Pedagogical Provinces in Dangerous Times

In the early 1930s, the famous and well-regarded German author Hermann Hesse had many of the familiar problems of middle age. He was on his third marriage, and he didn’t get along very well with his wife. A lifelong hypochondriac, his health wasn’t great. In his writings, Hesse channeled the internal struggles that he felt his whole life — between spiritual transcendence and earthly pleasures, between his desire to follow a righteous path and his independence of spirit, his serenity and his rebelliousness — into beloved works like Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, but these same struggles, as they played out in everyday life, made him into a pretty ordinary cranky man who had a hard time being happy. He took a course of Jungian psychoanalysis and while this process of self-discovery gave some marvelous additional color to his work, it’s hard to say if it made him much happier.

And then, the Nazis took over Germany. Hesse, born in Germany in 1877, had lived in Switzerland for decades by that time. One of the things he liked about Switzerland was its policy of neutrality. Hesse hated politics. In his many letters to other readers and writers, he made clear that his sympathies were broadly on the left. But he was unwilling to join any kind of political movement, and especially none that demanded commitment to a party line or had internal authority structures which might try to dictate what and how he wrote. As emigres from the Nazi crackdown on dissent fled Germany, he hosted many of them in his house in Switzerland. He was willing to help materially, but not artistically- he had no interest in “making a statement.”

Eventually, because Hesse praised Jewish and anti-Nazi writers in book reviews, his work was banned in Germany itself… which increased the writer’s money woes by cutting him off from his main market. He was stung when leftist emigres condemned him for not speaking out more. Perhaps his analyst might have told Hesse that he was playing out an old pattern, of feeling isolated for following the demands of his conscience (and ego), martyred by misunderstanding from all sides- he had been there before in his personal life.

Hesse wasn’t so cut off from the times that his concerns were purely selfish. Hesse hated politics in large part because he hated violence and war- another reason why Switzerland appealed to him. Pacifism ran deep in him. It wasn’t just the toll in lives that Hesse abhorred- it was the cultural effects of war, too. In the short term, this meant the ignorance, conformism, and bombast of militarism. Longer term, Hesse, and people invested in culture all over the world, feared deeply that if the cycle of wars went on, that the survivors would be brutalized. The strains of total war would burn away the conditions for any culture beyond propaganda and maybe cheap, mass produced entertainment. Anything with human spirit or even charm to it, from folk art to the most abstract philosophy, would become surplus to requirements - eventually, people wouldn’t even know to miss it. The very idea that people can be something more than fuel for an inhuman machine could be lost.

From these big questions, and from his personal vexations, and from the many feelings both provoked, Hermann Hesse wrote his magnum opus, a novel called, in English, The Glass Bead Game. He worked on it from 1932 to 1942, when fears that European civilization had entered an abyss from which it could never return were at their height. This work, along with a little help from his friend Thomas Mann, is likely what secured Hesse the Nobel Prize in 1946.

Somewhat uncharacteristic of Hesse’s major novels, The Glass Bead Game could be called speculative fiction, even science fiction. The bulk of book is made up of a biography of a man named Joseph Knecht. Knecht lives about two hundred years in the future- his biographer is writing from further into the future than that.

In Hesse’s future Europe — implied to be the more or less peaceful product of the exhaustion following a century of war — there’s a province called Castalia. They call it “the pedagogical province” and it is solely dedicated to the life of the mind. Gifted children are sent there to be raised up to think especially about abstract subjects- mathematics, philosophy, music, poetry — free from the distractions of quotidian reality. Castalia trains teachers for the rest of the realm, and sometimes people go there for schooling. But there’s a core of permanent Castalians, and their highest pursuit is the titular Glass Bead Game. Despite (or because of) its centrality to the story, Hesse never describes the mechanics of the game. We’re told it involves arranging highly abstract analogies between patterns of thought across diverse fields of knowledge. Whatever else it is, it’s a metaphor for intellectual life, especially as pursued in an un-self-interested manner, for its own sake.

Castalia, for Hesse, was a lot of things. Probably most importantly for him, it was a staging ground for a drama of self-discovery for his main character, the sort of story he specialized in, but that’s not what I’m focusing on tonight, for better and for worse. It was a fantasy of a world of thought and art separated entirely from worldly concerns like money and politics, especially appealing to an apolitical man in the thirties and forties. But it was also Hesse’s speculative answer to a question we would likely call political- what might preserve humanistic learning and culture in a future stemming from a present where these things seem endangered, possibly to the point of extinction? What sort of communities might arise out of the task of preserving the capacity for rigorous abstract thought?

The Glass Bead Game is one of three books I want to talk about tonight that ask some of the same questions. The other two are Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, published as a novel in 1959, and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, from 2008. I’m interested in how these three writers thought about what was needed to preserve and advance learning in situations inimical to it. None of the three thought of themselves as being especially “political” writers — indeed, two of them averred a disdain for politics in general — but all three put some degree of thought into what a community dedicated to preserving humanity’s culture-producing capacity might look like. These, in turn, were influenced by how the three authors understood what, exactly, the threat to culture was.

In all three of these books, the communities in question are, to one degree or another, cloistered- intentionally removed, socially and geographically, from the rest of the world. Their degrees of isolation vary, but all of them emphasize their mission via a physical separation from others.

In this, all three recapitulate an important historical story. Most of us are familiar with the idea that for hundreds of years, Christian monks preserved texts from classical antiquity, portions of the immense learning of Greece and Rome, from the social, political, and economic breakdown that went along with the fall of the western Roman Empire. These texts, and some practices of learning that monks preserved or created in their cloistered spaces, in turn allowed the Renaissance and scientific revolution to flourish.

There are many complicating factors to this story. A lot of them have to do with larger narratives that the story has been woven into- was it really preserved classical knowledge that gave Western Europe a leg up in scientific progress, or was it the massive sack of loot they sat on after stumbling into and savagely exploiting the new world? Were the monasteries a light in a dark age, or was the post-Roman period only dark because self-serving philosophers centuries later wanted to make their time look better? How many classical ideas were transmitted from monasteries versus came to the once-marginal lands of Western Europe as the result of interactions with the Byzantine and Islamic world, that did not see a collapse in institutions like you got in the west?

All of those caveats duly registered, the story that says “monks preserved old texts, encouraged learning (at least some of the time), and their work was important for cultural transmission” does seem to basically hold up, if not necessarily sustaining the weight of extra interpretative baggage. It is an important thread in the tapestry of history, and more than that it has become a legend, a symbol, that is, the stuff that makes up speculative fiction.

Mention speculative fiction and institutions protecting knowledge in a dark age, and inevitably someone will mention a book that I specifically excluded from my three topics. Let me then dispense with a work I’m sure you’d ask me about if I didn’t address: Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which drew directly on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to tell a story of a select body of scientists who predict a galactic dark age, preserve scientific learning, and help lead humanity back to glory. I honestly don’t care for it.

Across the three books in the original series, whenever the Foundation looks like it’s in trouble, like a bad guy is going to thwart its noble plan, it turns out that by using “psychohistory,” they had predicted almost every move the enemy makes centuries in advance. Classic scifi is usually about intelligence winning out over adversity, but in the case of many of the series characters, they don’t really overcome anything- they follow a script set up by a genius a long time ago and then they win. It takes a lot of the fun out of things.

Not just fun- a lot of the interest in such stories, for me, is lacking in Foundation. To me, the knowledge monasteries are interesting precisely because they aren’t all powerful. They don’t dominate the worlds in which they live. The people in them can’t be confident that the knowledge they’re preserving will redound to any benefit beyond knowledge for its own sake. They have to grapple with dilemmas. They can reflect on fundamental questions about what valuing knowledge means. And Foundation has very little interesting to say about threats to culture- the galactic empire just got too big and corrupt and as it collapsed, people stopped caring about science. That was about it. Foundation is about scientific progress temporarily inconvenienced — though really it had everything handled. I’m interested in stories where the frame is a threat to the concept of humanistic learning in general, science very much included.

I could lead off this lecture with a description of what Hermann Hesse’s life was like while he was conceiving of The Glass Bead Game because he’s had a lot of criticism and multiple biographies written of him. He was a Nobel laureate who was very popular in Germany and who enjoyed a revival in the US after his death in 1963, when he was taken up by the counterculture and other spiritual seekers (including my father- I had Hesse’s books in my house growing up). He also wrote volumes of letters and journals, the sort of things historians love to use as sources.

Walter Miller won the Hugo for A Canticle for Leibowitz after it was published in 1959. But he lived in a time when science fiction was little esteemed- no Nobel for him. He was also an intensely private man. Among devotees of his work, there’s a sort of litany of known facts about him that taken together form a tableau of tragedy and irony. We know he was in the Army Air Force during World War II, and took part in bombing and destroying Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in Western Europe, where Nazi troops had holed up during the Italy campaign. This, we’re told, impelled him to learn more about monasticism and to convert to Catholicism after the war. He wrote a few dozen stories for the scifi pulps in the fifties, including some that would be woven together into A Canticle for Leibowitz. The novel was an instant success and something of a crossover hit, garnering mainstream praise.

A Canticle for Leibowitz starts with the world plunged into a new dark age by a nuclear war that wiped out most of humanity six centuries prior. In the wake of the war, people turned furiously against the scientists who made the weapons possible, and eventually on literacy (and the literate) themselves. The novel concerns the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, a Catholic monastic order based in the New Mexico desert. Founded by repentant weapon designer Isaac Leibowitz in the aftermath of the war, the order dedicates itself to preserving what it can of mankind’s knowledge from the flames of the mobs and from the neglect of a shattered world.

The first third of the book depicts post-apocalyptic North America as being roughly like early medieval Europe- I’m told “dark ages” is a term we don’t use anymore, but it would have been current in Miller’s day and that’s what he was going for. The second third takes place six hundred years later, and the continent is undergoing something of a renaissance, including increased interest in the old scientific documents that the Abbey holds. The final portion, another six hundred or so years later, shows civilization back to space age technology… but seemingly not having learned much about how to live peaceably. Another catastrophe is in the works.

Through it all, the brothers of Saint Leibowitz carry on with preserving the memorabilia of the lost civilization of the 20th century, along with the usual tasks of a Catholic monastic order. While there are memorable characters in the book, the real driving force in A Canticle for Leibowitz comes from its considerations of human fallibility, time, and the commitments we make that seek to transcend both, but inevitably get entangled in them. The Leibowitz monks are always faced with the question of whether what they’re doing is worth it- whether anyone cares about what they’re preserving, or if anyone will do anything good with it if they do care.

Keeping going in the face of existential doubt is a major theme in Canticle, which makes the author’s life after writing the book all the more poignant. Miller never published anything else in his lifetime. He became a recluse in his Florida home. His literary agent never met him in person. In the nineties, his agent contracted the scifi author Terry Bisson to ghostwrite a sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz, based off of some writings Miller had been toying with for years. Bisson never had the chance to meet Miller, either. Shortly after his wife died, Miller shot himself. Bisson finished a sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, published in 1997, which deals with altogether different themes than Miller’s original novel.

Miller’s death is especially sad given that the last third of Canticle is a deeply felt cri de coeur against giving up on life. Even as everything the Leibowitz monks have been doing for eighteen hundred years seems to have all led up to humanity just repeating its worst mistakes, even in the face of terrible and inevitable suffering and death, Miller depicts soldiering on as the highest moral imperative. For me, some of it was noble — the Leibowitz monks packing away its archives to take somewhere safe — and a lot of it is questionable, like a monk counseling people dying of radiation poisoning about the evils of assisted suicide, but all of it was clearly deeply felt.

Rather than dwell on the painful irony here, I think it’s worth establishing what Miller was doing in Canticle in terms of presenting the task of preserving knowledge and culture. Canticle is the most directly religious of the three novels. There are more than a few religious overtones in The Glass Bead Game and Anathem, but Canticle is the only one where the culture-preserving order is actually religious, and via a religion that actually exists. Preserving the memorabilia is a way of remembering the dead and honoring knowledge, as a way of glorifying god. It wasn’t there, necessarily, to spur a technological revolution. The middle third of the book is about conflicts the monks face when some secular scholars researching at their archives become scientific advisers to emerging states with imperial ambitions. The cloistered orders in the three books aren’t anti-technology — far from it, the Leibowitz monks are often tinkering with devices inspired by the archive — but the point of what they’re doing isn’t strictly practical. They want to preserve thought for its own sake.

About ten years after Miller’s death, in 2008, Neal Stephenson published Anathem, our third subject. There’s a few extra-textual differences between Anathem and the other two books that we ought to address at the start. Hesse and Miller are dead- Stephenson is very much alive and writing. While the other two were pretty successful writers in their lifetimes, Stephenson is a contemporary bestseller. This means there’s a lot of promotional fluff out there about him and his work. The favor he’s found in Silicon Valley — he was the first hire at Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, and early novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are widely beloved by nerds — hasn’t helped increase the signal to noise ratio in the interviews, criticism, and such around his work. A last thing to note is that Anathem is longer, by a comfortable margin, than The Glass Bead Game and A Canticle for Leibowitz combined.

That means there’s a lot of Anathem to potentially discuss, which in turn means there’s a lot I’m not going to talk about. Suffice it to say that, like the other two, a cloistered order dedicated to preserving knowledge and ways of thinking stands at the center of the story. In the world of the book — for much of the novel, it’s unclear whether this is another planet or the earth in the future — most philosophers and scientists live in cloisters called “maths.” The Maths enforce varying degrees of isolation from the Saecular world around it — some parts of some maths act, essentially, like universities, with plenty of interaction with the outside, and some are so profoundly isolated that their doors only open to the saecular world once every thousand years.

As that implies, this state of affairs has gone on for millennia, depending on how one interprets some of the in-world information Stephenson liberally doles out through this long long book. We learn that advanced industrial civilization has risen and fallen at least twice in the world’s history, and that the Mathic system as we know it grew up in response to one of these downfalls.

