Folgen
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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 Conradâs 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 Conradâs own modernist manifesto of lâart pour lâart as applied to the art of the novel. Then I contextualize Conradâs 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, subscribeâand 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 Wildeâs dramatic life story with its consciously shaped tragic arcâthe tragedy he lived but could not writeâwith 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 siĂšcle. 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 Wildeâs 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 âreactionary prose poem,â the first piece of modernist fascist art; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the play as celebration of the âavunculate,â 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 playâs withering attitude toward the Victorian novel as the antitype to its Aestheticism. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
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Fehlende Folgen?
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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 Shawâs 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-siĂšcle realist drama of Mrs. Warrenâs Profession before pursuing it into the cosmic vistas of his later work. We also note Shawâs position that Wagnerian opera has made âthe drama of feelingâ obsolete, leaving only âthe drama of thoughtâ 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 âentertainersâ Shakespeare and Dickens below âartist-philosophersâ 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, subscribeâand 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 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 Rossettiâs conspiracy theory of literary history, and the Rossetti womenâs devout Anglo-Catholicism; the Oxford Movement and John Henry Newman; Christina Rossettiâs sonnets of female experience and limitation; and her âGoblin Market,â 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 Hopkinsâs tutelage at Oxford under Walter Pater; Paterâs theory of art for artâs sake, his lyrical prose style, and their influence on modernism; Hopkinsâs conversion to Catholicism and his entrance to the priesthood; his poetics, including his theories of âinscapeâ and âinstressâ and his use of âsprung rhythmâ; his poetryâs 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 âterrible sonnetsâ and their battle against despair. Above all, I discuss two poetsâ 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, subscribeâand please enjoy. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is below.
Erratum: I think I casually said Walter Pater converted to Catholicism, which isnât 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 Dickensâs successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwardly mobile origin, his literary celebrity, and his personal scandals; Dickensâs 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 Carlyleâs 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 novelâs utopian horizon, as against Carlylean fascism-socialism or sentimental reformism, located in the potentially universal dĂ©classĂ© 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, subscribeâand 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 Browningâs 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, âMy Last Duchessâ; his novelistic and psychological revision of the Romantic visionary poem in ââChilde Roland to the Dark Tower Cameââ; his historicization of realism as the product of burgeoning Renaissance capitalism and individualism in âFra Lippo Lippi,â and his religious defense, in the same poem, of realism as an artistic disclosure of the goodness of Godâs creation; and, finally, his attack on the pursuit of perfection, as opposed to imperfect striving, in âAndrea del Sarto.â 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, subscribeâand 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 Hallamâs claim that Tennyson carried on the legacy of Keats and Shelley as author of a sensuous but marginal poetry; Tennysonâs âLady of Shalottâ and its feminized medievalist aestheticism in relation both to the Pre-Raphaelite avant-garde of poets and painters and the thundering âviolent Toryâ art criticism of John Ruskin; Tennysonâs âLocksley Hallâ and âUlyssesâ as attempt to create a masculinist, futurist heroism to escape Romantic marginality; and Tennysonâs 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 restâand 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 Austenâs 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 âmimetic desireâ; 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.
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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 Lord Byron. It is free to all readers and listeners; if you enjoy it, please consider a paid subscription. Contents: Byronâs brief and dramatic life; the long afterlife of his âByronic heroâ in high literature, popular culture, and radical philosophy; Romantic gnosticism, idealism, incest, and gender in Byronâs dramatic poem Manfred; Byronâs 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 enjoyâand 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: Keatsâs link with Shelley as poets-gone-too-soon, as Romantic classicists, and as lyricists of high polish; Keatsâs tragically brief life and visceral life expeâŠ
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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 Shelleyâs scandalous life and fluctuating posthumous reputation, free love and its discontents, the dilemma of the âproblematicâ artist, the Romantic sonnet and the power of âOzymandias,â Shelley as the self-selected inheritor of the literary tradition, the âleague of incestâ and the âSatanic School of Poetry,â Shelley as self-appointed Christ figure, Shelleyâs elegy for Keats, Shelleyâs Platonism, Shelleyâs vision of the poet as passive wounded male God, Shelleyâs death wish, Shelleyâs 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 Shelleyâs Romantic novels as prophetic art. The first eight minutes are free to all. Please like, share, comment, subscribeâand 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 Coleridgeâs 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 âprogressive universal poetryâ; his âmystery poemsâ 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 âKubla Khan,â 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 authorâand possibly to the next world war. 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 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 friendâand please enjoy! The slideshow corresponding to the lecture is available at grandhotelabyss.substack.com.
