Weekly Readings #99 (12/25/23-12/31/23)
of what is passed, or passing, or to come
A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.
This week I published “Hollow Lake,” the latest chapter of my serialized novel for paid subscribers, Major Arcana. On Wednesday comes the penultimate chapter of Part Three, on the topic of YouTube suicide. That is not the chapter’s title, but it’s a good title for something nonetheless; I think of the song from Heathers: “Teenage Suicide (Don’t Do It).” “Don’t do it” is not, alas, the message our (anti-)hero(ine) Ash del Greco will be conveying to the online masses.1
I also published my last reading round-up of the year, December Books, with capsule reviews of Robert Boyers’s gossipy memoir about Susan Sontag and George Steiner, postapocalyptic fiction from Mary Shelley, more New Age modernism from Hermann Hesse, and Alan Moore at his most magic(k)al, as well as a compare-and-contrast on Poor Things as both (political) novel and (pornographic) film.
For this final Weekly Readings of the year, I look back at some highlights of 2023 and look forward to some goals of 2024, pending my announcement about this Substack’s future in the coming days. Please enjoy!
Of What Is Passed, or Passing, or to Come: 2023 in Review, 2024 in Prospect
I know it, you know it, and Justin Smith-Ruiu knows it: you won’t read a novel on the internet. (How do Smith-Ruiu and I know it? Easy: we aren’t reading each other’s fiction either.) Nevertheless, nothing I’ve written this year can compare to writing Major Arcana. The rest—and the rest was mostly Weekly Readings posts on here and responses to “Asks” on Tumblr—was designedly ephemeral. My thoughts of the week? Let them be entombed with the week itself. Major Arcana, while built quickly, was by contrast built to last. It sums an epoch, an epoch now more obviously passing when I finished it in December than when I began it in January, passing so quickly that I began it in the fearful conviction that I would be attacked for it by queer progressives and finished it in the fearful conviction that I would be attacked for it by religious conservatives. Is it too immodest to admit I was inspired by the first line on the jacket copy of Underworld? “Our lives, our half century.”
People write their in/out lists for the New Year. I don’t write in/out lists. Long nails vs. short nails, martinis vs. wine coolers, sloppy softness vs. aloof chic—all is one to me. I have, however, made a multi-year wager on a secular literary trend: minimalist autofiction is out and maximalist romantic realism is in.2 Writing the novel was not my way of making this wager; I just wrote the book I had to write and wouldn’t write minimalist autofiction—not at this point in my life, anyway—even if it was mandated by the state. But I still think romantic realism’s time, and mine, has come. What I’ve labeled my famously disappointed generation has a notoriously hard time doing what it grotesquely calls “adulting.” But the giants of yesteryear have almost all vanished: if we won’t stand in their vacant place, who will?
I’ll announce the next big project for paid subscribers on this Substack in the coming days. It won’t be another long serialized novel. I can’t write such things one after the other. I need a year or two to pass before I’d attempt something similar again.
I have already rashly announced my next two creative projects: a play called Saturn Dreaming of Mars and a graphic novel called Kosmitora.3 I don’t like to let good ideas go to waste, so I almost certainly will complete these in the next year or two, and my paid Substack subscribers will be the first to see them when I do. I may have been too hasty in planning to become the monarch of all media, however, so don’t be too disappointed if either or both the projected 100-page play script and the projected 100-page comics script becomes a novella or two instead.
Will I return to longform criticism? Sort of. I plan to write the occasional big literary essay on major or classic works in 2024, in keeping with my old ambition to make the johnpistelli.com archive a guide to the canon, as if I were a wholly online Bloom. But I won’t return to anything like the schedule I maintained in previous years, and I don’t really want to review my contemporaries unless it’s for a (preferably paying) venue.
I would very much like to write reviews for such venues, however, and even for non-paying ones if they’re good. To the editors who follow me, and you know who you are, I’d like to say that I am available. You can ask anyone who’s worked with me before: I write clean copy at the requested word count, and I always submit before the deadline. I am happy to review prose fiction, comics, and poetry, as well as nonfiction in the broad areas of the arts and humanities. No political punditry, though; I’ve hung that up for good. For a sample of my wares, here’s the big book review I published in 2023 at RealClearBooks: “Afraid of the Novel.” (I don’t always or even usually write hatchet jobs, but I do think they’re good fun.)
New readers can learn most of my “lore” from my appearance this summer on
’s increasingly essential Eminent Americans podcast. For more audio, also from this summer, there’s my cosmic conversation with the great about poetry, cancellation, and the occult, and my appearance on a paywalled episode of Manifesto! to discuss Sontag’s “Against Interpretation.” I didn’t go on the Art of Darkness podcast, but I did report from their live show and its bloody aftermath here in the Twin Cities back in June. I would very much like to appear on more podcasts in 2024, so if you host one, I am, again, available.As stated above, I don’t mind if these Weekly Readings posts prove ephemeral, so I’m not going to make a big list of the ones from 2023 here. Four might be worth revisiting, however, in no particular order: the one about 2666, the one about Colin Wilson’s Craft of the Novel, the one about the death of the English major, and the one about writers as manifestors and magicians. My review of Oppenheimer may merit rereading as well, since Oscar season approaches; that one also contains some John “lore.”
