God Rest Ye Merry, Loyal AGHS Readers
Event announcement + some year-end joy and good cheer.
It seems a bit silly to do a year end wrap with only a few months back to regular long form posting under my belt, but 2024 was the year I really started engaging with new writing on here, and as a friend of mine always says, you should never pass up a chance to compliment people who deserve it. So! An event announcement and some year-end miscellany, backslapping, and lists.
WYRD WORLD in LA December 23
Sometime in August or September, I had a dream, like a literal actual dream, that my friend and I were performing Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I reciting, him on improvisational accompaniment, as part of a holiday celebration. In our current 1970s redux, our newly intuitive and spiritual aeon, it’s more important than ever to listen to what your unconscious is telling you. So, we’re performing selections from the poem along with a few talented friends doing their own thing in Los Angeles on Monday, and we’re making it a Christmas party with drinks, lights, and song. I’ll have some period-appropriate books for sale as well. If you’re in the area, please please stop by and say hello! It’s the first literary event I’ve ever thrown, but hopefully not the last.
The Great Garden: My Year in the Invisible College
I didn’t study literature in college, nor did I go to grad school. As an obsession in my life, it lay largely dormant from the onset of adolescence to after I entered the workforce. This being the case, no one ever sat me down and made me read the canon. So when
announced he was expanding his weekly newsletter to include a series of weekly lectures on the great poets and novelists of the Romantic to the Modern era… reader, I obliterated that subscribe button1.
Normally, I’m too much of a magpie and too easily distracted to sit down and force myself to go through the Great Books if I’m not burning with an immediate desire to read them myself, and thus my knowledge is full of conspicuous gaps — the peril of the autodidact. But my problems were solved by giving myself the reward each week of John’s lectures and the promise of participating in their lively comment sections. It was like going to the gym: you find a program and you stick to it. Even when it can be boring, when you might not feel like it, if the podcast is dropping on Friday, that’s enough of a motivation to read another 20 pages of Middlemarch instead of doing other things. And the rewards, when you stick with it, are numerous. I realize I am making literature seem like a chore or some sort of virtuous self-improvement task, when in fact it offers intense aesthetic pleasure and is a major source of joy and meaning in my life. But the fact is, even if it’s worth it in the end, sometimes you need a little bit of a kick in the pants to get yourself to pick up flowery old Wordsworth or stumble through “Oxen of the Sun”.
And what a kick these lectures are: supreme entertainment, a dance of ideas, capacious, gossipy, and relistenable. Somehow they manage to synthesize trends and thoughts of the past and make their continued relevance obvious in a way that transcends clumsy “Shakespeare was the first rapper”-isms. When politics intrudes, it comes as daring and often challenging readings of works that are far from obvious or partisan, and throughout the lectures there is a pure pleasure in the act of speaking about (and reading aloud) novels and poetry2. A few years ago I got very into Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on classical music and John reminds me of no one so much as Lenny: erudite but straightforward, charismatic, exuberant, American.
The rewards of the Invisible College were not just aesthetic or educational. I am sensitive to the fact that there is an absurd surplus of writing online, most of it bad, so for a long time I was content to confine my thoughts to the comment section if I let them out at all. I do believe you should do the reading before you weigh in, and how could I have any right to speak on literature when I had never read Pride and Prejudice? When I had tapped out on Ulysses around when they put Paddy Dignam in the ground? I would be a phony, another bullshitter, a blatherer filling the world with words, words, useless words. Because I embarked on this journey, I started to feel, around the midpoint of the year, like I knew a little bit what I was talking about, and that gave me the self-confidence to start writing more and more, and a few of those turned into a commitment to put something out semi-weekly3. And now here we are.
So, to everyone reading this, consider it my highest recommendation, in this newsletter full of them, to take the eight dollars you would spend on two mediocre coffees and put it in John’s attempt to build a stronghold of thought and attention, a serious counterweight to the humanities-are-dead discourse and the denuded world of academia (and buy Major Arcana as well, it’s very good!). I hope he won’t take it as a backhanded compliment or an implication of potential wasted but rather as a tribute to his erudition and status as the social nexus of an emerging artistic sensibility when I call him the Ezra Pound of this little corner of Online.
Online writing I enjoyed this year:
Meaghan Garvey at
inhabits the America of Jim Jarmusch, Elvis, and David Lynch, of roadhouses, rail riders, sad country singers and barflies; a totally captivating writer who I have admired for many years. SCSG makes me want to sit in a bar with the snow falling softly outside and hear the sad stories of strangers.I can expound pretty well on matters of aesthetics and performance but I find I’m not nearly as good as I’d like to be at thinking through theological and political texts— I’m like a little baby, I’m always just kind of like “yeah, that sounds right.” So I always look forward to reading certified friend-of-the-blog
’s clear and penetrating writing on these matters, and I feel our areas of interest overlap in very productive ways. (Same with ’s writing on similar topics, though I am profoundly ignorant of Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch and that whole side of things).- ’s piece on the silver trade, Ming China, and the novel really baked my noodle and in general she is quite brilliant at illuminating fascinating longue-dureé movements in intellectual life. It reminds me of when I was a history major and I first read Braudel on the history of door heights and roof-thatching and so forth, only for books. Gives you hope for academia!
I salute the
— finally, a genuinely unpredictable Little Magazine (and an excellent new podcast too).The public intellectual inside baseball on
is also a favorite — nowhere will you find more genuine diversity with such a genial, curious host.I don’t even know why I like
so much — they’re often just short little collections of thoughts and impressions but they have such an undeniable joie de vivre they leave me smiling every time.I love
’s writing about food and the bohemian chef life, particularly I loved this acidic dispatch from London’s oldest restaurant which is a piece of social criticism that could have come from Waugh or Wilde. Also I made the trout gravlax and it was a big hit (and I learned to filet a whole raw fish in the process).Here’s where I praise some people that don’t really need my praise, but nevertheless: I don’t live in New York nor am I a big restaurant guy but I am an enthusiastic amateur chef and really enjoy Helen Rosner’s restaurant reviews in The New Yorker; they often give me good ideas for what to cook. In a similar vein I read through Valerie Stivers’ entire Paris Review Eat Your Words archive recently and came out with dozens of recipes and book recommendations, and she is the book critic worth reading at Compact as well. Lastly, though I find current events a pretty exhausting topic, I feel a strong moral core in
’s writing that is absent in most of the liberal intelligentsia (in general a low, dishonest profession). His public soul-searching on Israel/Palestine and his personal reflections on his family past and the Jewish diaspora I found particularly true and helpful in working out my feelings as a kinda-sorta-American Jew in a very strange and difficult moment for our people.
The peril of specifically mentioning people is that deserving others are left unmentioned; if I had a pleasant interaction with you, rest assured I probably read your work and enjoyed it. There are simply too many smart people around, it gives me hope for this thing of ours (reading, writing, and talking).
Here are all the books I read this year, if you’re curious:
Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and see you in 2025!
In the interest of avoiding accusations of puffery (the public writer’s temptation and vice), I should mention I had this whole thing written up well before John said some nice things about my writing in his last newsletter. My praise for the IC is of the utmost sincerity.
Also the IC introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Holy shit! Have you guys read Gerard Manley Hopkins?
Reading John’s work, both criticism and novel, has also taught me to take pride in my own writing and advocate for it. No more of this good-kid-in-class self-deprecation that is such an irritating habit of the elite classes. If you don’t think your work is better than the rest, why put it out there at all?
Truly honoured to be mentioned in such prestigious company! And all the best for your first literary event - it sounds great (since I'm on other side of the world, I'll have to be there only in spirit)
Wish I could come!