In all three of our novels, protagonists have to leave the cloister and venture out into the rough and tumble world. When Anathem’s characters leave the walls, they encounter a world that seems to be similar to that obtaining in the US in the early aughts, described through the eyes of deeply cloistered vaguely-Platonist science monks. Or, maybe early aughts America with a dash of Idiocracy thrown in. That’s not entirely fair. Yes, the landscape is largely made up of casinos and fast food restaurants. But Stephenson — not an author, historically, who’s above stereotype and cheap shots — doesn’t make the saeculars stupid and the mathic smart. It’s not even really that the saeculars are crude but practical and the mathic are sophisticated but unworldly, though there’s some of that.

Really, it’s more a reflection of different types of thought, encouraged by different social and cultural arrangements. Much like Castalia, much is made about how the isolation of the Maths allows the avout — as the monk-like inhabitants are called — to focus solely on things that are capital-T True and unchanging, not the contingent, ever-changing swirl of truth and bullshit that characterizes the outside world, regardless of what societal level obtains there. Not all of them are believe in something much like Platonism, but the protagonists all do, and are guided by the idea that truths like the Pythagorean theorem or classical mechanics are true in an existential sense and that there’s probably something like a world of ideal forms that these truths come from. The maths are an attempt to create a world where these truths are the focus of life by minimizing potential distractions.

Presumably, hiving off the philosophically-minded into weird science monasteries for thousands of years has encouraged a certain emphasis on the contingent and practical in the Saecular world, and Stephenson isn’t shy about saying that such worldly outlooks can lead to a world of casinos, big box stores, and an inability to pay sustained attention. Here, it’s worth noting two things about the mathic world- unlike Castalia and the Leibowitz abbey, the mathic world includes women and men both… but they also don’t reproduce sexually. Sex and relationships are allowed, but everyone is on birth control- they aren’t allowed to have kids. They adopt orphans, and sometimes people volunteer to join.

All of this, and a lot more worldbuilding aside, is set up for a great big philosophical scifi thriller plot that I won’t even go into here. I will say that the big adventure in the book helps answer a question that might linger in a reader’s mind about the relationship between the mathic and saecular worlds- what good are the avout? In the usual economy of scifi thrillers, whether in book, movie, tv, or video game format, the brainiacs are around to come up with technology for heroes and villains to use. But the saecular world doesn’t need the mathic world for technology- in fact, there are numerous technologies the avout aren’t allowed to use for various reasons. Of course, the avout in the novel go on to be all kinds of useful in various adventures once they get their feet under them, but the main thing the mathic world is good for is thinking - thinking deeply and systematically, thinking beyond convention, cliche, and short term means-ends rationality. It’s not as though the saecular people can’t think that way, but most of them don’t, and none of their social institutions or customs are built for it. The mathic world is.

The first decade of the 21st century is an interesting time for this book to appear. The culture at large was much more optimistic about technology, in a more innocent way, than you see these days- pre-Snowden, pre-Trump, pre-most Internet outrages you could care to name. But here is an author who many in Silicon Valley see as inspirational making a loving portrait of a society withdrawing not just from technology — information technology in specific is a type the avout are instructed to avoid — but from the world as a whole, and especially anything that would be thought of at the time as “innovation.” In some of his books after Anathem, Stephenson is even more emphatic about what he sees as the cultural and even cognitive risks of the ways we use information technology, including some prescient writings on generative AI helping to make the internet so full of slop that it’s borderline useless, or malignant.

Even in tech circles, he’s not alone in this pessimism. As many of us on the sidelines of the spectacle of a handful of overfunded, undersocialized nerds deciding what the future will be have observed, people in the generative AI field in particular predict both utopia and apocalypse as a result of the adoption of their products, sometimes seemingly in the same breath. To put it more concretely, as Stephenson and others caution us- it’s not the technology, it’s the people using it and the incentives they respond to that count, and clearly, those incentives don’t always direct people down good paths. Tech uses that as an alibi, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

People in this room mostly don’t need to be told this, however disdainful of generative AI or other tech products they may be. Most people here would call that set of incentives Stephenson understands as driving tech into the dystopian scenarios he lays out “capitalism” - some wouldn’t, some would equivocate, but I think most of us would agree that there’s some deep structural flaws in how we as a society, or a species even, are going about things.

But what else is new, right? Every generation predicts doom, especially as it starts getting older and can start to see its own mortality more clearly. People always freak out over social, cultural, and technological change. Plato thought that the youth of Athens were being corrupted by that insidious new art form, the drama. That’s how far back the “old man yells at cloud” genre goes. Look at the books we’ve been talking about- the wars Hesse and Miller saw as necessitating Castalia and the Leibowitz Abbey never happened, did they? The world didn’t end.

Given the strength and omnipresence of cliche in online discourse, it’s good to consider how the cliches of decline, especially as tied to new creative forms, are often just that. But the “old man yells at cloud/Plato thought the theater would kill philosophy” thing is also a cliche now, itself. Taken to an extreme, it compresses history into a static flux defined by superficial change and equally superficial resistance.

And here’s the thing: the world has ended. The world has ended billions of time for billions of people, and I’m not even talking about the inevitable end of one’s personal world i.e. death. The basic structures of how people have lived their lives have been yanked down around them countless times- that seems to be the threshold for “the end of a world” per speculative fiction. The introduction of the drama to Greek civilization has had profound effects on western culture ramifying down the millennia, if not the exact effects that worried Plato. The pre-drama Athenian world did end and life was not the same on the other side of the change. You can say that European civilization pulled back from the brink with the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, and for the most part you’d be right- but civilization as Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann understood it didn’t survive. People, even educated Germans, don’t live, talk, write, or think like them anymore, and if you read enough old books the differences are clear in a thousand ways big and small.

To me, the question should be- what can grow out of the ending of a given world? Most of the time, the answer is at least “something new and interesting.” That doesn’t mean newer is always better, or that we can’t mourn or lament the passing of a world even if a new one takes its place. It means the story can continue, and possibilities can multiply.

Before we get carried away with the beauties of cultural continuity- I am a materialist. The soil from which sophisticated thought grows — in our realm, anyway, even if there is a realm of pure thought out there — is society, is the meeting of people to exchange ideas. Culture, even at the abstract heights of thought, is a way of being social. It means little in isolation. In all of the stories I talked about here — The Glass Bead Game, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Anathem, the history and the legend of the monks of the Middle Ages, and yes, even Foundation — the crisis to which they respond is a crisis of the social production and reproduction of thought. Their societies had reached a point where it looked like there might not be any space for important kinds of thought — or even just literacy — to grow. If the story was going to go on, and not just become an endless brutal slog, someone needed to act to preserve not just books, not just rational thought, but thinking together in community because the community understands this as an essential thing for humans to do.

I think we are in an age where the social production and reproduction of thought is in severe danger. Here, the risks are less those of war or totalitarianism — though both are definitely factors — and more those of the particularly nihilistic and totalizing variety of capitalism with which we live, empowered by technological advancement. To be brief, there is too much power in too few hands and those hands don’t generally like people or care for their flourishing. Some of the ones who insist they do are actually the most anti-human of all. And they have a degree of power to force vast swathes of the population into the walled gardens made by their monopolies and incentive structures. They can strangle anything outside of it, through force or neglect, and the logic of their system insists that in the end, everything goes into the feed.

I don’t think anyone is going to burn your books, though we could easily see some of that under the guise of “protecting children” or something, or an AI company might buy up every copy of a book and “destructively scan” them to ensure you can only access it through them. I think no matter what happens, people can and will have new ideas and imagine different ways of being. But, characteristic of our current stage of capitalism, it’s a numbers game, and the house generally wins. Especially given how much technology has been dedicated to capturing attention and mental energy and retaining it for profit, the walls of the garden or pen we are being corralled into seem high indeed. If it’s hard enough to leave the walled garden, and people within it are run ragged by the demands of survival, and the outside is a confusing, neglected wasteland, you can wind up in a situation where cultural continuity is hard, and thinking along any lines other than the directives of the owners of the walled garden is harder.

So, obviously, all of us — you, and me, and the person sitting next to you, and all the people who said they’d come to the party but couldn’t — should move to a compound, adopt very strict rules about phones, all read a lot of Plato, start wearing robes, and begin growing our own crops so as to minimize interactions with the filthy TikTok addicts outside!

I mean, obviously, no. I’m a socialist. I’ve organized unions, I’ve knocked doors for candidates, I’ve led campaigns to discourage fascists. I’ve educated and agitated, to replace the systems that hold us down with something better. I plan to continue to do so.

But… but. What if we’re at the point where enough people — a critical combination of a sociopathic elite and beaten down masses — can’t or won’t leave their walled gardens, can’t or won’t think in a deliberative, continuous way, so as to render meaningful, purposeful change impossible? Cultural change can become material reality, especially when these changes are so deeply intertwined with patterns of production, reproduction, consumption and so on. Structures can cease to exist, people can lose capacities. Medieval peasants could, and did, revolt against their lords, but they couldn’t accomplish a revolution — they couldn’t permanently change their living conditions or the social and political structure — because the material conditions weren’t there, including the idea that a better world, here on earth as opposed to in heaven, was possible. I think we could wind up in a situation where incapacities in thought become a material condition preventing any kind of positive change in much the same way.

I don’t think this just concerns socialists, either. It concerns pretty much anybody whose idea of a better future isn’t “right now, 2026, the MAGA-grifter-Dubai-Labubu-Netanyahu-wildfire present, but more so.” If you want Liz Warren style progressivism or “classical liberalism” as something other than a fig leaf for fascism or even meaningful scientific progress not subject to the whims of tyrants and billionaires, then I think you need to think about where we are culturally and even cognitively and what that means. It’s true socialists generally rely more on mass involvement, and other ideologies can try to establish themselves on the social basis of an elite who get the vision even if the hoi polloi don’t. But honest liberals, conservatives, and so on surely haven’t missed how compromised elite institutions have been by these same dynamics- in many respects, their brains are rotted even worse than those of normal people. What’s more, at this point, it’s not just hifalutin philosophical thought we’re at risk of losing or massively reducing- basic understandings of science and technology are also at risk. The cloister would need to preserve philosophy, but would also need to preserve having any idea how to change an oil filter, because both are at risk of becoming lost knowledge.

I’m enough of a nerd that I have gamed out in my head a little what a withdrawal from the anti-culture that increasingly dominates our collective life might look like. Anathem is probably closer to a model than Leibowitz Abbey (too Christian, no women) or Castalia (nice, but also no women and dependent on the goodwill of whatever rando is in charge out there), but there’s a lot of weird shit in Anathem and, let’s be real- the likelihood that some kind of deliberative thought intentional community would degenerate into a cult is very high. And I don’t want to abandon the fight for something better for all of us, though, increasingly, it feels tiresome and not especially hopeful, and just having to maintain an awareness of how absurd things have gotten is demoralizing.

I suppose to end, I’ll say if we split the difference we can make an effort to reproduce the sociality of thought with purpose and rigor in our own lives. This is probably the largest group of people in one room in Middlesex County tonight who probably needs to be told this the least- a room full of people who think seriously and passionately and apply what they know to the world around them, readers, teachers, organizers - my people. Maybe the real preserve for thought is the friends we make along the way. Among other things, maintaining sociality of thought will be helpful if we ever do reach the point where we have to gather up all our books and start pricing out rural real estate and robes.

Share

Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy (2023) - Alamariu is better known to the world by his blogging name, Bronze Age Pervert. In the salad days of the altright, he made a career out of pairing Internet humor with the sort of classical references that appeal to adolescent boys raised on anime and history-themed video games, and using that to promote right wing bigotry and dispense picayune life advice. I read his collection of essays from his blog a while back. The ideology was rancid, but the writing was much worse. I’ve seen online right-wingers try to argue that annoying online writing tics are the preserve of liberals and the left, but the mote in our eyes doesn’t take the redwood-sized beam of insufferable efforts at cool or cute out of theirs. Alamariu was one of the worst in that respect. But people on the right, including apparently some people in the Trump 1 White House, thought highly of him. Eventually, he was doxxed as a Romanian-American (and half Jewish) classics PhD. He says this is when he decided to self-publish his dissertation.

Alamariu desperately wants to offend, but this book is more fatuous than offensive. He’s held in thrall by degraded nth-generation anime and video game versions of old, dumb dreams. Up there with the dream of immortality, among the fantasies of the rich and easily scared, is the dream of perfectly managed reproduction. This is also a way of managing the fear of death- you can create perfect little versions of perfect little you, or better, a race of supermen, to propagate into the future.

If you’re not a child, an idiot, or a despot hysterically frightened of a threat you can’t scare off or bribe (death, for my slower readers), the problems with any such scheme are obvious. We all know about the weak children of the great, and vice versa; we all can see how often generations fail to pass down their most cherished traits to their offspring; we have all experienced the millions of ways that dumb chance can throw off a plan for a dinner party or a commute, let alone an effort to micromanage the outcome of a human life. The clear heritability of some traits serves as bait for the simple-minded, just enough to convince those silly and scared enough that they can ward off their fears of life’s complexities and the universal nature of entropy.

