Weekly Readings #83 (09/04/23-09/10/23)
the other world
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “Books of the Law,” the most recent chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. In this chapter, occultist comic-book writer Simon Magnus finally discovers the secrets of space and time—only to learn as well that the consequence of vaulting Faustian ambition can be nothing other than death. This coming Wednesday, with Chapter 17, death rides in. Please subscribe today!1
For today, a twofold newsletter inspired by two readers’ questions. The first, original to Substack, is about about whether or not high literature is a completed system in permanent decline inaccessible to the barbarous newcomer. The second, revised from a years’-old Tumblr entry, sets the record straight on my abortive career as a teenaged pornographer.2 Please enjoy!
No Twilight of the Idols: Against Declinism
A reader wrote in to Tumblr to ask the following question. I decided to answer it here exclusively, though I preserved for Substack the more careering and associative style I tend to use on that blessedly superannuated platform.
What do you think of the idea that the highbrow as such is/was a closed hermetic tradition, like German metaphysics or French critical theory, and that this is the reason that all American literary greatness seems to have been spent after the last generations (those 30s births!) to have been initiated into the mysteries before the tradition was destroyed by arson in the 1960s? Is artistic greatness now as quixotic a pursuit for mere Americans as slaking the great snake Quetzalcoatl after Cortés? Is the chain now irreparably severed, without which only chintzy, superficial revivalism/pastiche/parody is possible?
If it is true, there’s no point in asking me, with my no Latin and less Greek; I would be just one more hirsute barbarian crouched in the rubble trying to make fire by knocking the severed marble prick of a kouros against a verdigris-cankered monstrance.
Now that I’ve put a picture in your head, however, let me say that I doubt it. To my father I once summarized Vico’s historical cycle—from aristocratic to heroic to democratic to chaotic ages and back again—and he replied, “All ages are chaotic ages.” The “closed hermetic tradition” is a retrospective construction of the scholars, whose own loss of charisma they project onto the poets, either boastfully (the left) or elegiacally (the right).
Neither Dante nor Shakespeare had direct access either to Homer or to Plato. Shakespeare’s chief dramatic inspiration was Seneca, whom I believe stands in relation to Sophocles as EC Comics stands in relation to Faulkner, not that I, a barbarian, have really read any Seneca, and not that the distance between the Faulkner of e.g. Sanctuary and EC Comics is exactly infinite either.
Had Cervantes really read, say, Aquinas? Or did he chance upon—so much for a closed tradition—the Maqamat of Al-Hariri while captive in Turkey? A professor suggested this to me once; I’ve never researched the matter. Modern European poetry, however, came to the Troubadours—and thence to Dante—less from Athens or Jerusalem than from Baghdad by way of Córdoba.
Does the mass of sheer obscenity in Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, even Dante and Goethe, affect the question? Do you think I meant country matters? What about Rabelais? I’ve never read Rabelais. What about the quantity of pastiche and parody in these writers themselves, Dante cargo-culting Virgil into his vernacular rap, Shakespeare with the sado-pornographic hallucination over his Latin school reading that is Titus Andronicus?
The first major writers without a shred of classical erudition arose in England in the 18th century, writing, God help us, in prose. Dickens adored fairy tales,3 he loved the Arabian Nights; did Dickens read, say, Statius? I don’t even know who Statius is. I know as much about the Arabian Nights as Neil Gaiman’s comic-book pastiche from the ’90s saw fit to tell me.
If you want to date the decline, it just keeps receding further and further back into the past. Was it strictly necessary, the declinist might ask, for Dante to write in the language of the fucking rabble? Eloquence of the vulgar my ass! Is Joyce the apogee of the tradition or its jesting gravedigger—his own works vulgar pastiche from end to end, masturbating in 10, 20, 30 languages? And how much Aquinas had he read, really?
While celebrating mass one day, Aquinas had a holy vision. He later said that, compared to what he had seen, everything he’d written was straw, and he refused to finish his Summa. I’ve taken his word for it.
The deeper you go into any one major writer, the sillier the anthology periodizations seem. Dante is a classicist, a Romantic, a realist, a modernist, a postmodernist4 all at once—as is Shakespeare, as is Joyce.
