mooi weer en warm (vier-en-twintig grade)

ons arriveer vanaf ‘n misrabele moerstad

ma’le se nuwe meethuis is groter as wat ek dedog het

sit lekker innie son soos ‘n dassie en lees (pa moes maar eintlik ‘n monnik geword het)

donnerdag

mooi weer en warm (vyf-en-twintig grade)

ons gaan drink koffiemilkshakes (melkskommel klink vir my altyd so jags) by cradlemoon en ek stap af na die dam..…..zebras met kleintjies (die een merrie duidelik hoogdragtig)..rooibokke…..….springbokke…(die arme bruinetjie het net een horing)..’n blouwillebees soek skadu onner ‘n donker wilger. ‘n kwêvoël se kwê en ‘n houtkapper se kap weergalm deur die bos.

die geelvinkies kwetter en dans rondom hul nessies om die wyfies te beïndruk

middagete by Maggie’s Farm (“Home of the Chicken Pie”)

by die tweedehandse boekwinkel koop ek Brink, Mikro en Van Heerden

‘n hoërskoolvriendin kom hêllo-sê — sy’t haarselfal al destyds boere goth gedoop — nou identifiseer sy ook as queer en neurodivergent en is ‘n anargis as dit by relationships kom

ek knik bedees en erken dat ek hoeka my gen z kêrel op feeld ontmoet het

(my veldmaatjie)

vrydag

mooi weer en warm (ses-en-twintig grade)

Walter Sisulu Botanical Gardens. ‘n springkaanplaag van Bybelse proporsies — hulle wapper so met die wind saam soos verdwaalde reënboogengele

ek loop langs die waterval op en sien die bekende witkruisarendpaar sweef (they rarely fail to deliver a show)

ek voel verruk deur die pers van die Kaapse vygies

nóg ‘n tweedehandse boekwinkel — ek koop Aucamp, Breytenbach, Coetzee (vertaal deur F.Olivier), Maas (?) en Rabie.

saterdag

mooi weer en baie warm (ag-en-twintig grade)

en famille

sondag

mooi weer en warm (vier-en-twintig-grade)

déjeuner de Woolies sur l’herbe des Pretoria National Botanical Garedens: the exact same statues I saw two days before in walter sis

feel slightly mugged

stunned by emmah godd’s lusotropical co-ords

die tarentale bekruip ons

maandag

mooi weer en warm (vier-en-twintig-grade)

ek loop vroegmôre in linden rond, luister na afrikaanse hip hop en skud my kop soos Chris Arnade oordat dagga nou klaarblyklik mzansi se enigste growth industry is (my neef sê British American Tobacco se enigste SA fabriek maak ook nou toe)

ek koop ‘n pre-rolled “Unicornz” joint (70% sativa) vir R120 and the sensitive young man behind the counter tells me he is descended from Scotts royalty, although he has never personally set foot in the yoo-kay

Ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie

En ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie (Making lekka money, spend it like it’s funny)

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie (Stress is net nie daar nie nee ons kan nie kla nie)

Ek soek ‘n huis by die see al staan hy dol fokken leeg

Ek soek ‘n kar in die driveway wat nie rerig beweeg

Ek soek sushi en kreef ek soek my glas nooit leeg

Ek soek klere en skoene vir elke dag van die week

Ek soek goud om my nek ek soek goud in my bek

Ek soek security as iemand net stop by my hek

Ek soek ‘n pool op my dak ek soek geld in my sak

Sodat ek kan koop wat ook al ek wil straight van die rak

Ek soek party’s elke naweek in my tuin

Met ek en my girl wat net sip aan champagne

Ek soek om elke hoek ‘n fokken Great Dane

Ek soek een van daai kaggels met die permanent flame

Ek soek ‘n cellar met die beste fokken wyn

Ek soek goue watches op my kas gepak in ‘n ry

Ek soek diamonds en ruby’s op my chain

Ek soek hoë mure sodat ek kan lewe in geheim

Ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie making lekke money spend it like it’s funny

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie stress is net nie daar nie nee ons kan nie kla nie

En ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie making lekke money spend it like it’s funny

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie stress is net nie daar nie nee ons kan nie kla nie

Ek soek ‘n huis in die berg met ‘n kanon op my dak

Ek soek ‘n sniper wat 24/7 bo op dit sak

Ek soek ‘n kar en ‘n trok, ‘n bus en ‘n van

Ek soek ‘n plaas in my yard ‘n aap giraffe en ‘n perd

Soek ‘n paleis vir my ma en ‘n huis vir my pa

Ek soek elke dag party’s but niemand verjaar

Ek soek grills in my naam en ‘n mill in my naar

Die mense sê my style is siek ek need ‘n pil in my naam

Ek soek een in elke strain in my tuin

Sodat ek en my brasse lekka elke dag meditate

Ek soek daai cellar met die beste fokken wyn

En ‘n lekke lewe waar ons celebrate en entertain

Ek soek ‘n taxi met bass ek soek ‘n space op ‘n space

Ek soek ‘n dame wat my kan wys wat ha naam is en gooi

Ek soek my naam op beskuit, caviar op my plate

Ja ek wil ok soos ‘n laanie uitsteek in die tyd

GBoy en Big in die tyd julle word ge-eliminate

Hulle sê soos illuminati because ons maak hulle wys

Ek soek Bacardi met ys, trans parties vir days

Soek ‘n bar in my huis soos ‘n laanie gewys

Ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie making lekke money spend it like it’s funny

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie stress is net nie daar nie nee ons kan nie kla nie

En ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie making lekke money spend it like it’s funny

Want ek wil ook lewe soos ‘n laanie stress is net nie daar nie nee ons kan nie kla nie

dinsdag

mooi weer en warm (vier-en-twintig grade)

terug na die effen vee-kaa

Since I was emancipated from the Afrikaner associate of Cis White Hetero-Patriarchy & Sons, the Culture has given me mixed messages about the question titling this post. On the one hand, it became clear to me that unless I wanted to be considered as-good-as-Nazi, I ought under no circumstances to take any pride in the culture of my birth (as a redneck Afrikaner). On the other hand, I was encouraged, even exhorted, to take pride in the subculture of my birth (as a flaming homosexual). Although I have long had my doubts about this prima facie two-tier moral system, I was assured that it was only my internalised homophobia speaking. But was it really? Looking back, the gayest moments of my life have certainly been among the most enjoyable, but it would be a stretch to count them among my proudest moments.1 En revanche, one could have been proud of oneself for coming second in a national public speaking contest organised by the Afrikaanse Taal- en Kultuurvereniging, had the organisation not been dedicated to the promotion of that language and that culture.2

I’m reading Binnerym van bloed (2025), an “autobiographical novel” / epistolary romance by Antjie Krog, the Afrikaans poet who wrote the definitive account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (in English). The book is conjuring up all kinds of emotions which I won’t even attempt to translate. I’ve accepted the futility of trying to communicate the other side of Afrikaner nationalism to those who did not grow up in this land speaking this tongue. (My Israeli friend has the same problem). As far as the incommunicable goes, I know this is an embarrassing triviality in the grand scheme of things, and I really ought to just let it go.

Yet who says I ought to? The professors at Cambridge University? Who made them Jesus?

You could call me a cultural anti-Catholic and like a typical cultural anti-Catholic I’ll tell you that my anti-Catholicism is grounded in Scriptural Authority: neither Jesus nor Paul appointed the Pope in Rome as God’s spokesperson on earth. The Roman Catholic Church is not and has never been the unam, sanctam, cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam. The Pope does not and has never had authority over all Christians, despite millennia of persecution and inquisition, semi-successfully downplayed by centuries of Jesuitry. But look at the alternative! a (cultural) Catholic might retort. Aujourd’hui, on écrase l’infame, demain on écrase Monsieur le Philosophe. How can I denounce Marx and keep schtum about Luther? On the eve of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church owned half the land in Germany!3 Ok then, no-one is denounced. There is a seat a the table for everyone if they promise to behave themselves (fat chance!)

In Binnerym van bloed, Krog plays Beckett to her Joycean mother, an unapologetic Afrikaner nationalist who idolised Verwoerd and wrote serialised novels about white working-class heroes under the pseudonym Dot Serfontein. Below is my translation of a what is presented as an undated letter from a ninety-year-old Dot, recently physically incapacitated by a fall:

I look at you pisher4 with children. You’re like plants in a headland turn,5 one doesn’t know what you stand for these days. With every breath my parents and I lived as part of that which you don’t want to call by its name anymore: the Afrikaner Volk. We were inveterate: for a non-Afrikaner magazine or cause or event there was never time or money. For an Afrikaner, always time, always money. A poor, degenerate Afrikaner was still closer to you than the richest, most attractive outsider. When the Bible says love your neighbour, we took it to mean the Afrikaner.

You children are coddled in school. It is nothing compared to the murderous drive with which our Afrikaner educators lifted us up by the skin of our necks. The rage with which tables of multiplication, verses from the Bible and hygienic habits were klapped6 into us, the endless concerts, eisteddfods, sport meets, the ruthless hounding of truants…

Because if a kid passed standard 6, he could get a job on the Railways and so cross the chasm between despair and hope. If a pupil obtained a school matriculation certificate, he could go work for the Civil Service and so cross the chasm between labourer and clerk. They indoctrinated us into an almost despairing, aggressive Afrikaner culture to use every available ounce of self-pride to fight for our survival, for our physical survival. Lachrymose ballades about dying mommies and victimhood were replaced by cheerful walking songs about springtime and the beauty of the land. We were taught that one picks up one’s feet when walking, one greets people with a firm handshake, one carries one’s shoulders in a square, one looks another in the eye…

In the midst of this education mania was of course the Voortrekkers with their sworn conventions. Probably cribbed from Nazi Germany, but to us it offered an immediate Volk-binding pastime and afternoons, weekends and holidays spent in joyful exuberance with teachers playing the role of spirited, physically fit, unwavering officers.

We had to manifest our Afrikaner culture by means of “service” to others. Thus I gave my best jumper to a poor kid at school and in the afternoons I would go fetch the milk cow of ou tant Doortjie and her blind sister, tant Non, from the kraal. I got a badge for that.

As a result, to this day, I can crack a whip, I know all the trees in the veldt, I can follow a spoor, navigate using the Southern Cross, build a hunter’s fire, a cabin fire or a trench fire, quickly construct a pit latrine, use a compass, tell a slip knot from a sheet bend and a sheepshank from a clove hitch, I might still be able to manoeuvre a few semaphore codes with a flag. We could sing with conviction:

Let the mountains from their pedestals

collapse into the sea —

we won’t shudder or turn back

Of course it now all sounds totally useless, but at least it kept us from smoking behind the bogs or trading dirty stories with the school dropouts by the river.

Maybe I should to my shame admit that I knew about the heroic feats of General De Wet before I heard of Christ’s miracles; that my mother in the evenings read to me Die vlakte by Jan FE Celliers and Klokgrassies by DF Malherbe and not from the Bible. In my later life it was exclusively my own responsibility to reconcile national pride with Christian humility; to find on the South African road also the path to Nazareth.

Oy, but I sometimes crave to hear Afrikaans as I got to know it back then in our closed-off platteland community: a gentle, luxurious rhythm, full of sharp individual precision, philosophical internal rhyme and shots of epithets. Today not a single word has longevity, everything is interchangeable. Just the other day I heard on the radio an expression that recalled something from the collapsed shafts of our language. And now I can’t even share it with your father.

But yes, child, I know it’s futile to try and keep those around me interested in my lamentations. Sometimes I imagine the Lord asking me: And what did you do for the salvation of your oldest daughter’s soul? and I answer: an Elna sewing machine and a blue Voortrekker dress. She never used either… So the thought lingers: Today the past is as light as a diving bell.

When last did you read Roy Cambell’s “To a pet cobra” ? For my money he is the only SA poet in English who knew how to wield the power of rhyme:

It was the desert starved us into being,

The hate of men that sharpened us to sting:

Sired by starvation, suckled by neglect,

Hate was the surly tutor of our youth:

I too can hiss the hair of men erect

Because my lips are venomous with truth.

Now that I’m reading Campbell, I’m thinking of that Conan Doyle who after the Boer War came up with a delicious definition of the Afrikaners:7

Take a community of Dutchmen of the type of those who defended themselves for fifty years against all the power of Spain at a time when Spain was the greatest power in the world. Intermix with them a strain of those inflexible French Huguenots who gave up home and fortune and left their country for ever at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The product must obviously be one of the most rugged, virile, unconquerable races ever seen upon earth. Take this formidable people and train them for seven generations in constant warfare against savage men and ferocious beasts, in circumstances under which no weakling could survive, place them so that they acquire exceptional skill with weapons and in horsemanship, give them a country which is eminently suited to the tactics of the huntsman, the marksman, and the rider. Then, finally, put a finer temper upon their military qualities by a dour fatalistic Old Testament religion and an ardent and consuming patriotism. Combine all these qualities and all these impulses in one individual, and you have the modern Boer — the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.

3

I got this factoid from Nicholas Wade, who got it from Joseph Henrich. I can recommend Wade as a Darwin-pilled guide to human nature, now that Charles Murray has given up racial pseudoscience for religious studies:

The use and abuse of political analogies

Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe (my translation):1

The proletarians say “we”. Blacks too. Positing themselves as subjects they change into “others” the bourgeois, Whites. Woman — except at certain conferences which remain abstract manifestations — do not say “we”’; men say “women” and women take this word to refer to themselves; but they do not authentically posit themselves as Subject. The proletarians carried out a revolution in Russia, the Blacks in Haiti, the Indochinese are fighting in Indochina [Vietnam]: the actions of women have only ever been a symbolic agitation; they have only won what men have willingly conceded; they have taken nothing: they have received. It is because they do not have the concrete means to assemble themselves into a unity that establishes itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion to call their own ; and unlike the proletarians, they cannot find solidarity in work and interests; there is not even the physical proximity that makes a community out of the Blacks of America, the Jews of the ghetto, the workers of Saint-Denis or the Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, attached to them by habit, work, economic interest, the social standing of certain men — father or husband — more closely than to other women. Bourgeois women are in solidarity with bourgeois men and not with proletarian women ; white women with white men and not with black women. The proletariat could propose to massacre the managerial class ; a fanatical Jew or Black could dream of stealing the secret of the atom bomb and turning humanity all-Jewish or all-Black: even in her imagination a woman can’t exterminate all males. The tie that binds her to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is in fact a biological given, not a moment in human history.

[…]

To prove the inferiority of women, antifeminists have enlisted not only religion, philosophy and theology but also science: biology, experimental psychology, etc. At most they are willing to grant the other sex “equality in difference”. This famous formula is very significant: it is exactly what the Jim Crow laws claim with regards to the Blacks of America ; no this so-called egalitarian segregation has only served to introduce the most extreme discrimination. There is nothing accidental about this: whether it concerns a race, a caste, class or a sex reduced to an inferior condition, the process of justification is the same. "The eternal feminine” is the homologue of the “the Black soul” or “the Jewish character”. The Jewish problem is however in its totality very different from the other two: for the anti-Semite, the Jew is not so much an inferior as an enemy and is thus accorded no place in this world: the wish is annihilation. But there are profound analogies between the situation of women and that of Blacks: both groups are at present in the process of emancipating themselves from the same paternalism and the hitherto dominating class wants to put them back in “their place” ; that is to say the place that the masters have chosen for them; in both cases they expound more or less sincere elegies on the virtues of the good Black man, on the thoughtless, childlike, cheerful soul of the resigned Black man, and of the woman who is “truly woman”, that is to say frivolous, childish, irresponsible, submissive to men.

In Myth and Meaning, Claude Lévi-Strauss proposes a provocative definition of meaning: that which can be translated. To understand something, we often resort to analogy, although an analogy, like a translation, is never quite exact. To say the human brain is like a computer can help us to understand certain aspects of how a brain/computer works, but it can also give rise to important misunderstandings. At what point does an analogy go from helpful to misleading? By the time Ono & Lennon sang “woman is the N— of the world” the distinction between hatred for Jews and condescension towards Blacks/women was already less apparent. Since Beauvoir, there have been concerted efforts to raise the consciousness of women to position themselves as a Subject in opposition to the Patriarchy. Those who grumble about the consequences are likely to be accused not only of sexism, but of. The most hysterical members of any “marginalised group” are convinced that the Other wants not only their deference, but their eradication, so they feel justified in indulging in a little annihilationist rhetoric of their own: see Valerie Solanis’ 1968 "S.C.U.M. (Society for Cutting Up Men)". All of this happened long before Elon Musk turned Twitter into X.

Where do us gays fall in this schema? Via the aforementioned X, I learnt a rather evocative analogy from Jean-Marie le Pen: “Les homosexuels sont comme le sel dans la soupe: trop peu, c’est un peu fade…”2 In terms of self-ID there are those who follow those who have followed Beauvoir in identifying themselves in primary in opposition to cis white heteronormativity (the queers), those who view it as a biological quirk (the homosexuals), those who believe that Heavenly Mother has made them extra special to spread joy and love and the occasional sexually-transmitted disease throughout the land (the gays), those who believe their inclination is a weakness to be overcome, perhaps a form of demonic possession (the closet cases) and those who have never give the matter much thought (the clones, scientific name Homo himbonosis). Which of these analogies you find most persuasive will depend on our intellectual, political and moral commitments. Luckily, we don’t need to agree on the most appropriate analogy to agree that at the very least gay sex shouldn’t be illegal or grounds for social ostracism (whatever you think of our personal lives, gays have never needed a special treatment to succeed professionally).

One of the reasons for writing under a nom de plume (in addition to sparing my poor mother’s heart) is that in waking life I am considered a “professional” who is professionally obligated to adhere to certain standards of professional conduct even outside of office hours. I am to refrain from behaviour that could bring my profession into disrepute, which is a higher standard than is expected of the ordinary private citizen who only has to consider how her conduct might bring dishonour to herself, t her family and to her community (however defined). I take these professional responsibilities seriously, which is why I don’t want to drag the good name of my brethren, sistren and non-binary-kin in the profession through the mud of my questionable decisions.

The measure of man

Are university professors professionals of whom a higher standard of ethical conduct can be expected even after even outside of office hours? Friend-of-the-blog Justin Smith-Ruiu doesn’t appear to think so, judging by his paean to the self-slain Jason Arday. If I had been less favourably disposed to Justin, I would have said it’s giving noble savage slash fic3

May his memory be blessed. And in the wake of this whole grotesque display of all that is worst in humanity may real room be made in our institutions, or may new institutions be made that are able to make real room, for the fabulous — which I mean in both senses, designating those who style themselves larger than life, who set themselves apart with their exquisite locks and threads and general self-display from the ordinary run of little nerds who dominate in academic life; and designating those whose primary mode of knowledge transmission, like Arday’s, is not data-mongering, but storytelling.

Justin doesn’t condone his plagiarism, but frames it is a weird nerdy thing to focus on when the real villains of present-day academia are the nerdy effective altruists preoccupied with curing infectious diseases in Africa and the existential risk posed by AI rather than what academia is supposed to be about — heartwarming storytelling. Justin has nothing but contempt for the nerdy data-obsessed race realist Nathan Cofnas who started the saga by accusing Arday of plagiarism on a Substack post:

I hope, but do not expect, that Cofnas is currently awakening to the thought that there are more honorable ways to spend one’s time than in smoking out holders of institutional positions of the sort he has been unable to secure for himself.

The fact is that Cofnas had secured a position for himself at the University of Cambridge, which he lost not because of any academic improprieties, but in an archetypal case of cancel culture (for some it is Woke 1 forever) in response to a post on Substack (some people never learn). The post has a provocative title but Cofnas didn’t write anything that wasn’t published in the New Republic in the 1990s. All it took was a thousand or so signatures and the University folded: the People have spoken and since the University has no higher principle to appeal to, they had no choice but to dismiss him. After his dismissal, the University published a defence of free speech, without reinstating him. This clear violation of freedom of speech and academic freedom doesn’t seem to faze Justin one bit. He believes there is no place for people like Cofnas in his own little academic fiefdom:

As I’ve described previously, a few years ago I was an external member on a hiring committee for a position in the history and philosophy of science, for which Cofnas presented his candidacy. I argued vociferously against short-listing him. I did not even have to bring up his “race-realism” in order to make my case. It was quite enough, from my perspective, to remind my fellow committee members that this was a position in the history and philosophy of science, and that however he might choose to identify himself Cofnas gives no appearance of having any real historical consciousness at all. Anyone who does have such hard-won consciousness will have become correspondingly unable to take an entity with such a complex historical life as “IQ” at face value, as simply given — which is to say, literally, as “data”.

To be frank, I’ve long been suspicious of field of “the history and philosophy of science” since it seems to be mostly made up of non-scientists telling scientists what their science is really about. With all due respect, if a measure like IQ is useful (it is), I don’t give a monkey’s paw about the “complex historical life” of the concept (call me a nerdy effective altruist - I’ve heard worse).

The Chinese imperial examination system that reached its peak under the Ming and Qing dynasties was not an IQ test per se, but from what I know of it, I daresay it sounds analogous to the standardised tests used by racist grammar schools and racist university, tests whose results correlate highly with racists IQ tests. Surely it wasn’t racism that led to the adoption of this system (the Han Chinese are famously anti-racist), so could the Ancient Chinese must have believed that people who show the ability to master a complicated written language and feats of memory and creativity may be more likely to act as competent administrators than the ones who can tell a whopping good story. Even if we accept such inegalitarian beliefs, we cool unnerdy thinkers could object that the value of a competent administration has to be weighed against other values, such as the value of having administrators be demographically representative of the peoples they are administrating. Again race wasn’t an issue (the Han Chinese are famously anti-racist), but sex certainly was — not a single woman was allowed to sit the exam until it was abolished in 1905 (the rebel Taipei regime briefly experimented with a separate exam for women in 1853).

Even if women were allowed to sit the exam, there would still be questions about whether men were given all kinds of unfair advances. Nevertheless, despite the perpetual tyranny that women are subjected to by men, they manage to perform so well in present-day Chinese civil service exams that the government has instituted quotas in favour of men to achieve a more balanced ratio of male/female appointments. This “data” should come as no surprise to “sex realists” since it is generally accepted that women are on average as smart and more conscientious than men (even though men seem to be more likely to be math geniuses, “data” that got Larry Summers cancelled). The lowering of Western academic standards that has accompanied the Great Feminisation of academia was therefore not necessary for the advancement of women, which makes one wonder why they went along with it so enthusiastically.

Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism (1979):

Faith in the wonder-working powers of education has proved to be one of the most durable components of liberal ideology, easily assimilated by ideologies hostile to the rest of liberalism. Yet the democratization of education has accomplished little to justify this faith. It has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational quality.

It’s a good thing Lasch remembered to mention wealth inequality, otherwise he might be branded avant-fash.

Az I I Gp Asc

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La version sous acide pour enfants terribles, bonnes vivantes et iconophiles:

Az I I Gp Lsd

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Vous le/la/les aimez ou détestez?

Dites-moi tout!

Burroughs’s idea of the forties was “What if truth broke out? What if everybody started talking frankly.”

— Alan Ginsberg, The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats

Sigmund Freud writing to Sándor Ferenczi am achten Juni neunzehnhundertdreizehn:

Zum Semitismus: Es gebe gewiss große Unterschiede vom arischen Geist. Wir überzeugen uns alle Tage davon. Daher werde es sicherlich hier und dort verschiedene Weltanschauungen und Kunst geben. Besondere arische oder jüdische Wissenschaft dürfe es aber nicht geben. Diese Resultate müssten identische sein und nur die Darstellung könnte variieren. Gingen diese Differenzen in die Auffassung objektiver Verhältnisse in der Wissenschaft, so sei etwas nicht in Ordnung.“

Ironically, a soi-disant commitment to objektiver Verhältnisse in der Wissenschaft led to the defenestration of both Freud and Jung from the psychological establishment for being shoddy scientists.

