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 new progressive racism?

Watchmen. Favorite characters. Alan Moore as stylist. Superhero comics. Watchmen and Don Quixote. Form and genre: Understanding Comics, understanding superheroes. Watchmen as American literature. Rorschach as hero. Necessity of perversion and extremism. Watchmen as the Bible of people who "go hard." Is there any defense of the Comedian? Watchmen's relevance to the war in Ukraine and renewed nuclear tensions. A debate about the merits of the American empire. Moore as closet conservative. The ambiguity of Ozymandias: ideological, ethnic, scientific, economic. The meaning (and pronunciation) of the vagina dentata. Gender in Moore's oeuvre. Allusions and epigraphs. A guest appearance from Sam's brother.

Erratum: General Pinochet was the dictator of Chile, not Argentina.

Ukraine. A political autobiography. Democracy and empire. Conviction and ambivalence. Ideological ferment: neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and MAGA. Individualism and collective identity in Milan Kundera, Toni Morrison, and Alexandr Dugin. Liberal nationalism. The trouble with land acknowledgments. Getting liberalism's story straight.

Note: my post about Kundera, Morrison, and Dugin.

Henry James. "The Art of the Novel." Romance vs. novel. Experience is everything. The necessity of cultural appropriation. Making love to the language. Free indirect discourse. Graduate school. Age-appropriate novels. The Bostonians. Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow fighting over Taylor Lorenz. The Ambassadors. The eroticism of difficult prose. "Live all you can." Henry James at the end of history. The 1990s as a Jamesian decade. A dramatic reading from John Pistelli's end-of-history '90s novel, The Class of 2000.

Note: my essay on James's Ambassadors.

Notes: My essay on William James.

General hilarity. Sidney Morgenbesser, Mencius Moldbug, Judith Butler. Nietzsche. Limits of thought. Cheapness of paradox. How to write. Hannah Arendt contra contemporary liberalism. More Mailer. Failures of the left. Charlie Hebdo.

Notes: my essays on Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer | my Tumblr post on why writing should difficult | Rebecca Panovka on Arendt

Literary mixes. The title explained. Georg Lukács. Are we leftists? How do we know each other? Don DeLillo, Iris Murdoch. Novels in general. Soundscapes.