Readingthinkinglistening: DECEMBER 2023
huddle and groan in a madhouse
Reading: Pynchon, Pale Fire, Pistelli
I finished Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire after a long interval-I tried to read the poem and notes back and forth about a year ago and it just didn’t work for me, while in a linear sense it went off splendidly. It’s tonally quite strange, with a blend of mean-spirited humor and deep, pervading melancholy that didn’t quite work for me for about half the book, but the ending twist which I won’t spoil is fantastic and wholly redeems any complaints I might’ve had.
I’ve also been revisiting Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon of late on my continuing journey through and revisiting his bibliography. It’s definitely worth a try just for the sheer novelty of seeing the Pynchon “thing” filtered through a pastiche of 18th century english, a stylistic choice and (anachronistic) form it shares with one of my favorite late 20th century novels, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor.1
Lastly I reread (just a bit of)
’s 2017 novel Portraits and Ashes to make good on a promise to review it I made back when I was just an anon lurking on his tumblr blog. It’s not his best work (that’d probably be the ongoing novel he’s publishing at the moment) but I recommend it nonetheless. As I described it on my unevenly updated Goodreads account:A zany novel of ideas. High cynicism, bitter wit and cruel irony masking a surprisingly sincere core about art saving the world-or at least individual people, for whom moderate aestheticism tempered by everyday realities is offered as a solution to modern alienation. Strong depiction of unreality in a decaying minor city overrun by vaguely Gnostic cultists and an art world so lost in theory it doesn’t even notice itself being poisoned in the most literal sense.2 I have little complaints here and there-the millennial characters didn’t necessarily completely convince me, and the villain of the piece Jobe too neatly allows Pistelli to place the currents the book sets itself against in one corner, but on the whole a thrilling effort.
Of late I’ve been on a bit of a project of reading fictions by critics I esteem-I didn’t write it up for this newsletter but I’m halfway through Lionel Trilling’s The Middle of The Journey at the moment-and I suppose this is really a part of that, although I didn’t think of it as such when I started! It’s fascinating albeit perfectly logical how a critic’s fiction often seems to flesh out and complete their aesthetic project, filling in gaps, weaknesses, or misapprehensions on the part of the reader.3
Listening: Beach House, other stuff
I have a piece of quasi musical criticism I’m working on loosely about the Taylor Swift renaissance as viewed through the prism of my own experience with Red and 1989 and my lack of comprehension of why exactly she’s returned so strongly, but that really isn’t ready for prime time yet, even if I have a suitably silly title for it!
I re-listened for the first time since around its release in early 2022 to Beach House’s Once Twice Melody, which I still enjoyed but found a bit too long. I like it more than 7, but less than a lot of their earlier material. I’m not sure a band like them really has much business doing a double album-there just isn’t that much stylistic diversity-but I enjoyed it nonetheless!
Thinking: redefinition time, possible hiatus?
It’s been a while since I last checked in here. This has been an extremely low energy month or so primarily for reasons of vague illness, although frankly I’ve been doing a bit of soul-searching about continuing with this blog at all. The format of these has been getting me down for a while now, I feel like I’ve said what I set out to when I started, and anyway what I’ve said is maybe not what I need to be saying, etc. A few times over the last while I’ve been reminded that there’s a bad or neutral enlightenment, what a thinker in whom I once put a great deal of stock once called a qlippothic enlightenment, and I guess that I worry a little that to the extent that I’ve provided any enlightenment at all it’s been that sort.4 More (or maybe less) seriously I have a novel to finish a draft of, and these weekly posts have increasingly begun to feel like a distraction from that work, which is really as far as I’m concerned my real work of writing. This isn’t to say I don’t still have things in the pipeline: at some point I want to write a sequel to the Lit Bro essay and there’s still the Albert Murray piece waiting in drafts, but I don’t want this kind of essay to take up as much of my creative energy as it did for a lot of this year. This blog started out as a kind of literary-aesthetic moodboard documenting my weekly reading, listening, and sometimes watching, and if it continues to be a weekly blog-which it may or may not-it’ll probably return to something like that format. It might take a while to get back on my feet, but I’ll be in touch over the next little while!
There are several origin stories I’ve never told on here, one of which being why exactly I wound up reading this book and being such a partisan for John Barth. It can wait for another day!
The Last Cafe subsection is worth reading the book for in and of itself, the dueling lectures scene in White Noise reimagined as the funniest mass murder in recent literary fiction blended with a genuinely devastating pathos.
If I may be permitted to misinterpret & mangle Pistelli as I did to (another of my favorite active essayists) Blake Smith last month, his criticism and punditry has occasionally seemed (this is I think a misreading on my part, but a misreading obliquely responsible for the existence of this substack) to point toward something like a kind of aesthete misogyny-domestic woman and her managerial successors as the enemy of everything interesting and good in art and culture-an impression which his novels, with their often female consciousness and deep sympathy for the little lives of ordinary people outside of intellectual circles, largely dispels and corrects.
My uncredited quasi cowriter said something along the lines of “well, it’s not like you’re writing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and she’s certainly right about that, but all the same one does worry about the energy of what one is responsible for putting out there!
Pale Fire felt like being forced to eat an entire birthday cake to me. I wasn't able to find any of the pathos that people seem to find in it. Lolita worked for me because behind the (very impressive, of course) verbal pyrotechnics are these moments when the horror comes into focus. But nothing else has.
Reading fiction by critics you like is always an interesting pursuit. One day I found myself reading Ryan Ruby's novel because it was on display at the library and it took me from thinking his criticism was fine to actively disliking it because the book was such shoddy hackwork lol (fun in its way, but boy does he owe Donna Tartt a few royalty checks). Whereas Under the Volcano only made me like Sontag more. Both were strange though because you feel as if you already know the author so thoroughly, it's almost like reading a novel by a friend.
Lastly, I've really enjoyed your writing here, I feel as if our interests have been oddly synced and I've gained a bunch of good recommendations and insights. But there comes a point where one doesn't want to churn out content for the sake of it and if it feels like the thing to do is retreat for a while, then you should and I hope to see you around this corner of the internet 🫡
Sincere thanks—I may quote you on this!
If I had to characterize my "theory," such as it is, it's that domestic woman is ironically the source of both aestheticism and its managerial adversary; hence, I'm sure, the ambivalence you detect between my fiction and nonfiction.