On top of that, everyone who isn’t entirely overawed by either vanity, self-abasing worship of their notional superiors, or both, gets that the most impressive specimens of humanity are, still, human, and they know what that means. There’s a tract full of vegetable and animal matter that runs down the middle of every single human being who ever lived, from the greatest to the lowest, and the matter gets stinkier as it gets lower in the tract until it needs to be ejected through a sphincter inches away from the human’s genitals. As a wise man put it, to Superman, we all look like shrimp nobody deveined. We need to lose consciousness for about a third of the day and during that time, our brain needs to tell us silly stories to keep our brains — and let’s not even get into how those work in any detail — from frying their own circuits. Olympians and peasants both die outside of a very narrow range of temperatures and air pressures, or from being denied oxygen for a pretty short amount of time, or from a wide, wide range of relatively minor infestations of microorganisms, or from the application of pretty small amounts of pressure to any part of their corpus, or just from one of their organs up and quitting. Nobel prize winner or skid row bum, you’re going to be rotting meat comparatively soon. The difference between an inanimate, rotting corpse and even the lamest living human is considerably greater than the difference between said lame and whoever you think is the greatest. So maybe we can all just cool it a bit.

The really stupid thing is that you don’t need to be an egalitarian to know these very basic facts of life. All you need is to live a little while and be strong enough to not need the degree of (empty, false) consolation that the dream of supermen (or immortality or salvation etc etc) provides. You don’t have to think everyone is equal to realize you have to be real dumb, and a weak, sad kind of dumb, to buy the idea that you can, through any means, reliably breed people who can beat the house odds of reality.

It’s a more risible dream than religious salvation, secular utopia, or even personal immortality, because it’s so obviously childish that no great culture has arisen around it, like you see with other human dreams, even silly ones. The closest you get has less to do with actually doing eugenics, and more some of the motivations that drive people into the dream in the first place. Most of the people into it are the self-serving rich, but a few are a special kind of pedant. Nietzsche was, whatever else he was, a self-hating nerd, a profoundly pedantic, self-conscious man whose self-consciousness drove him to observe his own self-consciousness, and that of other nerds around him, and think seriously about what it would be like if he/they could dispense with all that pesky overthinking. There’s many ways to try to do this. One is to embrace the bodily and biological in an effort to escape the longueurs of thought.

They call this “vitalism” and some valuable thought and art has come from it. Amusingly, all of what’s good in vitalism (and much of what’s bad) stems from the basic irony of their position: over-thinkers overthinking underthinking in an effort to stop overthinking, in theory so they can think better… but, really, out of wanting people (especially themselves) to stop treating them like overthinkers ie, nerds. This creative tension can make interesting things happen- again ironically, because irony and tragedy are things vitalists are usually trying to get past, because that’s nerd shit (which is typical overthinking- non-nerds also have tragedy, irony, etc in their lives). Vitalism is best appreciated against its grain- smarter vitalists (Nietzsche and maybe about three others) would grant this in their better moments.

Vitalism feeds into self-help — to a great many people, that’s what philosophy should be, anodyne life advice for the glum striver — which in turn feeds into every pore of our degraded culture and that’s how you get Costin Alamariu. If I wanted to be charitable, I could say that some of his narrower claims — that many classical Greek thinkers were more amenable to what we’d call biological determinism and the dream of race, eugenics, supermen etc — are at least plausible. It wouldn’t surprise me- those Greeks got up to a lot.

Alamariu didn’t want to be read for his narrow claims when he wrote this as a dissertation and he certainly doesn’t want it now that he’s published it after getting doxxed as a fascist blogger. “Selective Breeding” is an improvement on his blog, in that the dissertation process forced him to not write in internet-speak (though the stink of the fora lingers), and he’s not trying to be funny. But you’re still looking at poorly-done vitalism, weighed down by the tiresome culture war commitments Alamariu lards his already weak argument with, and the spectacle of a grown man trying to philosophize himself out of his own consciousness of time, entropy, and his own self-consciousness, to become the gigachad he knows he could be if only everyone would believe in his dumb dream.

Basically, Alamariu’s an otherkin for characters in his own history/philosophy fan fiction. That’s what we have to deal with, now.

Subscribe now

Here’s a picture of Burt wearing a handsome bandanna.

I read some good books lately. Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise, recommended by a friend, is brilliant, a harrowing, emotionally true, unsentimental novel of Americans doing stupid things in Central America during the late Cold War. I don’t know how to really praise or describe it- the book blurbs I’ve seen show the publishing houses don’t really know, either. It’s just great. Much the same can be said for one of the last books by the great Mike Davis, cowritten with Jon Weiner: Set the Night on Fire, an account of radicalism and counterrevolution in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties. Davis and Weiner argue that LA deserves to be seen as a center of the action, just as much as the Bay Area and certainly as much as NYC. They dug up a lot of interesting stuff about a wide range of movements, popping up like brushfire across the area, sometimes ephemeral but always leaving a mark.

I learned a lot from The Golden Age of Black Nationalism by historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses, which describes the arc of the black nationalist movement from its origins in the 1850s until its apogee with Marcus Garvey in the twenties. It can be hard to get into (white) heads that black nationalism isn’t always, historically wasn’t, usually a left wing movement except insofar as it advocated for a downtrodden group. It has often been fairly conservative, in terms of willingness to confront power (usually calling on the community to improve and separate), ideas about gender roles, authoritarian political styles, etc. One thing I’ve run across in a few places in my reading lately has been how foundational, and how seldom questioned, was the idea of “civilization,” this strict correlation between ideas, wealth, technological progress, and manners, acceptance of which arrayed the globe’s peoples in a hierarchy running from “savages” to the height of civilization, the most powerful people around, Europeans and especially Anglos. Old school black nationalists often felt white people were hypocrites who didn’t truly live up to their own civilized principles, but they didn’t question the basic equation, and considered it their charge to bring this “civilization” to their communities so they might compete. It took the irrational bloodletting of the First World War, where those countries sharing the peak of “civilization” slaughtered each other’s citizens in their millions for unclear reasons, to crack the facade and allow people to start to disentangle the knot the nineteenth century made of power, morals, arbitrary social standards, etc… or just to show that imitating Europe wasn’t always a great idea.

I read Lawrence Sutin’s biography of Philip K. Dick, Divine Invasions. It’s a bit of a thankless task, writing a responsible biography of a dude who bent narratives and realities for a living, but Sutin did a pretty good job. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Columbia historian Saidiya Hartman, is a fascinating and highly poetic look at ghetto girls during the “nadir” of racism in the US, their acts of self-invention in spite of their circumstances (and usually evading the archive unless you really know how to look, and often then too).

It wasn’t all gold. James Ellroy’s Red Sheet… well, as many of you know, I have a long history with “Meshuganah Uncle Jimmy,” as my good friend calls him. I love a lot of his stuff. I understand that he is far from a comrade. And I understand he’s probably not entirely in charge of his ad copy. Still, when the notices for this one came out comparing it to the work of Mickey Spillane, Ayn Rand, and Whittaker Chambers, an anti-communist classic for the ages… well, I never thought I’d say this, but I think Meshuganah Uncle Jimmy maybe could have taken a page from the former Alisa Rosenbaum’s book. If you’re going to do a red-baiting potboiler, don’t pussyfoot around the main joy the genre delivers: familiar stock characters, from the vast rogue’s gallery of left-of-center stereotypes the entertainment industry has been perfecting since before Communism was even a concept, getting loathingly/lovingly described and dispatched. Rand could do that. Here, Ellroy really couldn’t- to the extent the bad guys have any characteristics, they don’t really read. They’re… purposely bred CPUSA assassins who are also Nazis and opposed to integration? In the early sixties? The problem here isn’t a lack of realism, which would be fine. It’s just there’s no biting point for that. It’s not even a stereotype, it delivers no frisson. It’s not compelling. It’s slow, confused, and managed to be a worse read than the MAGA-“vibe shift” (two years too late) pandering that I worried we might get.

For my “readings on the right,” I spent a number of weeks slowly going through a sort of argument, and manual, for imperialism by one Frederick Lugard, who used his experience in Nigeria, Uganda, and elsewhere as the basis for his The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa. One way the British Empire distinguishes itself from other monstrous historical regimes is they didn’t have a big master plan or manifesto that people could point to, no Mein Kampf, no Little Red Book, no volumes of Marx and Lenin lining the shelf. Lugard isn’t a candidate for such a master text. Among other things, he was writing in 1922- they didn’t know it yet but their system was in terminal decline. But his last book is, arguably, the definitive statement on “indirect rule,” one of a few methods the Empire made use of and which was really a specialty of the British, one the French and the rest never really got into as much. Rule through local chiefs- it’s cheaper and easier. Are there communities in your colonial possession that are so “uncivilized” they don’t have chiefs? Easy peasy- pick some for them! Give them as much symbolic power and pomp as they could want (though always hold out the promise of more, for more obedience), but centralize administrative control in your colonial officials (who you all need to pay more and not be mean to, British reading public!). Sideline the “educated natives” - only missionaries, liberals, and the French like them. Lugard didn’t have to mention the best parts of the scheme- by doing this, you guarantee that you can play the locals off of each other forever… even after the Empire officially leaves, as it turns out. You can keep them squabbling with and killing each other, like they’ve been doing in Lugard’s institutional baby, Nigeria, ever since. And making use of “traditional” chiefs allows for an endless number of little fiefdoms that the sick white boys of your country can play around with and get their jollies off, running things just barely behind the scenes. Lugard doesn’t hint at that. He insists that colonial officers must be of the highest moral character, blah blah. The British knew what they were doing when it came to keeping imperialism omerta. But if you know even a little bit of the other side of the story, even his dry descriptions of tax policy (they could do a lot with tax policy) has a lot of rough, dark overtones.

Anyway- I can see a book or two in my list of recent reads I could maybe spin up into longer reviews. Thanks for reading.

Here’s Beau, the dog of a friend of ours who we took care of for a few days. He wags his tail so much he’s injured his tailbone at times! He’s a good boy.

Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics (2023) - This is a little book — almost a pamphlet — with one big point and I’ve thought of little else since I’ve read it… or rather, as I go about my day and think my thoughts, there’s Jäger’s little dyad, showing up again: low institutional involvement, high political participation. Everyone has a ton of opinions, people identify with their political ideas (and disdain those with opposed ideas) more than they have in a long time, but institutions — unions, churches, clubs, associations, political parties, any more-or-less permanent group of people getting together for a purpose other than being a family or making a profit — are weaker than ever. This, Jäger tells us, is how things stay the same — repeat themselves in a decaying orbit of bullshit — despite almost no one being happy with the status quo, anywhere. The closest to a précis of the dynamic that Jäger provides:

You can graph it, and Jäger does- I don’t know if the graph proves anything but it can help illuminate the basic dynamic. Once upon a time, Jäger tells us, in a vague stretch of time roughly from the Gilded Age to the thirties (most of his specifics, when he has them, come from the thirties), political participation was high, and so was institutional involvement. People were hyped up about all kinds of political movements, left right and center, and had rich associational lives, often in institutions built by those very movements. If you were a socialist in any of the industrialized countries (and some less industrial ones), you could live your life among fellow socialists, read their papers, hang out at their neighborhood clubs, do all kinds of activities with them, if things went badly for yourself or your family they could provide some assistance, etc. And this was true for numerous creeds, not just socialism. This is the upper right of the graph: high political involvement, high institutional/civic engagement. Call it “mass politics.”

Fast forward to the eighties. It’s the “end of history.” The Cold War is over, communism defeated, and we see both political participation and institutional involvement crater. People see themselves as “just men and women and their families.” No one joins stuff anymore, everyone is bowling alone. Politics is boring, because the big issues have supposedly been solved. Jäger cites the novels of Michel Houellebecq as an artistic description of what this means, especially for upper middle class Europeans, who tend to be less family-oriented and so even more isolated than most by this state of affairs. Sub in any sitcom at the time for the American version. This is the lower left of the graph- low political involvement, low level of institutional life. Call this “postpolitics.”

Fast forward again to the post-2008 era. The categories get a little less clear here as he tries on “antipolitics” as a category distinct from “hyperpolitics,” but both involve a good deal of agitation of the kind you didn’t see in most democracies between the mid eighties and the mid aughts. Jäger uses “antipolitics” for the movements of the tens, which rejected existing political institutions without proposing much of a serious alternative. It was usually either demand-less, like Occupy, or “all politics are corrupt but this one guy we like” — Sanders, Corbyn, Beppe Grillo — “isn’t and can fix it.” Well, we eventually got the ultimate “one guy” and we know the rest. I guess “hyperpolitics” is what we get when we haven’t got the collective societal focus even for meaningful antipolitics. Either way, you get what we have now- mass engagement with politics, hollowed out institutional existence. Life in the strange lower right quadrant.

Without institutions, movements rise and fade, leaving a cultural legacy, at best, but often not even that. The right is generally at an advantage in this setting, as they can prop up ersatz institutions with oligarch money, and they don’t really want people involved beyond giving their leaders adulation and obedience.

None of this was particularly new to me. Jäger didn’t dig up new information, or even particularly original interpretations. I’m sure there’s holes in his argument you can drive a truck through, if you want. How does the link between general institutional life — “bowling together” — and political organization actually work? Why could people so much poorer than us, facing repression at least as fierce as any we do, build institutions and we can’t? A lot of the answers to these questions invite tendentious, vibes-y answers, usually boiling down to a vague zeitgeist, and Jäger, clever fellow, mostly doesn’t bother with them. Neoliberalism has something to do with the hollowing out of institutions, but clearly abjuring neoliberalism in politics doesn’t make us any better at reconstructing the society some neoliberals told us didn’t exist. Jäger doesn’t provide much in the way of answers.

But, for whatever reason, this still stuck with me. Lots of politics - no institutions. Lots of agitation - no change. I graduated from college in 2008 and started getting involved in organizing in 2011, with Occupy Boston, not long after I turned 26. I’ve been in it for the whole darn shooting match. This does seem to be the story.

I say that as a bemused institution-builder, who has spent the last decade or so talking every day to people with whom I worked to build working, effective leftist organizations. My main task in the Boston chapter of DSA, my organizing home from 2016 up until when I moved at the beginning of this year, was internal organizing (helping the organization function) and, especially, organizing direct actions, protests, counterprotests, etc. To use Jäger’s framework, the people with whom I worked most closely and I saw our role in terms of building an institution, that is, a more-or-less permanent, self-sustaining group of people who can act in some capacity to advance a goal. The institution would be in line with, and advance, our strongly held political ideas. We saw those two things as inextricably intertwined.

