A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “Against Feeling,” the latest chapter of Major Arcana, my serialized novel for paid subscribers. Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow’s relationship continues to traverse its spiral to his doom; the gyre narrows this coming Wednesday. Please subscribe today!
Today’s will be a very brief post for Christmas Eve as far as wholly original content goes. Don’t worry: in a week’s time, you’re going to have more of me than you can handle. Next Sunday, December 31, I plan to release both my December Books post and a Weekly Readings that will double as a 2023 year in review. Then, on either the first or second of January, I will be announcing my plans for this Substack in 2024 (hint: they are related to this premature proposal from earlier this year). I have a backlog of Major Arcana chapters already written and recorded, so there will be no holiday interruption of the serial.1
Other than that, I am only going to paste in here, in case you didn’t see them, my two substantial Tumblr posts of this week, one about Major Arcana I wrote on Tuesday that may be of interest, and one from Friday in response to a question about literary what-ifs. Please enjoy, and merry Christmas to all who celebrate! As I write en famille from American suburbia, from the perhaps defuncting coeur of the American Century’s utopian dreams, please enjoy some seasonal Boomer rock at its most starry-eyed:2
Syncretism and Synchronicity: On Finishing Major Arcana
I wrote the final words of Major Arcana yesterday. I think the above Tweet, which I saw last night in my Ozymandias-like surveillance of social media, is about where the novel ends up, though I am not a theoretician or a theologian.
Speaking of Ozymandias, I’ve also completed my first re-reading of Alan Moore’s pedagogical Promethea in almost two decades, something I probably should have done at the outset of writing the novel, and suffered a mild blow to my pride. I’ve been congratulating myself for weeks on this syncretic occult-Catholic observation of my character Ash del Greco’s, which Google convinced me was original to me—
It occurred to her in her half-delirium that Mary, if divested of her vast sky-blue, cloud-white robe to reveal that the snake whose head was at her feet had the rest of its length coiled all around her naked flesh, would resemble not a piece of church statuary but rather the Universe card in the Thoth Tarot. Maybe she, the Blessed Mother, wasn’t trampling the snake but dancing with it: matter and mind, whichever was which, male and female, spiraling through the stars for eternity.3
—but there it was, alas, in Promethea’s final issue. (This might mean it comes from Crowley, since Moore takes so much else in his turn-of-the-millennium occult summa from the turn-of-the-century’s wicked mage. I find Crowley more interesting and sophisticated than I expected him to be while also being pretty much unreadable, so I’ll probably never know.) Promethea also strongly advocates the Jesus-was-a-fungi spiritual reliance on the pharmacopoeia lately criticized, or criticized for its recent capitalization anyway, in the more orthodox Compact.4 Anyway, please subscribe to my Substack for Judeo-Hellenic Syncretized Gnosticism!
Down the Passage Which We Did Not Take: On Alternate Literary Histories
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.
—Eliot, Four Quartets
A reader writes in to ask, “What are some of your favorite literary ‘what ifs’ to contemplate? Keats at 55? Joyce’s ‘Paradiso?’” I respond:
Those are two big ones. Keats would have been 55 in 1850. Is there any reason to think, based on what he could do at 25, that he wouldn’t have written something better than In Memoriam or Idylls of the King? That, with his Shakespearean sensibility, he might not have approached something like The Ring and the Book? Our whole map of 19th-century literature would look different had Keats lived to fulfill his promise.
The “what if” in Joyce’s case is more specific and less world-historical. He said, reports Ellmann, that he wanted to write “something very simple and very short” after Finnegans Wake, and I wonder what a simplicity following that kind of complexity would look like. Not Paradiso, perhaps, but also not Un coeur simple either, since he’d already done that in Dubliners and never repeated himself. What then? Something like Beckett’s short pieces? And if he had pre-empted Beckett’s counter-Joycean minimalism, what would Beckett have done? There’s a different “what if” with Joyce too. What if he had pursued his dream (or scheme) of opening a cinema, had devoted himself more seriously to the stage, had gone multimedia? (My old Joyce teacher, acquaintance and biographer of Godard, used to wonder about this: Joyce as Godard before Godard.)5
Then there’s Austen, dead at 41 (my age), and already starting to sound like Woolf in her final novel. What if Wilde, dead at 46, had lived, lived in Paris into the avant-garde years, calling at 27 rue de Fleurus and devising his own versions of Surrealism or the Theater of Cruelty?
Premature author deaths are interesting, because some feel like enormous losses and others don’t quite. Charlotte Brontë, not yet 40 when she died, had much more to do. She’d just finished Villette, a novel itself verging on the Beckettian. What would she have written had she lived into the 1870s? She was only three years older than George Eliot. A Middlemarch that grew out of the specific sensibility her truncated oeuvre demarcates might have been extraordinary, might have pre-empted, if not Beckett, then at least Hardy and (who knows?) Lawrence. Emily Brontë, on the other hand…while the structure and organization and irony of Wuthering Heights outdo even Charlotte’s work for intricacy and intelligence, that book still feels more like a channeled myth, somehow collective and impersonal, than like part of a single person’s corpus. I wish she had lived, of course, but maybe she would have fallen silent, having channeled her single vision, and then again maybe she would have drifted into Blakean private myth.
