, I can’t type here—is new and welcome to me. Carson McCullers and William Styron get chapters of their own, but they were lost on me as I am unfortunately weak on those writers, to say the least. The most important addition to the field of Morrisoniana contributed by Language as Liberation is her crucial and extensive analysis of race in Absalom, Absalom!, which, I congratulate myself, closely coincides with the one I myself developed for an Invisible College episode from a dropped hint in Morrison’s Paris Review interview.

Morrison eschews simplistic judgments, more concerned, as she says in her introductory lecture, with the effects of language than with the unknowable or uninteresting question of whether this or that white writer was a racist. Still, the cumulative effect of her criticism is to create a sympathetic but probing portrait of the white psyche (not of white society) as it contemplates what it construes as its own shadow, either to project it outward and reprehend or pity it, as in Poe or Stowe or Cather, or to integrate it as part of the self, as in Melville or Twain or Faulkner. (I simplify her interpretations for effect, but I believe I’ve preserved the tenor of her reading.) Though she fuels herself with a lot of Marxist rhetoric to get there (we find block quotes from Terry Eagleton and everything), her destination is finally rather Jungian,⁶ as we might have expected from a magical realist and a gnostic.⁷

But my favorite novelty in Language as Liberation is the collection’s surprisingly moving conclusion: a comprehensive and ambivalently laudatory interpretation of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, a now-controversial novel I love as much as Morrison seems to have loved it. Yes, Bellow places the novel’s ribald and picaresque and finally epic quest in a wholly fantastical Africa, a black setting made subservient to the white author’s ideological agenda, and therefore subject to every criticism we can think of about white vampirism on black realities. Like a novelist, however, Morrison writes Bellow from the inside out and finds what we might call the source of his other-regard, what need impels his voyage into blackness as a journey toward more life, and in a comic-epic style that shows up the lurid Gothicism marring Poe’s similar quest in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the subject of Morrison’s first lecture, whose conclusion Bellow re-writes in “Arctic silence.” Look, Morrison directs us, at the profound humanity this fantasy enabled, and wonder if the humanity, whatever the fantasist’s mixed motive, does not finally redound to the credit of that fantasy’s object:

Saul Bellow makes no secret of the self-reflexive properties of his mission. Indeed he is refreshingly forthright. His representative American becomes free, healthy, and capable of love by his imaginative appropriation of the original Africanist Presence—from which and in which he can discover not only what it means to be raceless, but what it means to be human.

I can’t help but hear a faint “just like you” after the word “human,” and that, no doubt, is why we read the great books.

1. To satisfy this putative coterie’s critics, I will use the familiar and friendly “Naomi” rather than the distancing and formal “Kanakia” to signal whatever lack of disinterest may be involved here. You might also read my essay from 2024 on her novel The Default World and her interview with me from last year about Major Arcana. While I’m obviously having unseemly fun with all this, I refer you back to my note on the ethics of what we might call the “colleague review,” and I say again, as I’ve said before, that I know these people, and that they know me, to whatever extent we do “know” each other, because we found and liked each other’s work; we didn’t get together and scheme to start discussing each other’s work before we read it!

2. Why are we capitalizing “Great Books” though? To answer that, we must consult Naomi’s useful historicization of the idea. The Great Books are neither the Greek and Roman classics, the basis of elite education until the middle of the 19th century, nor the English classics (or those of other modern national literatures) that were made the basis of specialized humanities education thereafter. Rather, they are the somewhat contrived canon of world (but mostly western) literature and philosophy devised in the middle of the 20th century as an anti-specialist acculturation device for middle-class American strivers, often scions of immigrants.

The Great Books weren’t something foisted on the nation. Rather, at precisely the same time the nation was becoming more democratic and less elitist—at precisely the time the Ivy League colleges were dropping their Greek and Latin requirement, for instance—a large part of that rising middle class developed an intense interest in the Great Books. Mortimer Adler was the son of an unsuccessful furniture-store salesman. […] And people who bought into the Great Books programs were cut from a similar mold. They were largely middle-class, in the technical professions, and cut off from mainstream society.