Given that we were a few dozen people doing this in our spare time, we did alright. Fascists, from open neonazis to MAGA chuds with delusions of grandeur, wanted to make Boston a battlefield like Portland or Berkeley. We developed and implemented a strategy that contained and frustrated those forces locally. DSA in general has managed to maintain an institutional life, and not as a cult or microsect. The group, and people within it, fail, fuck up, drop balls, disappoint. So does any institution. The prime directive for institutions is to do those things and still survive, still do something for its purpose.

It’s not enough. Even at the height of my involvement, I never would have said that it could have been, that we could have done in fascism or ushered in socialism with the institutions I helped build, on their own, in any time frame short enough to prevent catastrophe. I’ve always known that.

The reason I bring it up is to emphasize that I’ve lived both a highly politicized and highly institution-based life for at least the last decade. I tried to surround myself with people who, like Lincoln, “would rather win the war than the argument” - would rather achieve external-facing results than win internal political squabbles — so, if anything, that weighed my life even more heavily to the institutional side. They weren’t the most formal institutions in the world — especially not the direct action group within Boston DSA, which bears some of my personal stamp — but they’re probably about as formal as the bowling leagues that one book said we’re not doing anymore. They had firm senses of themselves and acted in the world, in their way.

The background of my life is heavy with institutions. Part of it is being from the northeast, with its longer period of Anglo settlement, denser population, and more organized, communal life than you get in most of America. People in my family often clashed with the institutions — schools, churches, workplaces, clubs, activist groups — they were in, but it’s reasonable to say we’ve mostly had lives that have been strongly connected to organizations, often on a long term basis. We bear the mark of these institutions, and in some cases we marked them, and this is true for those in my generation, coming up in the age of post-, anti-, and hyper-politics,1 not just our elders.

Since passing into adulthood, I’ve always taken it for granted that if you were going to have a lot of political opinions, you should do something to back them up. My political opinions were such that voting was not enough to satisfy myself, or anyone, that I was living up to my professed beliefs. You have to act, and generally you have to create. And you have to take things seriously enough to think about how you’re acting and creating, think critically and change accordingly, and to cooperate with others, even others you might otherwise not like. It’s a balancing act, keeping permanent values and goals in mind while also changing — growing — into the person and/or organization that can fulfill the values and meet the goals. Not everybody was going to change everything, devote themselves full time to their movement. I didn’t- I couldn’t even if I wanted to, I had to make a living. But doing my part to build something better became a core part of how I understand my life, and this is also true of most of the people I chose to have in my close social proximity.

More than that, doing something — preferably something with lasting value to other people, i.e. making the building blocks of institutions — has become my sine qua non for legitimacy. Like, ok, you can say whatever, post anything, but what are you actually doing, and how has that informed your ideas? Involvement, if taken seriously, is a practice of rigor that is harder to bullshit than most other methods of assuring against the arbitrariness of the life of the mind.

That doesn’t mean you need to drop everything and devote all your time and energy to whichever club best fits your opinions, which seems to be how people online often read calls to organize. I clearly value the life of the mind, as they used to call it. If your ideas imply action in this world, and you do nothing with them — not even a little bit! It doesn’t have to be a lot — then you’re missing a critical ingredient. There’s no real reason to take your professed commitment to your ideas seriously, in that case. If people talk to you as though they take them seriously, they’re doing it as a favor- to you or, more likely, to themselves.

Share

I get defensive at odd times, these days. I want to say we, I, did our part, and a whole hell of a lot of people — prominent among them the leadership cartel of the Democratic Party and snide comment section radicals — didn’t do theirs. “And yet, the right is stronger than ever, fascism is getting mainstreamed!” I’ve said dumb shit in response to that kind of thing due to a combination of sentiment — who are these internet people to give me backchat about dealing with fascism? — and something I couldn’t articulate until I read Hyperpolitics.

Serious, thoughtful, collective action is enough of a sticking point for me — is such a central concept in my life and thought — that I’ve carried around an idea for a long time that people who just talk about these things — content creators, more or less — are of no account, essentially. Or maybe they contribute analysis, or entertainment, but they’re not a movement, not on their own (the better ones don’t pretend to be, and do their bit by drawing attention to people who do more in that vein). Or anyway, they only count for something until people who both believe something, and build something, come along and wave them away. This is more or less what happened when antifascists confronted the Trump 1 era altright. Meme magic met movement organizing and lost that battle, even if we didn’t defeat fascism more broadly.

That’s why I really can’t see what the right is doing, especially the more open fascist right ala Fuentes and Owens, as building a movement. Their institutions are hollow! They’re a bunch of freaks constantly scamming and betraying each other! The 2010s era altright never created a genuine fascist mass movement (in part because antifascists prevented them from so doing). What I see from the fascist right now indicates they’re barely trying- they’re focusing on content creation. They’re all content creators, now, not builders of much of anything.

And why should they do anything else? The Democrats suck very badly at their job and let their guy back into office. Our Constitution and the conservative movement — which achieved escape velocity before the crash in American civic engagement — made the conditions for Republicans to hold onto power when they’re genuinely unpopular. The chaos of hyperpolitics benefits the right — and the worst, cheapest, most nihilistic elements of the right — more than it benefits anyone else, so they can just go right on doing what they’re doing. They don’t need to build anything. They can just prate and cavort and generally make everything vaguely worse, demoralizing everyone2 and running the clock out on humanity.

I don’t like it. Even if “my side” won with these dynamics, I wouldn’t like it, though I could probably live with it more peaceably. In my system, the good side can, and often does, lose. But belief without doing the work — opinions without critical thought, vision without the discipline that working with people to make something lasting imposes — shouldn’t win. I’ll give leftist skeptics of MAGA (and its global peers) as fascist3 this- a critical mass of our street fascists gave up on real movement building pretty quick, which you can’t say for classical fascism. It turned out not to matter that much, not when institutions are so weak. Is that sour grapes? Sure. Sometimes the grapes are sour.

What Jäger doesn’t do in this book is as admirable as what he does do. I think a lot of us, since well before MAGA/Brexit, even before 2008, have been dancing around the decoupling of politics from civic/institutional participation, and coming up with explanations, more or less fanciful. It’s the internet, it’s consumerism, it’s the professional managerial class, blah blah. Jäger doesn’t do that. There’s definitely something material about it, he allows, and it likely has something to do with changing conditions of labor, and that’s almost certainly part of the puzzle, likely the biggest part, we’ll need to get anywhere. But for the most part, most people who have gone into this space, including writers I like, are waving one or another political flag; a leftist inside baseball pennant is more like it. Jäger doesn’t bother. Whichever flag you want to wave, notice how you can’t seem to plant it? Institutions are the soil, and the soil has eroded. That is the heart of the matter. Jäger makes you focus on that, and more or less only that, well enough that even I can’t miss it4.

Jäger doesn’t have answers. Neither do I. Normally, I wouldn’t be especially impressed by someone introducing a new and kind of annoying term like “hyperpolitics” in a short book with as little analysis of how or why we’re here as Jäger offers. I’m not that impressed with the analysis, really, but I think he is by and large right, and it was clear enough — in no small part because the book is short and thin — to get me to think in terms of decoupling politics from, like… what I was used to calling “politics,” the Weberian “slow boring of hard boards” that Jäger cites.

In terms of making it a little less thin, I think we can think of the accrued institutional and civic weight that the twentieth century inherited as a capital stock that the rich countries burned through. They thought they’d always have it, or just didn’t care, and so they didn’t maintain it and sold off a lot of it for the liquid quick cash, which winds up where quick money usually goes- to those who already had a lot of money. They’re holding onto it, locking in their place and power. There’s a reason I call the period from the late seventies to the late aughts “the age of waste.” The habit of collective organization was spent along with everything else- people don’t have it. I don’t have that much of it, I just value it and try to nurture it.

I’ve had a weird enough life path that the upper right quadrant — high political commitment, high institutional involvement (in line with said commitment, not just any old institution) — feels natural and right to me. More than that, everything else feels bemusing, puzzling, like, “really? That’s how you’re going to be?” Jäger’s lower left quadrant — lack of both political commitment and institutional involvement — makes some sense, but the prevailing way of being is aberrant, pitiful, something we should have shown up as false, by now… that in a very small, not at all effective enough way, my comrades and I did show up as a paper tiger. Where were the rest of you?

But honestly, I can only feel that resentment so strongly (a lot more strongly when keyboard radicals flap their gums directly at me- I’m a simple man, in some ways). A lot more people than I would have thought are just stuck in the lifeway. We already saw a big change in my lifetime, from postpolitical apathy where the cool money ignored politics to this hyperpolitical state where kids by the millions tune in to ideological pedants (and, more positively, millions take to the streets to raise their voices against injustices many would have just let slide before). It was probably too much to expect a complete turn around, to get people back into mass, moving, thinking, fighting, building political involvement again, to cross both quadrants.

Too much to expect, and also the only thing that will work and, frankly, the only thing that deserves to succeed. I actually do think my standards are more legitimate than any standard that could be promulgated by the winners of the hyperpolitical game. I’m not so fusty and crusty, yet, that I think winning hasn’t got some legitimacy of its own — if nothing else, we need to succeed to protect the vulnerable and, at this point, to preserve civilization — but, to trot out a quote I’m sick of using at this point, “the armies of this age are weak.” I think they’re weak in an absolute sense, even if some win and some lose (and notice how impermanent and unsatisfying most victories seem to be, for any side, these days?). We can do better, though I’m not holding my breath until we do. I think a lot of people really genuinely think that we can’t, and never have, and I cannot sanction that, intellectually or morally.

It’s not a great picture, overall, though I appreciate having a clearer framework to put over my unease.

Subscribe now

Mithra came to us from a friend of ours who was living in Allston, one of the parts of Boston where a lot of students live. She noticed this beautiful black cat living on the streets and took her in. She already had two corgis, though, so the future Mithra needed a new home, and we had one for her.

She had almost nine years with us. She was a very simple cat. She didn’t care about toys, or display the sort of eccentricities other cats do, but she dominated the apartment with her regal air and sheer beauty. The only things she really wanted was food, treats, and pats and cuddles from her people. She would cuddle up with me while I read on the big couch we had. It was among my favorite things to do, or really, to ever have done. We all loved her very much, and she developed quite a fan community of readers of this newsletter.

It turned out she was a good bit older than we thought. She died peacefully. I’m sad, but I also know we gave her a good life, and I think she knew she was loved. I’m going to miss her.

Read more

Last year, I gave my personal annual literary award, the Mithra, to Philip Roth’s I Married A Communist. The Mithras are an award for the favorite/the best books I read in a given year, not what was published that year, so a lot of the awards go to older books and, often enough, dead authors. I’ve had some luck sending the award to the children of some of the authors I honored, which has been mutually gratifying, I think. I’ve had less luck finding other places to send them when I can’t find heirs. I’ve sent a few to the archives that hold a winner’s personal papers, and they tend to send the awards back, on the idea that they have no filing category for little stone statues of cats. The holders of James Stephens’ papers at Trinity College in Dublin sent me a delightful email about archiving the award, which was a nice surprise.

So, sometimes, I save the award to leave at the winner’s grave, whenever I can get there. I owe one to Doris Lessing, which will involve a trip to London, and another to CS Forester, who is buried in Orange County, California.

Philip Roth is buried in a cemetery at Bard College, in the Hudson Valley. There’s some discourse as to why he chose that particular spot, and not Newark, where he’s from and where his parents are buried, or in the Berkshires, where he spent a number of years - both locations appear prominently in his work. But Roth was perverse and unsentimental, anti-sentimental, like that. He had friends at Bard, and maybe he thought his instructions against religious observance would more likely be obeyed a few feet from Hannah Arendt’s grave than they would in the Jewish cemetery where his family lay.

Bard isn’t too far away. My partner Jess and I made a little trip out of it. Bard was quiet, largely abandoned. It was a beautiful day. The little stone cat looks all right, I think, nestled in with the rest of the stones.

I feel certain that Roth, even if he were alive, would only give a shit about this gesture insofar as he would think his talent obligated me to give it to him, if I was giving awards to any writer. He’d be right, too, the ludicrous egoist. I Married A Communist is compelling, not just in the “synonym for ‘interesting’” sense, but in the sense that it actively compelled me to… well, to engage in ritual activity he’d scorn, but more than that. Compelled to think and feel, though that doesn’t really get it across.

I Married A Communist tells the story of Ira Ringgold, a communist and radio star who became prominent in the Popular Front era and who experienced a long and ignominious downfall after getting blacklisted, with help from his ex-wife, during the McCarthy era. More than that, it tells the intertwined story of how generations of men influence each other, try to learn from each other or impart their learning, mold themselves after the image of their teachers, find themselves both failing to live up to the standards set and finding those standards failing to live up to reality. Ira’s story is largely told by Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, telling the story of running into Ira’s brother, an old high school teacher of his, who tells him his version of Ira’s story. Many of these stories, in their turn, are stories Ira told his brother about being told things by other men, most notably his communist mentor O’Day.

Women have their stories, too, though Roth tells them through men — unavoidable, given his sex, even if all of his narrators weren’t men — and doesn’t shy away from treating those stories differently and, for lack of a more precise term, worse. Whatever else I Married A Communist is, it appears to also be an extended “fuck you” to an ex-wife and stepdaughter. Thinly-veiled versions of them turn up as the self-hating Jewish actress Ira marries, who betrays him, and her daughter, a psychotically spoiled brat who sabotages the already rocky relationship. How much worse is it that, in his curdled way, Roth really did give both these characters the measure of humanity he gives to the others? If it were incompetent caricature, it’d be easy to dismiss1. That’s not what we have here, however cruel the depictions are or, even less to the point for anyone other than Clare Bloom and her daughter, however inaccurate they are to them (I wouldn’t trust Roth to be accurate, in a forensic sense, about anyone).