It’s similar with Keats and Shelley. Shelley was only four years older than Keats was when he died, but he isn’t mourned the same way. That’s because his canon feels somehow closed, complete, a total vision rounded in on itself. As I hinted in my essay on Shelley, if you told me he’d killed himself after writing “The Triumph of Life,” I’d believe you. Or that he’d lived but renounced poetry, like Rimbaud.
Then there are the deaths that didn’t happen. Hemingway, killed by his wounds in the Great War at age 18—and no half-century of iceberg minimalism.
Putting aside premature deaths, I wonder about a Henry James who’d succeeded in the theater. First we would be deprived of (dare I say “freed from”?) his novelistic late phase and the dominance its displaced-theatrical formal thinking exerted over 20th-century fiction. Second, he might have extended Wildean Symbolism on the English stage to challenge the standard of Shavian social problem comedy. I haven’t actually read a Henry James play, since he didn’t succeed, and I understand the ones he did write are more conventional; I’m just imagining what the sensibility that wrote The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove would have done with a theater at its disposal.
(Also, what if Henry James’s proposed collaboration with H. G. Wells had come to fruition—and had been a “scientific romance”? How would Jamesian Martians think? or a Jamesian Dr. Moreau? We might have had the New Wave of science fiction in the 1890s, not the 1960s.)
Moving forward in time, and back here in America, what about a Ralph Ellison able to rally his forces and produce a Jamesian or Faulknerian or Bellovian procession of novels right through the eras of Civil Rights, Black Power, and political correctness, challenging everybody’s racial orthodoxies at every turn and, as the author of Invisible Man, unable to be ignored? Staying within African-American literature but moving back a generation: what if the mind that produced Cane in 1923 and lived until 1967 had kept writing novels, even if under the influence of Gurdjieff and Jung and Quakerism and Scientology?
I could think of more, I’m sure—what if Eliot hadn’t converted to Anglicanism, what if he’d kept “turning”? or what if he’d taken the hint of The Waste Land and converted to Buddhism or Hinduism? imagine Eliot chanting sutras right along with Ginsberg in the Beat era!—but this is long enough. Feel free to contribute your own!
It’s indecent to repeat praise, but I gratefully note here a post from this week by regular reader
reviewing my previous novel, Portraits and Ashes:I grant the radical and the reactionary’s shared contention that the mawkish crypto-nihilist liberalism of “Imagine” is stupid, but you really wouldn’t want to get to a point where you are wholly unmoved by “War Is Over,” a traditional Christmas message rather than a political slogan. John himself wasn’t a Boomer (he was a Silent, like every important cultural figure in the late 20th century), however, and this is not what the actual Boomers are listening to as 2023 ends. Leave the nostalgia to their graying children: what gets played in their cars over the old-fashioned FM radio appears to be about 75% Taylor Swift and 25% Doja Cat, with a bit of the white man’s rendition of “Fast Car” thrown in. Alongside John and Yoko’s plea for peace, I carry into the New Year the ethos of a couplet from the unholiest member of that contemporary trinity, another kind of traditional American statement: “Yeah, bitch, I said what I said / I’d rather be famous instead.” Also, I’ll spare you my by-now customary Tori Amos soundtrack, but please do note that she has an entire Christian-pagan syncretic Christmas-solstice album.
This is from a forthcoming chapter, the third of Part Four.
As a Christmas bonus, here are two capsule movie reviews from my Tumblr in slightly irrelevant response to a questioner:
If you loved Tár, you’ll love May December. It’s not quite as oneiric, but its commitment to what one character calls “moral gray areas” and “epistemic relativism” in art and love is just as profound, as we watch two very different types of ruthlessly amoral woman—but are they so different?—confront each other. What performances—Natalie Portman has never been better, not even in my beloved Black Swan (the way she snatches that letter after she makes love…). And what a screenplay! So many good lines: “I am naive,” “This is what grown-ups do,” “I’m secure. Make sure you put that in there.” I recommend it highly.
I do not recommend Maestro, on the other hand, not even if you like movies about conductors as such. A pointless mess of a screenplay apparently meant only as an excuse for two shamelessly showboating Oscar-bait performances. A biopic of an artist that has nothing whatsoever to say about art, and a biopic of an artist remembered for his public life that has nothing whatsoever to say about public life. A film suffocatingly fixated on the private, but whose big idea about the private is that we should be titillated by the mere fact of bisexuality, as if it were 1992 or something. And Snoopy pandering (twice!) to the Zoomers who won’t watch it anyway. Thumbs down.
Merry Christmas John! Discovering your writing has been a highlight of my year, and as a fellow former Grant Morrison/Alan Moore library kid with an interest in gnosticism and magic(k) the collected edition of Major Arcana is one of my most anticipated reads of '24. Wishing you a happy and prosperous holiday season :)
I always enjoy your "readings." Today the musings on the deaths of authors and "what ifs" stood out. Plus I clicked on the Tori Amos album, which I'm listening to now. Many thanks, and Merry Christmas.