Grand Podcast Abyss: Recent Episodes
Grand Podcast Abyss
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 30 minutes are free, is about Clarice Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. I begin first with my checkered personal experience with Lispector’s writing, then the three phases of her reputation among Anglophone readers, and finally her biography. Then I embark on an explication of the novel, which I interpret as no less than an attempt to create a new religion, a new ritual, and a new gospel in the middle of the 20th century, a fusion of heaven and hell, matter and spirit, good and evil, like none seen before, equal parts disturbing and profound. Several ongoing themes of The Invisible College gather to their shattering climax here. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Anne Carson’s classic novel in verse Autobiography of Red. We discuss Carson’s evolving reputation from avant-garde to popular writer, her renegade classicists’ theorization of love, poetry, and the novel in her early treatise Eros the Bittersweet, and her narrative of a gay male artist’s romantic coming of age amid poetic language’s attempt to set being free in Autobiography of Red. Along the way, we query the political in Carson’s work, translator Emily Wilson’s recent critique of Carson, the meaning of cross-gendered gay romances written by straight authors, the potential of the verse novel as a genre, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. First we consider Bishop as “poets’ poets’ poet” (John Ashbery) vs. “almost a novelist” (John Hollander) in her perfectionism, variety, humor, restraint, and outward-focus, and compare her to contemporaries like her friend Robert Lowell. Then we map her biography according to the places she lived: Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Key West, Brazil, and more. Then we survey her poems of Brazil, with their suspended identification between native and colonizer, and their potential for visionary initiation; her prose piece “In the Village” recalling her childhood in Nova Scotia caught between her mother’s formless scream and the blacksmith’s form-giving art; her poem “Sandpiper” and its tribute to or quarrel with William Blake; the multiple identifications inspired by her recounted childhood experience “In the Waiting Room”; her wry self-portraits as a retired “Crusoe in England” and object of colonial surveillance in “Twelve O’Clock News”; and finally the ultimate synthesis of formal constraint and formless passion in the villanelle “One Art.” Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Susan Sontag’s In America. Most of the episode concerns the aesthetic, political, and personal peregrinations of Sontag’s “exemplary” 20th-century life: her changing beliefs about American culture and American power and her move from radicalism to liberalism; her concomitant abandonment of aesthetic extremism in favor of a more measured novelistic humanism; her thoughts about the conflict between the intellectual and the artist, the essay and the novelist; and more. Then we measure her final novel, In America, against these ideas and against her own high ambitions. Whether you’ve read In America or not, this episode should serve as a thorough and entertaining introduction to the one of the 20th century’s most important and influential authors. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall; I have also included, as a bonus, the slideshow for my earlier lecture on Sontag as mentioned in the episode:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Gore Vidal’s revisionist historical novel of the American founding, Burr. Aesthetically, we consider Vidal as icon and iconoclastic literary dissident, his alienation from the Romantic aesthetics of the traditional American novel, the limits of historical fiction as a genre, and Burr’s status as a neo-18th-century novel. Politically, we discuss Vidal’s ambivalence about the United States as a polity, his debunking presentation of historical figures like Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, and his ambiguous relation to questions of democracy, immigration, class, and the state. Finally and philosophically, we link Burr, for all that it is ostensibly a middlebrow historical novel, to the sexual antinomianism or queer nihilism of Vidal’s more vanguardist fictional efforts like The City and the Pillar and Myra Breckinridge. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Within a Budding Grove, the second volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (The Invisible College covered the first volume, Swann’s Way, in an episode last year.) We consider Proust’s complex reflections on art and artistic genius, his ambivalent portrayal of Jewish and queer characters as outsiders akin to the artist, his ironic survey of the meeting between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, his aesthete’s skepticism about both friendship and sexual desire as against art, his discomfiting tribute to the eros of adolescence, his gentle oscillation between demystifying and mythifying aesthetic modes, and much more. Please like, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Émile Zola’s Nana. We first discuss Zola’s life and influence on the French model of the activist writer-intellectual as well as his naturalism and scientific theory of the “experimental” novel. Then we test these ideas against his classic novel of an actress-courtesan’s rise in the corrupt society of Second Empire France, a novel aesthetically and politically divided between its naturalist commitment to showing the determinations of heredity and milieu, on the one hand, and, on the other, its conspicuous myth-making of the modern woman as world-devourer. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about Honoré de Balzac’s most famous novel, Père Goriot, exemplary of his pioneering realist style, and his novella Sarrasine, exemplary of his more decadent tale-telling vein. We first consider the eccentric and prodigious Balzac’s life and times and his ambition to write a Human Comedy. Then we explore Père Goriot’s portrayal of the modern city as labyrinth, its conflicts between the rival quests for love and power, its interest in crime and cynicism and cruelty, and its contest between realistic-scientific and allegorical-religious modes of literary representation. Next we turn to Sarrasine’s sensationalist tale of an sculptor in erotic pursuit of an ideally beautiful singer who isn’t what she seems. Finally, we dwell on the commentary Sarrasine occasioned by Roland Barthes, for whom it exemplified the ruse of Balzacian realism, and Camille Paglia, for whom it demonstrated Balzac’s commitment to androgyny and artistic production rather than the gender binary and sexual reproduction, Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is about George Sand’s novel Indiana. We discuss Sand—the most popular European novelist in her time—as exemplary of the fate of Romantic, idealist, popular, and women’s fiction after the later 19th- and early 20th-century dominance of realism, naturalism, and modernism. We consider Sand’s androgyny, progressivism, and feminism, and her reception by Anglophone writers like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, and Henry James. We explore Indiana as a novel in which realism and romance battle for aesthetic hegemony. We examine its place in the French politics of its time—the end of the Bourbon Restoration—and its own ideologies of gender, empire, nation, race, and class. We finally weigh the continued viability of the aesthetics of romance and idealism today. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. We speculate on Stendhal as both the first modern novelist and as the inaugural figure of the modern artist qua reactionary-revolutionary aristocrat-radical aesthete standing athwart bourgeois society. We stress the novel’s psychological analysis, metafictional technique, gender ambiguity, and political and religious critique, as well as Stendhal’s general prescience as a writer looking forward to (and influencing) later figures from Balzac to Flaubert to Nietzsche to Wilde to Camus. We emphasize Stendhal’s elevation of love, art, and nature over the quest for advancement within the social world. We quote Erich Auerbach and René Girard as important critical authorities on the novel. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Paradiso. We consider the arrangement of Dante’s heaven, his political views, and his treatment of theological controversies over damnation and salvation. We further explore the poet’s conception of the poem as an epic quest and its bearing on issues of gender and spirituality. Finally, we consider major modern critics on Dante: T. S. Eliot, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Luis Borges, and Harold Bloom. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Purgatorio. We dwell, in this most human of the Divine Comedy’s three canticles, on Dante’s portrayal of poetic tradition and lineage, his critique of reason, and the tension between his realistic and allegorical tendencies. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about Dante’s Inferno. We consider the conceptual and philosophical basis of Dante’s afterlife, his sense of sin and punishment, his placement of himself within the western poetic lineage, his attack on avarice as the ruin of secular and spiritual power, and more. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This free bonus episode, the prologue to a three-part series on the Divine Comedy, is about the life, times, and poetics of Dante. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription to access the rest of the Invisible College archive, including our three future Dante episodes. Please also like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here:
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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is on Virgil’s Aeneid. We discuss the distinction between the Greek and Roman character; Virgil’s posthumous canonization as prophet and magician; his belated contrivance on Homer’s model of a founding epic for Rome and its possible source in elite and imperial patronage; the poem’s decadent evasion of the martial destiny it narrates; its ambiguous portrait of love and war; the metaphysics of its underworld; its contest of masculine and feminine and interest in queerness; the mythical archetypes (Venus, Juno, Saturn, Mars, Diana) it mobilizes; and more. We end with Paglia’s stern reading of its sexual personae and Borges’s warm tribute to Virgil as patron of poetry. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is the third in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this episode, we consider Alyosha’s assembly of his young apostles, Ivan’s encounter with the devil, Smerdyakov’s confession, and the trial of Dmitri, all with an eye toward elaborating the novel’s social and spiritual themes. Plus: could Alyosha be the real killer? I begin and end with a comparison among The Magic Mountain, Anna Karenina, and The Brothers Karamazov, and conclude with reflections on Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky from Georg Lukács and Susan Sontag. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. After a proem triangulating Dostoevsky with Žižek and Tarkovsky, I move on to the discuss perhaps the novel’s richest and most famous episodes—Ivan’s return of his ticket to God and parable of the Grand Inquisitor and the life and homilies of the Elder Zosima—and what they tell us about totalitarianism and freedom, atheism and Christianity and more. We further explore the narrative’s tangled romances, the developing murder plot, and metafictional reflections on Dostoevsky’s art of the novel. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky. We discuss the novel’s themes of self-sacrifice, the corruption of innocence, contradictions and dialectics, sensuality vs. intellectualism vs. spirituality, domination and sadism, the roles of religious elders and holy fools, and more, plus some remarks on translation and aesthetics, and a startling poetic appearance of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss Tolstoy’s anti-political natural politics of the scholar, the peasant, and the mother, and his corresponding rejection of liberalism; his critique of modern art and his vindication of the novel from his own anti-aestheticism; his innovation in stream-of-consciousness narrative technique; his abandonment of materialism, philosophy, and reason and his embrace of faith in their stead, as relayed in the novel’s autobiographical passages; his controversial move toward pacifism in the novel’s final pages despite the contemporaneous social atmosphere of pan-Slavic war fever; and more, plus an opening consideration of the Tom Stoppard-scripted 2012 film adaptation. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s themes of Russian political, economic, and social reform; women’s place in society; the relationship between religion and conscience; the limitations of ideology as against a direct experience of reality; the importance of art as a disclosure of truth; the wisdom of childhood; and more. The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a three-part sequence on Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. We discuss the novel’s style, symbols, and motifs; its portraits of nature and labor, sex and death, aristocracy and peasantry, ideology and life, virtue and religion, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the final in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. It primarily concerns the novel’s culminating theme: the Bildungsroman, with its cultivation of the hero’s soul, as a secularized alchemical transformation of matter into spirit, not to mention this Bildung’s prospect in a modernity characterized by the decadence of culture and the frenzy of apocalyptic war. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Here we examine the intense paradoxes of the novel’s political debate between liberal humanism and Catholic communist totalitarianism; its sublime excursion into nature; its vision of civilization as sustained by sacrificial violence; its epiphanic exaltation of love over any one ideological position; its depiction of a major character’s death; its intimation of the persistence of secret societies and ancient mystery cults in modern politics and religion; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We further examine the novel’s philosophy of time; discuss its critique of Enlightenment progress and vision of cutting-edge technology (x-rays, cinema) as a paradoxically archaic, atavistic, and magical phenomenon; explore its Orientalism (especially as applied to Russia) and eroticism; consider its thesis on life as a sexual excitation and disease of matter; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2026 season is here. The 2024 and 2025 archives are here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the first in a four-part sequence on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. We discuss Mann’s life, times, and other works; consider questions of translation; and introduce the novel’s themes of bourgeois reason and moderation vs. illness, sex, death, and the exotic, in terms both private and public, personal and political. We also elaborate on the novel’s modernist form, its enactment or performance of a temporal philosophy, despite its superficially traditional realism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Paradise by Toni Morrison, a neglected and most mysterious masterpiece. We consider the novel’s place in Morrison’s oeuvre as both capstone and reversal, and its mixed reception by its first critics as a too-baldly mythic betrayal of novelistic realism. Then we discuss the thematic place of gender, race, and religion in the complex narrative, encompassing how Morrison’s propensity for victim-blaming rescues the novel from didacticism; how her elusive portrayal of racial identity interrogates the reader’s own ideology of race; how the novel’s plot parodies and critiques the Exodus narrative at the fount of Abrahamic religion, American national myth, and the African-American freedom struggle; and how Paradise finally offers itself as the ambiguous, riddling scripture of the next faith, a syncretic gnostic-infused non-dualistic neo-Christianity presided over by a Black Madonna. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, belongs to a sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Names, usually considered Don DeLillo’s first major novel. We begin by placing DeLillo in the possible contexts of “theory fiction” and “Italian-American literature,” neither of which may exist, and then consider his biography. Then we discuss the several genres The Names makes use of (expatriate novel, political thriller, imperial romance, domestic novel) to embody its themes of American corporate imperialism, the postmodern condition, the relation between art and violence, and language as a spiritual force granting access to the numinous and divine. