Readingthinkinglistening 11/22/23

Valeria Luiselli, Ralph Ellison, Yes, & Reactionary hipsters again

This week I read Valeria Luiselli’s strange second novel The Story of my Teeth. I had liked her first novel Faces in the Crowd a great deal but was largely unaware of this one’s existence until I stumbled across it in a bookstory. For some reason I thought she’d gone straight from Faces to Lost Children Archive with short story and essay collections I haven’t read yet in the middle. It’s a strange, episodic text peppered with odd allusions and a bizarre plot I’m not sure means anything. I enjoyed it!

I’m still reading The Recognitions, enjoying but finding it slow going. It’s not a difficult read really, but there’s a lot of detail, densely allusive passages, and just generally a lot of it. I see why people thought early on that Pynchon was just Gaddis with a pseudonym-they have similarly Dickensian taste in ridiculous names. I like them myself, but “Agnes Deigh” is just too much!

I was interested to see this healthy selection of John Barth’s works-newly rereleased by the Dalkey Archives-at the local Barnes & Noble. I’ve been derelict in my review series which you can begin here, but hopefully these issues can inspire renewed interest in Barth. He was (as I’ll eventually explain elsewhere) a flawed novelist in many respects, but The Sot-Weed Factor is a Great American Novel, and his best works are both influential and well worth remembering.¹ Speaking of which, I’ve been revisiting Invisible Man ahead of my reading Stanley Crouch’s novel. It’s one of those books I've read before, but so long ago that the details were a bit fuzzy. It really is remarkable how practically the entire tradition of the late 20th century African American novel comes out of this book. I’ll keep you posted when I’m done.

Useless begging won’t help you: Stuff I listened to recently.

This weekend I listened, for the first time in full probably since I was in my teens to Marilyn Manson’s Trent Reznor-produced 1996 concept album Antichrist Superstar. I will somewhat begrudgingly defend the first few Manson albums as crunchy slabs of adolescent edgelordery, and Antichrist is probably the best done and most developed of the bunch.² I could write if I wanted (and I don’t) a thesis on why I was a big Manson fan as a teen-something that seems unaccountable to me now as well, especially given that his cultural moment was past by then and I was never qute the right sort of shallow goth, but most alas, the spirit isn’t moving me.

Also over the weekend, on a journey through other stuff I liked as a teen I listened to (a song from) Yes’s 1973 album Tales From Topographic Oceans. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Tales features only four tracks, the shortest clocking in at just below 19 minutes.³ I listened to the second, pompously (this is an eighty minute album extrapolated from a footnote in The Autobiography of a Yogi) titled “High the Memory” on a long drive. It’s not bad, although it’s certainly too long and probably misses something of the energy that propels the best Yes material. It has a nice pastoral insularity though, and it’s probably my second favorite part of the album.

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Beard Wax on the Armalite: more musings on political hipsterism in our time

There are about five substacks that I read compulsively, and of these the one I write about by far the least is Katherine Dee’s Default Wisdom. I think she does valuable work-the digital anthropology niche she inhabits is so thoroughly leftist that it’s refreshing to see someone more-or-less center right making content.⁴ I was very interested by this observation in one of her recent pieces, as it corresponds to something I’ve been noticing on the heterodox/dissident trad/centrist/neo/new medievalist sphere for a while now.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that a significant handful of the most vocal pro-family Internet personalities are missing one vital thing: a family. But that’s the way it goes online. Many of the most vocal, most popular anti-feminists are unmarried cosmopolitans, hustling their way into a subscriber base that can pay their rent. 

The thoughts that spun off my reading of this piece aren’t so much about Dee herself-she’s someone working the same territory making some of the same observations and coming to some of the same conclusions-

I’m not confident that more structure is the way forward anymore: that’s the cope of the Digital Age. More rigidity. Something tells me that’s why the Very Online tends to eventually veer towards authoritarianism. The mind craves it in a world with so much chaos and information. 