In the introduction to his Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (Éditions Hermann, Paris, 1938), entitled «Psychologie, phénoménologie et psychologie phénoménologique», SARTRE writes (traduit en franglais par Marie-Jeanne de Rothschild von Eyre — les italiques sont de SARTRE):

Psychology pretends to be a positivist discipline, that is to say it seeks to be based on experience alone. Certainly, we are no longer in the time of the associationists; contemporary psychologists do not purport to interrogate or to interpret. They wish to be faced with their object [of study] like the physician faces his. Furthermore, it is necessary to limit this concept of experience, when one talks about contemporary psychology, because there could be, in sum, a crowd of diverse experiences and, for example, one may have to decide if there exists or not an experience of essences or of values or something like a religious experience. The psychologist only relies on two well-defined types of experience, that presented to us by la perception spatio-temporelle des corps organisés, et cette connaissance intuitive de nous-mêmes qu’on nomme expérience réflexive. If psychologists engage in debates about methods, it is almost uniquely about the following problems: are these two types of information complementary? Should one be subordinated to the other? Should one or the other be resolutely rejected? But these psychologists agree on an essential principle: their inquiry has to proceed from the facts. If we ask ourselves what is a fact, we see that it is defined by that which one encounters in the course of a study, and which is always presented as an unexpected enrichment and a novelty compared to previous facts. One should therefore not count on facts to organise themselves into une totalité synthétique qui livererait d’elle-même sa signification. Put differently, if we call anthropology a discipline that aims to define the essence of man and la condition humaine, psychology — even the psychology of man — is not and will never be an anthropology. It does not seek to define and limit a priori its object of study. The notion of man that it accepts is totally empirical : il y a par le monde un certain nombre de créatures qui offrent à l’expérience des caractères analogues. Other sciences — sociology, physiology, etc. — have taught us that there are certain objective links between these creatures. The psychologist needs nothing more than to provisionally accept to limit, with prudence and under the auspices of a working hypothesis, his research to this group of creatures. Information about these creatures is more readily available since they live in society, are in possession of language and leave witness of their existence. Mais le psychologue ne s’engage point : il ignore si la notion d’homme n’est pas arbitraire. It could be trop vaste : nothing suggests that the primitive Australian can be put in the same psychological class as the American worker of 1939. It could be trop étroite: nothing suggests that an abyss separates the higher apes from a human creature. In any case the psychologist defends himself rigorously from considering the men around him ses semblables. This idea of similitude, à partir de quoi l’on pourrait peut-être construire une anthropologie, lui parait dérisoire et dangereuse. He’d readily admit, with the aforementioned caveats attached, that he is a man, that is to say he forms part of the provisionally isolated class. But he would consider that this caractère d’homme ought to be conferred a posteriori and that he cannot, as a member of this class, be the privileged object of study, except for la commodité des expériences. Il apprendra donc des autres qu’il est homme est sa nature d’homme ne lui sera pas révélée de façon particulière sous le prétexte qu’il est lui-même ce qu’il étudie. Introspection yields here, as in the case of l’expérimentation «objective», only facts. If later a rigorous concept of homme is needed — and even that is doubtful— this concept cannot be envisaged other than as couronnement d’une science faite, c’est à dire qu’il est renvoyé à l’infini. Even then it would only be une hyptohèse unificatrice inventée pour coordonner et hiérarchiser la collection infinie des faits mis en lumière. This is to say that l’idée de l’homme, if ever it were to take on un sens positif, it would only be a conjecture aiming to establish connections between disparate materials and will take its vraisemblance only from its success.

PIERCE [sic] définissait l’hypothèse: la somme des résultats expérimentaux qu’elle permet de prévoir. So l’idée d’homme can only be the sum of the established facts that it permits to unify. If certain psychologists use une certaine conception de l’homme avant que cette synthèse ultime ne fût possible, ce ne pourrait être qu’à titre rigoureusement personnel et comme fil conducteur kantien and the first duty of these psychologists should be to never forget that il s’agit d’un concept régulateur.

To be honest, I haven’t made much of an effort to understand Sartre’s own theory of emotions, but I think his introduction is a good illustration of the inherent limitations of such theorising. SARTRE expresses a recognisable reticence to be analysed or studied by an “expert” in ψυχή. But how do we avoid scientism without wallowing in woo? I’m no anthropologist, but I doubt SARTRE’s definition of that field of inquiry (do people still say «discipline»?) is universally accepted. En outre, SARTRE can’t help but revert to religious language when talking of les créatures humaines. It would be much more accurate to call ourselves «les développements humains». The fact that we don’t suggests something important about the intrinsic conservatism of language (of the living).

Scrivere nella lingua del nemico, ma corromperla

The rainbow used to be the symbol of the Abusive Father, before philosophy unweaved it (as lamented by Keats, as critiqued by Dawkins). The symbol was rewoven into different narratives, tales first about the luck of the Irish and then about the technicolour damnation of the poetsgays. Personally I’ve never felt much affinity with the rainbow qua symbol of gay liberation. I was never into the whole “bring your (w)hole self to work” thing. I prefer to keep my Bermudan option dealers separate from my Brazilian boy toys. (Mob accountants and Jesuits were the original post-modernists).

Nevertheless, in the spirit of no negation I choose to view the symbology of the xviii O.G. O.G. Pride flag as synchronous with my sense that I should start L’ALBVM ZVTIQVE with la femme (IYKYK), so with a nod towards the illustrious example of my fellow créole Doris Lessing (criminally underrated around these parts), I decided to facilitate the birth not of “a novel” , but rather a queer sort of collaborative graphic novel — akin to what the ancients called a «magazine», un objet d’art populaire that they used to sell in establishments called «newsagents» (now vape-and-protein shops, soon to be soma dispensaries cum techno chillout lounges).1

The dark irony of the backwards prioritisation of sex over life was lost when the octocolour was truncated to the more familiar hexacolour, but the colour pink made a comeback (with the colours white and powder blue) to form the thin end of the chevron on the controversial “progress” flag that was all the rage in prominent outposts of the G.A.E. a few years ago.

I used to get (more) upset about such things, but K taught me to recognise that the roots of the delusions that cause an adult human being to proudly wave around a flag of whatever stripe or colour runs very deep indeed:2

We human beings are what we have been for millions of years- colossally greedy, envious, aggressive, jealous, anxious and despairing, with occasional flashes of joy and affection. We are a strange mixture of hate, fear and gentleness; we are both violence and peace. There has been outward progress from the bullock cart to the jet plane but psychologically the individual has not changed at all, and the structure of society throughout the world has been created by individuals. The outward social structure is the result of the inward psychological structure of our human relationships, for the individual is the result of the total experience, knowledge and conduct of man. Each one of us is the storehouse of all the past. The individual is the human who is all mankind. The whole history of man is written in ourselves.

Do observe what is actually taking place within yourself and outside yourself in the competitive culture in which you live with its desire for power, position, prestige, name, success and all the rest of it — observe the achievements of which you are so proud, this whole field you call living in which there is conflict in every form of relationship, breeding hatred antagonism, brutality and endless wars. This field, this life, is all we know, and being unable to understand the enormous battle of existence we are naturally afraid of it and find escape from it in all sorts of subtle ways. And we are frightened also of the unknown — frightened of death, frightened of what lies beyond tomorrow. So we are afraid of the known and afraid of the unknown. That is our daily life and in that there is no hope, and therefore every form of philosophy, every form of theological concept, is merely an escape from the actual reality of what is.

All outward forms of change brought about by wars, revolutions, reformations, laws and ideologies have failed completely to change the basic nature of man and therefore of society. As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to the world belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.

We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us. And only when we realise, not intellectually but actually, as actually as we would recognise that we are hungry or in pain, that you and I are responsible for all this existing chaos, for all the misery throughout the entire world because we have contributed to it in our daily lives and are part of this monstrous society with its wars, divisions, its ugliness, brutality and greed - only then will we act.

etc. etc.

these notes are for John Pistelli Camille Paglia Susan Sontag Oscar Wilde Jean Genet arthur rimbaud

When I was still living in the Heart of Darkness, I got stoned one night and ordered Taschen’s XXL edition of the collected works of Tom of Finland, curated by Dian Hanson. What piqued my interest (beyond the obvious) was the promise of an essay by Camille Paglia, whom I was pretty obsessed with at the time.1 I can’t give you a good reason for why I’ve schlepped the tome back to the Old World with me, or for why it remains a prominent feature on my little shelf of Great Books — a Totem for what is no longer Tabu —

Regardless, Paglia’s essay did not disappoint. She credits TomFin for single-handedly reinventing the popular image of the homosexual (his other hand being otherwise occupied):

In masculinizing the gay persona, Tom broke, for good or ill, with the cultural legacy of the brilliant Oscar Wilde, who promoted and flamboyantly embodied the androgynous aesthete. What is durably avant-garde in Tom, now that frank depictions of homosexuality (partly thanks to him) have become so common, is his unsettling treatment of male bonding, a foundational social principle that feminism has foolishly ignored. Tom’s surreal, random encounters show the male gang or team in operation —forming, disintegrating and regrouping through ruthless realignments and power reversals. This cruel, compulsive pattern enabled men to escape control by women (mothers and wives) and to push history and civilization forward. But the emotional cost may be chronic loneliness, a subliminal melancholy overriden by action, achievement or mere display. In Tom of Finland’s world of epic quest, with its bruising jousts and fleeting alliances, pugilistic sex becomes the medium through which rogue men regain their lost freedom.

The mommies of Substack, with their obedient low-T husbands, who find it difficult to wrap their reasonable2 minds around the phenomenon of cis white male heteropatriachs being attracted to rather than repelled by the violent, homoerotic persona of someone like Bronze Age Pervert, really ought to read Paglia (and Freud for that matter). In Paglia’s telling, TomFin’s M2M fantasies have the power to red/black-pill even the last straight woman —

Tom of Finland was crucial in the development of my own thinking about art and gender. He armed me as a dissident feminist for my long war against the puritan ideologues and philistines who co-opted American feminism in the 1970s and who perversely turned against the 1960s sexual revolution: Their reactionary movement would reach its peak in the 1980s in the fanatical anti-pornography crusades of Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Anyone familiar with Tom’s exuberant gay wonderland would have found as patently ridiculous as I did the feminist mantra that pornography is nothing but an instrument of political intimidation by which men threaten women with rape or, even more absurd, that pornography actually causes rape.

There is no doubt, however, that in Tom’s work, the penis is power. Stunningly exaggerated (as in Aubrey Beardsley’s witty rococo drawings), it is less a political weapon or club than a primitive totem, the ecstatic focus of a ritual cult. Tom’s flaunted, mammoth phalli, thick and fibrous, are like serpentine vines or trees, brimming with sap. They are Dionysian maypoles around which his sparring characters collect and carouse.

Everything bursts with vitality, including Tom’s impossibly wedge-shaped torsos, where brawny shoulders broaden like oaks from the slim hips. Gloved in super-tight clothing, the body itself is tumescent. Tom’s taunting sexual marauders are like Vikings or Goths, opportunistic adventurers who still roam or work in the open while most men are hopelessly chained to office and home. His leather men, draped in living, breathing animal skins, are wed to nature. Tom’s typical scenarios of hunt and capture have atavistic analogies in ancient and tribal ritual — particularly his bondage, flagellation, and crucifixion scenes, where nipples are wrenched or the teeming scrotum gripped and stretched. And his stockade-like panoramas of trampling boots recall Minoan murals of ritual bull-dancing, where the celebrant risked mutilation or death beneath the hooves of a beast worshipped for its pugnacious virility. But in Tom’s utopia, every wound is magically healed, and no scars remain.

The state of constant excitation and erection in Tom’s dynamic universe is his vision of the sacred and numinous. A theologian might speculate that Tom’s sadomasochistic reverie contains its own punish-ments, that heaven is always answered by hell. But Tom’s imperial satyriasis is his protest against boredom and ennui, produced by the modern industrial and technocratic withdrawal from nature. Tom cannot he accused of blind idolatry of the liberated body: His pictures show a theater of eyes, a mass voyeurism where consciousness itself has become penetrating and inflamed. And there is a deeply emotional dimension to his variations on the mythic motif of battling and reconciling twin brothers —for Tom’s personae often look like siblings in a wary dance of alienation and attraction.

But is it really a matter of Either/Or? It is one thing to argue that TomFin’s cartoonish gay porn was aesthetically and morally radical and therefore legitimately avant-garde in the 40s/50s, or that the popularisation of images of gay urban subcultures was politically important in the 60s (a bit of titillation to take the mind off white/black separatism). But by the 70s, or God forbid, the 80s, was there any liberation left to be squeezed out of sexual praxis, however queer?

In “PARANOID READING AND REPARATIVE READING, OR, YOU’RE SO PARANOID, YOU PROBABLY THINK THIS ESSAY IS ABOUT YOU”, the avuncular straight queen of queer theory with a human face, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, wrote:

Ricoeur introduced the category of the hermeneutics of suspicion to describe the position of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and their intellectual offspring in a context that also included such alternative disciplinary hermeneutics as the philological and theological “hermeneutics of recovery of meaning.” His intent in offering the former of these formulations was descriptive and taxonomic rather than imperative. In the context of recent U.S. critical theory, however, where Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud by themselves are taken as constituting a pretty sufficient genealogy for the mainstream of New Historicist, deconstructive, feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic criticism, to apply a hermeneutics of suspicion is, I believe, widely understood as a mandatory injunction rather than a possibility among other possibilities.

The phrase now has something like the sacred status of Fredric Jameson’s “Always historicize” — and, like that one, it fits oddly into its new position in the tablets of the Law. Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb “always”? It reminds me of the bumper stickers that instruct people in other cars to “Question Authority.” Excellent advice, perhaps wasted on anyone who does whatever they’re ordered to do by a strip of paper glued to an automobile! The imperative framing will do funny things to a hermeneutics of suspicion.

I fear that too many critics have flipped the maxim “Always Historicise” around to “Never Historicise”. It makes the research less taxing, but like everything in this dismal life, it comes at a cost. Black opium is still opium. Isn’t that the problem diagnosed by Anna Kornbluh in Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024)?

(I’m asking because I haven’t done the reading)

So let’s historicise, for old time’s sake. Fortunately, the XXL edition of the collected works of TomFin, funded by rich perverts like me (in my dreams, the rich part) provides plenty of material for a historical tour d’horizon.

The 20th century has never been gayer!

pour votre jouissance,

mari-jeanne

xxx

40s

Edward Lucie-Smith:

Born Touko Laaksonen in a Finnish village, the child of schoolteachers, Tom, aged at that time around five, derived his first sexual thrills from spying on a burly local farmboy named Urho— meaning “hero” in Finnish, appropriately enough. In 1939, at the age of 19, he went to Helsinki to study art, but soon got caught up, like all young male Finns of his generation, first in the Russo-Finnish war, and then in the German defense of Finland. It was the war that first presented him with sexual opportunities. He was particularly seduced by German military uniforms, and versions of these were incorporated into his personal sexual mythology. After the war, he began making pornographic drawings for his own satisfaction, drawings influenced by the fascist-classical style of both Soviet and Nazi propaganda posters, as well as by memories of his experiences in the wartime blackouts.

from the start, two sides of the artist are on naked display —

the hopeless romantic —

and the naughty little boy —

50s

E.L-S:

In 1956, at the suggestion of a friend, he sent some of these [fascist-classical pornographic drawings] to the American gay magazine Physique Pictorial, and the first of them, showing a logger deftly riding a single log in a Finnish river, appeared on the cover in the spring of the following year.

60s

outdoor sex between men turns from furtive shameful encounters to joyful bacchanalia —

no need to share your name (or your pronouns) —

or your religion (it’s pretty obvious) —

if they don’t quite reach the level of the mythic, TomFin’s tales have inarguably proven to be durable visual fables —

tom’s men/bois pre-refutes the sharp distinction between the naked male and the female nude drawn by John Berger’s in the 1972 docu-series Ways of Seeing (back when states were still interested in pretending to educate their citizenry) —

What does a nude signify? It is not sufficient to answer these questions merely in terms of the art-form, for it is quite clear that the nude also relates to lived sexuality.

To be naked is to be oneself.

To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself.

A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.

To be naked is to be without disguise.

To be on display is to have the surface of one’s own skin, the hairs of one’s own body, turned into a disguise which, in that situation, can never be discarded. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

nudity can also be a form of armour — and besides, TomFin’s angels are rarely fully naked — even if their coverings leave little to nothing to the imagination —

one reason why TomFin’s drawings are generally perceived as less threatening than the kind of pornography that kept andrea dworkin up at night (apart from the fact that they are cartoons) is that TomFin’s pictorial fantasies are so obviously Camp, in the way described by Susan Sontag in her (rather Camp) ‘64 listicle ‘Notes on “Camp”’ —

“love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” — “esoteric”— “something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques” —

SS’s Note 7 —

All Camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice. Nothing in nature can be campy.... Rural Camp is still man-made, and most campy objects are urban.

(Yet, they often have a serenity—or a naiveté-which is the equivalent of pastoral.

A great deal of Camp suggests Empson’s phrase, “urban pastoral.”)

for a generation that has never known War, a uniform becomes a Camp costume —

rarely in the history of Camp Phallogocentrism has the Male Member been worshipped so brazenly ———''

but it isn’t all cum ‘n go — there is still plenty of bromance (yes homo!) —

as TomFin’s output becomes more geared towards an Amerikan audience, his casting for b.d.s.m. scenes is not always race-blind —

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR (did they actually believe that it would work?) —

la mort est ce qui a été donné de plus précieux à l’homme

c’est pourquoi l’impiété suprême est d’en mal user —

mal mourir —

mal tuer —

(mais comment échapper à la fois au suicide et au meurtre?)

après la mort, l’amour

problème analogue : ni mauvaise jouissance, ni mauvaise privation

la guerre et eros sont les deux sources d’illusion et de mensonge parmi les hommes

leur mélange est la plus grande impureté.

(weil)

despite Homoütopia’s egalitarian ethos, certain (natural?) hierarchies tend to reassert themselves

70s

Dian Hanson:

As the 1970s progressed, gay sex became increasingly wild. Penicillin seemed to have conquered all sexually transmitted diseases, and sex appeared to be risk- as well as guilt-tree. Fisting the insertion of the hand into another man’s anus, and some-times even into regions well beyond it— was said to be the first new form of sexual intercourse invented for many centuries.

TomFin’s later drawings can be read as a fetishistic parody of the clone culture spawned by an earlier generation of TomFin’s drawings —

undeterred, TomFin continues to push the limits of “good taste” (aesthetically and morally) —

by the end of the 70s, TomFin’s portrayal of Gay Sex is positively Transcendental —

80s

TomFin’s output slows considerably over the next decade —

90s

TomFin dies in 1991.

Now that the technology is here to free humanity from toil and scarcity, are leftist intellectuals heralding our brave new world?

Ha ha! Ha ha!

Our culture’s bipolar response to our most impressive creation (it will either cure all disease or kill us all)1 can partly be explained by the mutual distrust between scientific and literary intellectuals observed by C.P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”:

The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment.

Snow goes on the observe that literary intellectuals are “natural luddites”:

The academics had nothing to do with the industrial revolution; as Corrie, the old Master of Jesus, said about trains running into Cambridge on Sunday, ‘It is equally displeasing to God and to myself. So far as there was any thinking in nine-teenth-century industry, it was left to cranks and clever workmen. American social historians have told me that much the same was true of the U.S. The industrial revolution, which began developing in New England fifty years or so later than ours, apparently received very little educated talent, either then or later in the nineteenth century. It had to make do with the guidance handymen could give it-sometimes, of course, handymen like Henry Ford, with a dash of genius

Faced with the obsolescence of human knowledge, many humanists seem to be choosing denial or panic. To help set all the hype and doom-mongering into perspective, there are few writers more capable than Robert Wright: a scientifically minded Buddhist*-inspired writer and broadcaster who is unafraid to tackle thorny political issues without overpoliticising them.2 In The God Test: AI and Our Coming Cosmic Reckonimg (2026), he offers an admirably succinct and lively explanation of what makes LLM so revolutionary: they developed the ability to think in a way that is analogous to how organic life developed the ability to think, through trial, selection and evolution. This analogy suggests that AI isn’t about to hit a wall. It will continue to develop in ways that will increasingly difficult for us to control.

If you don’t want to read the whole book, I can recommend a recent episode of Wright’s Non-Zero Podcast with Connor Leahy on “The Ideology Behind AI.3 I don’t know how helpful it is to dwell on the motives and weird sex lives of those summoning the machine gods/demons, except to realise that expecting these people to “self-regulate” in a way that avoids catastrophe is naive to the point of culpable negligence. The question is not should “we” regulate AI, but how (also who’s “we”?) There is no big red “Regulate AI!” button that the evil Republicans are unwilling to push, but can be pushed if “our guy” gets into office.

Let’s compare our current situation to the last time there was a bit of a wobble in public trust in the wisdom of the titans of industry. In response to the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks have been told to get their books in order and to take fewer risks, in exchange for easy profits from low interest rates. Most of the fun has gone out of Big Finance. Yes, the bankers are still filthy rich, but not through black magic. There is a lot of money that needs to go around to keep the global economy going and to a first approximation bankers simply keep a sliver of these funds in exchange for facilitating these movements. The market-to-book ratio of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase is a rather conservative 2.5. Things look very different on the West Coast. Microsoft’s market-to-book ratio is 10, i.e. for every dollar of assets certified by the public accountants, there is nine dollars of intangible value implied by the market’s valuation. Apple’s ratio is 50. Market participants clearly believe that the gains from AI will be substantial — and substantially privatised. This doesn’t strike me as a politically tenable situation — unless the whole world becomes China, which it might. What is to be done? Nationalise Apple? And then what?

Leahy grasps Nick Land’s simple message that Marx + AI = Hoorrah for Human Extinction! If value is defined in terms of human labour, and capital can create practically limitless copies of human labour, the value of human labour becomes zero. That means the bargaining power of labour, organised or unorganised, becomes zero. The system will have no need for humans, so it will continue without us. If we let it.

I don’t know if a nightmare scenario can be avoided. But I know it won’t be avoided if we don’t get our heads out of the sand. Start by reading Wright.

for the record, i don’t enjoy writing negative reviews

write better books please

xoxo

where have all the good straight (wo)men gone?

The last Jewish white male author. The last cis white gay. The last two lesbians. The last transexual. The last Afrikaner. If it’s a human breed you can bet it is dying: a species endangered if not actively threatened with genocide. In response to this chorus of vanishing voices, the straight female Phoebe Maltz Bovy says: me too, me and my kind are also disappearing (or what’s almost as bad: going out of fashion).2

They say il n’y a pas d’hors-texte de hors-texte.

un sujet grave

Judging by falling birthrates and my Substack feed, heteropessism is a serious problem, but rather than offering new insights, Bovy has chosen to simply rehash some of the stupidest things that celebrities and Internet randos have said (emphasis in original):

I’m not here to say that male and female sexuality are identical, or would manifest themselves as such in a sexism-free Utopia. Depending how you measure, Team Women are like so has observable facts on its side. Women are on average smaller and physically weaker than men, and we’re the ones who get pregnant and have babies. Even a trans-inclusive definition isn’t going to throw off those averages. Men will swipe yes I will sleep with that woman pretty much indiscriminately on apps. There have always been rather more men prepared to pay to have sex with women than vice versa. People who have taken testosterone—cis and trans alike—report sexual desires of an intensity that my dainty lady-brain could not fathom.

But is female desire really that different from male? If women aren’t sexual, what can explain all the efforts, across different societies, to curtail female sexuality? Why execute adulteresses or excise clitorises if not to keep us in check? (The existence of slut-shaming presupposes the existence of slut.) If sex is something women at most tolerate, what can explain the immense popularity of romance novels, which women read not as marital instruction manuals but as porn? If sex is just about placating husbands, why are some women the higher-libido partner in a libido-mismatched straight relationship? And if female sexuality is inherently fluid, how do we explain all the lesbians who have tried and failed at straightness, not to mention the ranks of straight women who have attempted in vain to expand their horizons?

Nobody’s saying straight women aren’t real, Phoebe, stop making things up. Except they are! When Emily Ratajkowski told Harper’s Bazaar, “I don’t really believe in straight people,” this read not as some bizarre off-the-cuff utterance of an avant-garde eccentric, but as a celebrity aligning herself with the zeitgeist. There are several separate theories that amount to a belief in the falseness of straight womanhood. I present each—along with my doubts—below.

Celebrities say the darnest things! There is no shortage of wacky statements that people seem to sincerely believe. I prefer to talk about vibes rather than the zetigeist, but OK, let’s take the statement “I don’t really believe in straight people by Emrata (whose existence I’m only aware of via the Red Scare podcast and a video ER did with Andrea Long Chu) seriously. Does Bovy help us trace the deep roots of this strange fruit? Ha ha! Ha ha!

Dr. Bovy has “a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University”, not that it is evident from reading The Last Straight Women. Bovy namechecks De Beavoir once, in the same sentence as Betty Friedan, to provide the social context in which a very important sitcom is set. She quotes a sentence from Germaine Greer’s “strange erudite coffee table book The Beautiful Boy” but has nothing to say about Sontag, Paglia or Butler, nevermind Irigaray or Wittig. I guess too many lezzers would distract from the book’s focus on straight women. (Bovy doesn’t mention the lavender scare).

[I’m not implying that Bovy is homophobic, I just wonder why she thought it important to write a whole book saying It’s OK to be straight!]

[[And it is OK to be straight. In fact, it’s more than OK: it’s fantastic! Some might say it’s perfectly natural. I’m a gay right-winger to the extent that I would like European “civilisation” to perpetuate itself so that I can fulfil my queer avuncular role of corrupting the youth.]]

[[[I actually kind of like women. Believe it or not, it was a woman who gave birth to me and nursed me and religiously took me to the public library every two weeks even though she exclusively reads the kind of books in which the male protagonist is a gruff but gold-hearted Christian fire fighter/medical doctor/viticulturist. I also have great respect for many self-proclaimed feminists (although I clearly prefer those like Murdoch who eschewed the label and simply wrote like a man). What I take issue with is the idea of female navel gazing as feminist praxis.]]]

je est une autre

Bovy’s dark double [not Phoebe-Waller Bridge (soz babe)], “the reactionary feminist”, is greeted with a curt nod and a quick dismal. This spectre is represented by the lopsided trio of Christine Emba, Louise Perry and Mary Harrington. [I’m not sure Emba appreciates the association with the two denizennes of TERF island, but I’m willing to whiteknight for the two ladies (not that they need it)]. In some places, Bovy reduces the reactionary trinity to only Perry as figurehead, as in the sentence That heterosexual sex tends to better suit men than women has been observed by everyone from radical feminist Andrea Dworkin to reactionary feminist Louis Perry. (I wonder what Madame Zeus would say about that!) Bovy treats Harrington like Brahma and never deals with her directly.