This redolence of petit-bourgeois arrivisme is why already arrived sophisticates paradoxically look down on the idea of Great Books, high-handedly disowning (usually with some bad-faith Marxoid excuse) an education of which they have been in part the beneficiary. (Then again maybe they haven’t been. I remember the first day of graduate school, when we all went around the intro-to-English-grad-studies table and shared the topics of our undergraduate senior theses or capstone seminar papers. Mine, written for an intensive Dickens seminar, was on the great Victorian novelist’s portrayal of interiority, for example. But the student next to me? Hers was on SpongeBob SquarePants as elucidated by Judith Butler’s theory of subject formation. That, which really happened even though it sounds like something Chris Rufo had a dream about, was 20 years ago, mind you. See my essay on Stephen King, whose fiction I cordially dislike, where I try to explain the replacement among the cognoscenti of highbrow literature by highbrow theory as the marker of cultural distinction, thus leveling the hierarchy that justly once obtained between King and his genuine artistic superiors—Toni Morrison, for example—on the grounds that all art is equally this theory’s object of critique.) And yet this democratizing origin of the Great Books idea is perhaps the strongest single refutation of the common complaint that Great Books are elitist.

On the other hand, unlike Naomi, I am a pretty pure product of the English and comp lit departments’ model of sophistication or the comme il faut circa the tail end of the theory era, just before historicism’s and sociology’s total (and to my mind destructive) takeover. I have been also been in love since my adolescence with an authoritative and admittedly willfully mystifying essayism she declines to indulge—even though, and I really must emphasize this, Naomi is better read than I am. I’m the one who puts on the Sontag-and-Steiner act, but she had actually read the whole of The Critique of Pure Reason and The Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, though she concedes it’s barely worth it for the non-specialist reader; I have tended, by contrast, to take the digest versions, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and the introductory lectures on aesthetics and history, on trust. She’s also far better acquainted with the literature of Asia than I am; e.g., I’ve read a smattering of spiritual texts and poetry, such as the Bhagavad Gita and the T’ang poets, as well as some modern fiction like Lu Xun or Mishima, but I haven’t read The Tale of Genji and the four classic Chinese novels. On the other hand, the formal properties of literature—verbal style, verbal splendor—matter much more to me than to her, as she allows, with her admitted coldness toward poetry and even slight dismissiveness toward Shakespeare’s unique achievement. Whereas for me the absolute pinnacles are Shakespeare and Joyce, not to mention Milton, Keats, Dickinson, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot, and (considered as a poet in prose, the way one considers Joyce a poet in prose) Woolf. But these are English department prejudices, which is precisely her point; the common reader in search of moral discrimination might understandably wish to bypass these labyrinths of language and set out on the straight path blazed by Tolstoy, Naomi’s ultimate touchstone of the novel.

This division of Great Books vs. literary classics was the source of our first disagreement on this topic a few years back. As against Allan Bloom’s exoteric exaltation of ancient philosophy and the mental discipline it supposedly inculcates in its young disciples, I upheld Harold Bloom’s much more flexible and modern ideal of the literary canon, the aesthetic corpus of a semi-secret antinomian spiritual tradition, one that notably sidelines all that philosophy that looms so large in the Great Books curriculum. (Never mind Allan’s esoteric agreement with Harold that of course Nietzsche, not Aristotle, was right about everything, which Allan alas had to hide, and not only for reasons sexual, but for those too, from his conservative allies. See here.)

Finally, despite all else that might divide us—gender, ethnicity, the class of our birth, even sensibility (she is no-nonsense; I am all nonsense)—Naomi and I are both immigrants’ children in America with an accordingly anti-sophisticated faith that both the horizon and our strength to reach it never end.

3. Hey, have you heard about this Nick Land guy? What he has to do with the Great Books is a question I tried to answer 12 years ago here.

4. Ellison and Morrison, incidentally, it seems to me, wouldn’t have thought of Joyce as a dead white man whose authority they had to overthrow; they would have understood him, rather, as a colonial subject on the far periphery of western high culture who nevertheless managed to convert his local dilemma into the substance of world literature—a figure they could therefore seize on as a model.