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the 10th in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. After discussing Nabokov’s eventful life and controversial opinions, we consider the novel’s experimental structure and send-up of scholarship, the implied metaphysics of the text, its treatment of key themes like beauty and pity, the ambiguous levels of reality the novel depicts, the nostalgia for Russia that may be at its basis, its potential ethic of sympathy, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the ninth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Herzog by Saul Bellow. We consider Bellow’s biography and the controversies occasioned by his use of his biography in his fiction, including recent allegations of domestic violence related to Herzog itself; we appreciate Bellow’s technical achievement in this latter-day modernist novel of ideas, its popular success, and pop-culture successors; we grapple with the novel’s portrayal of men and women, querying the source of its misogyny and masculine anxiety; we explore its portrayal of Jewish identity and class and cultural mobility; we articulate its philosophical argument about the nature of modernity, the legacy of Romanticism, and the failure of the radical and reactionary European intelligentsia from Herzog-Bellow’s humanistic American perspective; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, is the eighth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. We discuss the several overlapping literary and philosophical traditions in which the book can be placed, i.e., the Great American Novel, European high modernism, the bildungsroman and picaresque, the novel of ideas, Existential fiction, and midcentury anti-totalitarian polemic, among others; we further consider the novel’s symbolic structure and combination of modernist formalism with popular cultural and mythic material; we elaborate on Ellison’s complex three-way association of Jim Crow, Booker T. Washington-style “uplift,” and Marxist reductionism and totalitarianism, against the background of Ellison’s falling out with the left and the novel’s early Cold War context; we speculate on the novel’s anarchic individualism and affirmation of American democracy as pointing to the concerns of the New Left, on the one hand, and to those of the neoconservatives, on the other; we consider the objections raised to Ellison’s vision by the militants of the 1960s; we attempt to account for Ellison’s failure to produce another novel; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the eighth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. We consider the perennial relevance of the Gothic to American literature and society; Absalom, Absalom! as Great American Novel; the meaning of this novel’s “unreadable” style; its linear plot and this plot’s distortion through multiple storytellers; its revolutionary depictions of race and class, gender and sex, incest and miscegenation; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the seventh in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Nightwood by Djuna Barnes. We consider the novel’s reliance on ideas of decadence and degeneration; its portrayal of bohemia as aristocracy; its insistence on certain identities (Jewish, queer) as essentially modern qua deracinated heirs of a shattered tradition; its destabilization of human-animal, male-female, and other boundaries and binaries; its complex theory of gender and inversion; its borrowings from The Waste Land and Ulysses; the reception of the text by T. S. Eliot forward; and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the sixth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. We consider the work’s hybrid genre, a mix of faux-autobiography, biography, and novel; the relationship between the aesthetic and the domestic as gendered spheres in a portrait of “wives” and “geniuses”; its expression of Stein’s theories of culture, nationality, literary history, and composition; and the disputed eminence of Stein, despite her centrality to modernism, from her own time, when even sympathetic critics called her unreadable, to the present, when she has been revealed to present another case of modernist fascism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fifth in a 15-week sequence on the modern American novel. It concerns Cane by Jean Toomer, an unclassifiable modernist masterpiece comprising prose, poetry, and drama, and the inaugural work of the Harlem Renaissance. First, I place Cane in its early-20th-century context of burgeoning African-American cultural consciousness as theorized by thinkers like W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Then we consider Toomer’s life, with an emphasis on his spiritual questing and racial disaffiliation. Finally, we read the text of Cane itself: its unity-in-diversity, its titular metaphor combing beauty and violence, its tripartite structure joining Southern rural and Northern urban experience, its search in Southern culture for African roots, its interest in female interiority and the failure of love within and between races, its staging of the black intellectual’s alienation, and more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, which is free in its entirety, is the fourth in a sequence on the American novel. It concerns O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. We discuss Cather’s biography, critical reception, literary influences, claim to modernism, and overall genius; then we study the novel’s vision of mutual creation between people and land, its artistic vision of American ethnogenesis, its dueling visions of love, its complexities of gender and desire. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. We discuss the changing fortunes of Wharton’s literary reputation and status in the American canon in her lifetime and afterward and her theory of the novel as a synthesis of British social realism and French psychological realism. We assess The House of Mirth as a tragic study of one woman’s downfall as the aesthetic ornament of a declining aristocracy in an ever-more-more capitalist turn-of-the-century America. Ultimately, we survey the sometimes confusing co-existence in the novel’s vision of naturalism and Romanticism as Wharton negotiates the tumult of a changing society, at once sympathetic to an aristocratic transcendence of market society’s baseness and allured by capitalism’s ethic of risk and enterprise. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. We discuss the novel’s regionalist satire on provincial Christian America, its realist critique of Southern Romanticism, its Romantic idyll of the Mississippi, and its modernist use of vernacular and psychology. We contemplate the Book of Exodus as paradigm of American literature, Twain’s twist on Emersonian self-reliance, and his re-founding of a true Christian ethic outside of Christian civilization. Finally, we read four critics on the novel: T. S. Eliot on its mythic resonance, Ralph Ellison on its Romantic vision of blackness, Jane Smiley on its racist inferiority to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Toni Morrison on its modernist exposure of racism. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a 14-week sequence on the American novel. It concerns Henry James’s masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady. We consider the following: Jane Campion’s film adaptation; James’s revisions of the 1881 text for the 1907 New York edition of his works; James’s Preface, with its theory of modernist interiority and female heroism; and the novel itself, with an emphasis on the fine moral distinction it draws between its aesthete-individualist heroes and aesthete-individualist villains. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns his two final works, the brief epic Paradise Regained and the closet tragedy Samson Agonistes. I describe both as Miltonic rewritings, though Classical forms, of the Biblical Book of Job, the former focused on Job’s temptation and the latter on his suffering. I also argue that the two final poems point in the opposite directions of Milton’s legacy: Paradise Regained toward the “home epic” of the realist novel culminating in Middlemarch, Samson Agonistes toward revolutionary poetry and romance culminating in Moby-Dick (until Joyce resynthesizes the realist novel and the revolutionary poem as Ulysses). The episode begins with a brief consideration of cinematic Christs. In conclusion, I characterize Milton’s critical reception from Samuel Johnson to C. S. Lewis, with a focus on Milton’s God by William Empson and its controversial case against Christianity tout court. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! Note that The Invisible College is on vacation next week before resuming with the modern American novel. The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns Books VII through XII of his epic poem Paradise Lost, with an emphasis sex and gender, the role of nature and the natural sciences, epic as a genre in relation to classical and Christian cultures, and the poem’s conception of Biblical and universal history. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns Books I through VI of his epic poem Paradise Lost and what I read as its radical rewriting of Christian metaphysics, a spiritual revolution extending far beyond the famously sympathetic portrait of Satan, one that places Milton closer to post-Christian figures like Goethe, Blake, and Joyce than has been generally recognized. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in a four-week sequence on the works of John Milton. It concerns his biography, historical context, and early achievement in three different genres: the masque Comus, the pastoral elegy Lycidas, and the prose polemic Areopagitica. The political paradoxes of his Puritanism and concern for liberty, and their implications for the present, and for his status as second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poetry, are considered throughout. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is the final in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns Shakespeare’s valedictory romance, The Tempest, which I treat as epilogue and summation of Shakespeare’s art. I also conclude my reading of Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Along the way, we solve the Eleusinian Mysteries and the vexed relation of art to magic. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the seventh in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns Shakespeare’s final tragedy, the Roman history Coriolanus, often acclaimed and reprehended as the poet’s most political play, banned as fascist in 1930s France, the favorite of ideological dramatists of right and left like T. S. Eliot (who judged it better than Hamlet) and of Bertolt Brecht (who thought it anticipated his own epic theater), and which led the Romantic liberal critic William Hazlitt to argue that poetry itself is inherently right-wing. We consider the play closely, as well as these critical responses. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the sixth in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns Shakespeare’s late Roman historical love…
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fifth in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns Shakespeare’s ultimate tragedy, King Lear, and its place in the evolving spiritual development of the poet-playwright’s art. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the tragedy Hamlet, and its invention of modern subjectivity. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It concerns the “problem play” Measure for Measure, a sexual dystopia on the themes of death and justice. We consider the nature of the problem play as a potential genre, the relationship of Shakespeare to Christianity and the Gospels, the drama’s proto-Freudian depiction of repression and desire, the relationship in the play between the “two bodies”—spiritual and physical—of God, the political sovereign, and the artist, and, finally, begin to discuss Ted Hughes’s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the second in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It deals with love, melancholy, pastoral, and gender-bending in As You Like It, generally considered one of Shakespeare’s finest comedies, and featuring his most celebrated comic heroine, Rosalind. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the first in an eight-week sequence on the plays of Shakespeare. It deals extensively with Shakespeare’s historical, cultural, religious, political, social, literary, media, and theatrical context. Then we consider the early comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an exhibit of Shakespeare’s metatheater, his lyricism, his depth of characterization, his cultural syncretism, and his implicit reflection on the nature and power of poetry. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones. We discuss Borges’s influence on the culture as a Poe of the 20th century, his historical and political context, his philosophical idealism and gnosticism, and his obsessions with and tropes of 1.) the mirror, the labyrinth, the library, and the encyclopedia signifying total systems of closed knowledge, on the one hand, and 2.) his other motifs of the south, the knife-fight, the gaucho, and the chaos of immediate experience, these considered as escapes from the former. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, concerns Franz Kafka’s The Trial. I discuss Kafka’s biography and the many myths surrounding his life and icon; I offer a strange interpretation of The Trial, one resistant to the cliché that it’s a political dystopia or that its hero is an innocent victim; and, in tribute to the novel’s own staging of the interpretive process, I consider major critical voices on Kafka’s significance (Walter Benjamin, George Steiner, Gilles Deleuze, and Harold Bloom). Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, concerns Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies. We consider Rilke’s biography and progress as a poet toward modernism and the poetics of the New Age exemplified by Rilke’s agentic idealism; then we turn to angels, mothers, lovers, puppets, acrobats, blossoms, concepts, animals, poets, and stars in the Duino Elegies. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. We discuss Proust’s biography, translation, and reception; his conceptions of memory, art, culture, and nature; his study of jealousy and the ethics of apprehending personality; his pathology model of love; and his aesthetic Platonism. The first 10 minutes are free. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the eighth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, two revolutionary works of the modern theater, whose realism, I argue, assembles the properties of social drama only to clear them away in preparation for the void of modernism. The first 10 minutes are free. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns three of Tolstoy’s short novels: The Death of Ivan Ilych, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Hadji Murad. I discuss many things but mostly my latter-day aversion to the Count. First 10 minutes are free, the following two-plus hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: we return to drama with Chekhov and Ibsen. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the seventh in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the second half of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We focus on the novel’s more and more “Dostoevskean” tone with scenes of collective hysteria, as well as its developing Christian didacticism. We consider Nabokov’s criticism in more detail: is Raskolnikov’s motive coherent? We explore Dostoevsky’s satire of the materialist left and of the figure of Romantic evil. We dream Raskolnikov’s dream. First 10 minutes are free, the following two hours are for paid subscribers. Next week: Tolstoy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the sixth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns the first half of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We consider the novel’s context in Russian religious, cultural, and literary history alongside the author’s biography; then we investigate its dialogic, interior, and oneiric literary techniques, spanning sentimentalism, realism, and modernism, and its themes, including alcoholism, sexual exploitation, the nature of crime, the instability of the self, and the deficiencies of modern western worldviews like materialism, socialism, and the worship of great men. The first 27 minutes, including an argument against the received idea that Dostoevsky is a writer for adolescents, are free; a paid subscription will grant you access to the rest—and to The Invisible College’s ever-expanding archive of episodes on the classics. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the fourth in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I discuss Flaubert’s position at the intersection of Romanticism, realism, and modernism; his hatred of the bourgeoisie; his nihilism and irony; his war against cliché and search for le mot juste; his skepticism about language and progress; the novel’s obscenity trial and lack of a moral viewpoint; its several famous set pieces; and much more. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the third in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas and ancillary texts including the classic essay “On the Marionette Theater.” I explain the nihilism that befell Kleist after his reading of Kant, his anticipation of modernist irony in figures like Kafka, his Romantic conflict with Goethe’s classicism, and his troubled life. Then I show Michael Kohlhaas to concern the irony of a quest for justice that produces injustice and the consequence of a solipsistic post-Kantian interpretation of the Reformation as licensing absolute individuality. Along the way, I interpret later novels influenced by Michael Kohlhaas, like Doctorow’s Ragtime and Coetzee’s Life & Times of Michael K, I analyze minute but consequential differences in two translations of the text, and more. I conclude with Kleist’s essay on the marionette theater and its suggestion that we will use art to reattain our prelapsarian innocence, having observed the vanity of thought disclosed by modern philosophy. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the second in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part II by Goethe. I unravel crucial themes in this famously difficult experimental dramatic poem: the philosophy of money, the conflict between youth and age, the creation of artificial life, the conflict between Classic and Gothic cultures, the end of Romanticism, the potential and costs of technological progress, the multifarious representation of masculine and feminine, and the question of salvation. Plus, critical commentary from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Mann, Harold Bloom, and Goethe biographer Nicholas Boyle, who designates Faust, Part II not an example of Classical, Enlightenment, or Romantic literature but rather a quintessentially postmodern work. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, the first in a sequence on modern western world literature, concerns Faust, Part I by Goethe. I explain Goethe’s place in world literature among the most major writers, his rich historical context in the moment of German Romanticism and Weimar Classicism, and his extraordinarily various achievements in almost every field of literature as well as in science and thought. Then I recount the history of the Faust legend and explain Goethe’s innovations on the myth. Finally, we consider the many themes and modes of the first part of the dramatic poem: the mission of the poet, the value of negation, the meaning of magic, the truth of nature, everything from neo-Shakespearean tragedy to bourgeois romance to proto-surrealist phantasmagoria, not to mention the mystery of salvation. Next week: Faust, Part II. Please like, share, comment, and subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, free in its entirety, concerns two ancient treatises on literature: Aristotle’s Poetics and Longinus’s On the Sublime. First, I rehearse the life and overall philosophical contribution of Aristotle; then I explore his theory of tragedy—including immensely influential concepts like mimesis, the tragic flaw, and the catharsis of pity and terror—and discuss their relation to his philosophy in general and as a riposte to Plato’s censoriousness; finally, I explain why he judged tragedy a better genre than epic and poetry a more philosophical form of writing than history. Second, I turn to Longinus and his theory of the sublime in literature, his focus on emotion and ecstasy over structure, his rhapsodic close reading of Sappho, his mischievous praise for Plato’s madness, his defense of metaphor, his love for the flawed work of genius over the merely correct work of diligent mediocrity, his view that genius represents the inherent infinitude of humanity, and his discussion of literary decline in relation to war, democracy, and the love of money. Finally, I consider these two treatises as the origin points for divergent forms of modern literary aesthetics: neoclassicist and formalist for Aristotle, Romantic and subjectivist for Longinus. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, concerns Plato’s philosophical dialogues Ion, Symposium, and Phaedrus. We consider the roots of Greek philosophy and the character of Socrates; Plato’s war on poetry and sophistry, his philosophy of sex and love, his theory of forms, his totalitarian politics, and his case against media; plus, the real reason Socrates was executed and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Plato as writer. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 12 minutes is free, concerns Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata and Euripides’s tragedies Medea and Bacchae. We consider the Old Comedy and the New and their divergent legacies, as well as the conservative subversions of Aristophanic satire. Then we turn to Euripides’s controversial innovations in the art of tragedy (deprecated by Aristophanes, among others) and his association with radical currents in Athenian life. Added commentary by Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anne Carson, and Camille Paglia. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes is free, concerns Sophocles’s Theban plays. I discuss Sophocles’s biography and his place among the tragedians in 5th-century Athens; I consider Antigone as clash of values and ambivalent portrayal of perversity and extremism, with reference to Hegel; I read Oedipus the King as a counter-enlightenment statement vindicating the primacy of fate over knowledge, with reference to Freud; and I interpret Oedipus at Colonus as a mystery rite in defense of mystery, and a pre- and proto-Christian portrayal of the scapegoat-become-god, with reference to Girard. Above all, I consider Sophocles’s potential nihilism, redeemed only by the promise of joining divinity in death. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes is free, concerns Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy, The Oresteia. I discuss the limited state of our knowledge about Athenian drama and the philosophical impediments to that knowledge; questions of translation; the mythical life of Aeschylus; and the trilogy itself, a progressive dialectical narrative, half horror movie, half courtroom drama, about the regime change from impersonal youth-oriented masculine sky-god civilization from familial gerontocratic feminine earth-goddess tradition, a development I characterize as at one and the same time the nadir of misogyny and the apotheosis of feminism. Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The introduction to and schedule for the 2025 season is here. The 2024 archive is here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes is free, concerns Homer’s Odyssey. Topics include translation controversies, historical esoterica, and what it means—for everything from art to gender to social organization—for The Odyssey to be “the first bourgeois novel.” Please like, share, and comment! The slideshow corresponding to the episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome to 2024’s final episode of The Invisible College. It is about William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. My exposition is almost as aleatory as the novel itself, but I discuss Harold Bloom and Hugh Kenner’s dissent on the novel’s reputation, the general shape of Faulkner’s career, the novel’s high modernist narrative technique, the conflict between tragic and Christian visions in the text, and more. With the help of Jean-Paul Sartre, I consider the novel’s “metaphysic of time.” With the help of Ralph Ellison, I elaborate on its deconstruction of the racial ideology that masks humanity. With the help of André Bleikasten, I explore the novel as the frenzied stasis of a Grecian Urn frieze spinning around the vortex that is Faulkner’s view of the feminine. All this and more. Please enjoy! Thanks to my paid subscribers! If you are not a paid subscriber, please enjoy the free 24-minute preview, and please offer a paid subscription to hear the rest, to listen to the 2024 archive, and to join us for the next year of our “curriculum.” I will release the 2025 syllabus on January 1; the first episode of 2025 will drop on January 17. The slideshow corresponding to this episode can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 20 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Wallace Stevens. We begin with a contrast between Pound Stevens and its sequel in 20th-century literary criticism, as well as a consideration of the role played by social prejudice in Pound and Eliot on one hand and Stevens on the other. Then we discuss Stevens’s biography, a passionate inner life lived solely in poetry. We read three short early poems for what they tell us about the proper and improper uses of imagination in Stevens, and then consider his classic “Sunday Morning” for its attempt to replace religion with artistic imagination. We go on to his greater statements on the power of the poetic imagination to re-shape reality as against both totalizing religion and totalizing politics in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 16 minutes are free, is about the poetry of Ezra Pound. We begin at the ending, with the tragedy of Pound’s later-life political dereliction and incarceration. We ask not only how these events happened, but also why this most extraordinarily gifted of poets did not become his century’s greatest, his politics notwithstanding. Then I discuss Pound’s biography and trace his poetic and intellectual development from his early poetry through The Cantos, with a triple focus on 1. his love of Troubadour poetry and the esoteric Cathar gnostic mystical goddess cult he detected beneath it it; 2. his interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry as a resource for restoring English verse back to its accentual and alliterative strength after more than half a millennium of imposed iambic pentameter and rhyme; 3. and his engagement with Chinese poetry and what he thought its ideograms portended for a poetry of the image. We also discuss, with help from Hugh Kenner, his inner conflict between Romanticism-Taoism-anarchism, on the one hand, and Classicism-Confucianism-fascism, on the other. His obsession with an obscure economic theory and its influence on his politics after the calamitous Great War is also considered, as is the failure of The Cantos to find a readership even other difficult high modernist great books have. What, finally, can we all learn from Pound’s failure? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the episode, the remainder of the American literature sequence, with forthcoming episodes on Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever awaits us in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. I discuss the novel’s ubiquity and whether or not it is overrated, as well as why this is such a common contrarian opinion. I put the novel in the context of Fitzgerald’s influences from Keats to Conrad and Eliot and consider the cosmopolitanism of Fitzgerald and other American writers before the Cold War institutionalization of the 19th-century American canon. I rehearse Fitzgerald’s glamorous and tragic biography. Turning to The Great Gatsby, I elaborate on its sophisticated narrative technique and its inner quarrel between Romantic idealism and modernist irony. I trace themes of the modernist waste land; modernity, urbanity, and self-fashioning; ideologies of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality; the automobile as symbol of care and carelessness; the moral reliability of the novel’s narrator; conflicts between the Old World and the New and between the west and the east in New World; and the relation of aesthetic form and the beauty of wealth to money itself as an abstract medium for exchanging values. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever is forthcoming in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. I discuss the vicissitudes of Hemingway’s reputation, both sociopolitically (from midcentury man’s man to late-20th-century misogynist man to 21st-century trans woman) and aesthetically (from Nobel-winning great novelist to a writer now understood as a great writer of short stories and prose poetry rather than major novels). I explain his stylistic revolution in English prose, its relation to other currents in modernism, and its global influence. I briefly rehearse his biography. I discuss how he understood his own relation to Russian, European, British, and American literary traditions. Then I turn to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, first considering its early reception by critics like Edmund Wilson and Leslie Fiedler to frame my own interpretation. Then, via its epigraphs from Gertrude Stein and Ecclesiastes. I discuss the novel as paradigm of the generationally self-mythologizing documentary “scene” report, to be repeated later in movements like the Beats or Alt Lit. I read the novel as a despairing post-Great-War testament akin to The Waste Land and an ironic treatment of modernity’s instability of gender. I consider the sentimentalism paradoxically generated by its hard-boiled treatment of its wounded hero, its lament over the death of religion, and its investment in the cycles of nature and the traditional art of the bullfight. Finally, I invert the novel’s anti-Semitic scapegoating of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn, who represents a form of heroism abandoned by or unavailable to the narrator and other male characters who stigmatize him. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and whatever is forthcoming in 2025. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, free in its entirety, concerns the poetry of Robert Frost. I discuss the paradox of Frost’s career as an immensely popular poet whose poetry is also puzzling, difficult, and dark beneath its surface, an oxymoronic populist modernism. Via a selection of some of Frost’s most famous poems—lyric, narrative, and dramatic—I consider the many poetic personalities of Frost: popular, epigrammatic, romantic, realist, modernist, and political. I judge him an inheritor and critic of Romanticism, and a wry, chastened anti-gnostic. I make some timely remarks about his political evolution from “Grover Cleveland Democrat” to critic of what he saw as his party’s turn away from populism to overweening bureaucracy and administration in the New Deal. Finally, I explain and even defend his conviction that good poetry (or good literature in general) combines sound and sense, structure and feeling, as this episode’s titular “momentary stay against confusion.” Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 15 minutes are free, concerns Henry James’s novel The Bostonians. First I make some impromptu comments on the Merchant Ivory film of the novel, film adaptations of fiction in general, and why James lends himself less well to cinema than E. M. Forster. Then I discuss James’s biography, along with his illustrious family, and the three major phases of his work from social realism to psychological realism to modernism. I also consider his famous focus on the “International Theme,” the confrontation of America with Europe. Then I turn to his middle-period masterpiece, one of his few exclusively set in America, The Bostonians. I explore this post-Civil-War drama of a straight conservative Southern man’s conflict with a Northern lesbian feminist radical over the affections and alleigances of a mysterious mesmerist’s preternaturally gifted and beautiful daughter. I trace the central conflict to Coleridge’s “Christabel” and Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. I interpret the novel as a tragicomic elegy for all lost causes, Northern and Southern, right and left: a radical and reactionary critique of a modernizing America more and more given to the sensational, the instrumental, and the profitable. Transcending ideology to encompass both and all sides within his expansive consciousness, and offering aesthetic self-sacrifice instead of radical activism or reactionary nostalgia, James consecrates the novel form as the true national and international union. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I discuss Dickinson’s biography, with an emphasis on the shadow cast by Calvinism over her milieu, as well as her literary influences, her poetic practices, and the textual and reception history of her work compared to other American writers and other Anglophone female poets of the 19th century. Then I discuss a selection of 20 of her poems under the headings of “God,” “Nature,” “Love,” “Pain,” and “Poetics,” emphasizing her anguished and ludic religious doubt, her play with personae and identities, her sense of nature’s otherness, her attitude toward her poetic vocation, her sexual and social vision for women, and her obsession with pain and death. Finally, I consider criticism on Dickinson by Adrienne Rich, Susan Howe, and Camille Paglia, and these critics’ own comparison of the poet to a wide range of other authors—Sade, Whitman, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Stein, Emily Brontë, Jonathan Edwards, William James, and more—in quest of her unique vision. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Henry James, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, and William Faulkner, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, of which the first 10 minutes are free, concerns the poetry of Walt Whitman, particularly his epic-lyric Song of Myself. First I set the scene of 19th-century American poetry, and then I discuss Whitman’s biography and his life-long 40 years’ work on Leaves of Grass. I also establish that Whitman’s celebrated “free verse” is not as free as it seems but is carefully controlled by a series of potent poetic techniques rooted in tradition. Then we read excerpts of his manifesto-like Preface to Leaves of Grass with its call for a poetry commensurate with an America that is itself the greatest poem. Next we sample resonant passages from Song of Myself. I explore Whitman’s complex concept of the self; his embrace of all forms of otherness from the sexual to the racial to the social to the natural; his use of symbolism (especially the symbol of grass itself) and its relation to that of contemporaneous writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville; his intense auto-eroticism and bodily address to the reader; and his sense of the poet’s mission and destiny. Finally, I examine two other poems: “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” with its revision of Poe’s “Raven” and expansion of Whitman’s poetic to include the Gothic and decadent, and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” a richly symbolic pastoral elegy for Lincoln and all those lost in the Civil War. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes Emily Dickinson and Henry James, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode is the third in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; the first 25 minutes are available to all, the total two hours and 15 minutes reserved for paid subscribers. Here we discuss Shakespeare’s overwhelming influence on Melville, especially the final third of this novel. We also read Melville’s manifesto, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” which argues that an American Shakespeare will succeed the bard because liberated by the Declaration of Independence and “republican progressivism” to tell the truth. We also consider Melville’s homoerotic paean to Hawthorne and his praise of the writer’s “power of blackness.” This leads back to Moby-Dick: to its homoerotic phallicism and its transvaluation of racial values. With help from D. H. Lawrence and Toni Morrison, we discover in Melville a partisan of black revolution. We also consider Ishmael’s pluralism, pragmatism, and perspectivism as a narrator; another critical passage, this time from James Wood, finds atheism and polytheism in Melville’s flood of metaphor. We dwell on the novel’s epic and tragic sublimity, its quarrel with Emerson over self-reliance, and its conflict between individual and community. With Charles Olson, we examine its occult subtext, as Ahab takes the left-hand and Ishmael the right-hand path. Finally, we read the ending—and, following a suggestion from a commenter, test the idea that Ishmael and Ahab are doubles, the myriad-minded narrator what the monomaniacal captain would be if he’d survived his tragic apotheosis. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including forthcoming episodes on Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode—over two hours for paid subscribers, with a 15-minute preview for free subscribers—is the second in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First we discuss the unity and disunity of Moby-Dick—whether or not the novel is, as Melville said, a “botch”—with remarks on its relation to 20th-century critical trends like New Criticism and deconstruction. I offer my own view as a novelist about the question of whether or not works of literature should seek coherence or contradiction, unity or aporia. Then we consider the strange identity of the novel’s three main personae—Ishmael, Ahab, and the titular whale itself—and the novel’s vein of Orientalism centered on the figure of Fedallah. Next we explore the mood of pessimism and misanthropy that marks the novel’s middle third, abrading the revolutionary cosmopolitan optimism of the first third, and investigate the themes of fate, free will, and chance. For the rest of the episode, I examine Ishmael’s cetology chapters and their metafictional relation to realism and allegory, their theological implications, and their anti-philosophical bias. I further detect unexpected elements of the sentimental and the feminine—not to mention the ecological—in this otherwise radical, masculinist, and gnostic epic. Finally, I note the novel’s ambitious civilizational syncretism, uniting Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, and Christian myth. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including the finale of Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, free in its entirety, is the first in a three-week sequence on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. First I make some general remarks about Moby-Dick, its multiple genres and influences (the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton), and how difficult it is to read relative to other “difficult” classics. Then I discuss Melville’s biography, with an emphasis on “the tormented psychology of the decaying patrician,” to quote a critic, as well as his experiences with non-western cultures and his struggles with family and authority, and I make some remarks on his other works. I give a primer on the Biblical precedents for Moby-Dick’s three central characters—Ishmael, Ahab, and Leviathan—and summarize Melville’s radical redaction of Judeo-Christian tradition: his siding against the chosen and with the outcast and his speculations on a covenant with nature. I note the book’s multiple modes and traditions: epic, romance, satire, anatomy, tragedy, and realism. I then summarize the first third of Moby-Dick and consider its “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and opening paragraph. I survey themes of wonder and sublimity, the escape from domesticity and femininity, cosmopolitanism and queer desire, democracy and kingship, the modernization of tragedy, relativism vs. absolutism, and Melville’s proto-modernist critique both of Romanticism and Enlightenment. Finally, I try to solve the puzzle of the novel’s most esoteric passage: what is “the old State-secret”? Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including parts two and three on Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, the fourth in a 16-week sequence on American literature, focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of American radicalism, American occultism, and American aestheticism, The Blithedale Romance. First, I make general remarks about Hawthorne, especially The Scarlet Letter, and his role in high-school and college curricula, with a recommendation that The Blithedale Romance might be the young reader’s best introduction to the author considering its more immediate first-person narration and its perennially controversial themes. I also explore Hawthorne’s influences and affinities, ranging from Henry James and William Faulkner to Franz Kafka and David Lynch. Then I recount Hawthorne’s biography, review Henry James’s famous comments on the rudimentary American civilization he confronted, and evaluate his consequent insistence that he wrote “romances” rather than “novels.” Then I read D. H. Lawrence’s maliciously satirical plot summary of The Blithedale Romance before surveying themes of Puritanism, radicalism, feminism, conservatism, occultism, and aestheticism in the novel. Finally, with Irving Howe, I consider the question of whether or not this novel is an artistic failure. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, the third in a 16-week sequence on American literature, focuses on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. With help from writers as diverse as Borges, Mallarmé, and Lovecraft, I emphasize Poe’s extraordinary influence on world literature across several different domains from pulp fiction to avant-garde poetry. From his poem “The Raven” and his literary theoretical manifesto “The Philosophy of Composition,” I derive Poe’s formalist and polysemous aesthetics that would go on to influence modernist poetry and postmodernist literary theory, a conflict with the Transcendentalists cleaving the root of modernism and leading to further divisions like those between poets Pound and Stevens or critics Guy Davenport and Harold Bloom. In the Gothic stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” I identify his parodic recasting of older narrative forms, his aestheticism and exoticism, his cultural syncretism, his dark animism and vitalism, and his pervasive irony. In his mystery “The Purloined Letter,” I trace his invention of the detective genre and his theory of a poetry of the surface as reason’s highest form, surpassing mathematics and science. Finally, in his experimental tale “The Man of the Crowd,” I find the origins of urban and psychological fiction that looks forward to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Joyce. In passing, I remark upon the ironized and commercialized simulacrum of traditionalism that places Poe at the origin of a uniquely American right-wing politics. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, the second in a 16-week sequence on American literature and the second of two on the Transcendentalist movement, focuses on essays by Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. The first 10 minutes are available as a free preview. We consider Thoreau’s libertarianism, his anti-sentimental radicalism, his influence on passive resistance, his heroic vitalism, his classicism, his startling hatred of nature, and his final vision of nature as an excremental mother. Then we turn to Fuller’s feminism, her survey of ideal cultural images of women from antiquity to her own time, her insistence that women’s development of Emersonian self-culture and self-reliance will necessarily lead them away from motherhood, her view of the masculine and feminine as principles and forces, and her concept of the two leading feminine archetypes, Muse and Minerva. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This free episode, the first in a 16-week sequence on American literature and the first of two on the Transcendentalist movement, focuses on the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. First I review the origins of American intellectual culture in Puritanism and its historical connections to the Unitarianism of young Emerson’s milieu. Then I examine the nature and influences of the broader Transcendentalist movement, with an emphasis on the paradox of an attempt to create a uniquely American culture by assimilating global influences from British Romanticism to German Idealism to the broader western and eastern metaphysical traditions. I look at three essays of Emerson’s, stressing the underlying spiritual convictions neglect of which has led his concept of “self-reliance” to be misunderstood. I consider their historical context in the Jacksonian populist moment, their prose-poetic style of expansion and contract, and some of their potential self-contradictions, particularly around the self-relying American’s public obligations. I conclude with a discussion of his call for a new poet-as-prophet to capture modern American realities. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and, if you enjoyed this free episode, please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the fourth of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). We consider the status of Middlemarch in the 21st century amid controversies about religion and public life and an emphasis on literature as offering an ethic of “empathy,” an ethic Middlemarch, with its emphasis on what constrains and therefore enframes the feeling self, may complicate; we consider Joyce Carol Oates’s relative demotion of the novel among its rivals; we discuss Eliot’s portrayal of women in marriage and her portrayal of marriage itself as a practice of necessary self-sacrifice; we revisit the question of the novel’s politics and its “conservative reformism”; we revisit the question of its Christian ethics without Christianity; and, in conclusion, we link these post-Christian Christian ethics to a potential politics of culture, literature, and education akin to that of other Victorian intellectuals, all in service to “the growing good of the world.” Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick, beginning next week with Emerson, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and the first three episodes on Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, of which the first 10 minutes are free, is the third of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). We consider the representation of early democratic politics in the novel and perhaps the birth of political moderation (“Burke with a leaven of Shelley”); Eliot’s depiction of technological and social progress as typified by the coming of the railroad, with a comparison to the contemporary political archetype of the “hicklib,” and a discussion of the universal Christianity Eliot seems to promote; the novel’s view of art itself as frivolous and damaging when not connected to reality and to a higher purpose; and Eliot’s ambiguous portrayal of love and marriage, rooted and rootless, realist and Romantic, conservative and rebellious. Finally, we consider some early criticism of Middlemarch: an anonymous Victorian reviewers and Leslie Stephen (AKA Virginia Woolf’s father) pronouncing it too didactic and theoretical, and a young Henry James deeming it excessively attentive to the trivial. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of our reading of Middlemarch, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, of which the first 14 minutes are free, is the second of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2). I discuss Middlemarch’s indirect portrayal of history in the context of Georg Lukács’s theory of historical f…
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the first of four on George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), sometimes called the greatest English novel. I discuss Eliot’s biography and her context in a secularizing intellectual milieu; compare her to Dickens among great Victorian novelists; and consider Middlemarch’s place in the history of fiction. Then I summarize Books I and II of Middlemarch, address its themes of gender and of vocation, explore its approach to the mutually constitutive interplay of individual and society, and investigate the narrator’s implicit theory of the novelist as social and natural scientist and renovated Romantic poet. This episode is the only free one in the Eliot sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of our reading of Middlemarch, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, our previous sequence on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and our upcoming focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the seventh in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes 13 through 15 of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, I consider Ulysses as less a book than a sequence of experimental short stories and novellas; then I recapitulate the argument that the style of the novel becomes more autonomous as it goes on, its form swallowing its content. Next we turn to the “Nausicaa” chapter, which first attracted the book’s proscription by American authorities; I explain Joyce’s proto-feminist mockery of women’s domestic sentimental fiction and his portrayal of Bloom’s masturbatory sexuality. Then we investigate the comparison made between the gestation of a fetus and the development of the English language in “Oxen of the Sun” with its panoply of parodies and pastiches. I criticize this conceit and suggest it hints at a Joycean desire to make artistic creation superior to sexual reproduction. Finally, in the phantasmagoria of “Circe,” we consider Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus’s hallucinations—sexual, political, artistic, and otherwise—including Bloom’s transgender masochism and utopian fantasy of the New Bloomusalem and Stephen’s triumph over his mother’s shade and epiphany about where and how to “kill the priest and the king.” The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the sixth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes 10 through 12 of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, we recapitulate Joyce’s writing so far and examine the ways his works exemplify all the many meanings and practices of modernism, from the use of myth to the stream of consciousness to the mapping of the metropolis. We explore the 19 vignettes of the Ulysses-in-miniature that is “Wandering Rocks,” with a focus on the depiction of authority (the Catholic Church, the British Empire) and the characters of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in the labyrinthine city. Then we consider the fugue structure of “Sirens” and its omni-musical use of language to create the joyful Joycean nation, as well as its focus on fathers and children. Finally, we examine Joyce’s fierce satire of a bigoted and essentialist cultural nationalism in “Cyclops,” and Bloom’s humanistic passive resistance—all of it adding up to Joyce’s utopian horizon of the cosmopolitical enlightened nation. The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the fifth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes seven through nine of Joyce’s Ulysses. First, we hear James Joyce’s voice, reading from the “Aeolus” episode. Then I consider the following: the formal anti-realist turn represented by the use of interpolated headlines in “Aeolus,” plus the chapter’s motif of comparing and contrasting various empires and peoples and the way they are represented in the novel (Greek, Jewish, Roman, English, Irish); the narratively dense “Lestrygonians” and the information it relays about Bloom’s life and times, especially in one of the novel’s most moving, passionate, and beautiful passages; and “Scylla and Charabdys,” with its return to philosophical themes (Plato vs. Aristotle; idealism vs. empiricism; Romanticism vs. realism) and Stephen’s strikingly proto-postmodern theory of Shakespearean authorship, what I call “Dark Stratfordianism.” (You won’t want to miss my digressive tirade on Shakespeare authorship theories, nor my answer to the question: who is Shakespeare in Ulysses?) The first 15 minutes are free to all; the rest requires a paid subscription. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded behind the paywall:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the fourth in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. This one covers episodes four through six of Joyce’s Ulysses. I begin by characterizing the lower-middle-class cultural milieu of the Bloom sections of the novel with its focus on popular and middlebrow as well as high culture, as opposed to the highbrow sections devoted to Stephen Dedalus. I more closely consider the novel’s possibly almost occult use of Homeric correspondences with help from Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses: A Study. Then I investigate “Calypso,” particularly the introduction of Leopold Bloom as curious, kind, artistic, science-minded, socially outcast, and lower-middle-class Odysseus; the ambivalent-to-hostile evocation of Zionism; the subversive if potentially disturbing act of sexualizing domestic women, domestic children, and domestic spaces; and the theme of metempsychosis. In “The Lotus Eaters,” I focus on Bloom’s skeptical view of religion as opiate of the masses, as well as his pornographic correspondence as Henry Flower and his fancied erotic bath. Finally, I consider “Hades,” with its theme of fathers and sons, its pioneering use of the trauma plot, its secular conception of death, and the possibility that Ulysses overall is not just a revision of The Odyssey but also of Dante’s Inferno and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture, free in its entirety, is the third in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is the first three chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses: “Telemachus,” “Nestor,” and “Proteus.” I first make some general remarks about the novel’s context, its structure and form, and its textual history. I also discuss the nature of the book’s notorious difficulty. I summarize the first three chapters for first-time readers and then closely examine select passages. Themes raised in “Telemachus” include Stephen’s mourning for his mother and search for paternity, his sense of himself as a servant to three masters (the British Empire, the Catholic Church, and Irish nationalism), and his complex revision of Irish nationalist myth in the figure of the Shan Van Vocht; I also consider the formal interplay between stream-of-consciousness and more conventional narrative prose. In “Nestor” I dwell on history as nightmare and the affinity Stephen perceives between the Irish and the Jews as a usurped and oppressed people. In “Proteus,” with its much more thoroughgoing stream-of-consciousness narration, I consider the war in Stephen’s mind between Plato and Aristotle, idealism and empiricism, Romanticism and realism, and their synthesis in the very form of this novel; I further investigate Stephen’s relations—filial, sexual, and amicable—with men and women; and I pause to remark on the unparalleled beauty and significance of Joyce’s language. This episode is the only free one in the Joyce sequence. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of this summer’s tour through the most consequential novel of the 20th century, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett, a forthcoming sequence on Middlemarch, and the fall focus on American literature, including Moby-Dick. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the second in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. Its topic is Joyce’s first novel, the autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I discuss the novel’s history, from its first version, Stephen Hero, a 1000-page omnisciently narrated realist saga, to its revision as a dense, brief novel narrated entirely from within the language of consciousness of Joyce’s stand-in Stephen Dedalus, from the babytalk of his childhood to the philosophizing of his early adulthood. I explain Joyce’s modernist revision of the bildungsroman as genre: his schematic exposure of its structure and devices. I detail the paradoxes of a static portrait that is also a developmental bildungsroman, an interpenetration of time and eternity. I explore the relations between literature and painting. To demonstrate the type of close reading Joyce demands, I give a dramatic reading from a passage in my doctoral dissertation about the function of articles (a, the, a) in the novel’s title. Then I journey through the novel’s plot and structure, elaborating on themes, styles, and motifs, with attention to the narrative’s mythic dimension in the story of Daedalus and to the themes of gender and sexuality the novel raises. I also link the novel to Romanticism as both a fulfillment and critique of that earlier movement, with reference to Joyce’s Blakean, Byronic, and Shelleyean allusions. Finally, I discuss Stephen as Luciferian rebel, anti-nationalist apolitical radical, and aestheticizing philosopher. Next week, we will rejoin Stephen in the first three chapters of Ulysses. The first 14 minutes are free to all; please offer a paid subscription for the full episode. Please like, share, and comment—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is the first in an eight-week sequence on James Joyce. I begin with some advice for reading Ulysses, which we will begin in two weeks. Mainly, however, this episode covers Joyce’s first major work, the short story collection Dubliners. I briefly discuss Joyce’s life. Then I explain the censorship troubles Dubliners faced, the influential theory of the “epiphany” informing its composition, and its structure as the bildungsroman of a city. I also consider the history and theory of the short story as a form. Finally, I examine select stories from the collection for their stylistic and thematic significance, from the decadent minimalism of “The Sisters” to the universal vision of “The Dead,” with comments on Joyce’s religion, politics, and sexuality. Next week, we will turn to Joyce’s autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first 20 minutes are free to all; please offer a paid subscription for the full episode. Please like, share, and comment—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Samuel Beckett, with a focus on his play Waiting for Godot. We begin by considering Beckett’s place in literary history as an experimentalist trying to find a way to write after Joyce. Then I consider his biography in more detail, including his relationship with Joyce, his work with the French Resistance, and his turn to both minimalism and the French language. Finally, I read Waiting for Godot itself, his most famous play, as a drama of “posts”: post-Christian, post-Romantic, post-political, post-theatrical, post-modernist, and post-life, with nonetheless a minimal ethic counseling us against total despair. Don’t miss my shocking theory about the true identities of Pozzo and Lucky. This episode is free to all. If you enjoy it, please offer a paid subscription, especially if you want access to our summer reading of Ulysses and Middlemarch. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of W. H. Auden. I consider the poet’s reputation as the third of the three great modern poets in British literature after Yeats and Eliot. I read from a Virginia Woolf essay introducing Auden’s ’30s generation of young, privileged, radical writers, including Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and others. I discuss Auden’s biography, with a focus on his travels, both geographical and ideological, especially his journey with Isherwood to the U.S. and his journey from Marxism to Christianity. Then I turn to three themes of his anti- and incipiently post-modernist poetry, a poetry oriented toward “the mortal world” as against the occultism and obscurantism of high modernists like Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Lawrence, and Woolf: the reality of love in “Lullaby” and “As I Walked Out One Evening,” the reality of politics in “Spain 1937,” “September 1, 1939,” and “The Unknown Citizen,” and the reality of poetry itself in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “The Shield of Achilles.” I quote Orwell on Auden’s political dereliction in the Marxist ’30s and elaborate on Auden’s revisions of his own past work. I discuss his changing analysis of the causes of war (is “what all schoolchildren learn” adequate knowledge? must we love one another or die?) and how his view in the Yeats elegy that “poetry makes nothing happen” separates poetry from politics. Above all I consider his attitude toward love. I conclude with his rebuke to the modern and ancient worlds for their totalizing brutality, a brutality his poetry’s orientation toward the real may ameliorate, in the anti-Homeric, anti-Romantic ekphrastic poem, “The Shield of Achilles.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Virginia Woolf, with a focus on her novel To the Lighthouse. I open by considering Woolf as more poet than novelist. Then I discuss Woolf’s biography, especially her distinguished lineage, her participation in the Bloomsbury Group, and what she called her “madness.” I further explore her literary life as critic and novelist, her shift from mainstream publishing to independent publishing, and her move from realist fiction to various kinds of experimental fiction. I also examine her feminist politics and deepening radicalism, and her modernist and feminist manifestoes. I explain the stream-of-consciousness technique governing To the Lighthouse. Borrowing from my own academic advisor, I then read the novel as a portrayal of the 20th-century artistic woman usurping and extending the function of the 19th-century domestic woman in her affective literacy, her social sympathy, and her ability to bring people together. Borrowing from Erich Auerbach, I inquire whether this apotheosis of the modern artist portends a humanist utopia or an elitist dystopia. Finally, countering those socio-political readings, and borrowing from James Wood, I interpret art in To the Lighthouse as a confrontation with and a vision of the raw void or vortex at the heart of life—a confrontation and a vision even unto death, whether the death of the individual artist or of the social order at large. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is free to all in its entirety as a preview of what paid subscribers enjoy every week: it’s about the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. I discuss Lawrence’s life as the first English working-class novelist, his travails as his sexually explicit and politically rebellious work met with controversy and censorship, and his flight from England across the world from Italy to Australia to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s famous artist colony in New Mexico. I consider his difficult social, political, and metaphysical thought, which some have called “fascist,” and his once celebrated and then despised theories of love and sexuality, with comments on Frances Wilson’s recent Lawrence biography, Burning Man, and on Lawrence’s own most controversial novel, The Plumed Serpent. I then turn to an appreciation of Lawrence’s stylistic move from realism to modernism and his innovative approach to fictional characterization in early stories like “Odour of Chrysanthemums” and “The Prussian Officer.” I consider his ambitious middle-period manifestoes for modernist fiction and for free verse in the essays “Why the Novel Matters” and “The Poetry of the Present.” Finally, I read Lawrence’s later poems “Snake” and “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” as they transvalue the traditional values of the Christian and Enlightened west and become occult and Orphic free-verse hymns to a new interrelation of soul and body, humanity and nature, heaven and hell. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of W. B. Yeats. I discuss Yeats’s biography as his art goes from late Romanticism to a high modernism amid the turbulence of Ireland’s liberation and under the influence of spiritual forces. Yeats’s controversial political views and his occult philosophies are considered. Then we turn to some of the finest English-language poems of the 20th century. We investigate the pastoral Romantic nationalism of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” the epic-tragic anti-colonialism of the ambivalently elegiac “Easter, 1916,” the mythic and occult significance of the apocalyptic “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan,” the ambiguous spiritual escapism of “Sailing to Byzantium,” the Nietzschean aristocratic tragic heroism of “Lapis Lazuli,” and the earthy farewell to poetry and spiritual transcendence of “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Joseph Conrad, with a focus on his novel of anarchism and terrorism, The Secret Agent. I first discuss Conrad’s biography: his harrowing childhood as the son of a Polish nationalist under Russian occupation; his seafaring years in the merchant marine amid the industrial revolution in sailing from wind to steam power; and his gradual rise to prominence as a major novelist in British and world letters. I make several remarks about Heart of Darkness, his most famous work, and about his sometimes controversial reception by writers, critics, and biographers like Chinua Achebe, Edward Said, and Maya Jasanoff, while also emphasizing his enormous influence on British, American, and postcolonial literature. I then turn to Conrad’s own modernist manifesto of l’art pour l’art as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conrad’s thriller The Secret Agent in the history of anarchism and terrorism in the late 19th century. Finally, I offer a reading of this novel stressing its satire on radicalism and radical chic, its formal assault on the standardization of time and the fetishism of science, its depiction of murderous freedom and redemptive empire, its atopic portrait of the placeless and denationalized modern city, and its dueling visions of the nihilist terrorist and the compassionate idiot as exemplary modern artists. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Oscar Wilde. I begin with a recitation of Wilde’s dramatic life story with its consciously shaped tragic arc—the tragedy he lived but could not write—with passing remarks on most of his major work and on his Aestheticist philosophy. I elaborate on his revolutionary literary theory, which sunders art from mimesis and criticism itself from truth: a postmodernism of the fin de siècle. Then, in the light of this theory, I offer a formalist interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest. I reads the comedy as a device for producing Wildean epigrams, among them epigrams that mock Victorian sententiousness, epigrams that express Wilde’s own Aestheticism, and, finally, epigrams of pure contentless wit anticipating the linguistic experiments of high modernism and postmodernism in writers like Stein, Joyce, Stevens, and Ashbery. I consider critics on The Importance of Being Earnest: Terence Brown on the play as the utopia of the dandy; Camille Paglia on the play as “reactionary prose poem,” the first piece of modernist fascist art; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the play as celebration of the “avunculate,” those aunts and uncles who model for the budding queer child the pleasure and promise of non-normative sexualities. Finally, in anticipation of the next episode on Conrad and early modernist fiction, I emphasize the play’s withering attitude toward the Victorian novel as the antitype to its Aestheticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of George Bernard Shaw. We begin by discussing Shaw’s 1930s position that unproductive members of complex societies should be culled and then trace this concept through its hints and intimations in the Ibsenite New Woman fin-de-siècle realist drama of Mrs. Warren’s Profession before pursuing it into the cosmic vistas of his later work. We also note Shaw’s position that Wagnerian opera has made “the drama of feeling” obsolete, leaving only “the drama of thought” as the legitimate form of non-musical theater, as well as his view that art must be propaganda for a high spiritual and social vision and his consequent deprecation of the “entertainers” Shakespeare and Dickens below “artist-philosophers” like Blake and Tolstoy. The relation of these ideas to contemporary conspiracy theories, to socialism, fascism, and feminism, and to my own political views is also carefully considered. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the lives and works of Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is free in its entirety to all; if you like it, please offer a paid subscription to enjoy past and future episodes. I discuss the Rossetti family, including Gabriele Rossetti’s conspiracy theory of literary history, and the Rossetti women’s devout Anglo-Catholicism; the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman; Christina Rossetti’s sonnets of female experience and limitation; and her “Goblin Market,” with its Christian allegory, its anti-capitalist critique, and its sapphic subtext, not to mention its metrical originality and its bold use of metaphor and metonymy. I further discuss Gerard Manley Hopkins’s tutelage at Oxford under Walter Pater; Pater’s theory of art for art’s sake, his lyrical prose style, and their influence on modernism; Hopkins’s conversion to Catholicism and his entrance to the priesthood; his poetics, including his theories of “inscape” and “instress” and his use of “sprung rhythm”; his poetry’s performance of its meaning and its spiritual implication; his elegy for the working man and its homoerotic subtext; his nostalgia for medieval Oxford; and his “terrible sonnets” and their battle against despair. Above all, I discuss two poets’ struggle to conjugate their religious devotion, their literary originality, and their possibly proscribed desire on the threshold between the Victorian and the modern. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