Here is how Bovy describes the reactionary feminist position:

They argue that men and women are more different than the liberal, decadent sex-positive sorts would have you believe. They criticize the Sexual Revolution head-on, in a way that #MeToo did not. Rather than aimlessly gesturing at the badness of men, they point to a liberal society that let men act, unchecked, the ways they do. Perry, in particular, makes the case that the people who want to have weird sex with a million different people tend to be men, and that post–Sexual Revolution society caters to their preferences.

The sex-positive feminism the reactionary feminists argue against, the sort that treats sexual escapades as a gender-neutral social good, had already gone out of style by the time these writings appeared. In its place was this amorphous idea that the status quo was bad, but so too was all that came before. Rather than classifying relationship dynamics as ever more problematic, they label casual sex itself the culprit. Unlike #MeToo feminists, the neo-traditionalists are not afraid to victim-blame. Don’t want to be creeped upon? Find yourself a husband. (This misses that there was plenty of rape and abuse in the good old days. Maybe more of it was happening within wedlock, but it was happening.) They agree with their progressive contemporaries that the modern young woman is miserable, but suggest chastity (or reticence) followed by traditional relationships with men as the solution. The problem isn’t predatory men but the libertine culture that encourages these male tendencies. (In the three young men who are having IRL sex, that is.) Perry and Emba both insist that “consent is not enough,” by which they mean that women sometimes leave legal encounters, ones that fall short of rape, feeling used. Change the culture—and the availability of women for casual sex—and the men will exchange their date-rape tablets for briefcases, or something.

Bovy is so eager to wave away these matronly concerns to return to her preferred topic: lusting after the male-bodied guilt-free. Perry has explicitly stated that her argument for societal pressure to make sexual norms more female-coded is based on what we know about the preferences of most woman: she has not only acknowledged the existences of “straight” female outliers like Aella and Bonnie Blue (neither of whom are mentioned by Bovy), but has recorded cordial conversations with both them.

Bovy again:

The reactionary feminists are right to question the centrality of consent to sex discourse, but the problem with consent-focus is that it makes everything about the sex women don’t want to be having, rather than about the sex they do. They miss that one reason women claim to regret casual encounters is for fear of being slut-shamed, of being thought strange or desperate. The time-worn pressures on young women not to sleep around never really went anywhere, despite the arrival of a whole new set of pressures on women to do so. When a married, middle-aged woman refers to her youthful sleeping around in regretful terms, the expression revisionist history rather comes to mind.

Believe women! Unless she is middle-aged and referring to her youthful sleeping around in regretful terms… What is worse? Being called a slut or getting all-but-raped? Bovy mentions Me Too, but not Epstein (which nobody can claim nobody has been talking about) or the “grooming gangs” in England (ditto). Bovy tries to portray the concerns of the female reactionaries as schoolmarmish and passées, like Dworkin’s dungarees, even though her targets have long moved on from the gender wars, having declared victory on that front. Under the guise of a bold prediction, Perry wrote in March 2024:

[T]ransgenderism is on the way out, along with all the other manifestations of twenty-first century hyper-progressive gender politics. For good and ill.

That means that your great-grandchildren will not use they/them pronouns, and the military and police will never end up 50/50 female. It also means that the US Presidency will never be won by a woman, and in the (relatively near) future there will be many fewer women found in positions of authority in public life. If the last few decades of gender politics are remembered at all, it will be as a humorous blip. “Did you know that people in the early twenty-first century believed that women had penises?” some Stephen Fry-like figure will chuckle on a quiz show centuries from now, to the disbelief of his all-male panel.

But that doesn’t mean that wokeness per se is on the way out. Far from it.

One particular branch of wokeness that is going absolutely nowhere is the politics of racial grievance. In fact, it’s set to accelerate, particularly in some countries. Expect to see more affirmative action in higher education and more race-based quotas for government contracts. Expect to see more controversy over two-tiered policing. Expect, above all, to see more wins for politicians like George Galloway, who have cottoned onto the fact that appealing to voters’ sectarian instincts is often a successful strategy. “Free, free Palestine”? Buy buy buy!

[Since Perry has a gig producing British decline porn for the Substack arm of the Wall Street Journal one could tell her that whores in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but that is a cat fight for another day.]

être femme, c’est littéralement impossible

I want to return to this bit, in which Bovy channels her inner Greta Gerwig [Barbie (2023) does get a mention, in fact the word “Barbie” appears 36 times in the text):

But is female desire really that different from male? If women aren’t sexual, what can explain all the efforts, across different societies, to curtail female sexuality? Why execute adulteresses or excise clitorises if not to keep us in check? (The existence of slut-shaming presupposes the existence of slut.) If sex is something women at most tolerate, what can explain the immense popularity of romance novels, which women read not as marital instruction manuals but as porn?

Note how breezily Bovy mentions executed adulteresses and excised clitorises and porn-for-woman in the same breath. As an AMAB queen, I can’t help but read this as a case of throwing everything except the kitchen sink at the imaginary intellectual opponent arguing that maybe men and women are radically different, Schopenhauer, sexual dimorphism, natural selection, mumble mumble [actually Bovy hardly considers that fact that in the eons of pre-history, “straight women” faced different evolutionary pressures than “straight men” and that it is therefore not unreasonable to expect that something like “erotic desire” might have evolved differently]. I can’t tell if this is a shoutout to the global sistahood, or whether Bovy is unaware that “executed adulteresses and excised clitorises” is not just something that one reads about in texts, but something that is actually still happening i.r.l.

Bovy writes as if the pressures on straight women are not different whether they live in Tehran or Tel Aviv, Kabul or Kansas, Mogadishu or Minneapolis. [A more honest title for the book would have been The Last Straight White Feminist]. Apart from her own, the perspectives Bovy offers mostly come from the nearest open browser tab, or a sitcom from the middle of the last century. Compare this first-person approach to the one taken by Ariel Levy in her book Female Chauvinists Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005), which is not, as the title may suggest, simply a sex-negative screed, but a careful social documetary, including original interviews, with, among others

• attendees of Girls Gone Wild party where girls gladly flash their tits to whomever asks

• Christie Hefner, Hugh’s daughter and at the time the chairman and CEO of Playboy Enterprises

• Susan Brownmiller, who had famously clashed with H. Heffner in the 1970’s on the Dick Cassidy show

• attendees of a “CAKE party”3

• Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying (1973)

• Jacqui Ceballos, a former president of New York NOW

• a trio of friends who share a taste for raunch: Maxim, porn, Howard Stern, Playboy, you name it.

• San Francisco bois and FTMs

OK, so Dr. Bovy isn’t a journalist or a social researcher. She focuses on the “close reading” of texts, those texts just happen to be hot garbage. But why choose to focus exclusively on hot garbage? Is there some Faustian bargain that has to be signed together with a book contract. Since when? Consider the texts the (admittedly non-straight) female intellectual Susan Sontag did a close reading of in essays first published in the Partisan Review and later in collected in Against Interpretation (1961 ): “Sartre’s Saint Genet,” “The Death of Tragedy,” “Nathalie Sarraute and the Novel”, “Going to Theatre etc.”, “Notes on Camp”, “Marat/Sade/Artaud” and “On Style” [not to mention “Simone Weil”, first published in The New York Review of Books. Sontag offers to her readers, des deux sexes et d’autres, a portal, not to her personal boudoir but to other voices, other rooms.

Bovy doesn't mention Levy’s book, even though the stories of the bois and FTMs are very pertinent to the whole opting-out of women thing. She also doesn’t mention Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020) by Abigail Shrier, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (2021) by Helen Joyce or Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism (2021) by Kathleen Stock, even though two-thirds of these books were written by straight women and not nobody talked about them during the narrow period on which Bovy sets her focus. Bovy also doesn't mention the 2024 report of the UK’s Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people conducted by Dr. Hillary Cass, even though it contains the kind of graphs that can generate discourse for days:

I have never obtained a coveted Ph.D. badge, but I know enough about the norms of academia to know that it good scholarly practice to cite other work in one’s area of inquiry, especially if one wishes to refute their claims. You can’t just put all these other straight (and Heaven forbid — (faux) queer) women in a basket of deplorables labeled “radical and reactionary feminists” and ignore them. I mean, you can. These norms are obviously not enforced when one is writing for le grand public. But it’s a choice.

The “transgender critic” Andrea Long Chu does get cited as a prominent proponent of the idea that femaleness is submissiveness. Bovy isn’t having it:

While Chu is a theorist making ever so sophisticated arguments (femaleness as an abstract quality not restricted to biological women), one nevertheless arrives at the same place. The penis visits, the vagina receives visitors, fair enough. It doesn’t work to project, from this anatomical reality, a grand theory of women-are-like-so. Spend three minutes in the world of actual people, and whatever notions you may have had about a man active, woman passive division crumble. They don’t have to hold true during sex and they make no sense whatsoever in clothed settings.

I listened to Greer read her 1976 text The Female Eunuch some time after listening to Chu read her 2019 text Females4 and I realised that Chu’s “subversive” notion of “femaleness” is simply an “appropriation” of the concept of “femininity” critiqued by Greer and other paleo terfs. Too clever by half, one might say, although note that Bovy isn’t willing to say that Chu is wrong in theory, only in practice. Although I would’t be so quick to offer up the world tel quel — or recent audiovisual texts — as incontrovertible proof that “notions you may have had about a man active, woman passive division” are pure fabrication. Would that be the conclusion when presented with carefully selected three minute fragments from, to name a few recent examples, The Substance (2024) directed by (straight?) woman Coralie Fargeat, Babygirl (2024) directed by (straight?) woman Halina Reijn and “Withering Heights” directed by (married, straight?) woman Emerald Fennel (2026).

Bovy doesn’t mention Dr. Alfred Kinsey, even though the “findings” he promulgated in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), that 37% of males and 13% of females had had at least one homosexual experience to orgasm, indeed bolsters her argument that the supposed greater fluidity of “female” sexuality in our own time is just as much a social construct as the greater fluidity of “male” sexuality back in the day.

are straight women boring?

This is what one might call a loaded question, so let me stick to the facts.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s infamous discussion on/of women was first published in 1951 as Chapter XXVII of Volume II of Parerga und Paralipomena (Berlin: A. W. Hayn). It was first translated into French in 1880 and into English a decade later.

In this text, Schopenhauer argues that everyone, even Rousseau, admitted that a (straight?) woman may be very cultured, but she is rarely visited by genius:

You need only look at the way in which she is formed, to see that woman is not meant to undergo great labor, whether of the mind or of the body. She pays the debt of life not by what she does, but by what she suffers; by the pains of child-bearing and care for the child, and by submission to her husband, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion. The keenest sorrows and joys are not for her, nor is she called upon to display a great deal of strength. The current of her life should be more gentle, peaceful and trivial than man’s, without being essentially happier or unhappier.

Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long—a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man, who is man in the strict sense of the word. See how a girl will fondle a child for days together, dance with it and sing to it; and then think what a man, with the best will in the world, could do if he were put in her place.

Such obversations suggest why women have long bristled at their capacity for birth being used as an excuse for treating them as a second sex. But what is the alternative? Do we declare the war of the sexes a tie? Do let the boys and girls take turns being on top? Is being a member of a secret third gender better than being a member of the second sex? How about a fourth, a fifth? One doesn’t have to be an economist to notice the diminishing returns.

Let’s look at the numbers: here is the breakdown of the list of canonical 20th century authors compiled by a panel of literary experts on substack.com:

There’s no denying that Schopenhauer was a male chauvinist (out of decorum, we can leave out references to farm animals), but this does necessarily mean that he hated or feared woman or thought they had nothing to contribute to intellectual discourse:

However many disadvantages all this may involve, there is at least this to be said in its favor; that the woman lives more in the present than the man, and that, if the present is at all tolerable, she enjoys it more eagerly. This is the source of that cheerfulness which is peculiar to women, fitting her to amuse man in his hours of recreation, and, in case of need, to console him when he is borne down by the weight of his cares.

It is by no means a bad plan to consult women in matters of difficulty, as the Germans used to do in ancient times; for their way of looking at things is quite different from ours, chiefly in the fact that they like to take the shortest way to their goal, and, in general, manage to fix their eyes upon what lies before them; while we, as a rule, see far beyond it, just because it is in front of our noses. In cases like this, we need to be brought back to the right standpoint, so as to recover the near and simple view.

Then, again, women are decidedly more sober in their judgment than we are, so that they do not see more in things than is really there; whilst, if our passions are aroused, we are apt to see things in an exaggerated way, or imagine what does not exist.

The weakness of their reasoning faculty also explains why it is that women show more sympathy for the unfortunate than men do, and so treat them with more kindness and interest; and why it is that, on the contrary, they are inferior to men in point of justice, and less honorable and conscientious. For it is just because their reasoning power is weak that present circumstances have such a hold over them, and those concrete things, which lie directly before their eyes, exercise a power which is seldom counteracted to any extent by abstract principles of thought, by fixed rules of conduct, firm resolutions, or, in general, by consideration for the past and the future, or regard for what is absent and remote. Accordingly, they possess the first and main elements that go to make a virtuous character, but they are deficient in those secondary qualities which are often a necessary instrument in the formation of it.

Does this offend you, ladies? Learn to take it like a man.

“gay” “male” “history”

Bovy doesn’t appear to be threatened by Chu’s appropriation of femaleness, since as a 100% straight woman she identifies as FnH (Frumpy ‘n Horny), i.e. she has little love to to spare for herself as a woman. She seems more affronted on behalf of gay men by the spectre of a “straight woman” larping as a “gay man”, with a surprisingly sceptical read of “Harry Nicholas’s 2023 memoir A Trans Man Walks into a Gay A Bar”:

By transitioning, Nicholas gains access to a type of man-liking and man-pursuing that is simply not available to women. He visits gay bars and saunas, finds more men on apps than he knows what to do with, and makes repeated reference to how freeing it is to be queer and thus not part of the heteronormative constraints that lead people to settle down with a partner. He has nevertheless, by the book’s end, settled down with another man.

Nicholas writes in strangely confident tones about things he believes straight people are incapable of noticing: the rainbow flags on a gay bar, or the longing look of a man in a David Hockney painting. For Nicholas, being a gay man, rather than a straight woman, means more than just getting to live as the man he knows himself to be while having the male partners he desires. It’s also membership in an in-group. It’s access to a sensibility.

Is someone with a vagina arriving at a gay male space—or in a gay man’s bed—a transgender pioneer, or are they disrespecting gay men? Opinions evidently differ. When Nicholas uses “we” and “our” to speak of gay male history, there is a part of me that questions whether he really ought to be including himself in the history of—how else to put this?—men into dick. But I’m a cishet woman, right? So I’m not meant to question such things. But you know who has questioned them? Some cis gay men.

Nicholas is no bachelorette. He nevertheless writes about the backlash he’s experienced from within the gay male community. “As a publicly out trans gay man I have been labelled a ‘sex tourist,’ accused of ‘committing rape by deception’ and told that I am appropriating gay culture.” He rejects this interpretation. But at the end of the day, this is less about his persuasiveness than his lived experience. He writes about falling into the trap of having too much casual sex…with men, via Grindr. I can sit here saying that a gay man should have every right to demand that his partners have penises, but if some gay men themselves aren’t bothered (he writes that some are, some aren’t; Becker, the detransitioner, evidently had no trouble finding men on these same apps), who am I to say they should be?

Bovy is intent on staying her lane, even though some of her best friends are gay/queer. I’ve long criticised the homoreactionary claim to “gay and lesbian” as opposed to “queer” “spaces”. Nevermind the dolls, do we still have to talk about bi (in)visibility in 2026? Apparently so.

Many moons ago, I wrote (under the thin veneer of a fictional persona:

The problem with Queer Theory is not that it is queer but that it is theory.

The solution is not a more jealously guarded academic Bantustan.

In every society, the clerical caste needs to prove itself useful (or at least not actively harmful) to the economically productive population. American academics are clearly failing at this task. It’s a much bigger problem than a lack of respect towards cis white gays.

Fortunately, the academy is not the only way to maintain cultural traditions and much of gay culture is not Yanigihara or Hearstopper. I am no fan of Yanigihara-style gay trauma porn, but plenty of gays are. Luckily, there are many more choices on offer in the gay cultural buffet: RuPaul, Troye Sivan, Kim Petras, Dua Lipa, Mike White, Jennifer Coolridge, John Cameron Mitchell, Pedro Almodóvar, Tom Ford, Alexander McQueen, Celine Dion, Madonna, Cher, Elton John, Judy Garland, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Rimbaud, Michaelango and Plato, to name but a few. Not all of these artists are gay and neither is all of their art, but they all inspire millions of actually existing gays — what else is a culture for? And as far as I know, none of them were the products of a Gay Studies department. We don’t need more Bergmans to write about Holleran and Kramer, we need more Hollerans and Kramers!

I have my differences with the gay contributors to the gay symposium Inversion: Gay Life after the Homosexual (2025), but at least the co-host has the tzedakah to acknowledge the cumdump in the room. Allow me to indulge in another self-citation:

It is also not obvious to me why we should analogise gay history to the history of the English or the Poles rather than to the history of tarot or opera.

I believe that there are certain social constructs like “citizen” and “debtor” that should, for the time being, be treated as necessary evils. I believe there are other social constructs such as “straight”, “gay” and “queer” that should be treated like mind-forg'd manacles to be melted down and turned into something more beautiful (un veau d'or, peut-être?)

keeping the gate after the gay horse has bolted

Bovy writes:

If you’re a young woman who likes men, but whose interest in sex is perhaps less than your boyfriend’s, you could cop to fulfilling a stereotype about women having lower libidos than men. Or you could do something more modern and situate yourself on the asexuality spectrum. You can call yourself a “demisexual”—a type of asexual—and have people anxiously googling what you are, lest they offend a marginalized minority, only to learn that demisexuals are people who only have sex once they’ve formed an emotional bond. Conversely, if you’re a promiscuous woman whose many partners are all men, you can climb under the queer umbrella via self-identification as kinky, polyamorous, or even hypersexual.

I’ve expressed similar annoyance at the queer larpers, but on reflection, if we expect everyone to devote an entire calendar month each year to express just how proud they are of us, it would be rather churlish to check the papers of those who identify with gay history. There is no reason why someone from Nigeria cannot develop a passion for Anglo-Saxon history. Why should the “kinky” be put in a different category from the “gay”, what does any of this have to do with equality before the law?

In Hygiène de l’assassin (1992), the debut novel of Baroness Fabienne Claire (dite Amélie) Nothomb (1966/67—), Prétextat Tach is a morbidly obese Nobel-prize-winning author performing his splenetic swan song in a series of five tête-à-tête interviews. The final dialogue, the only with a female, quickly turns from l’Interview to Le Procès-Verbal. It is among his swampy ressentiments that I found the perfect image for what bothered me most about Naomi Kanakia’s What’s So Great About the Great Books? Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It Might Destroy You) (yes more than everything else I’ve mentioned already) [my translation]:1

They are scuba readers [les lecteurs-grenouilles]. They make up the vast majority of human readers, and yet I only discovered their existence very lately. I can be so naive! I had thought that everyone read like me ; me, I read like I eat : meaning not just that I need to do it, but especially that it enters into my constituencies [mes composantes] and modifies them. One isn’t the same after eating blood sausage or caviar; one is also not the same after reading Kant (God help me) or Queneau. Now, when I say “one” I should say “me and a few others”, because most people emerge from Proust [Joyce] or from Simenon [A. Christie] in an identical state, without having lost a crumb of what they had before and without having acquired a single crumb in addition. They have read, that is all: in the best cases, they know “what it’s about”. Don’t think I’m embellishing. How many times have I asked intelligent people “Did this book change you?” and they looked at me wide-eyed, as if to say “Why would you want it to change me?”

The image that came to my perverted mind to illustrate this form of aseptic, prophylactic reading, is of trying to perform cunnilingus through a dental dam: what even is the point? [Full disclosure: I’ve never given or received cunnilingus with or without the use of a dental dam]. Put more charitably, most people read for the same reason other people knit or do a crossword puzzle: to pass the time, to occupy the mind so it does not go wandering and falling into a pit of despair or inchoate rage. In a post from April 2024, entitled “Books don’t cause violence: The Columbia protests have no implications for university curricula”, Kanakia seems to endorse the view that literature, like everything else on this planet, is “mostly harmless”:

That’s why I’ve always been careful to avoid the idea that the Great Books will help you live a happier or more fulfilled life. I think the Great Books are invaluable if you want to live the life of the mind. I think if you’re a writer or a thinker, the Great Books are very grounding, because they put you in touch with universal spiritual values.

Which is to say, there are certain values that only make sense in the aesthetic or intellectual realm. For instance, intellectual integrity: the willingness to be honest in assessing your own reactions and to refuse to say anything that you know to be barbarous or stupid. The Great Books embody that integrity: they don’t attempt to make arguments (e.g. the argument that imbibing decolonial ideas will make kids violent) that very clearly and obviously do not make sense. The Great Books teach you that there are lots of things that you can say, but that it’s not worthwhile saying anything that you don’t personally believe to be true.

That kind of integrity really only matters in the intellectual or creative context. It’s not really useful in every-day life, and, what’s more, in every-day life our passions are so strong that we often forget the lessons of the Great Books. If a person out there is able to have integrity when they argue with their spouse, it’s probably not something they learned from reading Plato—it’s more likely something they saw modeled for them by their friends and family. The kind of animal self-control you need to live an honorable life in the world is simply not something you’re going to get from reading books.

The corollary here is: if you aren’t going to be a writer or thinker, do you need the Great Books?

And the answer is…probably not. But they’ll certainly do you no harm.

Certainly! If there are indeed “certain values that only make sense in the aesthetic or intellectual realm” and acting with integrity in the context of an intellectual argument is in no way related to acting with integrity in an argument with a spouse, then it would be pointless to argue about the relative merits of Shakespeare over sissy hypno, or Goethe over gooning. Perhaps because the medium requires it, Kanakia suggests in her book that the positive impact of the Great Books on the reader’s life will be somewhere between falling in love and a medium-sized miracle, all without challenging any of the reader’s sincerely held beliefs. In a footnote to the statement “The Great Books contain much that I, in particular, would consider to be false.”, Kanakia writes [emphasis in original]:

I am using true and false very freely here, but why mince words? I have beliefs that I regard as absolutely true. For instance, I do not think women are mentally inferior to men. Nothing that disputes this belief will read to me as being true.

I don’t know what an absolute belief is. I have beliefs that are more or less strongly held, but my fundamental position is one of radical agnosticism, which does not mean that I assign a 50% probability to Christianity or any other human religion being true in some absolute sense, but rather that I believe that the Absolute is by definition something of which we cannot get more than intimations. In explaining her reasons for refusing baptism, Simone Weil wrote [my translation]:2

In my reasonings on the insolubility of the problem of God, I had never foreseen the possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, here below, between a human being and God. I had vaguely heard people speak about things of this sort, but I had never believed it. In Fioretti [di San Francisco], the stories of apparitions repelled me [me rebutaient] more than anything else, like the miracles in the Gospels.

Moreover, in Christ’s sudden possession [emprise] of me, neither the senses nor the imagination played any part ; I only became aware through the suffering of the presence of a love that is analogous to that which one reads in the smile of a beloved face.

I had never read the mystics, because I had never felt anything that ordered me to read them. In reading as in other things, I’ve always forced myself to practice obedience. There is nothing more favourable for intellectual progress, because I read as much as possible of that I hungred for, at the moment that I hungred for it, and so I didn’t read, I ate.

God had in His mercy prevented me from reading the mystics, so that it was evident that I did not fabricate this absolutely unexpected contact. However, I still half-refused, not my love, but my intelligence. Because it appeared certain to me, and I still believe it today, that one can never resist God too much if one does so out of a concern with the truth. Christ would have us prefer the Truth to Him, since before being the Christ, He is the Truth. If one turns away from Him to go towards the Truth, one won’t go very far without falling into His arms. After that, I became aware that Plato was a mystic, that all of the Iliad is bathed in Christian light, and that Dionysus and Osiris are in some sense Christ Himself ; and my love became redoubled.

I have never asked myself whether Jesus was or was not an incarnation of God ; but in fact I am unable to think of Him other than thinking of Him as God. In the spring of 1940, I read the Bhagavad Gita. Curiously, it is in reading these marvellous words which sound so Christian, placed in the mouth of an incarnation of God, that I felt with force that we owe to religious truth something quite different than the attachment we owe to a beautiful poem, a categorically different kind of attachment.