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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. Itâs 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 canât afford a paid subscription but want access to the course anyway, please email me at [email protected].
This lecture is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Michael Sugrue.
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Please join me for a conversation with poet, teacher, astrologer, Tarot reader, Substacker, Dantologist, and soon-to-be-novelist Emmalea Russo. We discuss her âpoetic cancellation,â 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:
Emmaleaâs âcanceledâ collection Magenta, free to read on her website
Emmaleaâs essay on her poetic cancellation: âPurity Policing Is Poison to Poetryâ
Emmaleaâs previous collection Graffiti Confetti
Emmaleaâs Substack, Cosmic Edges, currently touring the Divine Comedy
Emmaleaâs website, where you can book a personal astrology or Tarot reading
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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. Itâs dark, but please enjoy!
PART TWO
Chapter 3. | The High Priestess
Simon Magnus ended up in Valerie Karnsâs house that night. Not far from the Magnusesâ 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 townâs bygone industries had once worked. Now, anyone might live there, amid the overgrown lawns and cars on cement blocks and grime-blackened sidingâanyone who couldnât 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 stepfatherâheâd managed the hardware store next to the bar where her mother workedâstill 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 fingersâthe nails permanently grimed in black oilâstroked 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 meantâbright bloody hearts ringed with runesâand 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 wouldnât 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 oâclock, 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 ladiesâ 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 buildingâfrigid on a fall nightâthat 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 didnât ask much else of her but her memoryâa memory of facts that didnât matter to her and therefore didnât 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 libraryâs 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, sheâd heard in school, was not a solid; it was a slow liquid. It only seemed solid, but with enough time, it would change shape. Didnât enough time change everythingâs shape? What, then, she wondered, was a solid?
She found a flashlight in a drawer behind the librarianâs desk. When the library was open, sheâd stayed close to the childrenâs 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, didnât feel as desperate to be somewhere and anywhere else as she did. âElsewhereâ 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 stepfatherâs 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 didnât need information, didnât 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 experienceââsexual abuseâ and its accompanying paraphernalia: âpenis,â for example, and âvaginaââbut suggested to her that it simply had to be endured. Adults stuck together. Theyâd close ranks against you if you told, âclose ranksâ being a phrase she learned from those shows. Your mother wouldnât believe you, other adults wouldnât believe you, and the police wouldnât believe you. The school might send you to a psychologist, who would try to figure out what was wrong with you. Doctors couldnât 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 stepfatherâyour uncle, grandfather, momâs boyfriend, priest, teacher, coach, cousin, camp counselorâcould get at you indirectly. One of the adult women on those shows had 100 different people living inside her head, a team sheâd formed to protect herself in childhood against the assault of momâs boyfriend, a series of stronger souls who could live with what she called âthe fear, pain, shame, and nausea.â This woman would start answering the show hostâs question in a baby girlâs voice and finish it in an old manâs 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 wouldnât 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: âstill early,â ânot home yet,â âmaybe not tonight,â âyouâre okay, youâre okay, youâre okay, youâre okay, youâre okayââthe latter what her dad always said to her if she fell down and scraped her knee or hit her head and couldnât stop crying, before her dad had to go live somewhere else, with somebody elseâs daughter, or his own, but somebody elseâs, 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 âmolest childrenââthis was another name she learned for what was being done to her, what had started being done to her when she turned 11 and hadnât stopped since, from the summer of one year to the fall of the nextâworshiped 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 didnât wonder why he prayed so hard; she knew, and he knew, and he knew that she knew that he needed forgiveness from God. He wouldnât get it from her. She prayed, too, but God hadnât spared her yet. The Sunday school teacher smiled and said, âGod answers every prayer, but sometimes His answer is âno.ââ 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 Karnsâs 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, tooâshe hated being tall and thin, hated the way her stepfather always said, âYouâre big for your age.â
Cross-legged on the floor, the flashlight held on a shelf above her in the grip of two hardcovers, she read in the bookâs 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): âLove is the law, love under will.â She browsed through the spells and stopped on the one headed âCurse Your Enemy.â She didnât have the bitter herbs or the lock of her stepfatherâs hair or the egg of the raven or the water in which the moon had shone. She couldnât 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 didnât 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, âIâll do this for you, daughter, but itâs not free. Youâll have to pay me later.â
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, âPlease do it.â
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. âYou think you can stay out all night, you bitch, you little whore?â 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 stepfatherâs 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, âNo,â but this other god, this god who lived in the moon and the woods, she said, âYes.â
Simon Magnus knew this story. Valerie Karns had told Simon Magnus all of it on the 13 monthsâ 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 didnât 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 Karnsâs stepfather or about how Valerie Karns discovered magic.