All artists confront an unmasterable shattered tradition in a fallen present sick with stupidity and corruption, and from these fragments they assemble their own fragile temples, only for the storm to knock down again, only for some later barbarian in some other chaos to re-assemble in the most beautiful wrong order.5
No Twilight: I Was a Teenaged Vampire Pornographer
One reader was bold enough to ask a question that must be on many of your minds:
Since you’re writing a novel about a comic book writer—what’s the deal with the vampire porn comics that pop up on Amazon with your novels? Were those you?
I only wrote one pornographic vampire comic book when I was a teenager, but they apparently reprinted it—without either consulting or paying me—more than once, hence the multiple editions available on Amazon. You can read the complete story here (please note that I was responsible only for the script, not for the art):
How did this erotica come about? The year was 1996 or ’97; I was 14 or 15; I desperately wanted to be a comic-book writer, and other teens had gone into the industry, e.g., my fellow Pittsburgher Jim Shooter, so why not me? I answered an ad in the back of Wizard: The Guide to Comics from a company looking for a scripter. I submitted a sample script in response to a prompt, and the editor replied that it was the best and most professional he’d received—perhaps less a tribute to my abilities than evidence of the talent pool’s shallowness—but that my age made my writing the company’s erotic vampire comics prohibitive.
Nevertheless, I was a would-be professional; I’d been reading Heavy Metal magazine since the age of 10; I’d read Philip José Farmer’s A Feast Unknown at age 12; so I gamely rallied and a piece of poetic vampire erotica. I thought it was suitably tasteful and non-pornographic for an adolescent author. The editor promised publication and $50; I never heard from him again. I believed the story hadn’t been published, I never got the money, and I soon started reading Faulkner and Joyce and wanting to write books without pictures in them.
Flash forward to 2008 or 2009. Idly self-googling, I discovered that my story had been published way back in 1998 even though the check had, let us charitably say, been lost in the mail, and that the comic was still for sale online. I bought it and found that my script had been illustrated in what I personally found to be a fairly rebarbative manga style, even though, when writing the script, I’d had visions of Kelley Jones, Brian Bolland, and even Dave McKean dancing in my mind. Speaking of rebarbative, the writing isn’t so hot either: portentous cliché after portentous cliché, all meant to be lyrical—my lodestars at the time would have been Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman—and all in service to high-school-breakup misogyny. (In my defense, I would not have written vampire erotica unprompted.)
Can we learn anything about juvenilia and artistic development from this unpromising material? As I read the story, it has flat characters, turgid prose, obvious themes, and derivative concepts; it also, however, has real narrative rhythm, if I do say so myself. I think of the passage in Hegel’s Aesthetics on how child prodigies are possible in music but not in literature, because music is purely formal, while literature requires not form alone but content that can only come from experience too. I had the music but was too young to have had anything else.6
I sent them two scripts, by the way. The second one really wasn’t published, but I recall that it was much better, more of a passion piece. (Both scripts are long gone, on some floppy disc failing to decay in some landfill somewhere.) It was called “Dry” and was set at an AA-style meeting for vampires trying to wean themselves from the hemoglobin; I’d gone to an actual AA meeting with a relative for research.
That is why vampire erotica arises when you search my name on Amazon. I wonder what $50 plus 25 years’ interest amounts to? I’m sure it’s an easy calculation, but, as you can see, I had better things to do when I was a teenager than paying attention in math class.
Speaking of Major Arcana, a reader also wrote to me with a question about Simon Magnus’s statement in this chapter that Aleister Crowley “had beneath the awareness of complacent college-goers…designed the entire 20th century.” While it’s the utterance of a fictional character and not necessarily my own thesis, I elaborate on the claim as a historical proposition and explain its function and context in the novel here.
Speaking of platforms, both of these pieces—the first in its somewhat delirious form, the second in its scandalous subject matter—may be taken as answer to a problem recently discussed on Substack’s Notes feature, to wit, that Substack has an excessively professional and middle-aged ethos that can’t match the disreputable energy of either Twitter past or Xitter present.
Speaking of fairy tales, a reader’s question about my thoughts on Hermann Hesse—I don’t have any yet—led me to reminisce about my time studying with the great fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes, whose annotated copy of Hesse’s Demian I own but have not read. The reminiscence—in which I recall writing an extravagant Stalinist denunciation of Zipes’s late, great friend Angela Carter as the final paper in his last fairy-tale class at the University of Minnesota—prompted a further thought about Nietzsche and Marx, including speculation on why undergraduates apparently now think of Marx as a “rapist.”