As someone who takes both religion and spirituality seriously, without endorsing one or the other, I find it in bad taste to include The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, The Bhagavad Gita [even though it is included in the aforementioned] and The Koran [but curiously not The Bible or The Tao Te Ching] on a “reading plan” together with Saul Bellow and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

At one point Kanakia writes:

The past is a very different place, and the contrast between the past and the present make any modern differences across cultures seem paltry. We live in a global culture now: If I were to go to any country in the world today, I would see people talking on their cell phones, driving cars, laboring for wages, reading books and newspapers, and so forth. I would see nothing that even remotely resembled the Anglo-Saxon poet wandering through these desolated baths that seem to be the work of giants.

On dit que le passé, c’est un autre pays. Tu sais ce qui est aussi un autre pays?

Un autre pays.

(De)constructing The List

• The List consists of 200 works of any genre published as books between the years of Our Lord nineteen-hundred and nineteen-hundred-nine-and-ninety.

• In square brackets there is a secret Secondary List of 200 works of any genre published as books between the years of Our Lord nineteen-hundred and nineteen-hundred-nine-and-ninety by the same 200 authors.12

• Primary and secondary allocations have been done mostly on a whim and should not be taken as a judgement either way.3 Sometimes a work is so essential I left it out completely (Brave New World, 1984, etc.).

• The List is organised chronologically according to the publication date of the Primary Choice, generally but not always in the language the work was originally written.

• The inclusion of a book on the Primary or Secondary list does not imply that it is one of the “best” books of the 20th century or that it is necessarily even a “good” book by aesthetic or moral standards. However, including them together on The List implies that the reader (Author) ought to attempt to read at least some of these books or something similar (the heavy philosophical tomes are mostly there to make the other items seem more manageable).

• The List tries to balance the “Great Conversation” and “Great Read” criteria Kanakia expertly dissects in her book What is so Great About the Great Books: Why You Should Read Classic Literature (Even Though It May Destroy You) (2026), with the caveat that the adjective “great” is best left in the 19th century, together with the plug-in vibrator and the telegraph. The so-called “Great War” was followed by another great (??!) war,4 the “Great Moderation” by the great immoderation, etc.

• One can think of “must reads” in orders of magnitude (a.k.a. levels of autism):

  • 10^0 = the Bible for Kanakia; Shakespeare for Pistelli.

  • 10^1 = the kind of question you can ask on a first date

  • 10^2 = popular among cultural strivers irrespective of the breadth of the scope (100 best melodies of all time; the 100 steamiest moments in Heated Rivalry). Here are some 100 lists consulted in the curation of the list

    • Le Monde’s 100 livres du siècle (+100 livres on the expert-chosen long list that le peuple thumbed their noses at).

    • The Guardian’s 100 best novels of all time across the universe hand-selected by your beloved literary elders (+100 best novels according to the Hobbits)

    • The Modern Library’s 100 Top Novels (+100 Best Nonfiction)5

  • 10^3 = for booksmaxxers, literary gooners and idiots savant, there is this the aptly named https://thegreatestbooks.org, where you can find a list of “The Greatest Books of All Times” ranked from #1 to #17111.

• Numerological considerations aside, 200 + 200 is intimidating enough to be humbling without seeming literally impossible.

• In terms of DEI, The List managed to decrease the SWMP6 from 80% to 60% compared to Le Monde’s longest. This necessitated letting go of some old stalwarts (soz Messrs. Greene, Vonnegut, Waugh etc.)7, although to keep things balanced I had to retain the most reactionary specimens.8 The representation of G&Bs are only slightly overegged; the Ls have probably been shafted inadvertently, I settled on Kate Bornstein for the Ts;9 there are plenty of Qs; no Is going by the Author’s knowledge; a few As10 among the more mystically inclined; the ignoble +s are represented by protagonists of many novels on the Primary List, if not the necessarily the authors themselves.11

• In terms of linguistic diversity, both lists are pretty dismal:

  

• Whether you react to this list with drops of jouissance or experience it as an assault on the spleen, any feedback on factual errors, lapses in moral or aesthetic judgement and poor taste would be humbly accepted. Unlike The Guardian’s lists, The List will always be accompanied by The List of Errata and Misjudgements in The List.

• The Author of the List has consulted with and drawn inspiration from , , , , , , , and many other voices on this strange little Utopia of the mind. The final judgement lies with the Author, as it does with RuPaul and the Author of Days. Any sins of commission or omission are the Author’s own.

• The Author attempted to make the list more about facts and less about feelings, but quickly realised that this was a hopeless endeavour. People read for different reasons but least among them is learning facts (unless you’re some Boomer Gammon). The List could be taken as a suggested starting point for answering the question “What makes us human?”; or rather as gesturing towards various different starting points for answering such a question.

• The Author of the List mainly used Wikipedia as a reference point for the consensus view of the most important works of authors more alien to the Author. Other forms of artificial intelligence contributed only clerical skills.

• The List is presented without further commentary.

• The esoteric message of the List is: read backwards.12

道
可
道
非
常
道

The List

1. KIPLING, Rudyard: Kim(1901), [Just So Stories(1902)]

2. GIDE, André: L’Immoraliste(1902), [Les Caves du Vatican(1914)]

3. JAMES (H), Henry: The Wings of the Dove(1902), [The Ambassadors(1903)]

4. JAMES (W), William: The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature(1902), [A Pluralistic Universe(1909)]

5. DU BOIS, W.EB: The Souls of Black Folk(1903), [Dark Princess(1928)]

6. PROUST, Marcel: La Bible d’Amiens(1904), [Du côté de chez Swann(1913)]

7. CONRAD, Joseph: Nostromo(1904), [The Secret Agent(1907)]

8. WEBER, Max: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus(1905), [Geistige Arbeit als Beruf(1919)]

9. WHARTON, Edith: The House of Mirth(1905), [The Age of Innocence(19210)]

10. MUSIL, Robert: Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß(1906), [Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften(1930)]

11. RUSSELL, Bertrand: Principia Mathematica(1910), [Why I Am Not a Christian(1927)]

12. নাথ ঠাকুর, রবীন্দ্রনাথ: গোরা (1910), [মানুষের ধর্ম (1931)]

13. MANN, Thomas: Tod in Venedig(1912), [Der Zauberberg(1924)]

14. CROWLEY, Aleister: Magick (Book 4)(1913), [The Book of Lies(19123)]

15. APOLLINAIRE, Guillaume: Alcools(1913), [Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d’Orphée(1911)]

16. KAFKA, Franz: La Métamorphose(1915), [The Trial(1925)]

17. KEYNES, John: The Economic Consequences of the Peace(1919), [The General Theory(1936)]

18. JÜNGER, Ernst: Storm of Steel(1920), [On the Marble Cliffs(1939)]

19. POUND, Ezra: Hugh Selwyn Mauberley(1920), [The Pisan Cantos(1948)]

20. YEATS, WB: Michael Robartes and the Dancer(1921), [A Vision(1925)]

21. JOYCE, James: Ulysses(1922), [Dubliners(1914)]

22. HESSE, Hermann: Siddhartha(1922), [Steppenwolf(1927)]

23. ZWEIG, Stefan: Brief einer Unbekannten(1922), [Magellan. Der Mann und seine Tat(1938)]

24. SHAW, G.B.: Saint Joan(1923), [The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God(1932)]

25. STEVENS, Wallace: Harmonium(1923), [The Auroras of Autumn(1950)]

26. FROST, Robert: New Hampshire(1923), [A Masque of Reason(1945)]

27. FITZGERALD, F. Scott: The Great Gatsby(1925), [Tender Is the Night(1934)]

28. MOFOLO, : Chaka(1925), [Moeti oa Bochabela(1907)]

29. HEMINGWAY, Ernest: The Sun Also Rises(1926), [For Whom the Bell Tolls(193040)]

30. CHRISTIE, Agatha: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd(1926), [The Mousetrap(191554)]

31. Булгаков, Булгаков,: Морфий(1926), [Мастер и Маргарита(1967)]

32. WOOLF, Virginia: To the Lighthouse(1927), [Orlando(1928)]

33. HEIDEGGER, Martin: Sein und Zeit(1927), [Einführung in die Metaphysik(1935)]

34. महात्मा, गांधी: સત્યના પ્રયોગો અથવા આત્મકથા,(1927), [Satyagraha in South Africa(1928)]

35. LORCA, Federico: Romancero gitano(1928), [Bodas de sangre(1933)]

36. BATAILLE, Georges: Histoire de l’œil(1928), [L’Expérience intérieure(1943)]

37. BARRIE, J.M.: Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up(1928), [Peter and Wendy(1911)]

38. LAWRENCE, D.H.: Lady Chatterley’s Lover(1928), [Sons and Lovers(1913)]

39. BENJAMIN, Walter: Einbahnstraße(1928), [Das Passagen-Werk(1982)]

40. FAULKNER, William: The Sound and the Fury(1929), [As I lay dying(1930)]

41. ARENDT, Hannah: Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin(1929), [The Origins of Totalitarianism(1951)]

42. KLAGES, Ludwig: Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele(1929), [Vom kosmogonischen Eros(1922)]

43. RILKE, Rainer: Briefe an einen jungen Dichter(1929), [Duineser Elegien(19223)]

44. DÖBLIN, Alfred: Berlin Alexanderplatz(1929), [Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende(1956)]

45. FREUD, Sigmund: Civilisation and Its Discontents(1930)Das Unbehagen in der Kultur(1930), [The Interpretation of Dreams(1899)Totem und Tabu(1913)]

46. ARTAUD, Antonin: Le Moine (trans. of Lewis)(1931), [Le Théâtre et son double(1938)]

47. HUSSERL, Edmund: Méditations cartésiennes: Introduction à la phénoménologie(1931), [Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie(1936)]

48. CÉLINE, Louis-Ferdinand: Voyage au bout de la nuit(1932), [D’un château l’autre(1957)]

49. BROCH, Hermann: Die Schlafwandler(1932), [Der Tod des Vergil(1945)]

50. VALERY, Paul: L’Idée fixe(1932), [Le Cimetière marin(1920)]

51. ORWELL, George: Burmese Days(1934), [Animal Farm(1945)]

52. MILLER, Henry: Tropic of Cancer(1934), [The Rosy Crucifixion(1949)]

53. GRAVES, Robert: I, Claudius(1934), [The White Goddess(1948)]

54. TOYNBEE, Arnold: A Study of History(1934), [A Study of History(1934), The Armenian Atrocities: The Murder of a Nation (1915)]

55. CANETTI, Elias: Auto-da-Fé(1935), [Crowds and Power(1960)]

56. HERGÉ, : The Blue Lotus(1936), [Tintin au Congo(1931)]

57. LOVECRAFT, HP: At the Mountains of Madness(1936), [The History of the Necronomicon(1938)]

58. 老舍, : 骆驼祥子(Rickshaw Boy)(1936), [四世同堂(1944)]

59. BARNES, Djuna: Nightwood(1936), [The Book of Repulsive Women(1915)]

60. WILLIAMS, William Carlos: Adam & Eve & The City(1936), [Paterson(1946)]

61. DINESEN, Isak: Den afrikanske farm(1937), [Anecdotes of Destiny(1958)]

62. CHURCHILL, Winston: Great Contemporaries(1937), [The Second World War(1948)]

63. STEIN, Gertrude: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights(1938*), [The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas(1933)]

64. CÉSAIRE, Aimé: Une tempête (d’après La Tempête de Shakespeare) (adaptation pour un théâtre nègre)Cahier d’un retour au pays natal(1939), [Cahier d’un retour au pays natal(1939)Une tempête (d’après La Tempête de Shakespeare (adaptation pour un théâtre nègre)(1969)]

65. BLANCHOT, Maurice: Thomas the Obscure(1941), [Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine(1986)]

66. WEST, Rebecca: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon(1941), [The Return of the Soldier(1918)]

67. GENET, Jean: Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs(1943), [Les Bonnes(1947)]

68. ELIOT, T.S.: Four Quartets(1943), [The Hollow Men(1925)]

69. RAND, Ayn: The Fountainhead(1943), [Atlas Shrugged(1957)]

70. COLETTE, : Gigi(1944), [Chéri(1920)]

71. WRIGHT, Richard: Black Boy(1945), [Native Son(1940)]

72. VON HAYEK, Friedrich: Der Weg zur Knechtschaft(19454*), [The Constitution of Liberty(1960)]

73. KOJEVE, Alexandre: Introduction à la lecture de Hegel(1947), [Kant(1973)]

74. AUDEN, W.H.: The Shield of AchillesThe Age of Anxiety(1947), [The Age of Anxiety(1947)], The Shield of Achilles (1955)]

75. CAPOTE, Truman: Other Voices, Other Rooms(1948), [In Cold Blood(1966)]

76. DE BEAUVOIR, Simone: Les Mandarins(1949), [Le Deuxième Sexe(194954)]

77. LESSING, Doris: The Grass Is Singing(1950), [Shikasta(1979)]

78. CAMUS, Albert: L’homme révolté(1951), [La Chute(1956)La Peste (1947)]

79. YOURCENAR, Marguerite: Mémoires d’Hadrien(1951), [L’Œuvre au noir(1968)]

80. WEIL, Simone: Lettre à un religieux(1951), [La Pesanteur et la grâce(1947)]

81. ASIMOV, Isaac: Foundation(1951), [I, Robot(1950)]

82. STEINBECK, John: East of Eden(1952), [Grapes of Wrath(1939)]

83. SARTRE, Jean-Paul: Saint Genet, comédien et martyr(1952), [Huis Clos(1944)]

84. BECKETT, Samuel: En attendant Godot(1952), [Murphy(1938)]

85. STRAUSS, Leo: Natural Right and History(1953), [Persecution and the Art of Writing(1941*)]

86. WITTGENSTEIN, Ludwig: Philosophical Investigations(1953), [Über Gewißheit(198469)]

87. HUXLEY, Aldous: The Doors of Perception(1954), [The Devils of Loudun(1952)]

88. TOLKIEN, J.R.R.: The Lord of the Rings(1954), [The Silmarillion(1977)]

89. NEEDHAM., Joseph: Science and Civilisation in China(1954), [The Great Amphibium(1931)]

90. KRISHNAMURTI, J.: The First and Last Freedom(1954), [The Network of Thought(1982)]

91. NABOKOV, Vladimir: Lolita(1955), [Pale Fire(1962)]

92. BALDWIN, James: Giovanni’s Room(1956), [Go Tell It on the Mountain(1953)]

93. SCHMITT, Carl: Hamlet oder Hekuba(1956), [Theorie des Partisanen(1963)]

94. COHEN, Leonard: Let us Compare Mythologies(1956), [Flowers for Hitler(1964)]

95. BORGES, Jorge: Manual de zoología fantástica(1957), [Ficciones(1944)]

96. MAILER, Norman: The White Negro(1957), [The Naked and the Dead(1948)]

97. ACHEBE, Chinua: Things Fall Apart(1958), [Arrow of God(1964)]

98. IONESCO, Eugène: Rhinoceros(1959), [The Bald Soprano(1950)]

99. QUENEAU, Raymond: Zazie dans le métro(1959), [Exercices de style(1947)]

100. RIEFF, Philip: Freud: The Mind of the Moralist(1959), [The Triumph of the Therapeutic(1966)]

101. BURROUGHS, William: Naked Lunch(1959), [Queer(1985)]

102. DURAS, Marguerite: Hiroshima mon amour(1960), [L’Amant(1984)]

103. FANON, Frantz: Les Damnés de la terre(1961), [Peau noire, masques blancs(1952)]

104. 川端, 康成: 眠れる美女(1961), [雪国(1935)]

105. LEVINAS, Emmanuel: Altérité et Transcendance(1961), [Totalité et Infini(196195)]

106. GIRARD, René: Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque(1961), [Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World(1978)]

107. JUNG, Carl: Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken(1962), [Antwort auf Hiob(1952)]

108. KUHN, Thomas: The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western ThoughtThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), [The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (1957]

109. MISHIMA, Yukio: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea(1963), [Confessions of a Mask(1949)]

110. BOURDIEU, Pierre: Les Héritiers, Les étudiants et la culture(1964), [La Domination masculine(1998)]

111. ELLISON, Ralph: Shadow and Act(1964), [Invisible Man(1952)]

112. LISPECTOR, Clarice: A Paixão Segundo G.H.(1964), [Perto do coração selvagem(1943)]

113. VIDAL, Gore: Julian(1964), [Burr(1973)]

114. BELLOW, Saul: Herzog(1964), [Dangling Man(1944)]

115. DICK, Philip: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch(1965), [Ubik(1969)]

116. עוז, עמוס Lands of the Jackal (ארצות התן)(1965), [To Know a Woman (לדעת אישה)(1989)]

117. LACAN, Jacques: Écrits(1966), [De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité(1932)]

118. RHYS, Jean: Wide Sargasso Sea(1966), [Sleep It Off Lady(1976)]

119. SONTAG, Susan: Against Interpretation(1966), [The Volcano Lover(1992)]

120. SVEVO, Italo: Lettere(1966), [The Confessions of Zeno(1923)]

121. KUNDERA, Milan: Žert(1967), [Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí(1984)]

122. DERRIDA, Jacques: De la grammatologie(1967), [Glas(1974)]

123. STOPPARD, Tom: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead(1967), [Arcadia(1993)]

124. Солженицын, Александр Исаевич: Раковый корпус(1968), [В круге первом(1968)]

125. MURDOCH, Iris: The Nice and the Good(1968), [The Sovereignty of Good(1970)]

126. MCCLUHAN, Marshall: War and Peace in the Global Village(1968), [The Mechanical Bride(1951)]

127. CRISP, Quintin: The Naked Civil Servant(1968), [How to Become a Virgin(1981)]

128. DIDION, Joan: Slouching Towards Bethlehem(1968), [Play It as It Lays(1970)]

129. HABERMAS, : Erkenntnis und Interesse(1968), [Die Einbeziehung des Anderen. Studien zur politischen Theorie(1996)]

130. ROTH, Philip: Portnoy’s Complaint(1969), [The Human Stain(2000)American Pastoral(1997)]

131. BARTHES, Roland: S/Z(1970), [Le Degré zéro de l’écriture(1953)]

132. HERBERT, Frank: The Worlds of Frank Herbert(1970), [Dune(1965)]

133. GREER, : The Female Eunuch.(1970), [Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.(1989)]

134. ILLICH, Ivan: Deschooling Society(1971), [Gender(1982)]

135. THOMPSON, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas(1971), [The Rum Diary(1998)]

136. FORSTER, E.M.: Maurice(1971), [A Passage to India(1924)]

137. DYLAN, Bob: Tarantula(1971), [Lyrics: 1962–1985(1985)]

138. CALVINO, Italo: Invisible Cities(1972), [The Baron in the Trees(1957)]

139. BRINK, André P.: Kennis van die aand(1973), [n Droë wit seisoen(1979)]

140. LE GUIN, Ursula: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas(1973), [The Left Hand of Darkness(1969)]

141. PYNCHON, Thomas: Gravity’s Rainbow(1973), [V.(1963)]

142. CIORAN, : De l’inconvénient d’être né(1973), [Cahiers 1957–1972(1997)]

143. SPIVAK, Gayatri: Myself Must I Remake(1974), [In Other Worlds(1987)]

144. COETZEE, J.M.: Dusklands(1974), [In the Heart of the Country(1977)]

145. DWORKIN, Andrea: Woman Hating(1974), [Right-Wing Women(1983)]

146. HELLER, Joseph: Something Happened(1974), [Catch-22(1961)]

147. LEVI, Primo: Periodic Table(1975), [If This Is a Man(1947)]

148. THEROUX, Paul: The Great Railway Bazaar(1975), [The Mosquito Coast(199881)]

149. FOUCAULT, Michel: Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1(1976), [L’ordre des choses(1966)]

150. BREYTENBACH, Breyten: A Season in Paradise(1976), [Die ysterkoei moet sweet(1964)]

151. SCHUCMAN, Helen: A Course in Miracles(1976), [Evaluating the educability of the severely mentally retarded child.(1960)]

152. ENGEL, Marian: Bear(1976), [Lunatic Villas(1981)]

153. ISHERWOOD, : Christopher and his Kind(1976), [Goodbye to Berlin(1939)]

154. VARGAS LLOSA, Mario: La tía Julia y el escribidor(1977), [La orgía perpetua(1975)] KINGSTON, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976), China Men (1980)

155. VARGAS LLOSA, Mario: La tía Julia y el escribidor(1977), [Conversación en La Catedral(19619)]

156. PEREC, Georges: La Vie mode d’emploi(1978), [Les Choses(1965)]

157. MIDGLEY, Mary: Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature.(1978), [Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay.(1984)]

158. LASCH, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism(1979), [The Revolt of the Elites(Evaluating the educability of the severely mentally retarded child(1995.)]

159. HOFFSTADTER, Douglas: Gödel, Escher, Bach(1979), [Le Ton beau de Marot(1997)]

160. NAIPAUL, V.S.: A Bend in the River(1979), [A House for Mr Biswas(1961)]

161. ECO, Umberto: Il nome della rosa(1980), [Il pendolo di Foucault(1988)]

162. DELEUZE&GUATARRI, Gilles: Mille Plateaux(1980), [Anti-Oedipus(1972)]

163. BURGESS, Anthony: Earthly Powers(1980), [A Clockwork Orange(1962)]

164. Гроссман, Василий Семёнович: Жизнь и судьба(1980), [Чёрная книга: о злодейском повсеместном убийстве евреев немецко-фашистскими захватчиками во временно оккупированных районах Советского Союза и в лагерях Польши во время войны 1941-45 гг(1945)]

165. MALCOLM, Janet: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession(1981), [The Journalist and the Murderer(1990)]

166. GORDIMER, Nadine: July’s People(1981), [Burger’s Daughter(1979)]

167. MODIANO, Patrick: Une jeunesse(1981), [La Place de l’étoile(1968)]

168. PESSOA, Fernando: The Book of Disquiet(1982), [English Poetry(1921)]

169. SARRAUTE, Nathalie: L’Enfance(1983), [Tropisms(1939)]

170. AMIS, MARTIN: Money: A Suicide Note(1984), [Einstein’s Monsters(1987)]

171. GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Gabriel: Love in the Time of Cholera(1985), [One Hundred Years of Solitude(1967)]

172. MCCARTHY, Cormac: Blood Meridian(1985), [All the Pretty Horses(1992)]

173. EASTON ELLIS, Bret: Less Than Zero(1985), [American Psycho(1991)]

174. KRAMER, Larry: A lonely heart(1985), [Faggots(1978)]

175. WOLFE, Thomas: The Bonfire of the Vanities(1987), [The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test(1968)]

176. ALLEN, Woody: Three Films of Woody Allen(1987), [Getting Even(1971)]

177. SHILTS, Randy: And the Band Played On(1987), [The Mayor of Castro Street(1982)]

178. 村上, 春樹: Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森)(1987), [The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (ねじまき鳥クロニクル)(1994)]

179. RUSHDIE, Salman: The Satanic Verses(1988), [Midnight’s Children(1981)]

180. HAWKING, Stephen: A Brief History of Time(1988), [Black Holes and Baby Universes(1993)]

181. SCOTT, James C: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.(198898*), [Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.(1990)]

182. ISHIGURO, Kazuo: The Remains of the Day(1989), [The Unconsoled(1995)]

183. PAGLIA, Camille: Sexual Personae(1990), [Vamps & Tramps(1994)]

184. BUTLER, Judith: Gender Trouble(1990), [Bodies That Matter(1993)]

185. LE CLÉZIO, J.M.G.: Onitsha(1991), [Le Procès-verbal(1963)]

186. 直子, 武内: 美少女戦士セーラームーン(1991), [PQエンジェルス(1997)]

187. MULISCH, Harry: De Ontdekking van de Hemel(1992), [Het seksuele bolwerk(1972)]

188. LAND, Nick: The Thirst for Annihilation(1992), [Machinic Desire (essay)(1993)]

189. BLOOM, Harold: The American Religion(1992), [The Western Canon(1994)]

190. ADAIR, Gilbert: The Death of the Author(1992), [A Void(1994)]

191. GURNAH, Abdulrazak: Paradise(1994), [Memory of Departure(1987)]

192. STEPHENSON, Neal: The Diamond Age(1995), [Snow Crash(1992)]

193. BYATT, A.S.: Babel Tower(1996), [Possession(1990)]

194. DELILLO, Don: Underworld(1997), [The Names(1982)]

195. PLANT, Sadie: Zeros + Ones(1997), [Writing on Drugs(1999)]

196. OZICK, Cynthia: The Puttermesser Papers(1997), [The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories(1971)]

197. MORRISON, Toni: Paradise(1998), [Beloved(1987)]

198. BORNSTEIN, Kate: My Gender Workbook(1998), [Gender Outlaw(1994)]

199. MACINTYRE, Alasdair: Dependent Rational Animals(1999), [After Virtue(1981)]

200. WALLACE, David Foster: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men(1999), [Infinite Jest(1996)]

List of errata and misjudgements in The List

• I can’t believe I left out Martin Buber!

• #45 and #135 — initial secondary choices for Freud and Roth were outside the date range

• #78: La Chute by Camus was included mainly because the Author has an unread copy lying around, but Pelarus convinced the Author that the choice was too idiosyncratic.

