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 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,...

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 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,...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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 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....

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 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...

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...

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 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...

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 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...

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 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...

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 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...

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...

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 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…

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 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...

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 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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...