Hello,
I’m on vacation, or a reasonable simulacrum thereof. Please leave a message and the wandering hermit will answer you in a poem he writes in thirty years on the back of a charred receipt from the last remaining Kwik Trip in the New American Territories.
In the meantime, here are some links:
Mary Gaitskill’s new substack is self-recommending. On how the physicality of the material world gave her access to humanity when humans themselves could give none:
I admit that I loved looking at things even more: the porousness of concrete, the density of canned goods on deli shelves, the dank, sagging patched leather seat of a taxi, the heavy machinery of the subway, the ramshackle shapes of roofs, water towers, heat vents and cooling systems on the tumbledown apartment blocks I could see from the tops of buildings: the random, inexplicable beauty of natural materials shaped at different moments by intrepid human hands. There were long periods when I had nothing, no partner, no respected identity, no one even to talk to. But I had all of this, the blocks and blocks of life I could somehow take in as if through the pores of my skin and it sustained me, made me feel hope.
Elsewhere I’ve addressed socialist realism and art as propaganda. Modern art as the Imperial American analogue.
An entertaining interview with Edward Luttwak. Most interesting are the stories of childhood in Palermo and gang life among the children of mafioso.
The oldest man in the world says the secret to long life is to “work hard, rest on holidays, go to bed early, drink a glass of aguardiente every day, love God, and always carry him in your heart.”
Ted Gioia thinks we’re living in a society without a counterculture. I would try to articulate it somewhat differently (knowing that I too will fail). As mainstream culture becomes overwhelmingly homogenized, repetitive, and top-heavy, there is a flight to a million different hermetic countercultures—microcultures, really, literally just tens or hundreds of people—abetted by the internet, in their separate ecosystems, few of which converse with each other, and which in their entirety are therefore both a) mostly illegible to outside analysis and resistent to an all-system view, and b) increasingly unlikely to make a play for a takeover of the mainstream, or even want to, or even think in those terms. (E.g., alt weeklies are gone, but good luck keeping up with the proliferation of online art or literature zines launched by individuals or cabals of 3-5 people.) In this sense, Gioia is correct—there is not a counterculture, or a handful of countercultures, with the coherence and thus the heft to form a bloc capable of exerting concerted influence or offering a respite from dominant tastemakers. So the mainstream sits and putrifies and stews in its own juices and talks to itself while infinite countercultures bubble below but don’t organically circulate upward. The mainstream only occasionally dips a ladle into one or the other of the subcultures in a desperate attempt to leech its cachet, but this rarely works like it used to and is widely seen as—cringe. In other words, an uncanny valley of culture. In other words, a broken conveyor belt. By its very amorphous nature this dynamic will be difficult to describe with precision, leading to the type of cultural criticism we see proliferating, in which writer after writer gestures at something real, a real sense of malaise and intellectual poverty at the commanding heights, without quite being able to put a finger on what exactly is happening or why. To poorly translate Hirschman, Gioia is describing the very real phenomenon in which (at least some factions of) the counterculturally-minded (the most energetic and creative cohorts) have abandoned Voice in existing cultural institutions, and Exited instead—becoming functionally invisible to those with eyes only to “see” mainstream institutions. But that does not mean non-existent. The open question is more along the lines of—do these latter-day Secessionists have the ability or the appetite to forge new institutions and associations, to create the Partisan Review or New Yorker or Nouvelle Vague of the 21st Century? Or is the very idea of elite but still broadly-relevant cultural institutions and movements is itself a long-irrelevant nostalgic artifact, like so many other things, of the unique social and technological configurations of the mid-to-late 20th Century?1
How zero-energy “fruit walls,” the precursors to greenhouses, were used to create warm microclimates capable of supporting fruit-growing in far northern countries.
The Jesuits’ complicated past in Haiti.
Has Google’s LaMDA artificial intelligence become sentient? (No.)
But the case reveals a lot about the assumptions at play at the bleeding edges of tech. Michael Sacasas digs in to Lemoine’s metaphysical commitments, and how they inform his view of sentience. Notably and unsurprisingly: “I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian.”
“I practice a lower, more bastard art, actually. I came at it from science. I was brought up with a scientific education, I’m not particularly well read. So what happened to me, I did some science, medical school, got interested in the scientific method. And I made what to me was a great discovery, it’s nothing new, it was discovered before that by Kierkegaard. Namely that science, the scientific method, cannot make a single statement about the individual man, insofar as he’s an individual. It can only describe a man insofar as he resembles other people. So science can say nothing whatever about the individual man. So it suddenly occured to me, how do you go about talking about the individual man? Finally I came to realize a novel could be approached as a very serious effort—an extension of science if you will—to explore the individual man, what I call the postmodern man. His perennial predicament—his historical predicament. And do it in a very serious way. My novels attempt to be an exploration of what it is to be a man in a particular time in a particular place.”