• #154: John Pistelli observed that Mario Vargas Llosa was included twice. I swapped one entry out for Maxine Hong Kingston.

• #181: Missing forenames pointed out by Mark Fettes.

• Titles have been correct, including reverting to the original language

• I regret not including at least one token non-Jewish MENA author to balance out #116. مَحمُود دَرْوِيْش, close friend of #150 would have been an obvious choice (see the second footnote to my exposition of the afterlives of tragic poetess and ex-amant of #139, Ingrid Jonker [not on the List], whom some (me) have called the Southern Sylvia Plath [not on the List].

• On the prompting of Moo Cat, I asked Chatty Petey — as (we) Brits have started to call our adults-only digital assistants/companions — to give the list a final once-over in terms of publication dates. I’ve taken aboard most if not all of its suggested corrections.13 Sometimes I had to swap the primary and secondary choices for the order to still work, other times there was no quick fix, so I corrected the date and indicated with an * that the correct date throws out the original order or is contentious, first written v.s first published.

• John Pistelli responded with a list of his own, defending the continued relevance of the concept of “greatness” in art (perhaps elsewhere in life as well). That our lists substantially overlap is no surprise, since I lightly plagiarised his Invisible College syllabi to conceal the lacunae in my own reading. Some brief comments on the names unique to his list:

  • Since I quote CHESTERTON in both of my first two pieces “published” by an other, the omission was a telling Freudian slip on my part. KADINSKY was another instance of self-blindness.

  • TANIZAKI, SILKO etc. would make welcome additions to the List’s ecology.

  • I had excluded CHEKHOV because most of his work had been published in the previous century

  • CATHER, PLATH etc. were excluded because I have so many white gays on the list that I couldn't make space for any more white ladies (or GINSBERG for that matter)

  • Most of the rest are too art-theoretical or American-centric for my taste.

• Apart from editorial corrections, the Author has decided not tinker any further with the List, but to make it explode into a million (8) psychedelic shards: la liste rose, la liste rouge, la liste orange etc.

  À suivre…

6

There are several works tied for #17,117th place. The agricultural metaphor “scraping the barrel” comes to mind.

The country filter is useful in seeing the unevenness of the geographical representation: the list for SA is decent; the one for China looks hopeless.

10

You might not think that “asexual oppression” is a real thing, but here you have it from the asexual horse’s mouth:

Why should all the attention be paid to those who went from being stoned to being hanged to getting railed to dying from AIDS? Won’t anyone think of the asexual spinster?

13

First part here.

In the first chapter of WSGAtGB?, N.K. discusses her decision to structure each chapter as a question, presenting both sides of the argument without trying to resolve the contradictions, since the “answer to the question is the entirety of the position”. She says this is what Hegel meant by aufheben, which I’m in no position to dispute, having read only a bit more Hegel than Proust. But the overall impression I got from the book is not sublation, but the psychological term splitting, also known as black-and-white thinking: if something is good, it is very good; if it is bad, it is very bad, even evil.

The reader, assumed to be a good person like N.K. and her wife, is promised that reading Great Books will be transformative, maybe in a totally different way than they have been for N.K., but still unequivocally good:

To open the Great Books is to begin a conversation. And the nature of that conversation is different for every person. Everyone who’s had a sustained encounter with these books has felt something, has felt themselves changed by them. That’s the whole reason people like me tend to recommend these books—because they do destroy you, in some way, but the destruction is good.

If you’re not one of the good ones, though, if you’re one of those “other people”, well, your evil is entirely your own fault:

What about those other people, who read these books, took the wrong lessons, and now are trying to erase people like me from existence? Well, I don’t care about them. From their perspective, they are doing what they think is right, but from my perspective, they are doing evil. Tolstoy gets no blame for their evil, just as he gets no credit for whatever good choices I’ve made. The relationship between the Great Books and human character and behavior is too strange to put in words.

It’s a bit strange to say that you don’t care about people who you think are doing evil. What N.K. appears to mean is: I’m not going to let the existence of these people diminish my enjoyment of these Great Books. Which is fair enough, but it brings us right back to the moral relativism that the likes of Allan Bloom thought the Great Books could inoculate us against. To convince others, it’s not enough to argue something is good or evil from my perspective, but that it is good or evil tout court. This can only be done through having discussions and debates with actual people with different experiences and perspectives than us. Reading a book offering a different perspective than our own can be prepare us for such difficult conversations, but it cannot replace them. Throughout WSGAtGB?, N.K. assigns qualities to the Great Books that are properly assigned to human beings, such as having (bad) politics, integrity, rigour and courage.

N.K. says she’s not a college professor and is not interested in questions of pedagogy, but despite all her hedging she is in fact advocating for a specific course of self-study centred on reading the Great Books, which is what she believes is the essence of what is called a “liberal-art education”:

In his book, Allan Bloom made an explicit, albeit embarrassed, case that students should be taught from the Great Books. While in Deresiewicz’s essay, it’s unclear what specific course of study is being advocating for. A lot of times these polemicists call for a “liberal-arts education,” but they clearly don’t mean the medieval ars liberae. Nor do they mean the study of Greek and Latin classics in the original. I think they simply mean mandatory literature classes where a few of the classics are taught in a small-scale seminar format similar to that used at liberal-arts colleges.

I’m sure where she get’s this impression. The reading list at St. John’s College, which prides itself in its Great Book curriculum, sounds very much like an updated version of the medieval ars liberae: “philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more”. Furthermore, students are taught enough Greek and French to be able to do their own translations. Learning how to translate even a mediocre foreign text develops skills that reading even the greatest text in translation cannot. Ditto for attempting to solve a mathematical problem yourself, rather than simply reading a story about a mathematician.

N.K. writes that those who want art to either ennoble society or change the status quo are “attacking the idea, derived from the Enlightenment that we arrive at the truth by reading as much as possible, from as many sources.” The Enlightenment is a contested concept that groups together several intellectual developments, but neither rationality nor empiricism can be boiled down to the idea that the truth can be arrived at simply be reading a variety of sources. The great religious and philosophical teachers of the past did not encourage their followers to revere the Great Books, but to be wary of them (Socrates’s warnings about the written word in the Phaedrus; Jesus’s opposition to the Pharisees).1 Since we’re not all lucky enough to know a Socrates, Plato offers us the next-best thing. A Great Book offers us the opportunity to enter into something like a dialogue with a Great Soul, but we shouldn't mistake it for the real thing.

In the last chapter, N.K. summarises what she takes to be the concrete benefits of reading the Great Books:

The argument I’ve tried to make is that (1) taste exists, (2) learning to appreciate the Great Books will develop your taste, and (3) a developed sense of taste will allow you to make finer moral distinctions in the rest of your life.

N.K. writes that “what the Marxist critical theorist Terry Eagleton called “the ideology of aesthetics” is at the core of her “own argument for appreciation of the Great Books”:

The Great Books, above all, develop our taste: our ability to appreciate great lit-erature. But we can also use that taste in all facets of life. Taste is the ability to discriminate, to discern fine nuances, and to see what truly exists within an ob-ject, versus what we are projecting onto it. Someone with taste can read a book and say, “It’s not for me, but it’s still a Great Book,” just as someone with taste can hear another’s position or view another’s action and see the internal logic and discern whether there is any true integrity there. A person with taste does not excuse everyone, and they don’t fall for every seemingly plausible argument. It’s that “instinct for cleanliness.” A cultivated individual senses which positions and which actions are dirty and then tries to avoid associating with those positions.

Given how such terms have been used throughout history to justify exclusion and oppression, I’m surprised that N.K. seems to endorse the association between virtue and cleanliness and between dirtiness and vice. The context of the quoted phrase, from Nietszche’s Beyond Good and Evil, doesn’t make it any less problematic:

What most profoundly divides two men is a different sense and degree of cleanliness. What help is all honesty and mutual utility, what help is all the good will for each other: in the end the fact remains - they "can't stand each other's smell!" The highest instinct for cleanliness puts the person marked by it in the strangest and most dangerous isolation, as a saint: for that's simply what saintliness is - the highest spiritualization of the instinct in question. Any awareness of an indescribable abundance of pleasure in the bath, any lust and thirst which constantly drives the soul out of the night into the morning and out of cloudiness, the "affliction," into what is bright, gleaming, profound, fine; just as such a tendency singles out - it is a noble tendency - so it also separates . The pity of the saint is pity for the dirt of those who are human, all-too-human. And there are degrees and heights where the saint feels pity itself as contamination, as dirt . . .

This view of saintliness is a far cry from Jesus’s association with lepers and prostitutes. Christ and the Buddha both challenged the obsession with cleanliness that empowered the Jewish and Brahmin priestly castes, but Christians and Buddhists are just as likely as adherents of other faiths and ideologies to get enamoured by their own sense of purity. N.K. claims “I don’t perceive myself as subordinating my own judgment to that of the experts; instead, I perceive the cultivation of my taste as a process of training myself to see what they see.” Again I’m struck by N.K.’s confidence in the reliability of her own perceptions, especially when Eagleton uses the term “ideology of aesthetics” to suggest that the development of “aesthetic judgment”may involve more sinister motives that the cultivation of a “true” appreciation of the beautiful and hence of the good:

The enheartening expression of this doctrine, politically speaking, would be: ‘what appears as my subordination to others is in fact self-determination’; the more cynical view would run: ‘my subordination to others is so effective that it appears to me in the mystified guise of governing myself.’

One does not have to be a Marxist to take the cynical view seriously. The cultivation of aesthetic taste and moral judgement necessarily involves the suppression of personal preference to pursue an objective, or at least not purely subjective, ideal. The fear of the Lord is the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. Reading the Great Books is a great way to cultivate one’s literary taste, which is definitely useful for a professional writer like N.K., but the link between literary taste and moral discernment is far from straightforward, as a brief glance at the lives of the authors of many of the Great Books will attest. N.K. says that she avoids introductions and commentaries and prefers to get immersed in the text itself as in a dreamworld. This is a perfectly respectable way of reading these texts, but sometimes she writes as if they sprang from the head of Zeus, rather than being written by particular men and women in a particular historical context and in conversation with other Great and Not-So-Great Books.

For Murdoch, it is the judgement of the artist rather than the critic that serves as a model for making moral judgements in our own lives. In her 1972 Blashfield Address delivered to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, tilted Salvation By Words, she starts by observing that the métier of the artist as “vehicle of truth” is threatened by “science, philosophy, and forces arising within art itself”. She is particularly interested in the criticisms of art made by Freud and Plato:

Plato outlaws the artist for reasons which are remarkably Freudian. He regards art as the base addressing the base, created by and for and about the lowest part of the soul. Art studies the unstable and the various, what we might call the neurotic, which it can easily and amusingly depict. Goodness, which is steady and unified and ‘uninteresting’, art cannot understand or represent. (Plato is thinking mainly of writers of course.) Art moreover makes us ‘relax our guard’ (Plato’s phrase) and indulge vicariously in adventures of emotion which we would not tolerate as part of our real life activity. Art is a false consolation, celebrating the mediocre and the mean and excusing self-indulgent emotion.

Murdoch admits that false consolation can be derived from good art as well as bad, but that great art reveals to us both the importance of ideals and the impossibility of reaching them:

I myself very much believe in the importance of the work of art as an attempted formal unity and completed statement. There is no substitute for the discipline of this sort of attempt to tell truth succinctly and clearly. This particular effort is uniquely world-revealing. I do not think that the traditional production of works of art is ending or should end. But art is not discredited if we realise that it is based on and partly consists of ordinary human jumble, incoherence, accident, sex. (sex, though it produces great thought forms, is fundamentally jumble: not even roulette so much as mish-mash.) Great art, especially literature, but the other arts too, carries a built-in self-critical recognition of its incompleteness. It accepts and celebrates jumble, and the bafflement of the mind by the world. The incomplete pseudo-object, the work of art, is a lucid commentary upon itself.

I think this is what N.K. means by the “rigour” and “integrity” of the Great Books. In the face of technological developments, Murdoch argued for the continued relevance of the serious study of literature because of the fact that human culture itself is based on words:

We must not be tempted to leave lucidity and exactness to the scientist. Whenever we write we ought to write as well as we can, in order to meet the dangers of which Plato spoke, and in order to defend our language and render subtle and clear that stuff which is the deepest texture of our spirit. When George Jackson deplored time wasted upon Latin that could have been used for maths or science he was wrong from his own point of view. Of course the exactness of science has an importance which is not likely to be underestimated. But the study of a language or a literature or any study that will increase and refine our ability to be through words is part of a battle for civilisation and justice and freedom, for clarity and truth, against vile fake-scientific jargon and spiritless slipshod journalese and tyrannical mystification.

I agree with N.K. that the Great Books are a gift to all humanity, irrespective of national, class or ethnic background and political affilitation, but I also believe that those of us who have been in position to appreciate this gift should strive together to overcome rather than reify these divisions:

The great artist, like the great saint, calms us by a kind of unassuming simple lucidity, he speaks with the voice that we hear in Homer and in Shakespeare and in the Gospels. This is the human language of which, whenever we write, as artists or as word-users of any kind, we should endeavour to be worthy.

Say it with your chest

At the end of What’s So Great About the Great Books (WSGAtGB?), Naomi Kanakia writes:

This book has a small limited point to make, but that point is neither banal nor overly provocative. I think that in this world there are probably a few thousand people who are wondering, “Is it possible for me to attempt to read the Great Books?” And I simply want to add my reedy voice into the mix to say: “Yes, reading these books is worth your time. Yes, there is treasure to be found. Yes, these books are truly great.”

I found this “small limited point” to be bit of an anti-climax after the grandiose promises made in the first chapter:

In the subtitle to this book, the one you’re holding, I joke that you should read these books “even though it might destroy you.” There is certainly a sense in which the Great Books ruined me. At fifteen, all I wanted was to write adventure stories about a chosen-one hero who saves the universe. Now, at forty, I am writing a book where I argue that everyone ought to read Proust.

Perhaps I’m not supposed to take this literally. When Kanakia writes “everyone ought to read Proust”, she doesn’t mean everyone ought to read Proust. But then why not write what you actually mean?

In many ways I’m an old-fashioned woman: I like costume dramas to be historically accurate, science to be unbiased and non-fiction books to be based in consensus reality. Perhaps N.R. talked herself down from her lofty ambitions while writing the book, but then she could have gone back and revised the first chapter. If I wanted a plot twist, I would have picked up a homoromantic murder mystery.

I had similar complaints in the case of J.S.R’s On Drugs and A.C.’s Open Socrates. In all three cases, the principle of “truth in advertising” would have called for these books to be marketed as memoir/apologetics. But such labels are déclasée. Our authors are distinguished philosophers, or self-taught women of letters, not B-list celebrities and presidential hopefuls. J.S.R. wouldn't be caught dead making “the case for God” directly, but he can’t help but include his personal conversion in a book that is ostensibly On Drugs, assuming that the reader, notwithstanding the decision to read a book entitled On Drugs isn’t actually that interested in drugs per se and would really like to hear more about the author’s personal journey of faith. Agnes Callard has become as famous as philosophers get these days by writing thoughtful philosophical musings about… being Agnes Callard. If I were as mean as J.C.O. I would have called these wan husks of auto-non-fiction.

I take these second shots at J.S.R. and A.C. to prove that my beef on this point is not personal, but systemic. The claim “X worked for me, therefore everyone ought to do X” has become the standard formula to try and sell “high culture” to le peuple. The formula must work on some level, not necessarily to sell high culture, but to sell content extolling high culture (see also: fashion magazines). Why classic literature rather than classical music, or classic cinema? It happens to be the author’s lived experience.

Why would someone interested in the Great Books read this book instead of one of the Great Books?

Since I’ve already read J.S.R. and A.C, in the grand tradition of Paris is Burning, permit me to read N.K. here. Since V.S. decided to keep her red pen sheaved on this occasion, I reluctantly pick up the mean girl mantle. I do not share V.S.’s view that N.K. has written a “great book” about the Great Books. In my view, she has written a bad book that spreads bad (harmful because false) ideas. There are many ideas in the book that I find good or neutral, but these ideas are hardly new. N.K. acknowledges that she is not the first person, nor even the first QPOC, to argue that the Great Books are in fact great. She even wrestles with the question of what her book is adding to the conversation, but not enough to have written another, more honest, more relevant book. I say more relevant because I believe that the problems the book aims to solve are non-problems, framed that way to flatter the reader:

People like me, who love the Great Books, often worry that the general public has a negative impression of these classic texts. We worry that ordinary people think the Great Books are a tool of White supremacy. And it’s true; that belief does exist, among some readers. But when I talk to people about the Great Books, they usually don’t say, “Oh, those books are racist.” Instead, they quite frequently say something like, “I’ve always meant to read those.” So why don’t they? If I dig deeper, I find that these titles tend to arouse feelings of shame and inadequacy. The people I talk with, my friends and my peers, are usually very educated. They’re writers, professors, and intellectuals. They’re not just avid readers; they’re also people whose self-worth is tied up with their love for books. But they’re afraid to approach the Great Books. Oftentimes that fear is rooted in negative experiences from college or young adulthood. Perhaps you took a class on Henry James, and you were inexpressibly bored by Wings of the Dove. Or you tried to read the Iliad and bounced off the seemingly endless catalogue of various kings with their “long black ships.” Over time you felt increasingly ashamed of your lack of reading, so it became a sore spot, something you no longer wanted to approach. And now it feels too late. Serious reading is for English majors. It’s for people with PhDs. It’s for weighty, self-important, intellectual types.

By her own admission the usual response to the Great Books are not “Oh, those books are racist.” yet she devotes not one, not two, but five separate chapters to rebutting this unusual response: ‘Aren’t the Great Books kinda problematic?’, ‘Why not read other books that are equally beautiful but have better politics?’, ‘When we say, “The Great Books are worth reading,” do other people hear, “White men are inherently superior”?’, “Can’t reading the Great Books be psychologically damaging for marginalized people?’ and ‘Weren’t some of the Great Books written by reprehensible people?’

Chapters 2-5 presents “the Great Books movement” as an explicitly democratic vision of eduction, contrasted with the more aristocratic vision articulated by the East Coast Straussian and noted rice queen Alan Bloom in his surprise bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students (1987).1

The weakest chapters to me were the ones defending the concept of “Great Books” and the need for a list. This is the very definition of a non-problem. There are thousands of Great Book lists in existence. There are hundreds of lists of lists of Great Books available for anyone who has access to the Internet, which N.K. apparently doesn’t, as she stubbornly refuses to update her list published in 1998 with the dinosaurs by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major’s in their book The New Lifetime Reading Plan. N.K. has no justification for promoting this particular list, almost thirty years after its original publication other than the fact that it is the list she used. The list it reproduced without amendment or annotation in the Appendix, apart from adding a tick next to each work the author has read. Presumably this is to encourage the reader to add her own tick next to the the tick of the author as she makes her pilgrim’s progress through the list. Perhaps to encourage flagging literacy rates we can start a trend of sharing “tick pics” of our copies of the list.2

The History Girls

Isaiah Berlin wrote about the hedgehog and the fox. You can guess which one I am.

WSGAtGB? does not show much evidence of deep research or engagement with what other lovers of the Great Books have to say. The endnotes are pretty threadbare,3 and what’s worse, N.K.’s way of summarising existing scholarship is often imprecise to the point of in accuracy, e.g.

But even the Greek and Latin classics weren’t always popular in the West. They entered medieval Europe in two stages: First, in the twelfth century, Latin translations of Aristotle filtered into Western universities via the Arabic world. Then, in the fifteenth century, scholars from Constantinople brought knowledge of Greek, and of many previously unknown Greek-language classics, to the West. In both cases, it took centuries for universities to add these works to their curricula.

As is later made clear in WSGAtGB? it is an obvious error to group “Greek and Latin classics” here. It is Greek that fell into disuse after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Monasteries continued to preserve the Latin classics. Aristotle was indeed rediscovered from Arabic translations, but these didn’t simply “filter into Western universities via the Arabic world.” Their acquisition can be very precisely dated from the reconquest of Toledo from the Moors by Alfonso VI in 1085, significantly weakening Arab power in the Iberian peninsula, although let’s not forget they held onto Granada until 1492, 40 years after Constantinople fell to the Turks. In both cases, Christian Europe wasn't jolted out of decadence by the rediscovery of Great Books from Ancient Greece, as the story is often Romantically told, but by the threat of being overrun by a civilisation with one God, one Prophet and One Great Book (#24 on the list).

Ought everyone to read Proust?

Let’s return to the argument (N.K.’s word, not mine) that “everyone ought to read Proust”. Getting to a statement like this from a statement like “I think it was good for me that I read Proust” (I am speaking hypothetically here; I have famously never read Proust) logically requires a number of intermediate steps:

1. I think it was good for me that I read Proust

2. I am justified in my belief that it was good for me that I read Proust

3. Other people are like me and are likely to derive a similar, or similarly valuable, benefit from reading Proust

4. It would be good for everyone if everyone read Proust

5. Everyone ought to do what is good for everyone

6. Everyone ought to read Proust

1. I think it was good for me that I read Proust

In one of a litany of false dichotomies N.K. uses to set up her arguments, she writes:

Human beings in their aggregate—that’s part of the social sciences. But human beings as individuals and how we individually experience the world—that’s the humanities.

This distinction, driven mostly by how non-STEM fields organise themselves bureaucratically, conflates two things: the level of analysis (the human individual or groups of human beings) and the mode of analysis (objective, subjective or intersubjective). We have at least six quadrants:

• Individual, subjective: autobiography, self-expression, self-analysis

• Individual, intersubjective: an analyst interpreting an analysand’s dream, a critic inferring an artist’s intention

• Individual, objective: a neuroscientist looking at a scan of the subject’s brain, a coroner investigating a body to determine the likely cause of death

• Group, subjective: “shared” experiences

• Group, intersubjective: intellectual debates, business negotiations, mind games

• Group, objective: the so-called “social sciences”

She justifies this hyper-individual focusing by making a rather solipsistic argument that only what we directly experience is properly considered real:

But when I talk about the Great Books and when I recommend them to people, I am really dealing not with people in the aggregate, but with people in the particular, specific sense. You can’t reduce people to inputs and outputs. Life consists of a moment-to-moment sensory experience that seems to come from both within and without our body. The wind on our skin, the sunlight on our back, the rumble of hunger, the pretty pair of legs walking past, and the chirp of the phone announcing another disaster—all these exist at the same time, in the same moment, and that is really all that exists, on an individual level.

Nobody can argue with the reality of someone else’s perceptions, but we can argue about inferences that person makes about other people and things based on these perceptions.

2. I am justified in my belief that it was good for me that I read Proust

I recommend this conversation between the skeptic Michael Shermer and the controversial former NYT science writer Nicholas Wade on the evolutionary origin of human morality and our almost fathomless capacity for self-deception.

If I compare my life before and after reading Proust, I can point to ways in which my life is better, but there is no way for me to know for sure whether I would not have been ever better off if I had taken up a different hobby, like learning to play all the Great Tunes on the piano.

3. Other people are like me and are likely to derive a similar, or similarly valuable, benefit from reading Proust

What frustrated me most about the book was that N.K. assiduously waves away thorny questions about whether everyone is equally equipped to benefit from a Great Books education, whether as part of an institution or self-led. N.K.’s sense that she wasn’t the type of person who would love the Great Books turned out to be wrong, but that doesn’t mean that everyone’s sense of the limits of their own abilities is off the mark.

Controversial “intelligence researchers” like Linda Gottfredson have argued that the denial of cognitive diversity harms not only those on the right but also those on the left of the bell curve:

Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essentially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across differ- ent arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.4

As a chubby, effeminate little boy with terrible hand-eye co-ordination “physical education” was my personal Inferno. Yet today I’m a great advocate of rigorous physical activity (although in my own case it mostly involves walking the dogs and having a spliff; I’m not about to write a book arguing that everyone ought to take up canines and cannabis).

4. It would be good for everyone if everyone read Proust

N.K. cites Edward Said defending Jane Austen (#66 on the list):

It would be silly to expect Jane Austen to treat slavery with anything like the passion of an abolitionist or a newly liberated slave. Yet what I have called the rhetoric of blame … attacks her, and others like her, retrospectively, for being white, privileged, insensitive, complicit. Yes, Austen belonged to a slave-owning society, but do we therefore jettison her novels as so many trivial exercises in aesthetic frumpery?

But why is it silly to ask why Jane Austen, by all accounts a good Christian woman, was not so moved by the abolitionists cause as William Wilberforce, who made delivered a passionate speech before parliament condemning slavery in 1789. Surely she had adequate time to reflect on these matters before writing Mansfield Park in 1814. I think it is a cop-out to say she “belonged to a slave-owning society” as if Victorian Georgian England was no different from the Antebellum South.