Speaking of postmodernism and of Xitter, the philistinism of the Intellectual Dark Web is catching up with their political project as they again make late-20th-century European philosophers sound like a crime syndicate or the Elders of Zion. This time, we’re told that Jean-François Lyotard tried to “bake postmodern relativist assumptions into science.” (Someone didn’t go see Oppenheimer this summer; he was probably too busy studying Einstein’s Theory of Objectivity or Heisenberg’s Certainty Principle.) If Lyotard had been such a fool, he would make an easy enemy, but in fact his point was the more complex and ironic one that scientific developments themselves are rendering our society’s narrative justifications for science increasingly untenable. Please see my essay on The Postmodern Condition (in which, incidentally, I identify Lyotard’s argument as “remarkably congruent with Cold War anti-communism and the even older traditions of moderation out of which it grows”) for more details. The communists and fascists may still be living in the 20th century, but the STEM-lord centrists have barely made it into the 19th.
Speaking of order, I thought about providing links to substantiate some of these assertions. I even thought about fact-checking them. But this seems false to the spirit of the answer. I once had a student who kept asking me for the sources of claims I would make while I was in my pedagogical flow state. I almost told him—not living down any gendered stereotypes, he was almost the lone him in a sea of hers and thems, though the easy deprecation of the conventionally masculine-coded pursuit of cold hard fact does little credit to the mush-minded deprecators, even if I am a male of mushed mind myself—that he should ask himself of my assertions not whether they’re factual but whether they’re stimulating. I might also have shared Wilde’s warning to smart young men about “fall[ing] into careless habits of accuracy.”
Speaking of aesthetics, and of adolescence: even if your only memory of Shelby Foote, like mine, is of the time your high-school history teacher wheeled out the TV stand and put on Ken Burns’s Civil War for a week, you should read friend-of-the-blog Blake Smith’s tremendous Tablet essay on Foote, “The South’s Jewish Proust” (granted that “Jewish Proust,” not Smith’s wording, is a pleonasm). Smith identifies liberals’ current bad faith about their own devotion to imperialism—exacerbated by the Atlantic’s center-left Civil War LARP incited over a decade ago and years before Trump by Ta-Nehisi Coates among others. Closer to home, Smith usefully antagonizes apologists of “the aesthetic,” presumably including your present author, for selling a soft fantasy that neglects the sheer will to power involved:
Beauty, though it may give pleasure, is first of all tyranny, the violent appropriation of attention and power. By learning to write beautifully Foote meant to storm the heights of our national and Western literature, to master it in becoming one with it—in a spirit of determined assimilative prowess—to become immortal in the only way he believed possible. To say that such a demand upon oneself to achieve the utmost excellence, a will to shine forever in the memories of men, is not political, is to imagine as unpolitical Achilles and Napoleon. To reveal one’s superior nature in arms or words is a primordial desire for and by which the space of politics—our law-bound life in common—is made (a point Arendt, that most Greek of modern thinkers, recalls throughout her work). Some of us desire to be better, and acclaimed better, than others, and give their lives over to discipline, sacrifice, and risk that they might be honored, if not by the contemporaries whose approval they alternately court and spurn, then by posterity.
With this blog’s other friend, Alice Gribbin, also writing in Tablet, I would reply that such a desire for greatness, if abstracted from any concrete political aim or program, is not therefore itself political even when embodied by a political actor. I agree with the main point, though, with the addendum that extending this desire and the means to effect it as widely as possible—cf. Philip K. Dick’s fascism for the masses, i.e., anarchism—is the American dream, the very thing for which the obscure lawyer turned democratic martyr-messiah Lincoln stands in our national imagination. As somebody once said, most people are conservatives or liberals, but poets are only fascists or anarchists—or, more likely, both.
Lol at the vampire comics. Agreed about decline:the fall-primordial or of our time- seems to be a part of human psychology as much as any outward reality. I liked that Smith thing, I’ve heard (from grizzled old historians of the nineteenth century) bad things about Foote’s books as history, but Blake makes a solid case for them as aesthetic objects, and Foote is another case for his file about closets. I’ll need to know more about what his argument is about honor before I nod along with it-I mostly know the Nietzsche-Strauss version of that view and I don’t put much stock in that. And yes, tumblr is such fun in its undeath, isn’t it?