I Married A Communist resonated with me as a reader who wants to read good books, but also as a historian, a leftist, a student, and a teacher. Roth makes his fair share of shots at Popular Front culture — its hokey earnestness, its self-delusion, its compromises — and would be as capable of being anyone’s “comrade” as a hungry mongoose, but he doesn’t take the easy way out of dismissing it entirely. Ira’s brother Murray, the teacher, represents the world of humanistic literary culture that Zuckerman ultimately chooses over, say, quitting school and passing out CPUSA leaflets outside factories like O’Day demands he do. Murray is the closest the book has to a straightforwardly good man. But good isn’t straightforward, in Roth’s world, and adhering to the good solid fundamentals of broadly humanist culture and midcentury left-liberalism isn’t the easy panacea that some of its proponents (thinking Tony Judt, who was writing a lot around this same time, but there were many) make it out to be.

I very much enjoyed listening to Philip Roth’s disputatious old Jewish men from the twentieth century. I’m just barely old enough, just barely adjacent enough to the kind of culture that produced people like Murray and Nathan and, in a different way, Ira, that I can experience their way of talking as something once real and now slipping away. People talk about Roth’s transgressiveness, or just his nastiness, and while that’s always present, enough to leave a mark even if you’re used to still more explicit stuff, that’s not what stands out for me. For me it’s the depiction of intelligent people with brains not completely chewed up by the one two punch of addictive, nonstop pop culture overstimulation and the linguistic anemia that comes with extended stays in our universities, talking (and talking, and talking) as though things matter. You get less and less of that, in the culture, and it’s not like Roth and his characters were strangers to either pop culture or academia, by any means, so it’s not just that.

The real joy of a good Philip Roth novel, at least for me, is… “basking” isn’t the right word for it, the discussions are too anxious for that, but immersing myself in the dialogues and monologues, internal and external, of these smart, flawed, human creations. It’s that immersion, more than any particular verbal pyrotechnics, that does it for me.

That said, I’ll leave off with one quote about being a brother. I’m a brother, like Murray Reinggold, who tells so much of this story. There’s some pretty important differences, like how Murray had a younger brother whose existence brought trouble, and I have two older sisters who have generally been pretty positive influences on my life, but I still like these lines-

“Well, that must be what brothers are for— not to stand on ceremony about the bizarre.”

That’s it for this week. I keep forgetting to say this at the end of my posts, but if you like this, please share it with anyone you can, any way you can.

Share

And subscribe!

Subscribe now

And also let me know what you think in the comments. See you next week!

If you’re not a Citizen-subscriber, you won’t be able to read the whole thing, but if you like what you see after the first three paragraphs, you can go ahead, click on subscribe, and upgrade your subscription and get double the MAR for five dollars a month! This helps keep me reviewing and is greatly appreciated.

C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1938) - While reading this, I had to think of how to explain it to people. “If I say I’m reading about Tom Watson, people will think of the golfer,” I said to myself. “No they won’t,” came the rejoinder, “other people did not have golf on the tv in their house as much as you did when you were a kid in the nineties, and if they did, surely he’s not the one they remember, you’re just weird.”

Anyway- this Tom Watson was not, to the best of my knowledge, a golfer. He was a politician, writer, publisher, general public man, in Georgia from the 1880s until his death in the 1920s. I read this biography of him, now almost ninety years old, for a few reasons. One reason lies in the author: C. Vann Woodward was one of the major American historians of the twentieth century, and I enjoyed some of his later works, most notably The Origins of the New South. It was from that book that he distilled much of his most well-known work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which civil rights organizers often cited to show how recent and flimsy segregation laws were (along with everything else wrong with them). The most important task American historians in the twentieth century had was dismantling the Lost Cause and “Redemption” mythology that their predecessors had lodged into the American understanding of its own past. Woodward played an important role in this. So, I was interested in this, his first published monograph.

The other reason is Watson himself, specifically his career trajectory. Watson entered public life as a fiery populist, in the sense of the term used in the US in the late nineteenth century1. Watson, son of a decayed gentry family, took up the cause of the southern farmers experiencing new forms of exploitation as agriculture became more fully integrated with the expanding industrial capitalist economy. Starting from regional organizations and granges that began sprouting up in the 1880s, the People’s Party roared to life in the 1890s, gaining a huge following among the farmers and some workers in the west and the south. Watson was one of the most important leaders of the southern part of the coalition, and the one that stood most boldly in favor of the independence of the Populist party, resisting the constant temptation towards “fusionism” - endorsing one of the two major parties in an effort to influence their direction.

Read more

Anyway. Here’s the review. I rewrote parts of it for clarity and to make my points a bit better. As you’ll be able to tell, I wrote this while “in my feelings.” I figured the added clarity was more valuable than giving you “the straight 2022 version,” which you can find in the archive anyway.

Patricia Lockwood, “No One Is Talking About This” (2021) (read aloud by Kristen Sieh) - I listened to this at a peculiar moment in my life, that has made me very, very impatient with this book. I am informed, by people whose taste I respect, that Patricia Lockwood is a very talented writer, largely on the strength of her memoirs “Priestdaddy,” which I will perhaps one day read. I could see glimpses of talent in this work, a smooth prose style and bits of humor. I have also been told she is a “master of Twitter.” I do like her tweets about her cat, which have escaped containment to find their way to me, far from their original social media context. But in general, “master of Twitter” is not strong praise for an author of novels, as far as I am concerned.

I did not enjoy, like, or respect this book.

A friend of mine — a friend I’ve known exclusively online, if that matters, one I’ve known for many years and have shared writing and other intimacies with — did something extraordinarily self-destructive recently. His stated motivation for doing this thing, the way he went about it, and the ways in which he informed his friends all simultaneously critiqued and reflected the internet/attention economy zeitgeist that seems to be one of the main topics of contemporary literary attention.

His critique, and what he did in response to this situation, struck home not just for his perspicacity, though he is quite perceptive, or the extremity of his action, though it was almost as extreme as you can get. It also struck home because at bottom, he and I are in similar positions- failed writer/intellectuals. People flinch from that word, “failed,” “failure” (like a certain other “f” word that I freely self-apply, “fat”). They point to my accomplishments, and they — I — point to his. They’re real. But there’s also no getting around the fact that neither my friend nor I can make a living from writing, academia, or any of the other societally-approved venues to cash out wordy oddballs. I know you’re all breaking out the world’s smallest violins for us, but there it is anyway.

I usually play straight man to this friend. In our dynamic, based as it is on discussing ideas and aesthetics via written text, I’m the stolid one, considering the implications, striving for consistency, trying to be “real. He’s the zany one, making bold proclamations, scorning moralism and consistency, throwing such mundane concerns to the wind… even to the point where he’d dispute this characterization. No pigeon hole for him! Maybe this is the way to put it: I make statements; he makes gestures. Another way to put it: we discussed depression, once, and he told me some facts about narcissistic depression, the depression of people capable of making flashy gesture and big deals out of themselves (as you can tell, my psychological vocabulary is… impoverished), whereas my depression, my family’s depression, was more the self-obviating kind.

Here’s a metaphor: the depression that has shaped the life of my family for generations drags a cart full of turnips on the rutted paths of some dank northwestern European field to deposit them at the feet of an indifferent landlord, utterly certain that he will do the same thing, and so would his descendants, forever. The depression my friend knows and described to me careens a tacky sports car it can’t really drive, and looks stupid in, around a distinctly unimpressed town until it fucks the tranmission up because it can’t really drive stick, or wraps the car around a tree. It took effort, on my part, to see that narcissistic kind of depression as “real.”

In his moodier modes, my friend would likely do something even more self-destructive before he accepted any kind of descriptor that said he, and his attempted last performance, were part of any kind of zeitgeist. Well, he doesn’t have to accept it. The thing that made me most angry as I read through his lengthy manifesto was the unsaid thesis: that he is above the real, above the quotidian. I answer emails about 3D printer failures forty hours a week1, and try to eke out time for what I care about — writing, reading, organizing, fun time with friends and family — when I can. I can live with my failure to be a professional writer, and try to convert it into a livable life, and this dude…2

My friend was a long time practitioner of what I call “Schrodinger’s Joke” - a remark where you can’t tell if it’s serious or not, that seems to exist as both serious remark and obvious joke, and that only becomes one or the other once someone other than the teller tries to say it’s one or the other… at which point the teller announces that it’s obviously the other option. So, it’s hard to say how much he “meant it,” but his message to his friends upon his act of self-destruction included detailed instructions for managing a posthumous fame he insisted would be coming his way. This was the part of what he did that made me want to kick his ass, along with whatever else I felt. I might give him a light ass kicking yet, if we’re even on the same continent.

His attitude was not exactly “get famous or die trying.” It was probably closer to “live in eccentricity and reasonable comfort or try to die in extraordinary fashion” guy. Surviving the experience seems to have woken him up to the fact that people care about him, and that living like the rest of us relatively-normie scrubs might indeed be preferable to mutilation and death.

So, getting back to No One Is Talking About This (including me for the last thousand plus words, hey-o!), where I felt a deep connection between it and what my friend did is not, exactly, their relationship to fame. It’s not exactly the specter of the internet, either, though most of my friend’s relationships took place there, and a majority of those appeared to be with internet-damaged millennials. What I despise most about No One Is Talking About This, about a whole swath of contemporary writing and thought about how we live now and the internet, is this hands-up-thrown refusal of concrete reality that can’t, even, really commit to its own lack of commitment.

That’s what I see, both in internet discourse and in the discourse about the discourse, among people who are supposed to be smart, to have something to say, not just howling chuds, though lord knows some chuds answer this description too. Half-digested nth-generation tropes from continental ding dong philosophers who barely even meant it themselves, circulated and recirculated like old coins until even the names wear off… glibly talking like nothing is real and nothing is worth speaking seriously about even as they milk everything from derogated social media platforms to climate catastrophe for cheap bathos, reworking their brands for all they’re worth (little, usually).

Whatever differences there are between my friend and I, neither of us fit in well with this – if you want to be mean about it, and I encourage you to be if you feel it’s more accurate, we both failed to make these dynamics pay for us – and I think it makes the world of letters bleak and pointless. My friend is eccentric, and individualistic to a point where the normative political sense of the word didn’t define him, but I do not think he lacked commitment, or things to talk about outside of his navel and how algorithmically served-up slop related to it.

No One Is Talking About This is about an unnamed female narrator who becomes moderately famous via “The Portal,” i.e., Twitter, but, like seemingly everyone else who is connected to said social media platform, is unsure whether she likes it or hates it. It certainly has a profound effect on how she processes reality and communicates with others! The first half of the book is made up of little vignettes, tweet-length remarks, and no real plot, to really get the meaningless signifier soup thing home. Lockwood less “nods” or “winks” at James Joyce and more just pointing openly at Joyce and saying “yeah, I’m doing that, but more so, because our TIME is actually more Joycean than Joyce, y’know?!”

We do get a pivot to something outside of the Portal, due to a family crisis. The narrator has a family, the family has a crisis. It’s not really a plot, but it’s something other than a morbidly self-conscious account of social media scrolling. That’s the thing… they really can’t manage either the real or the imaginary, these “we live in discourse hell” writers, whether fiction writers like Patricia Lockwood and Lauren Oyler, or the legion of nonfiction commentators that shade from professional thinkpiece writers to opinionated randos on your feed of choice. They can’t do the all-pretend world that some cyber-boosters of the eighties and nineties promised, but they can’t really do the real, either. And they’ll insist that their inability mirrors a human inability, or at least an inability inherent in our times… and they’re not wrong. Alienation is an old theme and it’s been done reasonably well. What’s real, how much do our feelings determine at least the subjective reality of experience versus what’s “actually” in front of us blah blah blah. Classic literary topos.

Look- I’m not some “I fucking love science” dork or an objectivist. I’m a reader, trying to read something interesting. And “discourse hell” isn’t cutting it anymore, to the extent it ever did, and pivoting to noticing how hard it is to take a family tragedy totally seriously because you spend too much time online isn’t going to get you over, not with me, anyway.

Maybe it should. Maybe this really is “the human condition,” with a definite article and everything. Maybe every rejoinder I could make to that is just a cliche about how we should read about Bangladeshi factory workers instead (it isn’t, but the internet smallfolk work very hard to slot anything you say into the nearest cliche-box, if they notice you at all). Maybe I’m the stupid, blockheaded socialist realist next to the beautiful thoughtful modernists in the tableau of art circa 1914-1950 that we’ve inherited, mostly from said modernists (who were already on their way to neoconservatism but later for that).

But I don’t think that’s how it is.

I said there was a confluence of factors that, perhaps unfairly to Lockwood, rendered me incapable of enjoying or respecting this book. One was my friend’s situation. Another, longer-term one, is that I am, sort of, recovering from depression. I’ve felt better the last few years than I have in a long time. Life is far from perfect, but I experience more and stronger feelings.3 One of those feelings is anger. I’ve gotten used to suppressing it, got used to thinking of expressing anger self-indulgent, a remnant of my adolescent self.

But let’s put it this way: I experience anger as impatience. And I can still be very, very patient, when the thing I am being asked to contribute is just time, or honest effort.

My patience for dishonesty, though, is gone. My patience for glibness is gone. Worn through. My patience for bullshit is mostly gone, the only thing keeping it from being entirely effaced being an appreciation for funny bullshit.