Erratum: I think I casually said Walter Pater converted to Catholicism, which isn’t true. He was attracted to the ritualism and aesthetics of the church, but, like his hero Marius, he did not quite make the leap before his unexpected death at the age of 54.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about Charles Dickens and his condition-of-England novel Hard Times. I discuss Dickens’s successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwardly mobile origin, his literary celebrity, and his personal scandals; Dickens’s afterlife as an influence and counter-influence on the development of both the elite and the popular novel; the importance to Dickens (and to the whole of modern literature and politics) of the Victorian Sage Thomas Carlyle, including Carlyle’s influence on the emergence of both socialism and fascism; the Victorian problems of utilitarianism, individualism, and revolutionism Dickens identifies in Hard Times; the solutions to these problems the novel proposes, including reformism, sentimentality, domesticity, Christianity, and fancy; and the novel’s utopian horizon, as against Carlylean fascism-socialism or sentimental reformism, located in the potentially universal déclassé space of the circus and theater whose form the dramatic Dickensian novel imitates. The first 25 minutes, which include a scorching denunciation of didacticism in the art museum, are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the lives and works of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I discuss Robert Browning’s theory that poetry historically cycles between objective and subjective styles; his use of the dramatic monologue as an adaptation of poetry for the age of the realist novel, especially as the novel has been theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin; the critique of aristocracy and patriarchy in his textbook dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess”; his novelistic and psychological revision of the Romantic visionary poem in “‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’”; his historicization of realism as the product of burgeoning Renaissance capitalism and individualism in “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and his religious defense, in the same poem, of realism as an artistic disclosure of the goodness of God’s creation; and, finally, his attack on the pursuit of perfection, as opposed to imperfect striving, in “Andrea del Sarto.” I further discuss the early sentimental activist poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and its reliance on the idea of separate spheres for men and women, and her later novel-in-verse, Aurora Leigh, with its satire of the limitations imposed on female intellect, its defense of poetry against progressive detractors, and its theory that poetry should become an epic of the present or realist novel in verse. The first 10 minutes are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. I discuss the Victorian period in general, especially considered as an object of study and as a cultural moment between Romanticism and modernism; the life of Tennyson, including his painful childhood, his time in the secret society of Cambridge Apostles, his relationship with his beloved Arthur Hallam, his struggle with the legacy of Romanticism, his emergence as the voice of his nation, and his afterlife as modernist whipping boy; the short-lived Hallam’s claim that Tennyson carried on the legacy of Keats and Shelley as author of a sensuous but marginal poetry; Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” and its feminized medievalist aestheticism in relation both to the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde of poets and painters and the thundering “violent Tory” art criticism of John Ruskin; Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” and “Ulysses” as attempt to create a masculinist, futurist heroism to escape Romantic marginality; and Tennyson’s In Memoriam as an expression of Victorian anxieties over science and religion and an expression of Victorian faith in order beyond chaos. The first 20 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the rest—and please enjoy! The slideshow for the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about Jane Austen and her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice. I discuss Austen’s biography; her place in the history of the novel; her posthumous reception by skeptical Romantics, hostile radicals, appreciative humanists, and realist and modernist novelists; the complex class system underlying her fiction; her characteristic irony and use of free indirect style; her hostility to “mimetic desire”; her creation of a perfectly flawed heroine in need of Bildung; her vision of class mobility and class reconciliation through the literal wedding of middle-class female emotional literacy to aristocratic male judgment and power; her valuation of nature and art; her ambition for the novel to play a leading ethical role in society; and the way her novels make moral self-knowledge newly available to modern audiences. The first 15 minutes are free; please offer a paid subscription for the rest. Please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded below the paywall.
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Lord Byron. It is free to all readers and listeners; if you enjoy it, please consider a paid subscription. Contents: Byron’s brief and dramatic life; the long afterlife of his “Byronic hero” in high literature, popular culture, and radical philosophy; Romantic gnosticism, idealism, incest, and gender in Byron’s dramatic poem Manfred; Byron’s epic Don Juan as anti-Romantic manifesto; and the decomposition of the epic into other modes and genres under the pressure of modern individualism and atomization. Please enjoy—and please subscribe! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here:
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of John Keats. Contents: Keats’s link with Shelley as poets-gone-too-soon, as Romantic classicists, and as lyricists of high polish; Keats’s tragically brief life and visceral life expe…
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I discuss Shelley’s scandalous life and fluctuating posthumous reputation, free love and its discontents, the dilemma of the “problematic” artist, the Romantic sonnet and the power of “Ozymandias,” Shelley as the self-selected inheritor of the literary tradition, the “league of incest” and the “Satanic School of Poetry,” Shelley as self-appointed Christ figure, Shelley’s elegy for Keats, Shelley’s Platonism, Shelley’s vision of the poet as passive wounded male God, Shelley’s death wish, Shelley’s Romantic manifesto and the poet as prophet, Shelley on the esoteric subtext of the poetic tradition, Shelley on poetry as against science and capitalism, and Mary Shelley’s Romantic novels as prophetic art. The first eight minutes are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribe—and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
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Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture is about the life and work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I discuss Coleridge’s life and its inauguration of the poet as Satanic opium-smoking tormented outcast; his late-life theory of the God-like poetic imagination and its debts to Immanuel Kant; his more youthful model of the poet as invaginated rapt/raped figure of passivity before nature; his metafiction and its relation to German Romantic ideas about irony and “progressive universal poetry”; his “mystery poems” of female monsters and dragons of the deep; his conservative revolution in prosody; his lesbian vampire pornography; his mythical person from Porlock; and his summative and explosive vision of Xanadu.
The last 12 minutes are free to all: there, in conjunction with “Kubla Khan,” I discuss a 19th-century theory positing a Mongol origin for the Aztec Empire and its startlingly synchronistic relevance to my recent querelle (since ended) with a fellow Substack author—and possibly to the next world war. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below the paywall.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This lecture for paid subscribers focuses on the life and work of William Wordsworth; it also contains a controversial discussion about the politics of the literary canon and a consideration of the idea that we are living through a revival of Romanticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribe, tell a friend—and please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is available at grandhotelabyss.substack.com.
Welcome to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This first episode in the sequence on British Literature from Romanticism to Modernism is free for all subscribers. It’s about the life and work of William Blake. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded at the episode's Substack page.
Future episodes will be behind a paywall. If you enjoy this one, please consider a paid subscription. If you can’t afford a paid subscription but want access to the course anyway, please email me at johnppistelli@gmail.com.
This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Michael Sugrue.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe
Please join me for a conversation with poet, teacher, astrologer, Tarot reader, Substacker, Dantologist, and soon-to-be-novelist Emmalea Russo. We discuss her “poetic cancellation,” the politics of the occult, the relation between magic and poetry, her collection Confetti, Dante and Spenser, her novel and mine, our favorite poets and novelists and the astrological implications thereof, astrology in general and her astrological readings in particular, horror movies in general and Altered States in particular, and more.
Readings:
Emmalea’s “canceled” collection Magenta, free to read on her website
Emmalea’s essay on her poetic cancellation: “Purity Policing Is Poison to Poetry”
Emmalea’s previous collection Graffiti Confetti
Emmalea’s Substack, Cosmic Edges, currently touring the Divine Comedy
Emmalea’s website, where you can book a personal astrology or Tarot reading
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com/subscribe
Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Because this chapter works as a standalone short story and can therefore serve well as a preview of the novel for free subscribers and general browsers, I am not paywalling it for now. It’s dark, but please enjoy!
PART TWO
Chapter 3. | The High Priestess
Simon Magnus ended up in Valerie Karns’s house that night. Not far from the Magnuses’ dark house, but on the other side of the dark forest, it sat behind a crumbling, graffiti-bright train trestle in a cul-de-sac. In that dead end squatted a crowded warren of small houses where the labor force of the town’s bygone industries had once worked. Now, anyone might live there, amid the overgrown lawns and cars on cement blocks and grime-blackened siding—anyone who couldn’t afford to live anywhere better. Valerie Karns lived alone with her mother, a hairdresser by day and bartender by night. Her mother was gone from the house from seven in the morning to midnight, except for the nights she spent in the bedroom upstairs of the bar, plying yet a third trade.
Valerie Karns had discovered magic a few years earlier, when her former stepfather—he’d managed the hardware store next to the bar where her mother worked—still lived in the house. He would visit her bedroom during the long nights when her mother was out. She pretended to sleep, her back to the door, one of the many cats who lived in the house pressed purring to her chest, when he came in. His lowering bulk made the mattress sink; she would roll, unless she clutched the corner of the mattress by her fingernails, into his lap. His silver-furred paunch like the back of a gorilla, the beer on his breath like sour pennies, the way the air whistled in one hairy nostril, the way his rough fingers—the nails permanently grimed in black oil—stroked her back with cajoling affection: these tormented her, sleeping and waking. The cat would shriek, would leap from the bed. She never made a sound.
She would regularly climb the sagging wooden steps that gave pedestrians access to the trestle above the train tracks. She read the graffiti, never knowing what it meant—bright bloody hearts ringed with runes—and imagined leaping down onto a train and letting it either kill her or carry her somewhere, anywhere: elsewhere.
She would walk from the public school to the public library: a pale gray building with a high red door, the vault of its lofty ceiling braced and crossed with wooden beams, its windows tall and colored like church windows, said to be the oldest building in the state. She felt cradled in its breadth. She would stay there until it closed, with the excuse of extracurricular activities and class projects. It wouldn’t save her from the nightly visitations, but it spared her more time with her stepfather than was strictly demanded by his power and her powerlessness.
One night, leaving the library at eight o’clock, she spied him driving up and down the streets, looking for her, looking for her mother, looking for whatever else he might put his filthy fingers on. She ran back into the building and hurried unobserved to the bathrooms. She crouched on the seat of the last toilet in the ladies’ room during the final inspection. When the librarians locked the building and left, she climbed down, stiff-kneed, and spent the night in the library.
It took hardly a minute to cross the whole one-room building—frigid on a fall night—that had housed the library for what to her, at age 12, in a bewildering and almost unnavigable universe, might as well have been hundreds or thousands of years. The oldest building in the state. Did it go back to Pilgrim times? Every school year, they started again at the Pilgrims. She had memorized the required facts of history. She had a good memory: she did well in school, since they didn’t ask much else of her but her memory—a memory of facts that didn’t matter to her and therefore didn’t hurt to remember. She had no idea, however, what these facts meant, or even when, exactly, they had happened in relation to her own time, to the ground she stood on. The library’s bare floorboards yawed and squealed; the glass of the tall, colored windows had begun to pool, ripple, and thicken at the bottoms of the panes. Glass, she’d heard in school, was not a solid; it was a slow liquid. It only seemed solid, but with enough time, it would change shape. Didn’t enough time change everything’s shape? What, then, she wondered, was a solid?
She found a flashlight in a drawer behind the librarian’s desk. When the library was open, she’d stayed close to the children’s books to avoid suspicion, falling asleep over dull stories about children in miserable houses who escaped to have fabulous adventures or slightly more interesting stories about the children of other lands and how they spent their days herding yaks or llamas or diving for pearls or harvesting rice. She wondered if these latter children in their funny hats, whose everyday life the books presented as equivalent to the fabulous adventure in the other kind of book, didn’t feel as desperate to be somewhere and anywhere else as she did. “Elsewhere” attracted her because it was elsewhere, not anywhere in particular. There were things she loved in her house; she loved the cats, anyway. The whistle of air in her stepfather’s nostril, however, would have ruined even paradise.
That night, alone behind a locked red door, with the building closed, she could read what she wanted. Carefully keeping the flashlight lower than the windows, she went up and down the adult shelves. She noted where the sex books were on the nonfiction shelves the better to avoid them.