Best books I read in 2023? The aforementioned 2666 is easily the very best. Roth’s Operation Shylock, which I read for topical reasons, isn’t far behind, nor is A. S. Byatt’s Angels & Insects, which I read in memoriam. Among older works, Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece is an extraordinary allegory for the fate of modern art, and The Duel brought me back to the humane vision of Chekhov. We know The Garden of Eden introduces us to a new Hemingway, but do we know it’s also a near-great novel? My nonfiction favorite of the year, remarkable when you consider that I dislike literary biography, is Richard Ellmann’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Let me also put in a word for Rachel Pollack’s wise guide to the Tarot, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, and Harold Bloom’s stunning Nietzschean Bible study, The Book of J. Biggest disappointment (besides the parts of the Bible that Harold Bloom and I don’t care about)? David Lindsay’s cult classic (and Bloom’s own beloved) A Voyage to Arcturus. I wasn’t too persuaded by the Jünger revival of On the Marble Cliffs either. Strangely, I wrote about 2666, The Book of J, On the Marble Cliffs, and A Voyage to Arcturus (and more, including Ottessa Moshfegh!) in a single post, April Books, probably the finest thing I composed in the mode of literary criticism this year, with an especially powerful conclusion that surprised even me.
With that reminiscence, it remains only for me to wish you a happy New Year and to thank you for reading. I’ll see you back here in 2024 for my announcement of this project’s next phase.
Please see also a Tumblr post where I answered a reader’s inquiry about my researches into Tarot for the novel, as well as a characteristically generous end-of-the-year post from Mary Jane Eyre again endorsing the novel and reflecting with wisdom and poignance on some of the novel’s own themes and those of this very Substack.
I’ve said this somewhere else, but I repeat here: I borrow the phrase “romantic realism” from the title of a book I’ve never read about Dostoevsky subtitled A Study of Dostoevsky in Relation to Balzac, Dickens, and Gogol. Despite this provenance—who would not want to work in the tradition of Balzac, Dickens, Gogol, and Dostoevsky?—Wikipedia reports that the phrase has also been claimed by or applied to such dubious though mutually opposed constituencies as the Nazis, the Communists, and the Ayn Randians, if also affixed to another great novelist in Conrad. It’s a useful phrase, though, so I’m taking it back from the political totalizers for my own brand of visionary apolitical art.
I personally don’t object to the label “magical realism” for my work, but its exponents have tended to disown it, and it has too much “cultural” baggage in America to adopt. I believe magical realism has nothing in particular to do with Latin American culture but is actually the natural state of narrative, since we can neither tolerate pure realism nor indulge in pure fantasy, neither accept that this world is all nor live in the world beyond we dimly intuit. Homer and the Bible are magical realism, as are Dante and Shakespeare, as are Hawthorne and Melville. The term, however, is passé, so I reclaim “romantic realism” instead.
On the longstanding inward-outward minimal-maximal dialectic in the history of the novel, I give you in this footnote a footnote from—what else?—my doctoral dissertation:
Dorrit Cohn hypothesizes a cyclical history of the novel in which periods of exterior character portrayal are followed by interior mimesis, as Sterne follows Defoe, Eliot follows Dickens, Woolf follows Bennett, and Wood follows Rushdie: “One could probably argue for a theory of cyclical (or spiral) return of the genre to its inward matrix whenever its characters get hyper-active, its world too cluttered, its orientation too veristic”
Patron-watch: Grimes has recently proclaimed her belief that the wealthy are obligated to become patrons of the arts. Now all she lacks is my name and my PayPal information. I mention it here because Kosmitora will be my first work of science fiction, or my first since I was in about the ninth grade, and science fiction is her preferred genre. I must disavow her statement today, however: “I happily am proud of white culture.” Whatever “white culture” may be, I am proud solely of my own achievements and not anyone else’s, and I have faith, science fictional though it seems, only and ultimately in human culture. I think that’s actually what she was trying to say, but the message got garbled. If she wants to pay me to edit her social media missives, that would be fine too.
Interested to see what the future brings (and what exactly in MA you think would get you cancelled by the religious right! Though for what it’s worth I think this year perhaps pointed to an exhaustion of both right and left modes of cancel culture.) About Pollack-I read her Doom Patrol recently and recommend it highly, while I need to read that Jünger myself. With you (I think) on maximalist romantic realism, hope we all make it in the new year!!
Northrop Frye has a pithy little negative review of On the Marble Cliffs and/or The Glass Bees, somewhere in the collected writings... Worth tracking down in a spare moment.