5. More capitalization questions. Naomi’s book—perhaps under editorial mandate and perhaps not—follows the post-2020 woke convention of capitalizing the “b” in “black” and the post-2024 based convention of also capitalizing the “w” in “white.” These are subtle, sensitive matters with many arguments for and against, but, even if one concedes that both black and white cultures exist and deserve respect in any pluralist society, I nevertheless go in fear of making an idol of race-qua-culture or culture-qua-race—art, for one thing, is not simply part of culture but exists to rupture culture and make way for the new—so I personally choose to retain the lowercase in both instances at the risk of giving offense. The political right, I might mention, has been arguing for over a week now about whether or not “white culture” exists and what are its boundaries if so. I believe “white culture” probably does exist, as opposed to the distinct and divergent cultures of the various European peoples, but it has very little to do with Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Mozart, or with any definition conservatives may give us of historic Christendom or the Enlightenment or any other such watchword. It is rather the culture (or cultures, plural, from churchly quiescence to rock-and-roll disturbance) of and directed to American suburban adolescents and all that it influenced from the middle of the 20th century forward, likely on the wane today. One may and even must scorn this culture as parasitic upon others it both fled and displaced, which we might gather under the sign of the suburb’s great anti-type in “the city”—adolescent suburbia is a culture of “white negroes,” in Mailer’s notorious phrase, as well as of “straight queers”—but one may also feel a nostalgic tenderness toward it if it was once one’s home. (And no, I’m not saying that only straight white people live in the suburbs, but please allow a poetic generalization for theory’s sake, even it forces you to recall Naomi’s caution about how humanists, as opposed to social scientists, don’t know what on earth they’re talking about.) See my novel The Class of 2000 for a literary description or artistic recreation of what I mean. It’s not an autobiographical novel, but it is an autoethnographical one. I think of the paragraph, looking forward to Major Arcana, where my hero stands in front of a used book shelf in an urban neighborhood occult shop that caters to kids from the suburbs, though he’s just self-educated enough to know that his suburban counter-culture of the widely disseminated paperback is also an anti-culture from any normative perspective built more solidly on traditional religious or philosophical systems whether from Europe or from anywhere else, Africa or Asia or wherever.

Lauren and I idly eyed the chaos of brittle, moldy, or water-logged paperbacks on the splintered shelves—Nietzsche, Orwell, Blavatsky, Dick, Marx, Gandhi, Rand, Mao, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Blake, Cayce, Huxley, Nostradamus, Jung, Dostoevsky, Solanas, Twain, X, Lovecraft, Heinlein, Wilson, two Brontës, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gnostic Gospels—the disorganized mess of mutually incompatible radicalisms that the bored, angry kids who came there out of the suburbs had in the place of a culture.

The “Wilson” there, by the way, is supposed to be Robert Anton; I hadn’t yet read Colin when I wrote The Class of 2000. Also note the deliberate “I idly eyed” as overwrought evidence of my English department bias toward the poetic even in prose, as discussed in footnote 2 above.

6. Mary Jane Eyre once complained on Notes that everyone (was it every male? or every white male? I forget) on Substack was looking for a dead German as guide and guru. I explained the Germanomania here and its special relevance to questions of cultural marginality and centrality, even for those of us who have never slogged all the way through Kant and Hegel. I observe, for example, that W. E. B. Du Bois, neither white nor even on Substack, though he would be the latter if he were alive today, went to study philosophy in Germany before he essayed “the color line” and “double consciousness.”

7. Metaphysics precedes aesthetics, says Alice Gribbin quoting Martin Gurri in her latest essay. (Metaphysics precedes politics, too, we might add.) In preface to her plea for “cool, sexy, and soaring” art, exemplified in the essay by Uccello, Correggio, and Tiepolo, respectively, she imagines what new metaphysics might enable her preferred new aesthetics:

If I had to guess—and this is the kind of speculation we are free to make and should—I would say that artists working in a recognizable new aesthetic register will concern themselves variously with how the universe is more than a naturalistic system; with the layered nature of reality; with those aspects of embodiment that data cannot touch; with the soul as mortal or immortal; with the soul’s relation to matter, particularly the tactile matter we call visual art; with where a hard new line between private and public should be drawn; with art as a nonpersonal practice; with how the body is not a prison; with the possibility for certainty that makes uncertainty consequential; and with the good that is pleasure.