She didn’t need information, didn’t need a language for what was happening to her. She had watched people tell her own story several times over on TV talk shows in the afternoon, between the time she got home from school and the time her stepfather got home from the hardware store. The stories gave her the words for her experience—“sexual abuse” and its accompanying paraphernalia: “penis,” for example, and “vagina”—but suggested to her that it simply had to be endured. Adults stuck together. They’d close ranks against you if you told, “close ranks” being a phrase she learned from those shows. Your mother wouldn’t believe you, other adults wouldn’t believe you, and the police wouldn’t believe you. The school might send you to a psychologist, who would try to figure out what was wrong with you. Doctors couldn’t prove your story one way or the others; the world is a dangerous place, and bruises may come from anywhere.
Most of the people on those shows escaped just by growing up, by becoming one of them, allowing themselves to be changed by time. She asked herself if she thought she could wait that long. She usually had these conversations with herself on top of the trestle as the train clattered past below. Sometimes, even in adulthood, you were not safe. Your stepfather—your uncle, grandfather, mom’s boyfriend, priest, teacher, coach, cousin, camp counselor—could get at you indirectly. One of the adult women on those shows had 100 different people living inside her head, a team she’d formed to protect herself in childhood against the assault of mom’s boyfriend, a series of stronger souls who could live with what she called “the fear, pain, shame, and nausea.” This woman would start answering the show host’s question in a baby girl’s voice and finish it in an old man’s growl.
Valerie Karns felt everything but the shame: those talk shows had spared her shame by showing her how often these things happened all the time to people who had done nothing wrong, the same way floods and fires struck people on the local news that played when the talk shows were over. Valerie Karns wouldn’t have minded company inside her head, during the hours and hours of boredom that made up most days until the 15 minutes of terror and disgust in the night. She would sit on the floor of the bedroom while the cats slunk around her, and she would give them voices and personalities and pasts and complaints and praises. Mostly what she heard in her head was her own voice, like an outside commentator, steadying and reassuring her: “still early,” “not home yet,” “maybe not tonight,” “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay”—the latter what her dad always said to her if she fell down and scraped her knee or hit her head and couldn’t stop crying, before her dad had to go live somewhere else, with somebody else’s daughter, or his own, but somebody else’s, too.
The talk shows got one thing wrong, at least in her case. The hosts and guests often talked for a long time about how those who “molest children”—this was another name she learned for what was being done to her, what had started being done to her when she turned 11 and hadn’t stopped since, from the summer of one year to the fall of the next—worshiped the Devil. Her stepfather did not worship the Devil. He took her to church and Sunday school, whether her mother came home after Saturday night behind the bar to accompany them or not. She saw him go down on his knees, clench his hands against each other, press his scaly yellow knuckles painfully into his forehead, shut his eyes as if trying to keep tears in, and pray. She didn’t wonder why he prayed so hard; she knew, and he knew, and he knew that she knew that he needed forgiveness from God. He wouldn’t get it from her. She prayed, too, but God hadn’t spared her yet. The Sunday school teacher smiled and said, “God answers every prayer, but sometimes His answer is ‘no.’” In her situation, she concluded, Satan was not the problem, nor God the solution.
That night in the library, she found The Complete Book of Salem Witch Spells. The cover showed a witch from the Pilgrim times: a tall, thin girl with blazing red hair and glowing green eyes tied to a tree trunk, fire starting at the hem of her white dress, a ring of pale men in black hats surrounding her as she cried out in defiance to the dark trees rearing overhead. She remembered that the witches had been burned by people who went to church every Sunday, that the witches had been accused of Devil-worship. Valerie Karns’s eyes were gray, not green, but her hair was almost the same color as the witch on the cover of the book, and she was tall and thin, too—she hated being tall and thin, hated the way her stepfather always said, “You’re big for your age.”
Cross-legged on the floor, the flashlight held on a shelf above her in the grip of two hardcovers, she read in the book’s introduction that magic is a tool for bringing what you want into the world, for aligning what they called your will with reality. The book quoted a man it said they once accused of being evil (she doubted all such accusations by now): “Love is the law, love under will.” She browsed through the spells and stopped on the one headed “Curse Your Enemy.” She didn’t have the bitter herbs or the lock of her stepfather’s hair or the egg of the raven or the water in which the moon had shone. She couldn’t start a fire in the library. She ran to to the window and looked up: the moon was full. She took this as a sign to proceed. She went back to the book and said the words three times. She even shouted the final couplet.
Lay him down in the dust!Break his crown, dry up his lust!
She fell asleep curled around the spell book, in the white circle the flashlight made, until its battery burned out around three in the morning. In her dream, she ran, the cats at her feet, slinking and swirling around her ankles, from her bedroom to the woods behind her house. There she found the woman with red hair and green eyes, who was also, she didn’t know how, the Sunday-school teacher at the church her stepfather took her to (the actual Sunday-school teacher was gray-headed and plump and short, not tall and thin and flame-haired). This woman was tying her stepfather with sharp-looking twine to the trunk of a tree, the twine slicing into the bulk of his silver-furred gorilla-back belly, spilling blood down the thick silver hairs. She looked up and saw Valerie Karns, and she said, this witch who was also a Sunday-school teacher, “I’ll do this for you, daughter, but it’s not free. You’ll have to pay me later.”
Valerie Karns woke on the cold floor in the dark. From where she lay, she could see out one of the tall colored windows up to the full moon. To the moon, she whispered, “Please do it.”
The next morning, her mother, who had come home early the night before, beat her on the shoulders and back with the heel of a high-heeled shoe. “You think you can stay out all night, you bitch, you little whore?” Her stepfather calmly watched at the kitchen table, drumming his thick fingers, his breath whistling in one nostril.
The next weekend, an icy rain fell as the weather turned: fall into winter. Her stepfather’s car slipped off the road and smashed into a tree trunk. He flew through the windshield and the trunk split his skull in two; then the car caught fire and burned his corpse. The God at the church, He sometimes said, “No,” but this other god, this god who lived in the moon and the woods, she said, “Yes.”
Simon Magnus knew this story. Valerie Karns had told Simon Magnus all of it on the 13 months’ worth of weeknights they spoke on the phone and weekends they spent in her bedroom, the 13 months between the night she killed the bird and the night she killed herself. Simon Magnus didn’t think the comics press wanted to hear anything as unpleasant as her recollections of her childhood, however, so Simon Magnus never said a word about Valerie Karns’s stepfather or about how Valerie Karns discovered magic.
Simon Magnus presented Valerie Karns to the public as the “origin story” of this superhero writer, the mysterious figure who had initiated Simon Magnus into the mystery before disappearing into it herself. She was, in Simon Magnus’s telling, a kind of naturally occurring phenomenon: a Gothic dryad of the greater Salem forest, and, with charming self-deprecation, even though Simon Magnus was in fact deprecating her, as a mundane goth girl, provincial countercultural flotsam of the late 20th century, randy and precocious.
Simon Magnus told the press that when they arrived together at her empty house on that night they first met in the woods, as soon as they had come through the back door into the stinking kitchen, amid the dirty dishes piled in the sink, with their shoe soles sticking to the filthy linoleum and the cats hungrily circling their legs, she immediately grabbed Simon Magnus’s penis until it hardened, her hands still stained with bird’s blood. Because she later whispered to Simon Magnus the whole story of her life, Simon Magnus understood privately, but never said in public, why that girl might have felt the need to seize control of that organ as soon as she possibly could. Randy mischief, despite what Simon Magnus implied to fans and fawning journalists, had had nothing whatsoever to do with it. After she’d jerked Simon Magnus to climax, she put her hand over her mouth, went back through the door, and vomited in the yard.
Hand in hand, she led Simon Magnus up to her bedroom. Crinkled and torn magazine pages of Paris and London were taped to the walls, next to hand-drawn, hand-painted Baphomets and burning witches, all of it lurid in the red bulb fixed in her bedside lamp. A message scrawled in red nail polish on her dresser mirror read, “Love is the law.”
She dropped herself to the carpet in a blossom of white tulle and invited Simon Magnus to sit too. She did a Tarot spread. She’d made the deck herself out of Polaroid pictures. She posed for all the figures, for all the arcana, major and minor, though Simon Magnus didn’t know they were called that yet. She’d taken the photos with the camera’s 10-second timer and labeled the glossy white bottoms with the fruit-scented markers so popular in those years. She handed Simon Magnus the top card to demonstrate her handiwork: The Lovers. On the card, Valerie Karns stood naked next to a mirror, doubled, a mustache and a cock-and-balls drawn with charming crudeness in black marker (licorice-scented) on her reflection. The whole deck smelled of artificial blueberry, lemon, strawberry, banana, chocolate—smelled sugary, like a candy shop, especially amid the musky incense perfume of her bedroom.
She did a simple three-card past-present-future spread. On the dirty pink carpet, unvacuumed and stained with nail polish, she laid down three figures of the major arcana, her own self in three guises: the Empress (she wore a cheap tiara), the High Priestess (a pair of real-looking antlers sprouted from her red curls), and the Magician (she held a still-leafy branch as a wand and wore a robe with an infinity sign—a lemniscate—hand-painted in red on the front).
Simon Magnus told interviewers that there on that dirty floor, with this handmade Tarot spread, she had manifested for Simon Magnus precisely what Simon Magnus had dreamed in the forest while reading Burroughs: what a comic book would look like if absolute intelligence were applied to its form.
“Valerie, darling Valerie, showed me the archetypes in their journey through the life cycle, the cycle itself available in every temporal permutation, represented as a spatial arrangement that made each image gather meaning to itself from every other—and it could be re-arranged! Time was not linear. You could stand above it, see the past to your left and the future to your right, and then you could reshuffle the deck and live them again in a different order. This is what God sees: not time as a line or even as a circle, but as every moment at once and in combination with every other. God sees time the way we see space. Reading a Tarot spread or reading a comic book, therefore, makes us God—or the closest thing to it.”
Simon Magnus would only be able to articulate the insight later, after reflection and study, but the whole of the thought crashed into awareness before it could be said in words that night in Valerie Karns’s red bedroom. Tarot and comics uniquely represented the fourth dimension in two dimensions by turning time into space. This placed the Tarot reader and the comics reader up in the fifth dimension, a divine plane, maybe the divine plane. Tarot and comics, then, were the highest forms of artistic consciousness, despite both forms’ association with fortune tellers and smut peddlers, gypsies by the roadside and hack artists who couldn’t get hired anywhere else. “‘Despite’ or ‘because’?” Simon Magnus would rhetorically ask interviewers and audiences—for wasn’t wisdom always scattered in the trash, pearls before swine, gems amid offal, shards of divinity lodged in the prison of the flesh?
Valerie Karns used the magic until it ran out. She’d conjured up Simon Magnus the summer before they met, she confessed, sitting naked in the woods in a circle of salt at three A.M. and imploring Aphrodite to bring her a man who might understand her and who would handle her gently. Simon Magnus handled her gently enough. Simon Magnus would tug the coils of her hair straight and then let them spring back into their spirals and tickle her cheek, as she patiently explained everything she knew about the art of magic.
After graduation, she couldn’t conjure the money for college or any job better than the night shift at the gas station convenience store by the side of the highway. Her mother would come home from the bar at one in the morning, wake her up and shake her, ask her for rent money, threaten to throw her out. By the time she graduated high school and Simon Magnus entered senior year, Simon Magnus was already planning to go to the city. Simon Magnus asked her to come, but she simply asked, “What will I do there?” as if she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, as if some spell, some salt circle, held her in Hollow Well. She sat for hours between midnight and five behind the convenience store counter, at first fearing and then wishing that someone would come in off the highway and shoot her dead.
She had stopped drawing and stopped taking pictures, even as Simon Magnus became more inspired than ever, writing poems, planning long comic-book series, making an attempt at a novel—the latter about her, about the working-class witch of Hollow Well, about the Gothic dryad of the greater Salem forest. Simon Magnus called her every night, Simon Magnus read her every word Simon Magnus wrote in those 13 months.
Was this the price she had to pay for using magic first to harm another? On the other hand, was this misfortune—her isolation, her dead-end life—a warning that she still owed the debt? The rules were the rules: you couldn’t plead self-defense before the bar of karma. Gradually, she stopped answering Simon Magnus’s calls, stopped showing up for work, stopped getting out of bed. At midnight on the first wintry Saturday in November, she climbed the sagging wooden stairs to the trestle, her bare feet slipping in the sleet. She walked to the middle of the bridge, climbed up on the rail, and didn’t even wait for a train. She didn’t need a train to take her where she was going. She escaped from the prison of the flesh.