—Walker Percy in conversation with Eudora Welty on the Southern Imagination
Recent work.
Here’s some recent paintings I’ve done I haven’t shared here.
I also wrote about Roberto Rossellini’s vision of St. Francis.
The liturgical life.
Take it easy sirs and madams, and have a nice July.
As ever,
J
After all, before mass literacy and mass communications, both “culture” and “counterculture” were intra-elite projects, and “mass culture,” the analogue of our Marvel movies or top-40 radio, to the extent such a category existed (historians don’t kill me), was religious/ritualistic/liturgical/oral/folkloric in nature. And thus both localized and participatory, not top-down and spoon-fed. (The closest to this that has survived in America is in her music, specifically the vast open-source tradition of blues, Americana, and the Great American Songbook.) To the extent we are returning, by necessity, to grassroots microcultures, it is, I think, what James Poulos means when he says that “the digital retrieves the medieval”—the decentralized and participatory forms of online life are shattering the centralized mass culture production assembly lines and returning us to older patterns of sense-making embedded, strangely and often disorientingly, in new tools.
Milosz asserts that the defining feature of modern and postmodern art was the way in which it replaced religious expression—the vertical axis oriented toward God—and in the vaccuum instead set itself up as the highest arbiter of values—resulting in a cultural milieu organized around a horizontal axis of competition and progress. The ideal of “above” was swapped out for the ideal of “ahead.” What this meant in concrete terms was the cementing of artists and cultural elites as a new priestly class, not using art to serve God but to serve a self-referential if always shifting idol of Art itself. All of culture was then laid open, like an open city, to be fought over and claimed by the strongest factions; on the one hand by the “apolitical” purists, like the Symbolists, for whom, to butcher Auden, art makes nothing happen—at its furthest reaches doesn’t even relate to the created world at all but only concerns itself with pure syllable, pure color, and pure sound—; and those, on the other, who sought to wield art for one project of social transformation or another. (Those seeking some sort of synthesis of these views, like Milosz himself and others of his cohort, unwilling to assent to the unreason of materialism but, after the conflagrations of world wars and the apparently apocalyptic destiny of humanity, equally unable to take solace in art as nothing but an elite game, were self-aware enough to recognize their cultural isolation and their ultimate inability to produce answers to the searching questions they raised.)
On the level of mass culture, this led over time from a world that Milosz describes as one in which everyone spoke the same symbolic language—that being, of course, the mythology of the Church—which united the artist with the child, the peasant, the merchant, the doctor, the warrior, and the king in a single overarching sensorium—to one in which real culture became a sort of privileged realm, a secret gnostic discipline only wielded by an initiated elect, and defined by contempt for “the masses” and, especially, the bourgeoisie. If the masses consumed it at all, it was just that—passive consumption, as directed by their betters. Even better if they remained wholly ignorant of it. (That Marxism self-consciously tried to dam this river and return artistic agency to “the worker” does not imply its regimes were able to defy cultural gravity, which shifts on the order of centuries. Instead they mostly recreated the same dynamic in various inverted forms with various degrees of mendacity.)
One notable is irony is how this contempt for the masses has been a dominant feature not just of the 18th and 19th century salons and the poetes maudits but also of our own postwar mass culture, equally defined by gatekeepers and monolithic arbiters of taste centered in the geographic centers of cultural production. The age of mass literacy and education, ironically, has been one of increasing isolation and contempt of high art, often well-deserved, on the part of the masses, compared with a dark age in which lowly Italian dock workers recited Dante. McLuhan might note that an era of “mass culture” is well fitted above all for mass homogenization and mass propaganda. But I would just note that the trope of artists as avant-garde rebels battling against the conformist forces of the reactionary bourgeoisie—what Milosz calls “the basic quarrel between the bohemian and the philistine”—even if the agressive illiteracy and suffocating conformity of our bourgeoisie (me among them) creates understandable sympathy for the bohemians—is a contingent historical form, being so much the water we swim in that we can no longer see that it’s water at all. The tension, again, between art that seeks both an elite quality (indespensible) and one that derives its power from deep roots in a common culture is to me in this moment a fascinating but perhaps for now insoluble problem. (Cited from C. Milosz, The Witness of Poetry, 1984.)
I don’t see a lack of countercultures. If anything, there is a frightening multiplicity of them. Crypto. Qanon. The new puritans on the left. The new fascists on the right. Perhaps it’s easy to overlook them because their aesthetics are so cringey and their cultural production is so rapid and ephemeral that it’s hard to regard it as Art. But they can't be discounted any longer as mere microcultures. And they all possess that key ambition you mention: to take over the System.