A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
The year’s last literary essay was on Dickens, that most seasonally appropriate of authors, and examines why his penultimate finished novel is the Victorian introduction of choice—or anyway used to be—for the modern American reader.
Below, I offer a retrospective as we not only enter a new year but approach the one-year anniversary of this very newsletter, launched on the 10th of January 2022.
My Year in Writing
I launched this Substack in support of an experimental podcast that ran for the first six months of last year, a foray into the post-left politics and post-political aesthetics of what’s been called “the Red Scare extended universe” of discourse. I’m not sure the “shock jock” approach worked for me, though, and I don’t want to be remembered for my political opinions, such as they are, anyway. Still, I think we created some fine audio entertainment at the bloody crossroads of literature and politics, and the archive is worth revisiting. The episode I’m proudest of—if you listen to just one, it should be this one—is the one on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a dense and personal meditation on religion, race, modernism, and maternity recorded in the shadow of the Supreme Court’s epochal Dobbs decision.
I started these Weekly Readings posts simply as a way to publicize other projects: not only the podcast but the literary essays at my long-running and award-winning site johnpistelli.com and the sometimes unseemly polemics at my mysteriously still extant Tumblr blog, this Substack’s Lukácsian namesake, Grand Hotel Abyss. But it gradually became more ambitious, with substantial essays on politics, culture, and literature. For me, if I may, highlights include, but may not be limited to:
my charting of great writers on the gnostic-sacramental/schizo-autistic spectrum
my review of Matthew Gasda’s much-discussed drama, Dimes Square
my defense of the much-maligned semicolon
my review of Netflix’s Sandman in relation to Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel, with a thesis on the artistic exsanguination of postmodern left-liberalism (i.e., “wokeness”) as it moved “from counterculture to hegemony”
my appreciation of the year’s major literary controversy, Alex Perez’s incendiary interview in the journal Hobart
my advocacy for a holistic approach in literary criticism to the writer’s total vision
my consideration, the last in a series, of whether or not artificial intelligence will obsolesce the human author
and my review of Noah Baumbach’s White Noise adaptation
As for my literary essays, 2022, the anniversary of modernism’s annus mirabilis, was necessarily a year of rereading. Any list of high points must begin with my essay on Eliot’s Waste Land and my essay on Joyce’s Ulysses. Poetry lovers should see also my quarrel with Blake and my struggle with Stevens.
Unshackled to publicity, I don’t spend a lot of time with new books, but I did take time to scrutinize the pretenses of Alan Moore’s Illuminations and appreciate the complex late vision of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris. I also enjoyed rereading Don DeLillo’s masterpiece, Underworld, perhaps my favorite of all the late 20th century’s Silent Generation summas, despite the stiff competition from McCarthy, Morrison, Roth, Pynchon, and—as I just discovered—Oates.
As for books new to me, I was probably most pleased to acquaint myself with G. K. Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday and to wrestle with D. H. Lawrence’s masterpieces from the Genesis of The Rainbow to the Apocalypse of Women in Love. As for sheer pleasure in writing, I may have had the most fun evaluating the didactic plays—and the dubious politics—of George Bernard Shaw. Finally, speaking of plays, I have to recommend, against the trendy Oxfordians, an essay on Troilus and Cressida that is actually a polemic on why Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
For the rest—for essays on nonfiction by Mill, Woolf, William James, and Francis Fukuyama; on great modern novellas by Dostoevsky, Mann, Conrad, Kafka; on Homer and Henry James, Edith Wharton and Cynthia Ozick, Norman Mailer and Will Eisner—please see the archive at johnpistelli.com.
I also started putting my fiction on this Substack. The highlight there is undoubtedly a never-before-published and too-controversial-to-publish novelette I wrote in 2015 or so on the fall of academe:
Ending the old year and beginning the new with the serializer and performer Dickens was no accident, however. I hope in 2023 to adopt the neo-Dickensian practices of serializing new fiction and of taking the spoken word to my audience again—much as I appreciate Substack, Wordpress, and Tumblr, it can’t be denied in our post-print age of “secondary orality” that more people follow me on YouTube than anywhere else.
In the meantime, thanks for your attention. Happy New Year!