“What does it mean?” Simon Magnus had asked Valerie Karns of the Tarot spread on the dirty carpet of her red bedroom that first night, drowsy from the orgasm she had, without invitation, wrenched from the budding writer’s body with hands still coat in bird-blood.
“It means you’ll go backward even as you go forward.”
Simon Magnus wouldn’t tell the interviewers her answer. Simon Magnus would tell the interviewers what Simon Magnus thought it meant: the past was Mother Magnus, the Empress; the present was Valerie Karns, the High Priestess; and the future was the Simon Magnus Simon Magnus would eventually become—the Magician, of course. About what it had cost Valerie Karns to become and to remain, for as long as she was able to remain, the High Priestess, Simon Magnus remained silent.
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Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, and A Room of One’s Own. The beauty of stream-of-consciousness narration. Woolf’s changing place in the canon. Woolf, gender, and class. Clarissa Dalloway’s bohemian background and elitism. A conversation with Sam’s mother about discovering Woolf in the 20th century; Woolf’s relationship to feminism, sexuality, and women’s experience; and what Woolf’s pronouns would be if she were alive today. Mrs. Dalloway as city novel and postwar novel. Septimus Warren Smith’s suicide, Woolf’s suicide, Woolf’s challenge to psychology, and the 20th-century cult of the mentally ill artist.
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GPA current events. More on Oscar Wilde, anarcho-Catholicism, and the libertine and anti-libertine post-left. The arrest of Peter Navarro. The theory of the healing punch and the decline of the American state. Dave Weigel’s re-Tweet and the Washington Post meltdown. Is cynicism enough for a sociopolitical movement? The need for discipline to resist a society of addictions. WWCIAD? (I.e., What Would the CIA Do?) “Ghosts in the Machine” and American psyops. Our lack of a credible utopian image.
Update (06/14/22): John’s column for Tablet magazine’s Daily Scroll on “Ghosts in the Machine,” as referenced in the episode, can be found here:
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We’re joined by cultural commentator and internet historian Default Friend AKA Katherine Dee (read her newsletter and listen to her podcast on SubStack and follow her on Twitter) to discuss hipster reactionaries in the mainstream, the coming conflict among Big Tech vs. crypto-optimists vs. neo-Luddites, the philosophical meaning of the detransition movement, the death of the mall, radicalization and misinformation, Nina Jankowicz and Taylor Lorenz, the secret history of Miladys, Urbit and spiritual warfare, The Mars Review of Books and the new confluence of lit and tech, femcels (read DF’s femcel essay in the MRB), the potential of podcasts as art, and a postmortem on her pod After the Orgy.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com
Not asking Toni Morrison about race. Morrison: a Catholic writer, a Rust Belt writer, a lower-middle-class-to-professional-class writer. Abortion, Roe vs. Wade. Liberal gothic and what’s wrong with The Handmaid’s Tale. Toni Morrison on Clarence Thomas: the cultures we share and don’t, that love us and hate us. Individualism vs. collectivism. The compassion of great writers. Beloved. Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and the postmodern historical novel. Feminism’s racial divide over domesticity and reproduction. Beloved as a novel about abortion. Beloved as a tragedy. Beloved as therapeutic text. Slavery’s anti-pastoral and Morrison’s political and apolitical neo-Romanticism. Morrison’s formalism and numerology: the novel incarnating black history and the female body. Sethe and Amy: Morrison rewriting Huckleberry Finn and Morrison’s political imagination. Morrison on nature. Morrison on masculinity and gender. Morrison on who belongs to the land and who the land belongs to. Morrison’s guilty conscience as a member of the professional class, the problem with collective racial consciousness, and the anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals. Beloved as psychological novel: a case history and a text of trauma. Freud, Lacan, modernism, psychiatry, TikTok traumatology. Baby Suggs’s sermon, loving the flesh, and Morrison’s Catholicism redux: kneel down and you will believe. Morrison’s quiet conservatism. “A woman who is a friend of your mind.”
Note: my essay on Beloved.
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Homer, The Odyssey. The sophistication of epic narrative. The Odyssey in education and academia. Homeric violence. Is the west founded on plunder and slaughter? Homeric sex and honor. Homeric psychedelia. The muse sings. A guest appearance from friend-of-the-pod Matt the Straussian. The difference between ancients and moderns: from the best regime to the realistic regime. A democratic Odyssey? Plato vs. Homer. What are the benefits of believing in the gods? Odysseus as philosopher king. Adorno meets Allan Bloom. Achilles/Sparta vs. Odysseus/Athens. Why does Odysseus reject Calypso and choose the human? Odysseus as man of pain and change. Homeric echoes in Dante, Melville, and Tennyson. Homeric gender. Is Homer a misogynist? Homeric race. Is Homer a racist? Homeric translation, male and female. The 20th-century loss of the hero in serious literature. Are Homer and the canon tainted? Representations of the poet’s freedom from ethical responsibility in The Odyssey. Art for art’s sake. Homeric magic. The glory of poetry, beyond left and right: that it means more than it says. The execution of the maids and the epic’s self-critique. Homeric cuisine. The metaphoric and the domestic. Homeric universality. Poets as vessels of the gods.
Note: my essay on The Odyssey.
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Reacting to the Vanity Fair article on the new right/post-left by James Pogue and the recent speech on “disinformation” by Barack Obama. Oscar Wilde’s aristocratic radicalism as precursor to the post-left. Honor Levy, good and bad avant-gardes, and the new literary conservatism. Media and democracy. How (or whether) to curb social media’s political effects. The persistent threat of technocracy. John explodes at the intellectual left; Sam proposes a theory of masculinity. Why CIA or Peter Thiel funding of cultural vanguardism doesn’t matter; why a healthy society should be able to withstand the ironist.
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For Shakespeare’s birthday, a celebration of The Tempest, including discussions of “Caliban upon Setebos” by Robert Browning, A Tempest by Aimé Césaire, and The Sea and the Mirror by W. H. Auden, with a consideration of Shakespeare’s power and longevity, thoughts on the racial and colonial interpretation of the play, and an argument about whether or not magic (and pornography and propaganda) are the same as art.
Note: my essay on The Tempest.
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T. S. Eliot. The Waste Land. Our personal histories with Eliot. The pleasures of literary difficulty. Mythic method: the Holy Grail, the Fisher King, and Eliot’s satire of the occult. Infinite levels of meaning. Voices of The Waste Land. Eliot’s anti-Semitism as projected self-hatred. Mythic method redux: Philomel, Tereus, and Eliot’s ode to a nightingale. Images of The Waste Land. Reading poetry like a novel. Eliot’s cosmopolitanism. Would you rather be in London, the desert, or the Ganges? Eliot’s transitions, Tiresias’s transitions. Four Quartets. Eliot’s religious conversion. The politics of Four Quartets. Inclusive nationalism vs. regicidal republicanism. Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate. Eliot’s mysticism and paradoxes: re-associating sensibility.
Notes: my essay on The Waste Land and Four Quartets is here; my novel, Portraits and Ashes, mentioned twice this episode, is available for sale at Amazon here and also most other places where books are sold online.
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A “fun” episode. The churning world of internet gossip. Justin Murphy and independent intellectual life. Cryptocurrency. Curtis Yarvin. Angelicism01. The vibe shift. Schizoposting. The independent intellectual’s two choices: found a cult or advise the prince. Peter Thiel, patchwork, and the sovereign corporation. Who is Peter Thiel funding? “He’s going to suck the adrenochrome right out of Dasha.” Compact magazine. Confusions of right and left. Post-left sympathies and antipathies. New single: “Come on the Pod.” The Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, The Exorcist, Arlen Specter, Corey Robin, academic constraint. “What is a woman?” A powerful story about Josh Hawley.
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Thomas Mann. Death in Venice. The greatness of modernist novellas. Art’s self-consciousness. Mann as autobiographical writer. Death in Venice as kin to Lolita. The classics as the most deceptively dangerous books. “The coming wave of sex negativity.” A digression on banned books, Fun Home, pederasty, pedagogy, and queer theory. Thomas Mann vs. D. H. Lawrence. Mann’s Orientalism. Italy as the Orient. Getting lost in Venice, the labyrinth of desire. Modernism’s mythic method: Death in Venice and Plato’s Phaedrus, Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, and Euripides’s Bacchae. Apollo vs. Dionysus. Audio drama: Aschenbach’s dream. Turn-of-the-century decadence and Max Nordau’s Degeneration. Does artistic form redeem all subject matter? Is it immoral to make art? Going full Plato. Is the liberation of pedophilia part of the general left-wing project of universal human emancipation? Sexual conservatism as social taboo. “The post-left.” In defense of the old liberalism. Freud, QAnon. Resenting and revering Death in Venice. Does great art redeem everything? Against nature. The roots of aesthetic pederasty in ontological misogyny. Camille Paglia. The revenge of the goddess.
Note: my essay on Mann’s Death in Venice.
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Right and left Hegelians. 1989 and the global triumph of liberalism. Science and the satisfaction of creaturely desires. Gorbachev in the Pizza Hut. For and against the consumer society. Taking modernist fascism seriously. Plato and the three-part soul. The importance of thymos. Hegel and Alexandre Kojève. Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave at the beginning of history. Left and right critics of liberal capitalism. Nietzsche and the last man. Neoconservatism as the supplementation of liberalism with illiberalism. A Fukuyaman defense of the autonomy of art. Fukuyama as artist and literary stylist. The rise of technocracy and the end of liberal democracy. The Great Reset vs. The End of History? Our advice to disaffected radical left- and right-wing youth.
Note: my essay on Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.
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Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. Russia and Orientalism. Extremisms of Russian and American literature. The holy fool. 2+2=4. Romanticism, nihilism, socialism. To see everything. Christianity vs. rationalism: “The Grand Inquisitor.” Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Fecundity of narrative art. Journalism, propaganda, aesthetics. Trump/Russia and the pause of history. Free speech: Milton was right. A new progressive racism?
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Watchmen. Favorite characters. Alan Moore as stylist. Superhero comics. Watchmen and Don Quixote. Form and genre: Understanding Comics, understanding superheroes. Watchmen as American literature. Rorschach as hero. Necessity of perversion and extremism. Watchmen as the Bible of people who “go hard.” Is there any defense of the Comedian? Watchmen’s relevance to the war in Ukraine and renewed nuclear tensions. A debate about the merits of the American empire. Moore as closet conservative. The ambiguity of Ozymandias: ideological, ethnic, scientific, economic. The meaning (and pronunciation) of the vagina dentata. Gender in Moore’s oeuvre. Allusions and epigraphs. A guest appearance from Sam’s brother.
Erratum: General Pinochet was the dictator of Chile, not Argentina.
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Ukraine. A political autobiography. Democracy and empire. Conviction and ambivalence. Ideological ferment: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and MAGA. Individualism and collective identity in Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, and Alexandr Dugin. Liberal nationalism. The trouble with land acknowledgments. Getting liberalism’s story straight.
Note: my post about Kundera, Morrison, and Dugin.
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Henry James. “The Art of the Novel.” Romance vs. novel. Experience is everything. The necessity of cultural appropriation. Making love to the language. Free indirect discourse. Graduate school. Age-appropriate novels. The Bostonians. Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow fighting over Taylor Lorenz. The Ambassadors. The eroticism of difficult prose. “Live all you can.” Henry James at the end of history. The 1990s as a Jamesian decade. A dramatic reading from John Pistelli’s end-of-history ’90s novel, The Class of 2000.
Note: my essay on James’s Ambassadors.
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William James. Pragmatism vs. Rationalism. Metaphysics. Why it’s good to believe in God. Louis Menand. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Eugenics and compulsory vaccination. The Civil War: liberalism’s “Good War”? Men of the sword and men of the spirit. Contingencies of Richard Rorty. The professionalization of the university and its price. Corporatism and fascism, yesterday and today. James’s anti-imperialism. Against “big organizations” and “big successes.”
Note: my essay on William James.
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General hilarity. Sidney Morgenbesser, Mencius Moldbug, Judith Butler. Nietzsche. Limits of thought. Cheapness of paradox. How to write. Hannah Arendt contra contemporary liberalism. More Mailer. Left conservatism. Charlie Hebdo.
Notes: my essays on Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer | my Tumblr post on why writing should difficult | Rebecca Panovka on Arendt
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Joan Didion. A dirge. Gnosticism. William Blake. Catholicism. The CIA. Assorted literary gossip.
Notes: my essays on William Blake, Elaine Pagels, and Joan Didion.
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Literary mixes. The title explained. Georg Lukács. Are we leftists? How do we know each other? Don DeLillo, Iris Murdoch. Novels in general. Soundscapes.
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