Ultimately., N.K. doesn’t try to rebut the idea that reading Proust won’t make people give up their “bad politics” and soothes herself with the thought that at least she has the perception that she has improved herself:

An uneducated reader could glance at this list of books and say, All of Africa hasn’t produced as many great philosophers as did the cities of Greece and Ionia during the fifth and fourth centuries BC. This list of books could give Western readers permission to think their culture is superior to other cultures. It’s not at all absurd to say that on a social-scientific level, the Great Books might be a tool of White supremacy, and that if the structure of society were different and more egalitarian, then perhaps Great Books lists would look very different. And in that world, I might be writing about a very different list (which has, say, Black political philosopher Frantz Fanon instead of Kant and Marie de France instead of Chaucer) in exactly the same way I am writing about this list. That’s the social-scientific level. But on a humanities level, we look at the individual and the human aspect of something. Which is to say, what matters most is our direct experience of reading these texts. And no matter what created that experience or what factors went into it, my experience of reading these texts is that I love them, am enlightened by them, am not offended by them, don’t find myself becoming more conservative or reactionary as a result of them, and in fact am able to perceive more nuance in the world because of reading them. It’s possible that all those effects are illusions: Maybe I am truly no wiser; maybe I am being harmed; maybe I am becoming more reactionary, and so forth. But that wouldn’t make my perception of self-improvement any less real.

5. Everyone ought to do what is good for everyone

I don’t have time to get into Hume and is and ought, but I think, stylistically speaking, one ought to avoid using “ought to” unless absolutely necessary.

6. Everyone ought to read Proust?

If we take “to read Proust” as being code not for “reading as many of the Great Books on the list as you can” but “challenge yourself to do something with cumulative long-tern benefits”, then sure, everyone ought to read Proust.

Oh! for the manly prose of the “old man” as the Saint1 used the call She Who Didn’t Beat Around the Bush:

I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper. The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty— moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the well- known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance.

If we’re going to be serious, then let’s be serious. We can play later.

I will likewise begin by stating my responses to each of these three theses. Almost 70 years after the original publication of “Modern Moral Philosophy”, we are still nowhere close to an adequate philosophy of psychology; we may in fact have regressed, to use an image from an unfashionable practitioner of this dubious art. So we continue to hold off on the impulse “to do moral philosophy”, although this abstemiousness has not proven very profitable either. I counter the argument that these moral senses can only arise from adherence to divine law and cannot be derived from nature and thereby the claim that moral language is harmful outside a theistic context. I’ll full-throatedly second the third thesis, extending “to the present day” to the current year.

Anscombe starts by observing that although we get the word “moral” from Aristotle, the way we moderns use the word is foreign to his Ethics:

Aristotle distinguishes virtues as moral and intellectual. Have some of what he calls “intellectual” virtues what we should call a “moral” aspect? It would seem so; the criterion is presumably that a failure in an “intellectual” virtue—like that of having good judgment in calculating how to bring about something useful, say in municipal government—may be blameworthy. But—it may reasonably be asked—cannot any failure be made a matter of blame or reproach? Any derogatory criticism, say of the workmanship of a product or the design of a machine, can be called blame or reproach. So we want to put in the word “morally” again: sometimes such a failure may be morally blameworthy, some times not. Now has Aristotle got this idea of moral blame, as oppose to any other? If he has, why isn’t it more central? There are some mistakes, he says, which are causes, not of involuntariness in actions, but of scoundrelism, and for which a man is blamed. Does this mean that there is a moral obligation not to make certain intellectual mistakes? Why doesn’t he discuss obligation in general, and this obligation in particular?

I’m reminded of Brother John’s reflections on malice masquerading as stupidity. But why make the distinction?

The answer is in history: between Aristotle and us came Christianity, with its law conception of ethics. For Christianity derived its ethical notions from the Torah. (One might be inclined to think that a law conception of ethics could arise only among people who accepted an allegedly divine positive law; that this is not so is shown by the example of the Stoics, who also thought that whatever was involved in conformity to human virtues was required by divine law.)

This is a rather selective reading of history, as I’ll argue further below.

Hume discovered the situation in which the notion “obligation” survived, and the notion “ought” was invested with that peculiar force having which it is said to be used in a “moral” sense, but in which the belief in divine law had long since been abandoned: for it was substantially given up among Protestants at the time of the Reformation.2

Anscombe is being unfair here to the Moderns. If the God of Chrysippus gets a pass, why not the God of Voltaire or Jefferson? Or, more to the point, the God of Darwin? Anscombe seems to get it in terms of vegetation:

But in the case of a plant, let us say, the inference from “is” to “needs” is certainly not in the least dubious. It is interesting and worth examining; but not at allfishy.Its interest is similar to the interest of the relation between brute an evolved as a social species.

One could argue that it makes no sense to say I have a moral obligation to water the plant if I do so because I believe that it will contribute positive utils to my life satisfaction. But we could equally say that it makes no sense to say that I have a moral obligation to love my neighbour if I pretend to do so only to keep the peace. Just because a law ethics evolved with ulterior motives doesn’t make the feeling go away. We are a social species, so some of our evolved instincts are not for the sake of ourselves, even if some of us prefer to be lone wolves.3

As I said, I agree on the narcissism of small differences between both so-called analytical and so-called continental (post)-modern philosophers — who cares about the différance between Nozick and Rawls? Effective altruists have effectively ended utilitarianism as a serious intellectual pursuit, which explains why the would-be revival in virtue ethics inspired by Anscombe, MacIntyre and Taylor seems like something that morally ought to be happening, but unfortunately isn’t, apart from a few eggs Benedict.

Anscombe has an interesting way of framing her reason for lumping all her intellectual rivals together:

The overall similarity is made clear if you consider that every one of the best known English academic moral philosophers has put out a philosophy according to which, e.g., it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error. […] Now this is a significant thing: for it means that all these philosophies are quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian ethic. For it has been characteristic of that ethic to teach that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten, such as: choosing to kill the innocent for any purpose, however good; vicarious punishment; treachery (by which I mean obtaining a man’s confidence in a grave matter by promises of trustworthy friendship and then betraying him to his enemies); idolatry; sodomy; adultery; making a false profession of faith. The prohibition of certain things simply in virtue of their description as such-and-such identifiable kinds of action, regardless of any further consequences, is certainly not the whole of the Hebrew-Christian ethic; but it is a noteworthy feature of it; and if every academic philosopher since Sidgwick has written in such a way as to exclude this ethic, it would argue a certain provinciality of mind not to see this incompatibility as the most important fact about these philosophers, and the differences between them as somewhat trifling by comparison.

It is interesting because of the expansion of the list of divine taboos from “choosing to kill the innocent for any purpose, however good” (fact check: more honoured in the breach by many historical Hebrew-Christians, what is more central to the Hebrew-Christian ethic than forgiveness?) to “idolatry; sodomy; adultery; making a false profession of faith” since again, speaking historically, I don’t think it is sensible to talk about the “Hebrew-Christian ethic”. Several Hebrew and Christians have blessed at least one item on this list, which suggest that, not unlike other laws, divine law can be amended (if you’re a Protestant).

There are other religions with an even stronger sense of law ethics. Should we always be lawmaxxing?

2.3.26

Chérie

I hope you made it back to Dubs saine et sauve. The daffodils emerged soon after your departure — a tiny cosmic recompense for your deeply felt absence. The daffodils inspired me to write down a dirty little ditty in the small green notebook I call my Album zutique, like the one Verlaine, Rimbaud et al would produce amid much drinking and drug-taking, while Mme. Verlaine looked after le petit:

i wandered lonely as a clown

and suddenly i chanced upon

the perfect image

for my spiritual spank bank

I’m in higher spirits than usual thanks to Le Rouge et le Noir by the one and only Stendhal. The reading experience was like scaling Mont Blanc with an old friend. Unlike English or German, or God forbid, Afrikaans, French was for me une langue choisie, something gratuitous, like the grace of God, although en vérité I’ve hardly read un mot since abdicating my post as Maître. Donc it’s been très romantique getting reacquainted, if know what I’m saying.

I had lost faith in the educability of man, least of all the man in the mirror. One summer Sita and I were inspired by Jumpha Lahiri to learn Italian. By now she’s written seven best-selling volumes of erotica nuova under un nome d’arte; I’ve been stuck at the Aziz Ansari-level of saying Alora! in an exaggerated fashion.

The “standards” of A-level French had become so relaxed that before l’affaire [redacted] (pbuh), I had the syllabus almost memorised.

Maître corbeau, sur un arbre perché,

Demain, dès l’aube, à l’heure où blanchit la campagne,

C’est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière

Les sanglots longs

Strap a neuralink to a mynahbird and it could sing these chansons with equal aplomb. So I went on a quest to replace my amour-propre with some proper amour de soi. But rather than coming closer to finding the skeleton key to my authentic self, I got weighed down by an ever-expanding collection of keys for locks I had never seen and could not even imagine. It was like being stuck in an interminable “escape room” with “office people” who don’t get me wrong are lovely bless their hearts salt of the Earth and all that but not the kind of people I would choose to hang out with on a Saturday night nevermind for all eternity. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. It sounds so much nicer in Italian. Maybe my French parts needed to be exiled so that they could wander for a bit in the psychic wilderness before returning in triumph like Zarastrustha. Maybe it’s all a load of tosh. Reading R&N was like taking an hour-long cold shower after a bender, or a self- annihilating dose of post-nut clarity: ma nouvelle foi était aussi mauvaise que l’Ancienne. To be compassionated towards my former selves, though, mauvaise is at times the only type of foi the soft animal of my body can muster.

Quant à moi, je ne suis pas une machine à prier.

I wish I had more intelligent things to say about R&N, but it was enough of a scholarly effort for me to flip between the body of the text and the very useful endnotes by Michel Crouzet to have taken many notes of my own. Despite my love for the idea of monasticism, kindled by Il noma della Rossa and The Pillars of the Earth, I would in truth have made a terrible monk. It’s not like I expected to immediately receive the visitations of Teresa of Ávila, but I thought that least that the demons sent to tempt St, Anthony would be good craic. But hell must be all out of devils because like T. Swift I’ve been haunted mostly by those whom I have ghosted and by those who have ghosted me.

I remember a line a black gay friend of a friend wrote decades ago in Afrikaans:

Ons leen mekaar se lywe uit soos biblioteekboeke.

We borrow each other’s bodies like library books.

If I imagined every body that I have ever borrowed as a text, I could organise them geographically, like they do in Daunt Books.

Jabulani was a medical student; vegan and bisexual. He wore the ohm sign around his neck and had the words ORDO AB CHAO tattooed beneath his clavicles. We used to smoke up and fuck for hours. It turned me on to think that under l’Ancien régime we would have been guilty of three separate crimes. (Now even the zol is nbd). He liked to shout “Ja, Baas!” when I entered him. It made me uncomfortable, but I didn’t ask him to stop. (My Traitor’s Hard-On)

The Egyptian stoner, the Greek diplomat, the Jewish scholar, the Roman model, the German Romantic, the American optimist, the Bolivian poet, the Brahmin guru etc. etc. etc.

Amicalement,

J.

23.3.26

Chéri

The war with Iran has shattered my fragile inner peace. I’m finding it very difficult to focus on the cowslips. I’ve reverted to old habits, like listening to the Commentary magazine podcast. It’s like listening to the kvetching of the Jewish uncles I never knew .J. Pod. says the darnest things. He expressed astonishment at Charlie Kirk’s widow saying at his funeral that she forgives his killer saying that in his religion, there is no such thing as forgiveness for an unlawful killing, only righteous retribution. He also denounced references to W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, saying that the Jews don’t deserve what is being done to them, as Auden himself realised when he converted Catholicism and denounced the poem. I was quite surprised to hear this, since I’ve used this very poem to try and persuade strident anti-Zionists that ancestral trauma is mutually reinforcing, so I asked ChatGPT whether it was true and it said that “denounce” is putting it too strongly: he thought it was too sentimental, emending the line “we must love each other or die” to “we must love each other and die” in later editions.

I shouldn’t be telling you all this. Il ne faut pourtant pas les brûler. Depending on whom you ask, it’s been one bad vibe after another since October 7, or since 9/11, Vietnam, the Naqba, the Partition, the Shoa, the Armenian genocide, the Herero genocide, 1789, 1619, Martin Luther, Joan of Arc, the serpent in the grove, the visitors from the dog star Sirius…

Prima facie, R&G is a very different novel from R&N, a rather incestuous family melodrama set in Dublin in 1916. Here is how the weatherbeaten family tree is described from the Anglo-Irish Andrew’s perspective:

His paternal grandmother, Janet Selborne-Doyle, a great beauty as his mother always said when she was referred to, had married twice. Her first husband was John Richard Dumay, from whom she had had issue two children, Brian and Millicent. Of these, Brian, it was always said whether truly or not as a result of a nervous breakdown, had become a convert to Catholicism when still a student at Trinity. The ‘great beauty’’s second marriage, after the death of her first husband, had been to Arnold Chase- White, and the one offspring of this union had been Henry Chase- White, Andrew’s father. Henry married Hilda Drumm, and Brian Dumay had married one Kathleen Kinnard who was in fact a connection of Hilda’s mother’s family, and who had caused pain and scandal by forthwith adopting the religious faith of her husband. Millicent Dumay then married Kathleen’s brother, Sir Arthur Kinnard, and the third sister, Heather Kinnard, married Christopher Bellman, Frances’ father. Both Mrs Bellman and Sir Arthur Kinnard had died fairly young, and Andrew could not recall having met them. His Uncle Brian had produced two sons, Pat Dumay, who was a year older than Andrew, and Cathal Dumay, who must now, Andrew reflected, be about thirteen or fourteen. Uncle Brian had died when Andrew was about fifteen, and his Aunt Kathleen had caused some surprise and a good deal of adverse comment by subsequently marrying her co-religionist in the family, his Uncle Barnabas, who it appeared had been one of her early admirers. That marriage had been childless.

A critic hostile to my person may want to liken me to the character of Barnabas, even though my physiognomie could not be more different:

Barnabas Drumm was a short round man with a mild flabby face and a large golden moustache a little grizzled at the ends or soiled with Guinness. His brown hair fuzzed tonsure-fashion round a neat bald spot. The puzzled light blue of his eyes, invaded now by streaky reds and yellows, retained a childish quality. He still had a mouthful of good teeth and showed them often in a smile which though invariably gentle was also a reminder that he had once been better armed for the battle of life than he now seemed in general to be. Women, speculating about why level-headed Kathleen Dumay should have taken up with this muddle of a man, were divided between those who said that she had been pushed around by her first husband and now wanted someone she could push around, and those who voted Barney to be ‘really rather sweet’.

I detect a soupçon of Stendhal in the caustic characterisation of this Celtic Casaubon:

Barnabas Drumm had penned these words [about the “dumb devotion” of his wife Katherine] that very afternoon as he sat at his work’ in the National Library, and they noon as he sat at his “work” in the National Library, and they now ran through and through his head, all pure and glittering like a clear brook. Or perhaps the words were the stones in the brook, speckled and smooth, which through a trembling translucent medium he saw steadfastly arrayed before him. His words, it seemed to him, rang out with a quiet authority; and when he had uttered a convincing passage it remained with him and eased his spirit for the rest of the day. For several years now Barney had been secretly working on his Memoir.

Barney is one in long line of priests and prophets manqués in the Murdochian canon:

His failures to practise his religion, for which his wife reproached him only by her own increased piety, did not indicate any slackening of the bond which united him to his Church. On the contrary, it seemed to Barney that this bond grew ever closer and more painful. He had so much thought himself into the priesthood and he could not now undo this.

He was ordained in his mind and his heart and he had no other profession. He was by vocation a failed priest. Yet it was an almost unlivable vocation. Barney would ask himself: could not even now some miracle of regeneration occur: It seemed as if, all along the way, he had exaggerated his faults, he had despaired too soon: suppose he had turned back then, or then; for what happened later was worse, whereas then it would have been possible to hope. Well, he found himself saying, yet again, was it not still possible to hope? His life was like the Sybil’s leaves; there was always, for the same price, less to salvage. And he followed, as it were at a distance, the yearly cycle of the Church, the pilgrimage of Christ from birth to death. Even now He was drawing near to Calvary. He was riding upon an ass into Jerusalem to die.

‘And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way: others cut down branches from thetrees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried saying, Hosannah to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosannah in the highest. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying Who is this!’ Who indeed? Barney felt that if he could really believe, even for a moment, in redemption by love he would be instantly, automatically redeemed.

He dreamed of being punished and then restored to the flock: when even punishment would fade within that love and be transformed, becoming the spectacle itself of the suffering induced in a pure being by the existence of evil. But for all his cries of Kyrie eleison the faith eluded him that would have made him whole. His self-abasement provided a not wholly disagreeable emotional occupation; and not only was there no large change, there was not even the smallest, most momentary change in the pattern of life which he deplored. He was inside, indeed he was, the machine.

Of the Romantic nationalist named Patrick (!!) is said:

His patriotism was not of the diffuse and talkative kind, and though it was certainly romantic it was with some distilled essence of romanticism, something bitter and dark and pure.

He had small use for ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, nor was he interested in Patrick Pearse’s archaistic visions of a virtuous manly society whose manners were somehow to be restored. He had never joined the Gaelic League, and though he had attempted to learn Irish he did not think the language important. He was himself a matter-of-fact practising Catholic, but the pattern of his religion, though it remained secure, did not enter into the chief passion of his life. He was not one of those who made their Catholicism into nationalism. He was unmoved by the Holy Ireland affected by his stepfather, nor was he, like his younger brother, an ardent theorist. His Ireland was nameless, a pure Ireland of the mind, to be relentlessly served by a naked sense of justice and a naked self-assertion. There were in his drama only these two characters, Ireland and himself.

On how Pat approached the WQ:

Pat had little use for women. He connected them with the part of himself which disgusted him. He found them somehow muddled and unclean, representative of the frailty and incompleteness of human life. He despised the stupidity and frivolity which characterized their talk, and he was positively nervous of being touched by one. He did not, in fact, like being touched by anybody. The human touch reminded him of a fact which he preferred to forget, that he was incarnate. The desires, the disturbances, consequent upon being a sexual being he either suffered with a bitter consciousness or else disposed of by his own means, despising himself for this servitude.

In a spirit of pure enquiry, or perhaps to kill within himself a troublesome demon of curiosity, ne had made his explorations in the world, both lurid and pathetic, of the Dublin prostitutes. He had discovered there exactly what he sought and took the fich of the sport into which he was initiated as a symbol of what he had in his more respectable surroundings already divined. He avoided married people.

His experience with the prostitutes had been in some ways his most momentous experience so far. It was something to which he had had to bring himself with violence. What seemed the greater part of him had felt such extreme nausea at the mere proximity of these grotesque animals: to force himself to seek their company and actually to embrace their atrocious bodies had been both a supreme degradation and a triumph of pure will. These two conceptions remained for Pat very close together. There was a satisfaction and a certainty in forcing himself to go down to the very bottom, to feel as it were the absolute floor of the world and know there was nothing under it.

But enough with the Irishplaining!

Chaleureusement,

J.

20.4.23

Chéri(e)(s)

I’ve been trying to shift my attention way from war and politics by listening to an Apple Music Classic Rock playlist called Laurel Canyon Essentials. It’s surprisingly bourgeois. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young:

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy cause of you

Judy Collins sweetly covering Leonard Cohen:

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

B. S. echoing E.K.S.:

Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid
Step out of line, the man come and take you away

Oh would you look at me, playing Rainer Maria Rilke (aux belles dames qui ne wisent pas mes lettres), better than becoming una vecchia checca acida I say! So while I have your imaginary ear, permit me to give you some gratuitous advice: don’t let anyone cast you in their D-list reality shows. Look how far we’ve sashayed! lml romances are topping the charts, enriching their female authors and straight beefcakes continue to serve high-minded gay4pay performances. Hooray for us! Gay rights for gay people! It would be hyprocritical for me to now denounce the little games we play with each other, the spells we try to cast, trying to forget that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Hunting a caged lion. Once you meet a man’s MSF (minimum standards of fuckability) you have to try real hard to kill is boner. In South India, they worship it like a god.

Nothing uncle Larry didn’t warn us about.

Victor-Marie Hugo said that the Book of Nature is but the first chapter of the Book of Love, but I say the reader has too abruptly turned his gaze away from the veldt to the library. The educated man can be just as useful to those in Power as the idiot. Homo homini lupus (no homo).

Once you leave society, habibi, you never go back.

A.R.:

Mais l’orgie et la camaraderie des femmes m’étaient interdites. Pas même un compagnon. Je me voyais devant une foule exaspérée, en face du peloton d’exécution, pleurant du malheur qu’ils n’aient pu comprendre, et pardon-nant! — Comme Jeanne d’Arc! — « Prêtres, professeurs, maitres, vous vous trompez en me livrant à la justice. Je n’ai jamais été de ce peuple-ci; je n’ai jamais été chrétien; je suis de la race qui chantait dans le supplice; je ne comprends pas les lois; je n’ai pas le sens moral, je suis une brute: vous vous trompez...»

Oui, j’ai les yeux fermés à votre lumière. Je suis une bête, un nègre. Mais je puis être sauvé. Vous êtes de faux nègres, vous maniaques, féroces, avares. Marchand, tu es nègre; magistrat, tu es nègre; général, tu es nègre; empereur, vieille démangeaison, tu es nègre: tu as bu d’une liqueur non taxée, de la fabrique de Satan. — Ce peuple est inspiré par la fièvre et le cancer. Infirmes et vieillards sont tellement respectables qu’ils demandent à être bouillis. — Le plus malin est de quitter ce continent, où la folie rôde pour pourvoir d’otages ces misérables. J’entre au vrai royaume des enfants de Cham.

Connais-je encore la nature? me connais-je? — Plus de mots. J’ensevelis les morts dans mon ventre. Cris, tambour, danse, danse, danse, danse! Je ne vois même pas l’heure où, les blancs débarquant, je tomberai au néant.

Faim, soif, cris, danse, danse, danse, danse!

We don’t choose the mind-forg’d manacles that we are assigned at birth and we only “choose” the alternative in the sense that we are condamnés à être libre à choisir. It takes some people decades of psychoanalysis and/or black sex magick to face the simple truth revealed to H.a.K. by the Nordic angels:

À Dieu,

J.d.A.

Lately, many self-described liberals have been asking themselves what it even means to be “liberal”.1 To be sure, no-one wants to be illiberal, but there is little consensus on how a good liberal should be. On The Ezra Klein show, the historian Helena Rosenblatt opted for the definition of freedom beloved by Thomists and Rousseuvians alike: “true” freedom is the freedom to be as you should be, as a citizen or as a Christian or as both. I dislike this adulterated concept. Justice and Virtue are fine things to strive for, but confusing them with freedom just muddies the water. The freedom to be as you believe you should be implies the freedom to be as others believe you shouldn’t.

I’m more sympatico with the description provided by Adrian Wooldridge in conversation with Andrew Sullivan:

Liberalism is the belief that society starts with the individual rather than the collective, that power is so dangerous that it needs to be restrained, that truth can be striven for only through open discussion.

Although the opening metaphor is pretty muddled as well: society doesn’t “start” at any point; society is much older than the human individual. (Note again the order of Mary Midgley’s Beast and Man).2 It is true in a sense that society is created anew each moment by those who participate in it, but experiments in living conducted by Soviets and kibbutzim have shown that the creation of a “new man” and thereby a “new society” is easier said than done. Saying that power needs to be restrained without specifying who is supposed to be doing the restraining is not saying very much. The last point about striving for truth through open discussion needs to be shouted from the rooftops in our cowardly times in which people fear even the words of others.

For those who fear the unauthorised production of words, LLMs are a catastrophe, but then what isn’t a catastrophe for these people? But if what we are doing is not just automating word games but “creating digital life” then more existential fears come to the fore. In April, Palladium magazine published an essay by James Poulos entitled “The Dosteyvskian Moment”. On X, Tanner Greer remarked that it might in time come to be a seen as a touchstone, like Peter Thiel’s “The Straussian Moment” (2007) to which it is in part a response.3

Poulos starts with some pertinent observations about the evolution of the myth of Faust:

The Faustian bargain was once a bad deal. The demon Mephistopheles offers you—a man in full at the dissatisfying limit of your great knowledge and success—even greater power and pleasure; you accept these things, but they make you less of a man. What, after all, does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?

A few tweaks by Goethe, however, and the Faustian bargain became a good deal. Now, Mephistopheles bets he can actually satisfy you with an attainable measure of pleasure and power; these you wrest, with his aid, from the gods, mastering war and nature to the degree that you create a new world where a new kind of people, the beneficiaries of your liberating work, can live free to strive without limit. Dying happy, more than the man you were, you surrender your soul to complete the bargain—but the intervention of the divine feminine redirects it toward God in heaven. Even your soul is more and better than it was before you made the bargain.

Thanks to Goethe, Faust is largely seen today as the image of the sovereign man, whose liberation into full or complete human power is defined by his grant of this power to the human race. In this modern fable man shakes off his debt to the old gods, even Prometheus and Dionysius. Contemporary interpreters are not incentivized by this fact to linger on Faust’s odd soteriology. What matters to today’s Faustian is that the use and development of technological progress to master the universe is a good deal, one that we can consciously and competently know from the outset is a good deal. Mephistopheles can be counted on to deliver on his end of the bargain. He is not a trickster or a cheat. He is not a deceiver. No nightmarish realization of our foolish entrapment awaits. At worst, Mephistopheles promises only the soul’s obliteration in “the eternal empty,” hardly a hellscape of torturous regret.