-but rather yet another go at a theme that I often like to riff on here, that of politics as downstream from or even a kind of fashion, and one of the products of that reality in our time: the reactionary hipster. See, the more I go along the more I wonder if the cultural logic of the hipster as a figure, the logic of counterculture itself might lie behind some of the cries one hears so often in certain spaces for the masses to go back to church, back to monogamy, back to a time before hair dye and the internet, to a time when you knew who you were. My suspicion more and more is that knowing who you are might be another way of saying that you know who you aren’t, you know the great unwashed, the normies whom you define yourself against.

The reactionary hipster glances out from the overstimulating non-life of the digital world into a reality where there are no more normies. The people who never left your hometown, the people who in another lifetime might’ve been John Updike characters are vulgar leftists or up on whatever successor brainworm to Q is existent on the right. The suburban matrons who are after all in this view the true enemy of avant garde culture love their trans daughter while their cis daughter is a fujoshi theatre kid and their son knows what gooning is. There are simply no normies left to oppose-even opting out and into tradition makes you not-normal, marks as individual rather than allowing a subsumption, a desired submission and assimilation into moral majority. Shorn of the oppositional logic that defined the 20th century adversary culture that the hipster of our own century developed from, our subjects find themselves in a state of existential terror, seemingly devoid of any essential substance. This is part of what I mean when I say that we’re all trans in postmodernity.⁵

Part of the drive to make everybody normal again is perhaps a way to make sure that you are an elect, an aristocrat of the spirit, rather than just another weird nerd self-medicating in a machine world from which there is no escape. It’s not actually (at least for some of these people) about tradition or the proper maintenance of something ordained by god, it’s about being a bohemian übermensch who knows the way things really are-something you can’t do if the esoteric knowledge is available to anyone who reads wikipedia.

In theory I should be more sympathetic to this than I often am. I too am an internet-damaged person trying very hard to be normal, or close enough to it, and yet… There’s something in this logic of the bohemian übermensch that always gives me pause. So often with these people-referring as much to heterodox take-havers as reactionary hipsters- I fear that I’m not one of the elect, on the wrong side of their categories.⁶ I also don’t think you can ever really RETVRN, and the process of trying to do so always seems to mangle the future. In any case it’s certainly a thought (I’m simply terrible at ending these things or extrapolating useful conclusions!) Happy Thanksgiving!

1. David Foster Wallace for one basically synthesized the metafictional style of Barth circa Lost In the Funhouse with White Noise-era DeLillo, something that I’ve bizarrely almost never seen discussed given how obvious it is if you’ve read all three.

2. As records I think I’d argue both Portrait of an American Family and the Billy Corgan consulted Mechanical Animals are better, but as an experience, as something to be an angry but somewhat pseudointellectual teen to, Antichrist (and about half of Holy Wood) is the one.

3. Even many diehard Yes fans will argue that this probably shouldn’t have been the case-the band have said in retrospect that they were burdened by the technological limitations of the period-they had written an album and a half’s worth of material but there was no way to release that at the time, and rather than abandon the surplus material they padded it out to epic length. Everyone agrees that two of the tracks on Tales shouldn't be as long as they are, but there’s little agreement about which ones they are.

4. I’ve been rewatching a lot of King of the Hill and Daria lately, so it’s possible that Beavis and Butthead have just colonized my frontal lobe, but there’s something in Dee’s sensibility I’d gloss as “Mike Judge-ism,” this very particular blend of conservative faith that traditional values and the nuclear family is the best way to live coupled with a libertarian unwillingness to condemn anyone who doesn’t conform. It’s the sort of thing I remember being much more common when I was growing up (it seemed to be the dominant sensibility in the red hinterlands of Western Massachusetts in the aughts) and I wish there were more of it around today. Don’t get me wrong, as dominant culture it was stifling and uncomfortable in its own way, but it was also I think a stabilizing influence.

5. I will explain this further someday, as I’m not totally satisfied with my previous explanations.

6. This is incidentally what occasionally worries me about the otherwise to-my-liking second liberalism of Blake Smith-I can’t seem to shake the impression he thinks my people being on the other side of the door on the outside is necessary for the proper functioning of society and culture. I’m always wondering if this is too paranoid-it very possibly is! (that’s why it’s a footnote)