You can do what you want. You can be as glib as you want, act as though it’s all just performance and that what I’m doing, here, is also a performance, and therefore also blah blah yadda yadda. You can “cringe” (there, using it as a verb, not an adjective, like we’re supposed to). You can fuck off, or not. But I’m not playing with that bullshit anymore. Not with Patricia Lockwood, who is intermittently funny but not funny enough, not here, and not with you.

Because on top of whatever else it is — genuine cris de coeur over authenticity! Artistic expression of your experience! Funny memes! — the glibness of the “we live in the hell of discourse and there is nothing at all outside of it” ideology is intensely disrespectful. It does not live in peace, as I would live in peace with the internet people. It oversteps, by nature. It disrespects life, disrespects effort, personally disrespects everyone who tries to live something better than a shitty day on any given “hell site.” You can tell if you try to do anything other than wallow in discourse hell anywhere where they can see or hear. They don’t like it. They scorn it. And these assholes generally haven’t even got the integrity to admit that they are spitting in your face. A number of internet strangers recently, and at least one or two IRL acquaintances, have behaved disrespectfully to me, impugned my intelligence and my integrity, and, my patience gone, I asked or told them to stop, and I got earfuls about my “defensiveness.” “U mad, bro?!” gone to therapy. Fuck off. I see you, and I’m not playing. Not now, not anymore.

Ironically, my self-destructive friend discussed a fair amount of what I’m saying now in an essay of his on… well, notionally on David Foster Wallace, but really on the whole literary scene circa 2010, around when it was written. His major thesis is that because young-ish bourgeois writers4 live such cushy lives that they have no real suffering to write about, and so write about a fake suffering, the feeling of inauthenticity and how they feel bad for wanting people’s sympathy, and want sympathy for that bad feeling. I have a number of friendly critiques of that article. But I think, if anything, the situation has degenerated since then. Now, books like this one, and Fake Accounts and probably many others, somehow manage to be “about” ever less, and to be corrosively hateful to even the possibility of being about anything at all, and somehow, somehow! These works manage to dump themselves into the same old same old of familial sentimentality or careerist pseudo-heroism in the end.

I can agree with the internet scribblers about this much- it is a discouraging picture. But I have a better solution than they have: turning the fucking page. My next audiobook was about the Armenian militants who hunted down and shot the Turkish pashas who led the genocide against their people. A perfect palate-cleanser!

I turned definitively against this book after Lockwood, culminating a series of little jokes about how being political is stupid — I get the impression she is meant to be a somewhat serious leftist, who knows, I don’t buy that and don’t much care — by belittling people’s reactions to the killing of Heather Heyer at the Unite the Right Nazi rally in Charlottesville. A good friend of mine was a medic on the scene. She split a vuvuzela in half to manufacture a splint for someone’s broken leg. Why are we telling the story of some dumb internet person’s inability to be honest about the situation, any situation, again? Why are we telling it over and over again? Why are we acting like this is the only story to tell, that telling other, more interesting stories is gauche? I don’t care what a commie you think you are, this whole fucking business is fash nonsense.

We actually did pretty good bringing the altright, as it was called at the time, into offline reality and beating them there. From where I sit, we did our part. It was people who had their heads up their asses, in no small part due to social media psychosis, like the consultant class within the Democratic Party, who fucked up their end of the bargain and let fascism off the hook and back into power. It’s not just bad literature- clearly, a substantial portion of our bourgeoisie prefer the narcissistic mirror of discourse hell, and in their passive aggressive way, will resist getting a little bit outside of their comfort zone, getting real, even briefly, to prevent catastrophe. They’ll resist responsibility, rigor, commitment, and other “cringe” notions much harder than they’re willing to resist fascism.

Well… fuck that. After everything that’s happened, I’m done entertaining these fools. Quite done.

Here’s Burt-

Here’s Burt listening to me read some of Macaulay’s History of England-

Subscribe now

M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Everything For Everyone (2022) - I find it hard to settle on a rhetorical stance in talking about this book. I know what I think of it, quality-wise: it’s pretty good, I enjoyed it, and it had substantial flaws. But this is a scifi “oral history” of a world where, by the 2070s, the global left has won out, with capitalism and the nation state almost globally replaced by a very chill vibes-y communism. As a participant in said left, I’d have a lot of thoughts about this in any event. As someone who has tinkered with fiction set in a world where post-capitalist socialist societies dominate the planet after the catastrophes of the 21st century, I have even more. And, as is often the case, the ways I’d criticize (or even ridicule) this book are more lively than the ways I’d praise it.

I suppose we’ll start with as neutral of a description as I can offer. This book is a set of “oral history interviews” where versions of the authors (suitably changed by harrowing experiences) speak to participants in the creation of the New York Commune, one of the bodies within the big global communist society, or who were affected by the process. New York being a “global city” and this being a global revolutionary upheaval, we also get good looks at what people were up to in other parts of the world, thanks to characters who went to China, the Middle East, California, etc at some point in the narrative.

The basic lineaments of the future history is basically that things fall to complete shit in the 2030s and 2040s. Climate change and economic disaster cripple huge swaths of the globe. America and China hold on a little more but become increasingly fascist, all while losing state capacity (often selling it off to the highest bidder, who generally accelerate the crises). America invades and occupies Iran, which leads to a long and terrible war that breaks the unity of the army. There’s a pandemic that kills hundreds of millions. California and vast swathes of the rest of the world dry up and die, just collapse ecologically. It’s bleak!

And then, the people in their glorious fury rise up, because they have nothing left to lose. In some cases the narrative is as vague as that. People just figure shit out. The powers that be have weakened so badly that street people, refugees, indigenous militia, etc can survive an initial onslaught from the authorities, who then chicken out and quit- “Drop your guns and run,” as the human wave of Palestinians surging out from their bantustans tell the IDF, who do just that. Capitalism was already not working too hot, what with the collapsing social order. And because people need food, they figure it out. Militant sex workers take over a food distribution warehouse near their strolls in the Bronx. They team up with farmers in the Hudson Valley to provide food once the corporations aren’t reupping the deliveries anymore.

Yes, I am putting a paywall into my review on the book about communist utopia. I see the irony. We aren’t in utopia. Help a critic out. Subscribe!

Read more

Erik Davis, “High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies” (2019) (narrated by the author) - Reading (well, listening to) this book, appropriately enough given its content and tone, was an experience. Historian of religions Erik Davis landed this book right into two registers that produce very different emotional responses for me. One register is that of chewy, involved, critical intellectual history, a happy place for me, somewhere I feel both welcomed and challenged. The other register is that of mysticism, spirituality, and the particular chip on the shoulder of intellectuals who study esoteric subjects, a much more fraught and murky intellectual/emotional space for me. It is impossible to disentangle these strands in “High Weirdness” and pointless to try. In the end, the challenges involved in taking this book in have helped make it, for me, one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I locate an echo of my ambivalence in the three subjects around whom Davis structured his narrative: hallucinogen evangelist Terence McKenna, journalist and novelist Robert Anton Wilson, and scifi master Philip K. Dick. Before listening to this book, my feelings were reverence for Dick, distaste for Wilson, and for the most part a lack of interest in McKenna. In many respects, I took opposite paths between Dick and Wilson. Wilson’s “Illuminatus!” trilogy was passed around by the hippie/nerdy boys (gendered pronoun used advisedly) of my very hippie/nerd-heavy school. I got my hands on it at fourteen, enjoyed the first fifty or a hundred pages of historical references and sex, and then lost it. I picked it up again in my late twenties, and was distinctly unimpressed by the history, the sex, the libertarian politics, the prose style, and the general “ain’t I a stinker?!” tone of the work. I read Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” as an alternate history obsessed teenager. I liked it but didn’t really “get it” until I got into PKD more generally in college and reread it. As for McKenna, I only knew about him because a psytrance act I liked (don’t at me, they had some groove to them) sampled his lectures.

Did I change my mind about any of these impressions? Not really- maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to Wilson, learning about assorted personal tragedies of his, but that’s not enough to make me read more of him. But in many respects the men themselves are beside the point except as ideal types of “the psychonaut.” The word itself takes me back to attic rooms with boys tolerant of, but not always enthused by, my uptight company, shoving Chinese research chemicals from the internet up their noses while I sat by and prattled (knowingly) of tabletop role playing games and (utterly ignorantly) of girls… boys who are now men, many of them husbands, fathers, homeowners, and I’m very pleased to say some of them are still friends (it probably helps I got a bit less uptight). Anyway! Davis is a historian, methodologist, and champion of “the weird,” as both a topic of study and as a way of approaching the world. As I was in those attic rooms, I am ambivalent. Unlike my time in the attics, I am going to make a good faith effort to understand.

This is made difficult by a few things. In many respects, I came to what intellectual maturity I possess through interaction with the special bugbear of countercultural psychonautry- materialist critical analysis. Hippies need squares, and one suspects that goes both ways. Hippies and communists actually just don’t get on very well if they take each other’s premises even marginally seriously. They are incommensurate. I identify as a democratic socialist more than a communist, and my friends, then and now, interested in psychedelia identify even less with hippie-ness, but you get the idea. In college, I put down my few feelers to what Davis calls “consciousness culture” in no small part by reading The Baffler, which took great delight in skewering the conjunction between counterculture and capitalism that loomed so large during the first internet boom. I wasn’t a punk, and if anything, I’d rather listen to the 13th Floor Elevators than to Minor Threat any day, but many of my teachers were punk. Be fast, be mean, hit vulnerable spots… among other things, it seemed a better set of principles for someone escaping nerdery (let’s throw another subculture in the mix!) in my circumstances than “tune in, turn on, drop out.”

And then there’s the chip on the shoulder that students of esoterica who get as far as Davis has gotten — well-known journalist, history PhD — in “straight” intellectual life. I get it… kind of. Academia can, indeed, be stultifying. Studying stuff off the beaten path can get you frozen out, especially considering grim economic realities (though esoterica can also be flashy enough to attract grant money and undergrad eyeballs, it’s worth noting). But there is a distinctly passive-aggressive hippie-macho quality to the way psychedelic advocates express the chip on their shoulders, and Davis is no exception. He broadly implies that academics don’t engage more with the esoteric, the “weird,” and the psychedelic because they are afraid of having their minds blown, that they have to stay within the rules of consensus reality because they’re too chicken to venture outside.

Well… lord knows academics are often cowardly enough. But I’ve also known a lot of people who would do god knows what with their bodies and cerebellums but are terrified of critical thought or honest self-examination. They’ll brave the ayahuasca jungle but not the therapist’s couch, take aboard criticism from fellow impaired miscreants before listening to an editor. Moreover, speaking as a materialist, what’s more comforting- the idea that there is a big magical universe that takes human consciousness as a key element, or the idea that there is nothing other than the material, that there’s no magic, that when we die we rot, and human consciousness was probably an evolutionary adaptation to make us better hunter-gatherers? I could just as easily say psychonauts, heads, and freaks are the cowards, retreating up their own assholes, refusing the trek into the desert of the real. That’s certainly something like what The Baffler would have said back in its glory days.

It’d probably be pretty good if I got into what’s actually in this book, huh? Because it’s good. It’s really good. Even the parts where I was ambivalent made me happy because they made me think. Davis dealt not just with three “psychonauts,” but their most outre flights of fancy, on their own terms but in a way that made them relevant even to my materialist ass. It would have been easy to focus on “Illuminatus!” and “The Man in the High Castle,” and Davis does discuss them, but as a prelude to jumping into the deep ends with his subjects: the McKenna brothers’ efforts to build a… psychedelic musical computer/philosopher’s stone? in the Colombian jungle, Wilson’s entry into (and out of) a paranoid “Chapel Perilous,” and Dick’s “2-3-74” experience, which dominated the last part of his life and helped produce the Valis series as well as his impenetrable Exegesis. Davis’s own exegeses of these are bravura performances of insight, sensitivity, and erudition, borrowing from vast arrays of historical and theoretical literature. This is already a long review so I’m not going into detail, but take it from an only intermittently-sympathetic interlocutor, they are quite good.

But there is a certain extent to which these exegeses, for me, were more like (noble, accomplished) work-showing for the larger contextual points Davis makes in “High Weirdness.” As far as the exegeses themselves are concerned, they serve as proof of concept for Davis’s takes on how to approach “the weird.” Neither confirming nor denying whether his psychonaut’s experiences were “real,” applying Bruno LaTour’s actor-network theory where objects are constituent, active parts in the construction of truth, borrowings from Derrida, there’s a lot going on here. Some of it is genuinely innovative- some of it reminds me of that other habit of esoteric academics, using “what do you mean by REAL?!?”-type rhetoric to keep alive the idea (often a childlike hope- not that of the six year old desiring magic power, but the twelve year old who doesn’t want to put his magic kit away) that the supernatural is real… more the former, really, I guess I’m just sensitive to the latter, especially from a guy who likes to take his shots at the intellectual courage of materialists… really, I’d say methodologically, Davis is at his best in incorporating “trash culture” and subculture histories into serious intellectual history, but that could just be reflective of my particular interests.

Historically, Davis makes some provocative claims for his subject. McKenna, Wilson, and Dick were proud freaks, outsiders… but their thoughts and actions weren’t so far outside of the mainstream as that might imply, especially not in the seventies. I have some disagreements with Davis, here, though probably more about emphasis (and arguably misprision) than fact. Davis wants to upend the seventies-as-decline narrative, one of the few things both the left and the right can agree on. All three of his subjects were involved, to one degree or another, with the sixties movements, and according to many readings, their retreat from politics and entry into paranoid delusion (if we choose to look at their experiences that way) goes along with the decline-into-individualist-malaise theme of a lot of seventies historiography.

Share

I basically agree with this notion, but also think it is ripe for some productive disagreement. If nothing else, the psychonauts didn’t (always) understand the situation as a decline, especially not the comparatively hearty Terence McKenna and the increasingly smug right-libertarian Robert Anton Wilson… the depressive (and actually brilliant, as opposed to half-smart like Wilson or just sort of questionably relevant like McKenna) Philip Dick had a tougher time. A lot of people thought they were going in the right direction. I might disagree (so might PKD!) but it’s worth understanding their perspective.

