Grand Podcast Abyss

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 Rossetti’...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 Dickens’s successful but tumultuous life, including his petit-bourgeois and downwa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 Browning’s theory that poetry historically cycles between objective and subje...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 Austen’s biography; her place in the history of the novel; her posthumous reception...

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: Byron’s brief and dramatic life; the long afterlife of his “Byronic hero” in high literature, popular culture...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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: Keats’s link with Shelley as poets-gone-too-soon, as Romantic classicists, and as lyricists of high polish; Keats...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 Shelley’s scandalous life and fluctuating posthumous reputation, free love and its discontents, the dil...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 Coleridge’s life and its inauguration of the poet as Satanic opium-smoking tormented outcast; his la...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit grandhotelabyss.substack.com 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 c...

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. It’s 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 wi...

Please join me for a conversation with poet, teacher, astrologer, Tarot reader, Substacker, Dantologist, and soon-to-be-novelist Emmalea Russo. We discuss her “poetic cancellation,” 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...

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. It’s dark, but please enjoy! PART TWO Chapter 3. | The High Pr...

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 woul...

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 Woul...

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...

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, T...

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 ? P...

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. Jo...

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...

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 poet...

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.”...

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 Or...

Right and left Hegelians. 1989 and the global triumph of liberalism. Science and the satisfaction of creaturely desires. Gorbachev in the Pizza Hut. For and against the consumer society. Taking modernist fascism seriously. Plato and the three-part soul. The importance of thymos . Hegel and Alexandre Kojève. Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave at the beginning of history. Left and right cri...

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 n...