Poulos suggests that Thiel et al. have been too obsessed with power and haven’t paid adequate attention to the question of authority. He offers a perceptive list of different potential sources of authority:

Vitalists summon the inner authority of the body, whether more physiological and neurological (Andrew Huberman) or philosophical and mystagogical (Costin Alamairu);

Transcendentalists appeal to the authority of consciousness, whether more in the key of wellness practices, New Age spirituality, or syncretism—between, say, Buddhism and physiology (Yuval Noah Harari);

Rationalists invoke free reason: in this vein, neo-stoicism (a la Ryan Holiday) has of late waned in influence relative to the neo-utilitarianism of the Effective Altruists—which appeals to impartial moral reasoning, calculating intelligently about the proper scale and scope of application, but which has significantly shifted its sense of authority toward the more cultlike modality of the postrationalists;

For the postrats, a shadowed sort of spiritualism, led by charismatic gurus or spirit guides, occupies the throne of authority; eternal archetypes and vision quests in the tradition of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell promise self-mastery through intuitive integration of the ultimate cosmic patterns;

From there, one can readily slide out of cult mode into occult mode, where the authority of True Will brings the self to heel by unleashing a magical kind of radical autonomy. Whether more through chaos magick (in the Crowley-Parsons-Aquino line) or time-transcendent numerology, often of Kabbalistic influence or provenance, the occultist can shape and reshape both inner and outer reality through ritual on command;

Yet occultism can serve as a portal or catalyst (as in the case of Nick Land) to the authority framework of accelerationism—which, as the reigning movement within tech culture today, merits especially close focus.

Against this cacophony of drives likely to lead to pandaemonium, Poulos claims that only divine authority can re-orient us in a less self-destructive direction:

Power without authority tends to fail even on its own terms, but philosophers and theorists have struggled to define authority since the modern age. Max Weber, classifying types of authority as charismatic, traditional, or rational-legal, hardly settled the debate. The most ancient and unbroken tradition and model of authority is divine authority. To the detriment of Weber’s taxonomy, which reduced religious authority to a subcategory of the charismatic (itself a term redefined away from its original meaning of divine grace), the authoritative power of faith, tradition, reason, and law all stem quite logically on simple theological terms from divine authority. In the wake of modern social science’s inability to provide a sounder conceptual account of authority than theology, philosophy and theory have struggled inconclusively to do so ever since.

The first claim shows that the concepts of power and authority cannot so easily be disentangled. Power without authority is no power at all. Authority is the successful exercise of power, or more precisely, that which masks the successful exercise of power (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain). Is this too cynical? If not a higher Power, can we not appeal to a higher Principle, call it Justice if you don’t want to call it God. Those in Power indeed make such appeals… to legitimise their earthly powers.4

Poulos’s dismissal of Weber’s classification of religious authority as a subcategory of the charismatic is belied by his own appeal to charismatic authority as part of the altar call at the end of the essay:

As the present trajectory of technological development has reopened ultimate inquiries about our human identity and purpose, questions like those facing the merely philosophical approach to self-mastery are now becoming commonplace even among once-committed Silicon Valley rationalists. Signs are everywhere: amid an unprecedented surge in conversions to the ancient Catholic and Orthodox Churches, noted Berkeley philosopher of perception and consciousness Alva Noë was among those received this Easter into the Catholic Church.

If a philosopher of consciousness is converting to Catholicism, it must be true! I for one will continue to defy the self-appointed spiritual monopoly of the “ancient Catholic and Orthodox Churches”. Although I like the style of the French radicals,5 my beef with Churches is more empirical than rational. Darwin’s theory of evolution and Bart Ehrman’s work on the contradictions in the New Testament was enough to convince me that whatever else Christianity was, it wasn’t what it claimed to be: the unvarnished Truth. Protestantism has the tragically beautiful tendency to self-deconstruct, the more fervent varieties rarely lasting more than a generation. Puritanism gives way to transcendentalism gives way to a new kind of puritanism. It is the way of the world they say. In Weil I found a kindred spirit:6

Dès l’adolescence j’ai pensé que le problème de Dieu est un problème dont les données manquent ici-bas et que la seule méthode certaine pour éviter de le résoudre à faux, ce qui me semblait le plus grand mal possible, était de ne pas le poser.

#TeamWittgenstein

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen

To those spiritual punters left dissatisfied by the trad life and/or digital Sodom, I shall again hawk my own brand of virtuous vitalism. (I’m yet to see any evidence of virtue, she says with an arched eyebrow.) God knows I’m not suggesting anyone follow my example, I’m simply testifying that, in my lived experience, what gives me life, what sustains my weak and wayward spirit, is nothing other than life itself. The bluebells, the herons, the foxes, the turtles and the turtledoves. We can speculate whether there is something or Someone behind this life, but I honestly find these speculations beside the point. For all the talk of the Mother Goddess, the McKenna/Lin lineage of shroomed up American gnosticism foolishly attempts to look through nature to some purer linguistic realm.7 In Ars Vitae: The Fate of Inwardness and the Return of the Ancient Arts of Living Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, daughter of the Christopher Lasch, faults the neo-gnostics for their shallow appropriation of the myth of Gaia:

Plato, in his Timaeus, presents the anima mundi, or World Soul, the idea that the entire universe is one living creature containing all other living creatures. This concept, linked to the myth of Gaia, informs the environmental scientists and others who entertain the “Gaia hypothesis.” The idea that all organic and inorganic matter is connected, that human life and society are intrinsically connected to the life of the earth and the physical universe, has inspired efforts for sustainability and stewardship of the land and ecosystem. Whether one agrees or not, one must concede that this is holism and not dualism. In a work that fuses the environmental and feminist movements alike, Rosemary Radford Reuther envisions the goddess as consistent with Christian spirituality. Gaia is clearly not Gnostic. To suggest as much reflects a gross misunderstanding and underestimation of her mythical, spiritual, and poetic importance as consummate earth mother.

I know, I know, my sentimental attachment to nature, like that of a Victorian bourgeoise, can easily spill over into goddess worship by another name. I’ve read Sacred Nature by ex-nun and fellow Murdoch-appreciator Karen Armstrong, but I’ve also read Straw Dogs by John Gray. I know Mother Nature doesn’t give two hoots about us as individuals, but she likes it when we join her in putting on a good show. The World-Soul invites us to transcend our petty individuality, but such transcendence does not imply a return to the undifferentiated primordial goo. Life is struggle or it isn’t life, just some simulation of it. You aim, you leap, you fall, you die. You leave behind a trace.8 And soon even that is gone.

The narratives that spiritual and/or religious people like to tell are full of coups de foudre, moments of clarity and time-stopping Enlightenment. K believed that this much is true. Insight comes in an instant. It takes a lifetime to unravel.

Caveat lector: I’m not suggesting that gays with mommy issues constitute a subtype of gay. Daddy/mommy/bro/sis/cousin issues are by no means mutually exclusive. Nor do I mean to essentialise the distinction between gay and straight misogyny. The narrow scope of my inquiry is motivated by intellectual humility. Since I emerged vogueing out of the womb, the straight male mind is to me terra almost as incognito as that of the feminine.

We’re so awash in rainbow girlboss propaganda that it is easy to forget that the girlies, gays and theys have not always been so perfectly synced in their opposition to the Patriarchy. The timeline f événements at the beginning of the Gallimard publication Un concert deniers: Vies et poésies Arthur Rimbaud Paul Verlaine is a trip in and of itself.1 Here are some of my favourite bits:2

1844

30 mars. Naissance de Paul Marie Verlaine à Metz, au 2 rue Haute-Pierre. Son père, Nicolas Auguste (1798-1865), originaire du département des Forêts (actuellement en Belgique), est capitaine au 2º régiment du génie; sa mère, Élisa Dehée (1809-1886), née à Fampoux, dans le Pas-de-Calais, est issue d’une famille de cultivateurs et de fabricants de sucre. Dans plusieurs écrits autobiographiques, Verlaine évoquera le souvenir de ses parents aimants et attentits.

La notice qu’il se réserve dans Les Poètes maudits (1884), sous le prête-nom de «Pauvre Lelian», indique: «Son enfance avait été heureuse. Des parents exceptionnels, un père exquis, une mère charmante, morts, hélas! le gâtaient en fils unique qu’il était. […]

Mais à cette évocation lumineuse et émue se superpose dans l’esprit de Verlaine une ascendance d’un autre ordre, dont il soulignera à maintes reprises l’influence durable.

Dans le texte placé au fronton de Poèmes saturniens, Verlaine déclare sa filiation: au-delà du cercle restreint de l’hérédité familiale, en dehors des données de l’état civil, il se range parmi ceux qui « sont nés sous le signe de SATURNE», lesquels « Ont entre tous, d’après les grimoires anciens,/ Bonne part de malheur et bonne part de bile». Réintégrant une engeance maudite, le poète se donne une origine imaginaire marquée au sceau de la prédestination: il se soumet à «la logique d’une Influence maligne».

1854

20 octobre. Naissance de Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud à Charleville (Ardennes). Son père, Frédéric Rimbaud (1814-1878), est capitaine d’infanterie. Sa mère, Vitalie Cuif (1825-1907), est issue d’une famille de propriétaires terriens, possédant notamment une ferme à Roche (canton d’Attigny). Le frère aîné de Rimbaud, prénommé Frédéric, est né en 1853. À la naissance du poète, Rimbaud père est en garnison à Lyon.

Dans un de ses cahiers (1865), Rimbaud brossera le portrait contrasté de ses parents, entre contession et inven-tion. «Mes parents étaient peu riches, mais très honnetes. ils n’avaient pour tout bien qu’une petite maison qui leur avait toujours appartenu et qui était en leur possession vingt ans avant que je ne fusse encore né en plus quelque mille francs auxquels il faut encore ajouter les petits louis provenant des économies de ma mère mon père était officier dans les armées du roi. c’était un homme grand, maigre, chevelure noire, barbe, yeux, peau de meme couleur quoi quil n’eût guère quand j’étais né que 48 ou 50 ans on lui en aurait certainement donné 60 ou 58 il etait d’un caractère vif, bouillant, souvent en colère et ne voulant rien souffrir qui lui déplut ma mere etait bien differente femme douce, calme, s’effrayant de peu de chose, et cependant tenant la maison dans un ordre parfait et elle etait si calme que mon père l’amusait comme une jeune demoiselle. j’étais le plus aimé [....]» (Le Cahier des dix ans).

S’il ne fait pas doute que Rimbaud fut entouré de l’affection de ses parents, il n’en reste pas moins qu’il fut très tôt rebelle à la discipline autoritaire de sa mère, la «mother», comme il se plaira à l’appeler plus tard. Incarnation du devoir et de la loi, celle-ci surveillait ses lectures, aspirait à gouverner sa vie morale, affective et intellectuelle.

Rappelons ici l’attaque du poème « Les Poètes de sept ans»: « Et la Mère, fermant le livre du devoir/ S’en allait satisfaite et très fière, sans voir,/ Dans les yeux bleus ou sous le front plein d’éminences,/ L’âme de son enfant livrée aux répugnances. […]

1870

29 août. Rimbaud fugue. De Charleroi, il prend le train pour Paris, muni d’un billet non valable. Il est arrêté à la gare du Nord. On le conduit au dépôt de la préfecture, puis on le transfère à la prison de Mazas.

Octobre. Rimbaud fait une nouvelle fugue. Il se livre à la vie errante, va, en train, à pied, jusqu’à Charleroi.

1871

Fin août. Rimbaud envoie à Verlaine plusieurs lettres accompagnées de poèmes. Il fait notamment allusion au «projet » d’un «grand poème» et affirme ne pouvoir «travailler à Charleville». «Je suis empêché de venir à Paris, écrit-il à Verlaine, étant sans ressources. Ma mère est veuve et extrêmement dévote» (Lettre d’août 1871).

Verlaine l’invitera à le rejoindre à Paris: « Venez, chère grande âme, on vous appelle, on vous attend » (Lettre à Rimbaud d’août-septembre 1871).

Septembre. Rimbaud arrive à Paris; Le comité d’accueil qui l’attend gare de l’Est (alors gare de Strasbourg) est composé de Verlaine et de Charles Cros. Il s’installe rue Nicolet, où les Verlaine ont élu domicile.

30 septembre. Verlaine se rend avec Rimbaud à un dîner du cercle des Vilains Bonshommes qui avait repris ses réunions. Le jeune Ardennais y apparaît, selon la formule de Valade, comme «le Diable au milieu des docteurs».

Octobre. Rimbaud est contraint de quitter la rue Nicolet, où sa présence est devenue indésirable. Il s’installe chez Charles Cros jusqu’à la fin du mois.

30 octobre. Naissance de Georges Verlaine, fils de Paul et Mathilde.

Novembre. Rimbaud est pour ainsi dire sans domicile fixe. Il va d’un logement à un autre, au gré des hospitalités et des humeurs. Il participe aux réunions du groupe des Zutistes, qui se tiennent à l’hôtel des Étrangers, situé à l’angle de la rue Racine et de la rue de l’École-de-Médecine. Comme Verlaine, il collabore à l’Album zutique, pour lequel il compose quelques pièces parodiques et satiriques.

1872

Janvier. Après une scène conjugale particulièrement violente, M. Mauté éloigne sa fille et son petit-fils à Périgueux. Verlaine et Rimbaud passent alors ensemble la plupart de leurs nuits rue Campagne-Première, mais les premières démarches de la procédure en séparation engagée par sa femme inquiètent Verlaine.

Mars. Au cours d’un dîner des Vilains Bonshommes, hostile à ce qu’il considère comme un rassemblement de bourgeois, Rimbaud blesse le photographe Carjat avec la canne-épée de Verlaine.

Juillet. Le 7, Verlaine sort chercher le docteur Cros pour sa femme souffrante et rencontre Rimbaud. Ils quittent brutalement Paris. Leur destination est la Belgique, mais ils font une halte à Arras. Voulant épater les bourgeois, ils se font passer pour des criminels et sont sommés de s’expliquer face au substitut du procureur.

20 juillet. Mathilde prend le train avec sa mère pour la capitale belge, avec la ferme intention de reconquérir son mari. Dans Romances sans paroles, le poème «Birds in the night» évoque leurs retrouvailles. Les époux semblent même avoir envisagé la perspective d’un départ en Nouvelle-Calédonie auprès des communards dépor-tés, dont Louise Michel, qui avait été présente à leur mariage. Mais Rimbaud veille au grain en se cachant dans le train. À la gare frontière de Quiévrain où tous les passagers doivent descendre, l’adolescent convainc Verlaine de demeurer avec lui. Mathilde rentre sans son mari à Paris et y reçoit une lettre impitoyable: «Misérable fée carotte, princesse souris [...], vous m’avez fait tout, vous avez peut-être tué le cœur de mon ami; je rejoins Rimbaud, s’il veut encore de moi après cette trahison que vous m’avez fait faire.» (Lettre de Verlaine à sa femme, juillet 1872.)

Septembre. Depuis Ostende, les deux poètes gagnent l’Angleterre. Ils emménagent à Londres dans le logement que le communard exilé Eugène Vermersch, tout juste marié, vient de libérer. La ville, qu’ils arpentent longue-ment, leur semble dépaysante. Verlaine décrit à Lepelletier les « [p]etites maisons noirousses», les « boys rouges » frottant les bottes, les théâtres, les «4 ou 5 cafés potables» et les « dining rooms où l’on ne boit pas», ainsi que «l’inouïe circulation de voitures, cabs, omnibus [...], tramways, chemins de fer incessants» (Lettre du 20 septembre 1872). Ils s’inscrivent à la British Library, composent de nouveaux vers et fréquentent le milieu communard de la capitale. […]

1873

8 juillet. Arthur arrive cependant à Bruxelles. Outre son compagnon, il y retrouve Mme Verlaine, accourue auprès de son fils quelques jours auparavant. Tous trois déménagent à l’hôtel de Courtrai, pour éviter d’être surpris par la femme ou la belle-famille de Paul.

10 juillet. La tension est à son comble. Arthur a évoqué son intention de partir seul pour Charleville ou Paris. Au matin, Verlaine achète un revolver. Après boire, il tire sur Rimbaud, qui est touché à l’avant-bras gauche. S’étant fait panser à l’hôpital Saint-Jean, le blessé, qui a pris le chemin de la gare du Midi, est convaincu d’être menacé à nouveau par son compagnon. Il s’en remet à un agent de police et Verlaine est aussitôt arrêté. Comme Rimbaud et sa mère, il tente de réduire les faits à un malencontreux accident, imputable à un excès de boisson.

11 juillet. Mais leurs premières dépositions ne convainquent pas le juge d’instruction Théodore t’Serstevens, qui ordonne l’incarcération de Verlaine pour tentative d’assassinat.

16 juillet. Les docteurs Semal et Vleminckx font subir à Verlaine un humiliant examen corporel. Leur rapport, caractéristique des théories médicales alors en cours, évoque des « traces d’habitudes de pédérastie active et passive» qu’ils interprètent comme la preuve de « pratiques plus ou moins récentes» (ibid., p. 68). Trois jours plus tard, Rimbaud signe une lettre sans doute dictée par l’avocat du prévenu, qui confirme son renoncement à toute poursuite. Verlaine évite le procès d’assises mais n’en subit pas moins une peine lourde.

8 août. Le jugement, qui sanctionne ses sympathies communardes et son homosexualité plus que son coup de revolver, le condamne à deux ans de prison et deux cents francs d’amende.

Verlaine was imprisoned 92 years after sodomy was decriminalised by the revolutionary Penal Code, 12 years before Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for criminal libel and 86 years before the first brick was thrown at Stonewall.

Reading le beau garçon’s gynophobic invectives as une femme d’un certain âge myself, I can now see both sides of the argument, like Joni Mitchel.

Beyond the obvious psychoanalytic explanation for my interest in the “love story” between V&R, I’ve been thinking about why artistic and romantic partnerships and collaborations seem less fertile now. The Substack masses appreciated my clapback to a feminist insinuation that male writers are so productive because they have wives to take care of questions of material existence, but I don’t think a greater appreciation for the role of the genius’s wife (or mother or husband) has to be accompanied by a denial of genius, which is often dubious and unstable, and can truly benefit from a loving companion and helper. By all accounts it did the trick for Blake and Dostoevsky and Murdoch.3

I’m weary of abstractions like “society” and “religion”.

There are at least three forms of extant Christian soteriology:

• low: Jesus literally died and rose from the dead to save us from literal eternal damnation, but only if you sincerely believe that Jesus literally died and rose from the dead to save us from literal eternal damnation

• mid: Jesus may or may not have literally died and/or risen from the dead, but it’s still a good story to guide our pilgrim’s progress through this earthly purgatory to prepare our souls for heaven

• high: one day the lion will lie next to the lamb and Satan xirself will be redeemed

(As with drugs, higher is not always better.)

The secularised version in reverse:

• L’homme est condamné à être libre.

• Live, laugh, love

• Be kind

I’m enjoying listening to Diarmaid MacCulloch read his monumental Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity. I’ve long been fascinated by the early history of Christianity, not only pre-Protestantism, but pre-Catholicism and pre-Orthodoxy.

In the case of the Church of the East, the fundamental contrast with the imperial Churches of the Mediterranean is that it never enjoyed the alliance with power that led to ‘Christendom’ in Byzantine Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The eastern frontier of the Empire swayed over time, but, from the third century to the seventh, the great power was the Sasanian Shah (king) in Iran (Persia), self-consciously heir to Iranian monarchies that had fought Mediterranean empires all the way back to the time of Athenian democratic greatness. Their religion was Zoroastrian, a far older monotheistic faith than Judaism, and indeed an influence on it. The establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire encouraged Zoroastrian Sasanians in pogroms against what they saw as a Christian fifth column in their midst. Though these bouts of persecution in the fourth and fifth centuries were savage, they were intermittent, while the Church of the East’s own quarrel with the Byzantine Chalcedonian Church gave it every incentive to come to an understanding with the Iranian monarchy.

The high level of scholarship in the Dyophysite Christian elite was an advantage for integration. A Christian school of higher education established in Gondeshapur in south-west Iran was a repository of Graeco-Roman learning which included medicine, and Christian physicians proved very useful to the Sasanian rulers. Nevertheless, reconciliation with a Zoroastrian monarchy posed even greater problems for Christians than the Roman imperial system. At the centre of the difficulty was marriage and celibacy, one of the major issues in Sasanian persecution: the Shahs could detest Manichees and Christians equally because they both belittled the institution of marriage through the programmatic celibacy of their clergy. Sexual abstention offended the Zoroastrian principle that humanity had a moral obligation to have children and to work the land: Zoroastrians saw the monastic vocation of prayer and abstention as an insult to this divine command, and such an offence to the divinity deserved to be punished by death.

On the 8th-9th century Byzantine war on icons

Shocked by another apparent sign of God’s displeasure in a massive volcanic eruption in the Aegean archipelago of Santorini in 726, [Emperor] Leo [III] implemented what was at first a fairly restricted programme of removing prominent icons from imperial buildings and whitewashing over church mosaics. His son Constantine V (reigned 741–75), another successful soldier, extended the iconoclastic campaign into persecuting ‘iconophiles’, the defenders of sacred imagery: he had one of them whipped to death in the Hippodrome of Constantinople.33 Images were destroyed in huge numbers, as is proved by how few icons dating to before this era survive to us outside the remote haven of the monastery of St Catherine in Sinai, which the iconoclasts never reached.

Archaeology has revealed the systematic removal of images from mosaics on both sides of the frontier between Byzantium and the Caliphate.34 Both Church and imperial government were deeply damaged by this bitterness. One feature of the long-drawn-out dispute, finally only settled by an imperial decision in 843, was that the turning points in favour of icons were the work of two successive empresses. Constantine V’s daughter-in-law Irene, whose blinding of her son Constantine VI left her as the only reigning Empress in Byzantine history (sole reign 797–802), had gone so far as to summon an Oecumenical Council in the name of that unfortunate teenager, at that stage still in possession of his eyes, and this second Council of Nicaea (787) systematically reversed iconoclast policies. For the time being the shift was temporary, since Irene’s unmaternal behaviour, combined with the alarming diplomatic prospect that she might make a second marriage, to the Western Latin monarch Charlemagne, led to her deposition and exile in 802. The issue remained in play for another half-century, before the later Empress Theodora was freed by the death of her iconoclast husband Theophilos in 842 to emerge as a second female champion of icons. A run of military victories for iconoclast emperors had abruptly and humiliatingly ended in the 830s: God’s favour seemed to have deserted the iconoclast cause. As regent for her son Michael III, toddler as well as Emperor, Theodora ordered a new Patriarch hand-picked for his iconophile sympathies to restore the icons to public worship. The occasion of their joyful formal reintroduction to the great church of Hagia Sophia, 11 March 843, was a decision never reversed, and it has always subsequently been celebrated in successor-Churches as the ‘Triumph of Orthodoxy’.

music videos > movies since when?

With thanks to my parasocial friend with intellectual benefits John Pistelli, I present the post-post structuralist socio-economic version of my chart to end all charts:

The O.G. Mother Mary didn’t mog her Son by staging her own crucifixion.

In a thought-provoking essay entitled Fulfilment, Faith, Feminism: Should religion be able to answer the problem at the heart of the second wave? friend of the blog sees in Simone de Beauvoir’s insistence on transcendence as the essence of selfhood a potential bridge between “secular feminism” and “religion”, quoting from The Second Sex:

Every subject posits itself as a transcendence concretely, through projects; it accomplishes its freedom only by perpetual surpassing towards other freedoms; there is no other justification for present existence than its expansion towards an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is a degradation of existence into ‘in-itself’, of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fall if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases it is an absolute evil.

Can we ransack religion’s largely abandoned cupboard to plug the meaning-shaped holes in girl boss feminism? In Christendom, the slide towards secularisation continues apace, notwithstanding articles in the style sections of NY magazines on the microtrends of Dime Square girls attending Mass and cancelled right-wingers finding Jesus. Things are different in the Islamic world, but a religion that teaches peace through submission doesn’t generally look kindly on non-halal forms of individual transcendence. (My Iranian fuck buddy tells me that back home the penalty for tops is lashes and for bottoms is hanging.)

My own branch of existentialist mysticism, which I’ve self-derogatorily called stoner Buddhism but can more respectfully be called Anglo Zen, doesn’t recognise De Beauvoir’s uncompromising binary, but views the relationship between the transcendent and the immanent as that depicted in the image beloved by Master Iris Murdoch of mountains disappearing before appearing again.

