My current reading, the despised app, and Sunday fictions
Not in that order
Starting on June 29th, I’ll be releasing some serialized short stories.
I’m beginning with one that was published elsewhere last summer, and then I’ll follow up with an as-yet unpublished piece that I wrote alongside this first one. In between, I’ll keep releasing essays and reviews at a staggered pace, since fiction will be out every week, and I don’t want to flood inboxes too much.
This will probably continue until the beginning of Fall, but who can say. Part of what I like about Substack is that you can completely change your own publishing schedule (after developing it for months and months on end).
Speaking of Substack: I recently deleted the Substack app.
It’s annoying in the extreme.
The “notes”, the smugness, the embarrassing level of “discourse” (which Heidegger would derisively and correctly dismiss as Gerede) and which necessarily involves anyone who so much as looks at it... It’s bad.
I like Substack—the newsletter service—but if the app disappeared off the face of the earth, the world would be a slightly better place. It’s a shining parallel example of why I never had a Twitter. The idea that you can just make something in the exact same form as Twitter/X but just say that it’s good for “culture” has an amazing hold on people. It’s not “the home of culture”. It’s a social media app and it’s designed to do what social media does but with the added issue that every single person using it does so in a way that can’t be anything other than essentially deceitful. The content of much of the app says only one thing via infinite petty variations: please, please check out my Substack. I get it… It’s not the issue of the user but the entire purpose of the app itself.
Others have been far clearer and more incisive in their criticism of Substack and similar platforms. I’m thinking specifically of
, who wrote Against Platforms and writes , which I recommend if you’re interested in the dual-history of techno-utopianism and institutional decay, as well as What is to Be Done about the issue, if you know what I’m saying…Well, other than an intense ambivalence toward the very platform via which I am publishing this and some new pieces going out, what’s been going on with me…
I have recently been on the hunt for good weird fiction. I started out by reading the first volume of Three-Body Problem a couple weeks ago. Last year, I recall wanting to read it but getting sidetracked by a few other (far better) books. For all its glaring clunkiness, I enjoyed it. Kind of a summer/beach read. What got me through the book was the sense of approaching weirdness, although immediately into the second book, The Dark Forest, this sense completely vanishes.
I do not read science fiction very often, and this seems to be why: it is the genre of over-explanation. In this sense, it’s the very opposite of horror, which is based on the fundamentally uncanny character of anything being at all—rather than not being, or being (radically) otherwise. Science fiction seems to say “This at first might seem fundamentally uncanny, but do not worry: in the end, it’s something we can explain.” No matter that what passes for scientific “explanation”, in fiction just as much as in everyday life, is merely further description (this description itself functioning as a nearly hysterical retroactive explication/justification of method).
I set aside The Dark Forest after the first part, finding it increasingly ridiculous and devoid of any sense of wonder or strangeness. Then, I picked up something I hadn’t read for over a decade, Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature.
This is a great little book (and the cover of the Dover edition is genuinely unsettling). My opinion about sci-fi agrees with what Lovecraft says when critiquing Gothic fiction, which (almost) always had a natural explanation for the “ghost”. In a sense, all of this early horror fiction that couldn’t get itself away from showing the marionette-like guts of what was previously given as inexplicable or unnatural is merely a category error—or a category slip, more like. Bad Gothic romances, once they offer up naturalistic explanations, simply become sci-fi (or poor detective fiction).
After that, I considered going back and rereading some Arthur Machen but ended up landing on Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer. I’m reading the second book now, Authority, and so far VanderMeer is able to create, maintain and develop that sense of the weird and the eerie so rapidly extinguished in Three-Body Problem. And the prose is actually good, having a subtle sense of irony and depth that recalls Philip K. Dick.
I might say something more about these books later (Absolution, a “surprise” fourth book, came out last October), but for now I’m just really enjoying them.
At the risk of being slightly hypocritical—I was only just deriding Substack notes a moment ago—I figured I’d include a brief concluding update on one of my last notes. I’ll catch you up with a screenshot:
After looking all over for this edition of The Sea of Fertility with no luck, I found what I suspected might be one for sale online, but it didn’t have a seller image. It was only ten pounds (had to order it from the UK). When I looked up the ISBN, nothing promising came up.
Happy to report that I received the book in the mail. It’s an edition that I’ve never seen before and which I can’t seem to find any other copies of online. I’ll probably pick it up once I’m through with Authority before moving on to Acceptance.
The first part of “Some Things about Ficino” comes out on the 29th. In the meantime, this is what you can expect to see:
a short review of Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition by Glenn Alexander Magee (along with a Hegel reading list for paid subscribers)
an essay about the wonderful city of Philadelphia
an essay about Maxim Gorky, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy
another installment of Drifts (which’ll probably have to be paywalled)
Maybe I’ll fill in the next two Sundays with writing similar to today’s,
Thanks for reading,
Zane