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...

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....

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...

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to...

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?...

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...

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...

Listen now | right here, right now, there is no other place I want to be Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com

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?  

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? Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com

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...

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...

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.  

Listen now (71 min) | if history teaches us anything Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Listen now (76 min) | freedom, indirection, discourse Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com

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...

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.” Notes: 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. Failures of the left. Charlie Hebdo. Notes: my essays on Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer | my Tumblr post on why writing should difficult | Rebecca Panovka on Arendt

Listen now (60 min) | freedom of speech Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com

Joan Didion. A dirge. Gnosticism. William Blake. Catholicism. The CIA. Assorted literary gossip.

Listen now (75 min) | enough! or too much! Subscribe at grandhotelabyss.substack.com