The Buddhification of the Western Mind is nothing new.1 Schopenhauer learnt much from Asia (including about women) even if purists insists that he got Buddhism all wrong. I don’t believe in purism, Buddhist or otherwise. I learnt the basics from Messrs. Alan Watts, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, who read the Tibetan Book of the Dead as an allegory for the psychedelic experience.2

Along with Watts, Aldous Huxley is perhaps the paradigmatic Anglo Zen preacher. The Perennial Philosophy (1945) is composed of easily digestible mystical nuggets, closer to self-help than true art, perhaps, but it doesn’t make it untrue. Likewise, his novel Island (1962) is little regarded qua novel, but instructive of a previous waves of attempted East/West synergy. Here is the Anglo protagonist, who finds himself on a Utopian Island in the Indian Ocean, talking to a local girl peeling bananas3:

The child peeled another banana, gave two-thirds of it to Will and offered what remained to the mynah. “Is that your bird?” Will asked. She shook her head. “Mynahs are like the electric light,” she said. “They don’t belong to anybody.” “Why does he say those things?” “Because somebody taught him,” she answered patiently. What an ass! her tone seemed to imply. “But why did they teach him those things? Why ‘Attention’? Why ‘Here and now’?” “Well …” She searched for the right words in which to explain the self-evident to this strange imbecile. “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.” “And the mynahs fly about reminding you—is that it?” She nodded. That, of course, was it.

Zen is just one way of philosophising à l’anglaise, by analogy to jardiner à l’anglaise, which is to say jardiner aussi peu que possible.4 John Pistelli has recognised the importance of Iris Murdoch in keeping alive the tradition of the European novel as a philosophical work of art. Not all works of art are philosophical (Kant gets around Plato’s iconoclasm by permitting art that hews close to nature: a careful drawing of a flower, a simple melody reminiscent of birdsong…) and not all works of art are philosophical in the same manner,5 but there is no need for theory envy chez those fortunate enough to have English as their primary or solitary language. Murdoch would be the first to admit that she was only following in the footsteps of that great Master Shakespeare, who bequeathed a one-man secular canon, not only to the English, but to the world. One can find almost anything in Shakespeare: feminism and anti-feminism, Jew hatred and anti-Jew hatred. It is this capaciousness that I find lacking in the kind of contemporary art friend of the blog writes about in the prelude to his review of the new Ben Lerner:6

More than a century ago the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács described the novel as “the epic of a world without God.” This type of fiction might be uncharitably described as the novel without the world. The anhedonia is really the main thing though, and largely why I’ve never loved “autofiction” as a term of abuse for this material. Proust is autofiction. Renata Adler’s two novels are nonfiction

To me, it’s never been about the style, but the about the spirit. Gnocchic cites John’s decade-old taxonomy:

If Dickens and certain maximalist strains of modernism (Joyce, Faulkner, Ellison, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, and García Márquez) were the progenitors of hysterical realism, penitential realism can boast of its lineage in a more austere modernism—Conrad, Hamsun, Kafka, Hemingway, Beckett, Sartre, Camus, Spark, Duras

I protested the post-colonial footnote regarding the penitentialists, but my broader point is that maximalism and minimalism come and go, like daffodils and fashion trends. The authors on this list have something much deeper, much more unsettling in common. Although few of them could have been said to have been “a good person” in the Sunday school / HR sense, they all produced works that reflect a Great Soul.

Now Rann the Kite brings home the night
That Mang the Bat sets free—
The herds are shut in byre and hut
For loosed till dawn are we.
This is the hour of pride and power,
Talon and tush and claw.
Oh, hear the call!—Good hunting all
That keep the Jungle Law!

— Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book (1894)

Today is Freedom Day, marking thirty-two years of a free and democratic South Africa. Out of a combination of homesickness1 and a perennial preoccupation with what it means to be free, I wanted to write something to commemorate the occasion. To appeal to a cosmopolitan audience, I considered structuring my thoughts in a listicle of uncompromising binaries, like those beloved by NYT headline writers and American scholar-geniuses (Don’t read that to understand South Africa. Read this instead.) But since we try to keep things literary in this little corner of Substack, I decided not to do that. Instead, I set out to answer the question: What would an invisible affiliate of the Invisible College spiritually located somewhere around the Cape of Storms put on its invisible reading list?

To start with, I had a look at the courses offered by the “English Literary Studies”department of the visible University of Cape Town, nestled between Kirstenbosch Gardens and Table Mountain, where the likes of John Maxwell Coetzee and Andre Pierre Brink have professed the English language.

According to the department’s public website, here is the 2024 list of prescribed texts for the first-year, first-semester course ELL1013F Literature: How and Why? :

• Short Stories

• Ḥanān Al-Shaykh, One Thousand and One Nights

• William Shakespeare, The Tempest

• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

• Concerning Cookbooks

• ‘Poetry and Apocalyptic Imaginaries’

• Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, The Island

And for the first-year, second-semester course ELL1016S Image, Voice, Word:

• Cole, Teju. “A Crime Scene at the Border”. New York Times (July 10, 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/magazine/drowned-migrants-photo-us-mexico-border.html

• Butler, Judith. “Precarious Life”. In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. 128-151.

• McClintock, Anne. “Paranoid Empire: Spectres from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib”. Small Axe 28 (2009): 51-74.

• Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York, Picador, 1993.

• Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag”. Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2010. 63-100.4.

• McClintock, Anne. “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice”, e-flux. (Accessed 9 August 2020). https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/oceans/331865/monster-a-fugue-in-fire-and-ice/

• Poetry and Performance: TBD

• The Essay: TBD

• Visual Poetics: TBD

• Franz, Kafka. The Metamorphosis (1915)

• Can Themba, “The Suit” (short story)

• Makhosazana Xaba: “Behind The Suit”, “The Suit Continued: The Other Side” (short stories)

• From Queer Africa: New and collected fiction (2013), edited by Makhosazana Xaba and Karen Martin:

  • “Pinch” by Martin Hatchel

  • “Poisoned Grief” by Emil Rorke

  • “Impepho” by Roger Diamond

  • “The Big Stick” by Richard De Nooy

  • “Sethunya Likes Girls Better” by Wame Molefhe

• The NYC Public Theatre’s Radio Production of Shakespeare’s Richard II

Before I became a person of migratory experience, I was more tuned into the discourse about the need to decolonise African universities. The mission seems to be going swimmingly, with everything that doesn’t spark immanent queer African joy being placed Marie Kondo-like “to the left, to the left, everything you own in the box to the left”, to quote the self-appointed queen of Africa, like they partitioned even the official silverware between the new nations of India and Pakistan.

But it’s easy to point fingers. The idea of a Southern African canon that manages to balance inclusivity and rigour raises some uncomfortable yet potentially illuminating questions, perhaps also for readers from other regions of the world. Please accept these mostly off-the-cuff2 remarks as an opening gambit rather than as the last word on the matter. This land has over the centuries been divided and conquered in various ways by powers and principalities of varying degrees of indigenousness, but since the nation state has become the dominant form of political power here as elsewhere, I’ve organised my thoughts according to boundaries presently recognised by the international community.

South Africa

Let’s not beat around the bush, the regional hegemon in the room is the Republic of South Africa, founded in 1961 when a whites-only referendum declared independence from the British crown.3 The territory had been a unified dominion since 1910, when a union as brokered between the remaining Boer republic of the Orange Free State and the Cape, Transvaal and Natal colonies after the First (1880–1881) and Second (1899-1902) Anglo-Boer Wars.

The Natal province (now officially preceded by the qualifier Kwa-Zulu meaning “place of the Zulus”) was briefly (1838-1843) known as the Natalia Republic after the Boers defeated Shaka Zulu’s less photogenic half-brother Dingaan at the battle of Blood River, a victory attributed to divine intervention and commemorated to this day on 16 December (it is still a public holiday, but now officially called Reconciliation Day) when, as designed through careful attention to the creator’s clockwork, a sun beam shines illuminates the words “ONS VIR JOU SUID-AFRIKA” on the cenotaph in the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. The name “Natal” comes by Vasco da Gama who sailed past on Christmas Day 1497. Nine years before, Bartlomeu Dias became the first European to sail past Cabo das Tormentas (Kaap van Storms), where the Dutch East, led by Jan van Riebeeck, settled in 1652 and soon after began importing Muslim slaves from Batavia to supplement the recalcitrant local labourers. It’s among these slaves that the creole that would later be known as Afrikaans first developed.4 The Dutch offered refuge to French Huguenots fleeing Catholic oppression at the end of the seventeenth century. The British seized the Cape from the Dutch in 1806 and in 1820 encouraged impoverished Brits to settle in a buffer zone named “Albany” between the Cape Province and the land of the Xhosa. In 1833, slavery was abolished across the British Empire. In 1835, the Boers started on their great Trek:

In the 1860s, the British important low-caste Tamils and Telugus as indentured labourers to work in sugar plantations in Natal and others, such as Gujarati merchants, bought their own tickets to seek commercial opportunities in the dark continent. In 1867, diamonds were discovered on the banks of the Orange River, resulting in the development of the city of Kimberley. In 1886, gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, resulting in the development of the city of Johannesburg (a.k.a. Jozi, Joeys, eGoli (place of gold), Sodom and Gomorrah, Jerusalema) and its very own Stock Exchange only a year later.5 Unfortunately, doux commerce was not enough to prevent the before mentioned wars, involving heretofore unimaginable levels of white-on-white cruelty.6

The Constitution of the new South Africa, formally adopted in 1996, recognised nine provinces instead of four and eleven official languages instead of only English and Afrikaans. It was the nineties, a time of liberal abundance, doubly so in South Africa, still recovering from the sixties, which had reached a late cultural peak with the Voëlvry tour in 1987, two year before the hardline P.W. Botha was replaced by the more conciliatory F.W. de Klerk. Broadcast TV had arrived only in 1976, a full four decades after the BBC started indoctrinating educating and entertaining the British public. Ironically, the SABC skipped the black-and-white era and started broadcasting in full technicolour.7

African languages

Saul Bellow notoriously asked: Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? To which we could cheekily add: Who is the Dostoevsky of the Xhosa, the Valmiki of the Venda, the Homer of the Tswana, the Dante of the Tsonga, the Shakespeare of the Swazi, the Cervantes of the Sotho, the Goethe of the Sepedi or the Molière of the Ndebele?

I’m not the person to answer these questions or to speculate why Southern Africa has produced relatively few world-class black writers as compared to East or West Africa.

English

Friends of the blog and are much more qualified than I am to make the case for John Maxwell Coetzee. I would simply ask that we not neglect our other Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, although I’m hardly one to talk.8 Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country remains essential, so is non-fiction like My Traitor’s Heart by Rian Malan. The Afrikaans poet Antjie Krog wrote the harrowing Country of my Skull after working as a journalist reporting on the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Archbishop Desmond for the SABC. I had mixed feelings about Damon Galgut’s Booker Prize-winning The Promise (a very Jewish novel about an Afrikaner family), but I want to read more from him and from Ivan Vladislavic.

Afrikaans

Since I can’t in good faith plead complete ignorance here, I took a stab at producing a rudimentary reading list:9

Geestelike Voortrekkers

• Eugène N. Marais (1871–1936), Selected Poems, Die siel van die mier

• Totius (1877–1953), Selected Poems

Dertigers

• C. M. van den Heever (1902–1957), Somer

• N. P. van Wyk Louw (1906–1970), Raka

• Uys Krige (1910–1987), Selected Poems

• D. J. Opperman (1914–1985), Selected Poems

• Elisabeth Eybers (1915–2007), Selected Poems

Sestigers

• Jan Rabie (1920–2001), 21

• Etienne Leroux (1922–1989), Sewe dae by die Silbersteins

• Sheila Cussons (1922–2004), Selected Poems

• Bartho Smit (1924–1986), Die Keiser

• Ingrid Jonker (1933–1965), Selected Poems

• André P. Brink (1935–2015), Kennis van die aand

• Dalene Matthee (1938–2005), Kringe in ’n bos

• Breyten Breytenbach (1939–2024), Selected Poems

• Koos du Plessis (1945–1984), Selected Songs, Siener in die Suburbs

’n Nuwe Aarde

• Antjie Krog (born 1952), Selected Poems

• Marlene van Niekerk (born 1954), Triomf

• Koos Kombuis (born 1954), Selected Poems and Songs, Somer 2, Seks & drugs & boeremusiek

• Kleinboer (born 1956), Kontrei

Unofficial and marginalised languages

According to Wikipedia:

Khoekhoegowab, !Orakobab, Xirikobab, Nǀuuki, ǃXunthali, and Khwedam; and other African languages, such as SiPhuthi, IsiHlubi, SiBhaca, SiLala, SiNhlangwini (IsiZansi), SiNrebele (SiSumayela), IsiMpondo, IsiMpondomise/IsiMpondomse, KheLobedu, SePulana, HiPai, SeKutswe, SeṰokwa, SeHananwa, SiThonga, SiLaNgomane, SheKgalagari, XiRhonga, and SeKopa (Sekgaga)

As a sop to what is left of the Khoisan community, the motto on the Coat of Arms of the new South Africa is written in the extinct language of the !Xam people, (the : ! and / denoting the different click sounds all but impossible for the European tongue to imitate.10

Namibia and Angola

Namibia achieved independence from South Africa in 1990, after decades of armed conflict, known as the “Border wars” of “Grensoorlog”. In 1966, the UN withdrew the mandate it had granted in 1919, after control was wrestled from the Germans in 1916, who in 1904-08 were responsible for the genocide of around 80,000 Herero and Nama people.11 The Border Wars intensified after an independent Angola (granted independence from Portugal in 1975, after the fall of the fascist Salazar in 1974) became a safe haven for [freedom fighters]/[terrorists] supported by Cuba and the USSR and culturally speaking became a bit like South Africa’s Vietnam.

Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland

The Republic of Botswana was granted independence from Britain in 1964. The South African deep state sought an ever closer union with what was then called Bechuanaland and the mountain kingdoms of Lesotho and Swaziland, but the British resisted.

The Rhodesian-Scottish Alexander McCall Smith has written twenty-six novels of the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series set in Gaborone. More popular among writers for “little magazines” in Europe and North America is Mating by Norman Rush, an American who was with his wife co-director of the Peace Corps in Botswana from 1978-1983.

Zimbabwe and Zambia

Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) gained independence from Britain 1964. Many senior ANC officials spent their exile in Lusaka. In 1965, the white minority government in Southern Rhodesia made a unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain to preserve white rule and fought the Rhodesian Bush wars against Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF, before capitulating in 1980.

The invisible polymath has observed chez certain elements of the American Right ghostly echoes of the dream of the young Cecil John Rhode to form a secret society to ensure the survival of Western Civilisation. Regardless of the seriousness of the Rhodesmaxxing poseurs, Robert I. Rotberg’s doorstopping biography, The Founder: Cecil Rhodes and the Pursuit of Power sounds like it could shed some light on the circles around the likes of Thiel and Musk.12

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook was very important to me as was The Grass is Singing which I read more recently. Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga is highly praised.

Malawi

Malawi, formerly known as Nyasaland, was granted independence from Britain in 1964.

The aforementioned Galgut’s In a Strange Room make the shores of Lake Malawi sound like the perfect spot from which to watch the world burn.

Mozambique

Like Angola, the Republic of Mozambique was granted independence from Portugal in 1975, after the fall of the fascist Salazar in 1974. The phrase a luta continua was popularised by the Soviet-backed FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) and become to signify the permanent struggle against oppression of all forms. A luta continued after independence between FRELIMO and (RENAMO) Resistência Nacional Moçambicana, formed by anti-communist exiles in Rhodesia, until a final truce was struck in 2019.

Today, Mozambique is a sough-after holiday destination for the South African 4x4 class.

Madagascar

A complete mystery to me, known only from nature documentaries and that DreamWorks movie. Nick Land’s demonic time lemurs may be of relevance.

Mauritius

Visited by the Portuguese in 1507, took possession of by the Dutch in 1598, colonised by the French in 1715, seized by the British in 1810, Mauritius was granted independence in 1968.

A popular honeymoon destination for the upper Boergeoisie (pun stolen from a restaurant Pretoria) before it became cheaper to go to Thailand, the island nation also also performs the role for Johannesburg that Jersey and Guernsey perform for London and the Cayman Islands and Bahamas perform for New York, providing opportunityies for some light tax and regulatory arbitrage.

The Nobel laurate J.M.G Clezio considers himself part-Mauritian since that is were his father’s family is from, even though he was born in Nice and raised in Nigeria.

St. Helena

Jumping back over the continent 2500km West of the coast of Namibia and Angola is the island of St. Helena, governed by East Indian Company from 1658 to 1834, where Napeleon was famously exiled in 1815-1821, dictating his memoires to Emmanuel de Las Cases. Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène has inspired Julien Sorel and countless other ambitious young men across the seven seas.

Here at the unofficial Southern African affiliate of the Invisible College, we take invisibility to a whole new level. Not only are there no tests and no assignments, there are no lectures and no seminars, no fees and no students, only a few ostrich feathers and the sun-bleached skull of an oryx.

5

The adjacent invisible Business School ponders the irredeemable oxymoron of “Business Ethics” by contemplating the fortunes and failures of the Dutch and English East India Companies, the former founding the world’s first stock exchange in Amsterdam in 1602 and the latter’s exploits in India carefully documented by William Dalrymple in The Anarchy.

La guerre et Eros sont les deux sources d’illusion et de mensonge parmi les hommes. Leur mélange est la plus grande impureté.

— Simone Weil

I was sceptical about the promise in the headline of the NYT puff piece (“Sofia Isella’s Dark Pop Is Poetic, Feminist and Right on Time”), but I listened and judged for myself and found that for once the gals were not exaggerating.

The EP gets off to a forceful start with “Numbers 31:17-18”:

Now kill all the boys
And kill every woman who has had sex with a man
But save for yourselves the young girls who have not had sex with a man

A refusal to view the horror “in context” slyly draws attention to the Straussian fact that when the ancient Babylonian equivalent of Bari Weiss compiled what some call “the Torah” and others call “the Old Testament” she decided not to omit this problematic little detail. It’s perhaps the fundamental feminist paradox: which came first: the rape or the justification for the rape?

“Out in the Garden” articulates the patronising unbelief of the young and beautiful:

You know Hannah, I wanna begin by saying this
That there is a small part of me that’s envious
That you full heartedly believe someone is always there
That will always love you, and there’s a plan for you out there

How beautiful it must feel to be so sure
I don’t know anything, Hannah, I don’t know anything anymore
But how pretty to be praying to nothing
That gorgeous pill of sugar you swallow like it’s something

“Star v” switches to a lower gear, bemoaning the literal impossibility of being a woman:

You got a mind that's leaving you and a horrible appetite
You're hoping that the muscle and the meat turns to wood
They carve out pieces without the mess, very good

Although I’ll gladly play the vapid fag for laughs, the truth is I’ve never been particularly interested in the appearance or private lives of those the French refer to as «les people», so I was genuinely gooped and gagged when this conversation entre femmes prompted me to I google “Demi Moore” and “Kelly Osbourne” and “Mindy Kaling” to see the lewk they are maxxing these days. If old Schopenhauer were alive today he would probably have muttered Ich habe es dir doch gesagt. Man invents miracle weight loss drug; woman brings back anorexia nervosa. To which the affronted female could reply that 1) many women were instrumental in the creation of the miracle drug and 2) a fair accounting would also require the tabulation of those whose natural virility is given a little pharmaceutical boost.

“The Chicken is Naked and Afraid” is not, as I had assumed from the title and clucking intro, vegan propaganda, but an anti-dick screed:

Caught the truth right by the tail
That animal keeps on calling
Saw you naked and afraid
And all your clothes are hiding nothing
And my god, do you look sad
The chicken’s out of the bag
Curiosity’s instilled
I’m the cat and I got killed
Again-gain-gain-gain-gain-gain-gain-gain

[…]

There’s nothing to you, and that’s very sad
I looked for depth in a dick, that’s my bad

I’ll use the occasion of this needlessly cruel song to remind all dick-having readers of M.J.E.’s Golden Rule for Sharing Dick Pics Without Being a Dick: before sending the pic in question, ask the potential recipient, would you like to see a picture of my dick?1

In Madrid, recently, I was watching myself watching los Madrileños watch the peahen judge the cock’s display in los Jardines de Cecilio Rodríguez. It was a very vulnerable, theatrical, moment: biological triumph or failure. Sovereign is she who gets to decide whose lineage is “fit” to survive.

“Above the neck” is a surprisingly witty anti-porn screed:

Everything above the neck
Everything but the imitation of youth must be given up at the desk
Everything but the look that sells
You're twelve looking twenty, or you're twenty looking twelve
And you're tight, and you're baby, and you're sexy about it
And you're subtle and doe-eyed in a toddler's outfit
And her eyes are crossed and big and bright and bug
And she withers around like a salty slug
There's a beautiful balance to realize and reach
When the women act like both a child and a sex beast
Men are titillated by that delicate line
Between sex song and nursery rhyme
Over time, you'll not remember normalcy
Because normalcy is what you see repeatedly
So there will be nothing to miss
It must be so relieving for you to hear this

Do note the switch from second- to third-person pronouns in line 7. What could have been a critique of women wilfully participating in their own sexual degradation à la Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005) lands in the safer territory of making fun of the pornbrained manchild (emphasis mine):

Your hands are down your pants, you're settled in for the night
It's time to watch eighteen-year-olds on a private browser site
But eighteen years isn't short enough for you
They have pigtails and Hello Kitty shorts on to undo
They've learned that the closer you look like to a kid
The more money you get from a forty-two-year-old piece of shit
So on screen, they'll touch a dick and act so confused
Because cluelessness is easier to get off to
There's no button to push for third base
I'm not trying to seduce you, fuckface
I'll be out in your lawn, covered in snot
I get away with so much shit 'cause you think I'm hot
Oh, you'll praise the virgin, self absorbent
You think your penis is very important
But if something's dirty after you touch it
The problem is your hands, dipshit, cut it off

Full disclosure: I have never had sex with or as a woman, unless you want to equate bottoming with being a woman. In other words, I have only been on the giving and receiving end of male sexual attention, and a curious kind of male sexual attention you might add, since whatever the specific configurations involved, these were all man-on-man interactions (or man-on-man-on-man or man-on-man-on-man-on-man etc.),2 so I’m unsure to what extent I can extrapolate from my own vast but queer and narrow experience of human sexuality.

One of the tragic realisations of maturation is that although the time man can spend thinking about sex is practically limitless (as opposed to the time man can spend actually engaging in sex, natural limitations here being more apparent) trade-offs apply in this as in all areas of life, which is short (especially the productive part). I’ve been trying to follow Sister Agnes’s advice to intellectualise my predicament, so instead of thinking about sex, I try to think about thinking about sex. I’m unsure whether this form of meta-masturbation is better or worse for the state my immortal soul than regular self-abuse, a practice which I can’t claim to have surrended either.3

Since I’m preoccupied enough with male sexuality, I would prefer to not have to think about female sexuality at all and to leave it to the straight bros and hoes to sort out amongst themselves, but the hetero dudes and dudettes seem to be locked in a toxic co-dependent NPD/BPD relationship4 that threatens to disturb the peace of the Homotopia my gay comrades and I have been steadfastly mincing towards. As a reluctant combatant in the forever sex wars I try to develop my ability to empathise with the female perspective by listening to women talk about what it is like to be a woman. On the free portion of a recent episode of the Feminist Chaos podcast entitled “Raccoonus Interruptus”, the gals struggled to wrap their hetero minds around the concept of “heteronormativity” beyond the pronouns-in-bio level social etiquette of not assuming the gender or sexual orientation of someone’s romantic and/or sexual partner(s). So allow me to queersplain: “Heteronormativity” is primarily a gay-on-gay critique of taking “top” and “bottom” to mean more than who is penetrating whom at any given moment. At first glance, this might appear to be an odd critique, since everyone knows that the classical model for homosexual relationships in “the West” isn’t butch/femme but Daddy/twink but 1) when last did you hear anyone speak Ancient Greek? and 2) in a certain branch of folk sexology Top/bottom (sometimes rendered Dom/sub) has come to represent the primary axis of human sexuality, with male- and female-bodiedness being correlated with rather than constituting this polarity. A band (remember when there were bands?) would of course not now get away with the provocation “Let’s play Master and Servant”, like Depeche Mode did in 1984, but this would not be because of prudishness exactly. It is safer to flip the initials and never spell out the acronym. LARPing as buyers and sellers in an Imperial Slave Depot is very titillating and all, but it is au fond a sexy pantomime to distract from the bleak reality that everyone would prefer to never have to grow up and to never have to grow old. Only the good die before hitting the wall.

I’ve noticed the plot point “excessive masturbation as a side effect of male idleness” showing up in more than one upper bougie TV sitcom (e.g. Platonic or I love LA),5 part of what Kat D has called “the coming tide of sex negativity” or something like that. My general gloss of the reactions to recent lady memoirs and memoiristic pop albums is that the lady memoirist will be praised as long as she by the end of the story followed the default women-on-women advice on the Internet, i.e. DTMFA6. No ifs, no buts, no excuses, no forgiveness, no redemption, no fallenness of man, no blurred lines: the moment he looks at a teenage pop star the way he used to look at you anything is permitted. Observe the greater amount of womanly consternation caused by the revelations of Ms. West’s lived experience compared to the far more salacious details revealed in Ms. Gilbert’s latest non-fictional offering,7 perhaps because in the latter case it is less obvious how to blame the Patriarchy.

“Evergreen Soldier” is the closet to an old-fashioned love song and the track I’m mostly likely to be listening to on repeat on my quotidian promenade en chien through my predominantly Bangladeshi borough of London.

4

When she’s right, she’s right.