Simon Magnus presented Valerie Karns to the public as the âorigin storyâ of this superhero writer, the mysterious figure who had initiated Simon Magnus into the mystery before disappearing into it herself. She was, in Simon Magnusâs 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 Magnusâs penis until it hardened, her hands still stained with birdâs 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 sheâd 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, âLove is the law.â
She dropped herself to the carpet in a blossom of white tulle and invited Simon Magnus to sit too. She did a Tarot spread. Sheâd made the deck herself out of Polaroid pictures. She posed for all the figures, for all the arcana, major and minor, though Simon Magnus didnât know they were called that yet. Sheâd taken the photos with the cameraâs 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, chocolateâsmelled 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 signâa lemniscateâhand-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.
âValerie, 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 otherâand 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 Godâor the closest thing to it.â
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 Karnsâs 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 formsâ association with fortune tellers and smut peddlers, gypsies by the roadside and hack artists who couldnât get hired anywhere else. ââDespiteâ or âbecauseâ?â Simon Magnus would rhetorically ask interviewers and audiencesâfor wasnât 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. Sheâd 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 couldnât 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, âWhat will I do there?â as if she couldnât 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 novelâthe 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 misfortuneâher isolation, her dead-end lifeâa warning that she still owed the debt? The rules were the rules: you couldnât plead self-defense before the bar of karma. Gradually, she stopped answering Simon Magnusâs 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 didnât even wait for a train. She didnât need a train to take her where she was going. She escaped from the prison of the flesh.
âWhat does it mean?â 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 writerâs body with hands still coat in bird-blood.
âIt means youâll go backward even as you go forward.â
Simon Magnus wouldnât 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 becomeâthe 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 Oneâs Own. The beauty of stream-of-consciousness narration. Woolfâs changing place in the canon. Woolf, gender, and class. Clarissa Dallowayâs bohemian background and elitism. A conversation with Samâs mother about discovering Woolf in the 20th century; Woolfâs relationship to feminism, sexuality, and womenâs experience; and what Woolfâs pronouns would be if she were alive today. Mrs. Dalloway as city novel and postwar novel. Septimus Warren Smithâs suicide, Woolfâs suicide, Woolfâs 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 Weigelâs 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?) âGhosts in the Machineâ and American psyops. Our lack of a credible utopian image.
Update (06/14/22): Johnâs column for Tablet magazineâs Daily Scroll on âGhosts in the Machine,â as referenced in the episode, can be found here:
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Weâre 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 DFâs femcel essay in the MRB), the potential of podcasts as art, and a postmortem on her pod After the Orgy.
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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 whatâs wrong with The Handmaidâs Tale. Toni Morrison on Clarence Thomas: the cultures we share and donât, that love us and hate us. Individualism vs. collectivism. The compassion of great writers. Beloved. Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, and the postmodern historical novel. Feminismâs racial divide over domesticity and reproduction. Beloved as a novel about abortion. Beloved as a tragedy. Beloved as therapeutic text. Slaveryâs anti-pastoral and Morrisonâs political and apolitical neo-Romanticism. Morrisonâs formalism and numerology: the novel incarnating black history and the female body. Sethe and Amy: Morrison rewriting Huckleberry Finn and Morrisonâs political imagination. Morrison on nature. Morrison on masculinity and gender. Morrison on who belongs to the land and who the land belongs to. Morrisonâs 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 Suggsâs sermon, loving the flesh, and Morrisonâs Catholicism redux: kneel down and you will believe. Morrisonâs quiet conservatism. âA woman who is a friend of your mind.â
Note: my essay on Beloved.
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