Davis takes us home towards the end of the book with a discussion of “the network society,” a concept that starts taking on valence more in the seventies and which the three subjects prefigured, and especially McKenna participated in. Whatever credulity Davis might display towards the claims and especially the premises of psychedelia, he is no naïf about the magic of networks, showing how from the beginning, whatever supposedly liberatory, freaky-Deleuzian (to bring in another theorist he name-checks) quality networks might have had, they were also systems of deception, fuckery, and control- and it was impossible to disentangle the two. This he displays in the case of hippie, early network enthusiast, and murderer Ira Einhorn’s both digital and social network of futurists and freaks.

I know a thing or two about how cold the countercultural imagination can be, from that same school often described as a “hippie” school. When I enrolled in the late nineties, this school openly advertised itself as being the school for the network society. There was a certain amount of peace and love there- but that wasn’t all it had. The founders were libertarians, ruthless Zionists, pigheaded supporters of the Iraq War, and one of them even made the local news for how much money he donated to Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. In a gesture at contemporary relevance that I don’t think Davis necessarily needed to justify his work, he ties in the altright, “meme magic” etc., in an impassioned call to understand “the weird” before it destroys us.

Well… as it happens, I know a thing or two about fighting fascists and cut my teeth in fighting the “altright” variant. We beat the altright by dragging them away from fora and memes and into the real. We challenged them to come fight on the streets, with the means of politics, violent and otherwise. They tried, and we beat them so hard that no one calls themselves “altright” anymore. There are plenty of Nazis, but that specific strategy is played out, dead, because of us and what we did, in reality, relying on masses, weight, truth. If you ask me, that points to a good way to study the weird- not necessarily with an eye towards beating it (though learning to break anything down is often quite instructive), but by relating what it says about itself to assorted tests of consensus reality. You don’t need to be “reductive” to do that. You don’t need to grade the weird like so many undergrad essays. Just throw it around and see how it reacts. If these ideas are so interesting and important, they should survive.

Along with “psychonaut,” Davis uses an interesting word, mainly for Dick- “hermenaut” (not sure of the spelling because audiobook), navigator of the word and the methods of reading. Maybe it was my odd sensitivities, but it seems like Davis had an odd relationship with Dick. It turns out that Davis knew Terence McKenna “Bob” Wilson- Dick died when Davis was fifteen, and they did not meet. Davis knew of Dick’s work and helped edit the Exegesis, and maybe this herculean task introduced a certain frustration with the great man that Davis doesn’t have for his old, now dead, friends McKenna or Wilson. It got borderline disrespectful, from where I sat- more emphasis on Dick’s romantic failings, the phrase “mendacious imagination” came up… but “hermenaut” is interesting. It’s worth noting Dick had given up on psychedelics, mostly, by the time he had his vision in 1974. He still did plenty of drugs, especially the proletarian uppers needed to keep him writing. All three subjects were voracious readers but Dick had a reading (and writing) habit that put the other two to shame. There’s a reason (beyond academic appreciation, which Dick has more than the other two) for the Borges comparisons.

Forgive me for another reference to my youth. At my weird hippie-nerd high school, I was known for my refusal to use drugs, and a boy I knew who was quite enthusiastic for them asked me how I intended to expand my mind. As far as he was concerned, the options were either psychedelic drugs or decades of meditation- I didn’t want to do either, so what was I going to do? “I’m going to expand my mind by reading,” I told him. I don’t relate this story to “own” the boy. I don’t actually stand with the Baffler crowd in dismissing other ways of learning and other existential concerns out of hand, though I may not have much time for them myself and utterly refuse to be shamed for that. But I’ve chosen to explore the noosphere — the realm of human thought, which Davis refers to once or twice but wasn’t really part of his or his subjects approach — instead of whatever dimension the psychonaut chooses.

Truth be told, I think it’s been good for me, and has actually granted some of the benefits, like enhanced connection with others, that more esoteric strains of consciousness promise. Dick’s hermenaut imagination helped raise him from his “tomb world” of depression and paranoia (funny how the whole range of “spiritual” thought avoids the realities of clinical depression like it’s a damn leper, like it doesn’t disprove the idea of a good universal consciousness…). I think that way of doing things has helped me, too. And that’s part of why, despite my ambivalence, despite occasionally rolling my eyes, I can only feel gratitude to Erik Davis for producing this work. *****

Jess and I went to the Catskills for a few days. I’ll actually write about part of the reason I wanted to go soon, maybe next week. It was nice! Here’s a picture from Kingston, a town that makes much of having been mostly burned down in the Revolutionary War. It seems it recovered.

Subscribe now

Coming close to the half-year point for 2026, I have to say, I haven’t loved very many of the books I’ve read. The last novel I could give my highest personal rating to was Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy back in February- after that, only Glorious Exploits stands out as something other than “reasonably competent entertainment.” I’ve had more luck with non-fiction, getting a lot out of Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less and Brian Aldiss’ Trillion Year Spree, but the general trend is the same as with fiction.

I haven’t read that many books I’ve truly hated, either. The stuff I’ve been reading has been serviceable but not great, or just kind of bland, or good ideas that get maybe halfway or three quarters there, and I have to ask myself - “is it right that I feel underserved by this book, or is this me wanting the author to have written a different book, one more in line with my wants, which we all know (because it’s said so often) is a big no-no?”

Anyway, here’s some capsule reviews of stuff that has failed to enthuse me, even on the “well, this is fine” level.

Walter Miller, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997) - I discussed this, including its sad backstory, last week. In his account of working on the book he would finish, Terry Bisson said how he read Miller’s manuscript and thought it was perfect, not a word out of place. I imagine he might not have wanted to mess with the work of a scifi legend, coming partially out of a decades-long seclusion to get this sequel out, who then killed himself. It makes sense. But this definitely could have used some major editing. I feel like a jerk saying it, but also like I have a right to, because I have a lot of the same problems when I try to write fiction. It’s clear that Miller elaborated massively on the world he developed for A Canticle for Leibowitz, and gave a lot of thought to many characters over the years, and it’s all on the page, here. Without editing, you wind up with a long meander through centuries-post-apocalyptic America and its dynastic/ecclesiastical politics, and how they intersect with the main character’s spiritual dilemmas. The prose is fine, but the pacing is slow and flattens out all of the tension from a plot involving numerous wars, assassinations, etc. I really think with some editing down this could have been a lot better. I get why they didn’t want to do it, though. We’ll always have A Canticle for Leibowitz, though- go read it if you haven’t.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) - I’m helping a friend of mine on a project he’s starting about the history of cosmopolitanism as an idea. It’s a very old idea, at least as old as the Cynics of classical Greece, and crops up as a subject of discourse here and there ever since. One such time was the first decade or so of this century. The philosopher son of a major figure in Ghana’s independence movement, Kwame Anthony Appiah put his stamp on things with a book I remember people carrying around but haven’t heard anything or thought about for ages before I looked it up for this project. It’s a weird time capsule from a time when people, or anyway cosseted elite academics and the people who read them, could really believe that “conversation,” in and of itself, could fix things. That’s what cosmopolitanism is, in Appiah’s telling- an ongoing conversation about values and shared living. We may not always come to agreement, but we can agree enough to live together, blah blah. If you want to get past platitudes, in this or anything else in the cosmopolitanism literature from this time, you have to dig a little. You eventually get to foreign aid donor politics – yes, we should be welcoming to outsiders, no, all because we think all cultures are good and have an equal claim to the world’s goods doesn’t mean we need to inconvenience ourselves in dividing everything up more evenly – and the shadow of the war on terror. Muslims “feel besieged” by Christians- whyever might that be? Something about their counter-cosmopolitanism, perhaps?m Christians don’t see Muslims as a threat, after all, the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton avers! What planet was this guy living on? That strangest of all planets, I suppose- the comparatively recent past.

Peter Byrne, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutually Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family (2013) - This one I also read for my birthday lecture. Without giving too much away, one of the three books I’m discussing, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, involves a particular gloss on the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum physics. A ways back I had heard of this biography of the guy who first promulgated it, and figured this would be a good chance to read it. Who knows- maybe if I had read it when I first heard of it, I would have liked it better. At this point, I get the picture- the Cold War science establishment was weird, and employed a lot of weird little guys, who weren’t super pleasant to be around. Their ideas sometimes echoed their mental states and vice versa, and some of that got foisted on all of us, through defense policy, or the design of Cold War technologies like the internet, or through whatever kind of cultural osmosis. Hugh Everett was one of those weird little guys. Moreover, per science journalist Peter Byrne’s account, Everett was completely sidelined in the quantum physics field because his Many Worlds hypothesis went across what Neils Bohr had in mind and Bohr was basically the pope of quantum physics at the time. Bohr kicked so hard Everett had to go into defense operations research instead- he’d never accelerate particles in this town again!

There’s a few things here militating against my enjoyment of this book. Byrne gets pretty breathless about the whole Cold War science scene – the nerds, the soldiers, the physics that sounds like theology and the engineering that sounds like eschatology, the weird shit all of these people got up on the side – but it’s not new news to me. I can cut him some slack on explaining quantum physics – that’s a hard thing to explain at the best of times – but if I’m being honest, I find the whole inquiry tedious, and it gets nerds to be tendentious in the worst pedantic ways. The whole “meltdown of a nuclear family” bit is about how Hugh Everett III wasn’t a good husband or father, and had unhealthy habits that contributed to him dying in middle age. Less nuclear meltdown and more… well, when I try to read for a more ordinary disaster, even saying “car crash” is a bit too dramatic. A midcentury American dude fooling around on his wife, smoking/drinking/eating a lot, preferring the office to the family home, dodging the nursing home for an early grave, surely such a scenario can only be explained through the tragedy of like… Cold War… nerds… multiple worlds as metaphor for… something? I’m no fan of American Cold War shenanigans or its sinister nerds, but this was tedious.

Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea (2022) - Speaking of tedious… like I mentioned last week, this story of evolving octopus intelligence suffers from the lame thriller plot that takes up much of its time, and overindulgence in cliche in its scifi components. I found myself wondering if there’s anything to say about which animals nerds choose to fixate on, when. There always seems to be a type of animal that the culture picks up on as the smart one, the one in some ways smarter than us (not that hard, really) but, critically, usually has some value that specific humans – the humans using the wise animal as a totem – have more than everyone else… the sheeple, if you like, to reverse the operation. When I was a kid it was whales and dolphins. Apes of various kinds go in and out of style, depending on which researcher gets on TV and/or which type hasn’t ripped anyone’s face off on camera lately. I vaguely remember some nerds putting in for pigs around the time I was in college, and they’re as good a candidate as any, really, but with some drawbacks where mass appeal is concerned.

These days cephalopods are the nerd favorite, though corvids seemed to compete with them for a bit- among other things, it seems squid, octopi, ravens, and crows tattoo better than gorillas, pigs, or dolphins, a more relevant fact now than when I was a kid and tattoos were less common. How much does it make sense to draw a larger point from the symbolism involved? Part of the selling point seems to be how different cephalopods are from any other form of terrestrial life- I hear the descriptor “alien” thrown around. If you want to separate yourself from the human (even while displaying the distinctly human trait of making totems out of other animals to project onto), squid give you a lot of room for that. I remember cephalopods being depicted as cold and emotionless – the counterpoint to warm, mammalian whales and dolphins – but that doesn’t seem to be where the pop science/culture is going with it anymore, seeing a big emotional range in all those colors they flash on their skins. If nothing else, humans (and, for that matter, dolphins) seem less warm and fuzzy than we did when I was a kid, too, so the contrast shrinks from both ends. That complicates the obvious (to me) and likely specious analysis, that nerds find an affinity with cephalopods on account of our increasingly cold, grasping, openly meaningless way of living, though I do figure that dynamic enters into it… anyway, all of that interests me more than what happened in this mediocre book that has been praised more than it deserves. The end.

Share

Speaking of sea life, I live near the ocean.

Subscribe now

Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (1939) and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953): Someone on Perry Miller’s Wikipedia entry dug up a quote from an obscure essay about another topic altogether to claim that “the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability.” Miller drank himself to death in 1963, not yet sixty years old, and the event was hailed as a major loss to American intellectual history. He produced many books but “The New England Mind,” his two volume work on the intellectual world of the Puritan settlers, probably stands as his magnum opus.

Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and their radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but Miller’s spadework was spectacular.

The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist.

Read more

For my “big nonfiction read,” I’ve got C. Vann Woodward’s biography of Tom Watson. Woodward was one of the major American historians of the twentieth century. His work on Jim Crow and the post-Reconstruction South played an important role in our reappraisal of the period between the civil war and WWI, where increasing sophistication in historical analysis went hand in hand with disputing sentimental and nationalistic “lost cause” mythology. His first published monograph was a biography of Tom Watson, a populist political leader from Georgia between the 1880s and the 1920s. Watson symbolizes the course of southern populism after the Civil War. He started out in an effort to build a cross-race coalition of farmers and poor people to build a political force opposed to the elite-dominated Democrats. He ended up becoming one of the most infamous race-baiters in the country after the Populist wave in the South ran aground, in some cases violently. I’m still in the beginning of the book, where young Tom is a hustling autodidactic country lawyer, wowing courtroom crowds with his rhetoric back when that sort of thing was an important rural entertainment. Woodward wrote well from early on but buys into some anti-reconstruction stuff. We’ll see how it goes.

I just finished Middle England by Jonathan Coe. It’s the third book in a trilogy covering a group of Birmingham boys from the seventies to our time. Truth be told, I’ve read the three books so far apart I mostly lose track of the characters. They’re still pretty good. Middle England felt a little blah, a little too “let’s cover the lowlights of the 2010s in Britain,” the characters mouthing the lines you’d expect from their respective demographics, but had two major things going for it in the end. First, Coe gestured at a “political correctness gone mad” plot, but pivoted away from making it too cliche, and even has a trans character who’s a human being and everything- a low bar, but this is a British writer, remember. There’s also a pretty funny brawl between two children’s clowns, paying off a good deal of buildup, and I appreciated that. If you want to read Coe, my recommendation would be The Winshaw Legacy (British title: What A Carve-Up!). My next “serious lit” read will be Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. I read Housekeeping a while back. I was impressed, even if it spoke little to me, and flummoxed me in some ways- I look forward to another journey into that strange country: the inner world of serene WASP ladies.

I started The Darkness That Comes Before, the beginning of the fruitful career of Canadian fantasist R. Scott Bakker. A lot of names, a lot of cities, realms, empires, cults, etc., and Bakker is… deliberate with his exposition, so we’re not sure what all these proper nouns really mean, yet. There’s a crusade (well, a tusk-ade… this religion uses a lot of tusk imagery), some magical schools are seeking to make use of it for their arcane purposes, etc. Elevated cynicism among intimations of deep lore. Not bad so far, we’ll see how it progresses.

For my readings on the right, I’m picking along at Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It’s mostly about software, at least so far. Raymond was a big open source software guy. He’s gotten more attention in the last few decades for saying loud, dumb things on the racist chud end of the libertarian spectrum. He probably thought many of those things in the nineties, when he wrote this, but it wasn’t first on his mind. Open source software is good, because some (all? He hasn’t said that yet, and might not) things are better built like a bazaar- have a lot of different people involved, everyone doing their own thing within a set of rules. That’s how you debug your new Linux whatever. Not like building a cathedral, with a master plan, a hierarchy, etc! I picked this up because this bazaar-cathedral dichotomy is still an important metaphor among people who get their opinions from engineering or business thought. I don’t know if Curtis Yarvin adapted his use of “Cathedral” — meaning the mean professional managerial class that says you shouldn’t do racism and rules the world, allegedly — from Raymond, but there’s probably some relationship there. But mostly, so far, it’s about how open source software projects work, and it seems pretty sensible. Reading this is probably a bit like reading Isaac Newton to see how liberalism works. Many of the thinkers who influenced liberalism at its roots borrowed a lot of metaphors from Newton, and saw an affinity between the universe as Newton described it and what they were doing. Newton didn’t know that, or care. It might still be a useful exercise- we’ll see.

I’m listening to Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, a novel about a scientist in a near-ish future who is tracking down rumors of a super-intelligent octopus off the coast of Vietnam. It’s a contact story, with a bunch of post-cyberpunk thriller plot added on. I don’t love saying this as I have friends who like this book a lot (I think?) but neither element is really doing it for me so far. They both feel pretty rote, and where not rote, far fetched in a way that makes it hard to take seriously. The thriller plot involves sneaky Russians (rote) and AI-run slave-manned fishing vessels, the idea being that in the future, slaves are cheaper than robots (far-fetched). The octopus-communications angle involves a genius scientist who is a loner, attached to cephalopods because of her inability to understand her own species (rote), and every chapter opens with a pseudo-profound epigraph from her fictional book or that of her mentor (tacky- yes, Frank Herbert did it… you’re not Frank Herbert, and neither were you, Robert Anton fucking Wilson…). Basically, it runs into the normal guy writing geniuses issue. Now that I’ve gotten into the groove, I like it better than I did at the beginning — Nayler is too clever by half in introducing the plot elements — but Adrian Tchaikovsky beats him in a walk where smart cephalopods are concerned in Children of Ruin.

For my birthday lecture project, I’m finally reading Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. Walter Miller’s classic post-apocalypse novel A Canticle for Leibowitz has been a favorite of mine since I was a teenager. Miller never published anything in his lifetime after Canticle. As the decades wore on and he suffered from creative block, PTSD from his time in WWII, and depression, he became a recluse near the Florida town where he was born. After his wife died, Miller killed himself. Before he did, he wrote most of a follow-up, or so the story told by the guy they brought in to finish it, fellow scifi great Terry Bisson, goes. Wild Horse Woman did not get anywhere near the reception Canticle did. I tried reading it a few times when I was younger, in my first flush of enthusiasm for Canticle, and never got far. It’s a good deal slower, and seems longer. I’m a bit more into it now. It takes place around the middle point of Miller’s future history, when the peoples of post-nuclear America, after a centuries-long dark age, start putting together more sophisticated and powerful societies and take an interest in learning again (the titular Saint Leibowitz had founded an order of monks to preserve human knowledge after a nuclear war and attendant “Simplification”). The story follows a monk from one of the mostly-pagan nomadic tribes of the Great Plains. He’s caught between multiple worlds and his own inner turmoil, and soon enough, in the internecine conflicts between popes, empires, and nomads. It’s not bad- it is a bit slow, and does not have the same spark as Canticle, and does not balance the human with overarching universal themes with the same grace. But we’ll see how it goes.

Share

That’s it for me. Burt is with us, and despite his sad mug, is having a very indulged rainy morning.

Ferdia Lennon, Glorious Exploits (2024) (read aloud by the author) - This is one I’d recommend as an audiobook. Based, it seems, off a story related by Plutarch, Glorious Exploits is told from the perspective of Lampo, an inhabitant of Syracuse, the biggest city in Sicily, in the fifth century BC. Syracuse had just defeated an Athenian expeditionary force sent to conquer Sicily, in one of the greatest examples of hubris, and its inevitable downfall, in classical history. After the defeat, the Syracusan authorities herded thousands of Athenian prisoners into quarries outside of the city to die of hunger and exposure. Lampo and his friend Gelon, both unemployed potters and fans of Athenian drama and poetry, get a brainwave: find Athenians who know the work of their favorite, Euripides, bribe them with food, and put on their own performances of the masters’ work, right there in the quarries.

Read more

Subscribe now

Hans Jonas, “The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity” (1958) - It’s a commonplace, and a true one, that a lot of the tropes we assign …

Read more

Subscribe now

Tyler Mahan Coe, Cocaine and Rhinestones: A History of George Jones and Tammy Wynette (2024) - Country star David Allan Coe died the day before yesterday. I first learned of him from this little squib in the Onion-

As you can see, this would have been in 2002, when I was in high school. I didn’t know who he was at the time. I had the standard aversion to country music that nerdish boys had then, especially if they were from the northeast. I wouldn’t even have a heritage reason to like it- my forebears went from the music of the old country to Sinatra and easy listening to rock and other genres for northeastern boomers. Our country – our iteration of America – wasn’t “country,” if that makes sense, except insofar as it was a big country and people over there liked odd things sometimes. I knew a lot of boys who affected the style of the other major identity-fraught genre of the day, hip hop, but few who went in for country, and of those none for then-mainstream country.

Tyler Mahan Coe, DAC’s eldest son, grew up in quite different circumstances. As the opening of his podcast, Cocaine and Rhinestones, puts it, “I’ve been hearing these stories my whole life.” In the first season, he tells a variety of stories about twentieth century country music, about the intertwining between the artistic, the biographical, the social, the technological (via an understanding of the production side) that went into the stories he knew.

The first season is good. The second season is something very special. Coe set out to tackle a range of subjects in one podcast season, each of which near-inexhaustable in its own right: the “Nashville Sound,” the life of George Jones, the life of Tammy Wynette, the histories of moonshine, pinball, bullfighting, all sort of things. It’s been called “maximalist” and that sounds right to me.

Above all, Coe told a story about country music and modernity. He wanted to refute the idea that country music is about a premodern Americana vision untouched by industrial civilization, by other genres of music, and above all, by pop music and its modes of production. This is part of why all these other seemingly extraneous subjects get pulled into what was supposed to be a season about George Jones. It’s about Jones, considered by many to be the single greatest country vocalist who ever lived, but only because Coe makes him, and the constellation of people and dynamics around him, a mirror for modernity more generally.

Coe did not go to school to be a historian, as far as I can tell, and does not work out of the academy. He played music with his father for a while, and his knowledge of music production tools suggests some time doing that professionally. I haven’t dug deep into his background. My point is, I’m interested in how people do history outside of the academy. Podcasters do this all the time, but most of the time, I’d rather just read histories of the subject than listen to podcasters (for instance, I’d much rather read Mike Duncan’s book about Lafayette than listen to his Revolutions podcast, and the podcast is reasonably good, too- just not for me).

This isn’t how it is for Coe. It’s hard to put a finger on why. Some of it is the scale of his vision. A lot of it is probably that I don’t know the topic very well, so both don’t see where the cracks might be and I get to learn more. I learn more the basics, but also the broader conversation around country music. Some of it goes over my head. I have taken up listening to more country in the last few years, but I’m a neophyte, and while there are some country artists I love, I think enough of the genre isn’t my cup of tea that I will never know it all that well.

I also get to listen to someone smart and passionate about multiple areas of knowledge I know little about engage with big historical dynamics that I care about. Coe read plenty of history books, about country music and otherwise, in the course of researching this book. But, not being ensconced in academia, he’s not necessarily thinking, especially in his big overarching themes, along the established grooves.

Modernity, for instance, is a topic that has vexed generations of historians, critics, and assorted others in their efforts to define. Coe sort of just goes with it, seemingly arriving at a definition reasonably close to a working consensus- modernity as a state of rapid technological and economic advance and its associated social, political, cultural, etc changes. Now, I love some engagement with “the literature” but what Coe lacks in terms of long sections struggling with the state of the discourse about what “modernity” means, we gain in storytelling and verve. Sometimes, he indulges in more psychological or pop-sociological explanations than I would go for, but never to a point that really detracts from the work, even for a methodology snob like me.

The stories are great. You’d have to be pretty deep into anti-country snobbery to not allow that the genre is second to none in terms of producing stories. George Jones was, genuinely, burdened by “the unbearable weight of massive talent,” to borrow a phrase. He thought he’d make some records imitating other singers (a common practice) and make a little money. Put in the room with producers, session musicians, and other industry types then revolutionizing country music (and saving it from being killed stone dead by one Elvis Aaron Presley, as apparently threatened to happen?), with people who knew what to do with him, he became something he couldn’t understand or handle. Coe can tell the stories of his legendary binges, his absurd behaviors, and the way the introduction of Tammy Wynette into his life somehow multiplied the chaos factor by at least two, in all their glory but with their real impact, too… makes it all feel a little less like rubbernecking as the storm we call “modernity” (or “country music stardom”) continues to pile wreckage at our feet…

Coe deserves praise for tying together the structural – and if we want to talk structure, the country music industry in the middle of the 20th century was, indeed, quite structured! – and the contingent… and what’s more “contingent” than the deeds of an out of control country star (well, the deeds of two of them, and that’s part of our story too). He can be quite emphatic about points he wants to get across, from his broad thesis about the modernity of country music to what sound like long-standing points of debate amongst hardcore fans of the genre, but Cocaine and Rhinestones isn’t thesis heavy. He’s confident enough in the strength of his design to let it play out without hand-holding.

If you prefer reading, which I generally do, Coe released a book based on his massive second season. As far as I can tell, it is basically transcripts based on his show notes. Coe’s a perfectionist with his recordings- he sounds natural, but he never sounds improvised, no uhms and ahs, and he is generally the only voice you hear. Especially if you have listened enough to him speak, you can very clearly hear it in your head as his voice, talking to you.

I contribute to Coe’s patreon, and have since the first season of Cocaine and Rhinestones. He hasn’t put out new podcast material since the end of the second season, a few years ago. I know enough about creating to have some inkling how taxing creating something of the magnitude of that second season would be. He’s had some health problems, too, it seems. I listened to a brief video he made about his father dying. He never talked much about David Allan Coe in the podcast. Among other things, George Jones was pretty far from the “outlaw” country DAC helped create. I learned from the video that the Coes had been estranged for a number of years. That’s a hard way to lose someone, even when you know they know you love them.

Neither Coe is or was a stranger to the highs and lows of the creative process, to use a phrase that doesn’t seem to do the subject justice. Tyler Mahan Coe brings this knowledge and experience to a brilliant example of historical craft in Cocaine and Rhinestones. I doubt I need to tell him, or anyone else who has ever put their heart and soul into creating something, that even the highest highs of creative achievement can’t entirely balance the scales of capital-C Creation, and make everything make sense. But it’s still more worth pursuing than most anything else.

Share

That’s it for me! See you next week. If you can do the “like, share, subscribe” stuff that’d be great.

I went to New York recently and spent time with a cat named Torshi. That’s Farsi for “pickle.” He is beautiful.

Claudia Verhoeven, Love and Terror: The Helter Skelter History of the Manson Murders (2026) - Oof… that subtitle… as you’ll see, I’m not the biggest fan of Verhoeven the historian1, but she doesn’t deserve that lurid of a subtitle. Among other things, if the reviews of other goodreads users who also got advanced copies is a hint, a lot of people get a look at the title, subtitle, and other marketing accoutrements and think this will be true crime.

It’s not, though I knew that going in. Way back towards the beginning of my grad school career, I read Verhoeven’s first book, The Odd Man Karakazov, about radical Narodnik terrorism in pre-revolutionary Russia in a class on political violence. She’s a cultural historian, out on a limb a few levels off from the main branch of post-Foucault cultural history. That’s about as far as you can go from the straightforward narrativizing that true crime entails. Love and Terror is several degrees less theory-brained than Karakazov was, if memory serves, but it was a lot more than the poor goodreads folks were expecting.

I didn’t want true crime. I wanted history- we’re advancing sophisticated historical writing well into the late twentieth century now, it’d be good to look at the Manson situation in that light. I got history, and I got at least some insights. But it took more energy and frustration to read this book than what it offered was worth to me.

Read more