Notes from the Delinquent Underground #3
Exogenesis by Peco Gaskovski; The Reenchantment of the World by John Carter; and Dry September by William Faulkner
My Dad reading me Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy by Lynley Dodd, a New Zealand classic
Notes from the Delinquent Underground* is a series I post the last week of the month, every month. I share updates and discuss what may happen in the future at The Delinquent Academic, and share links to books and articles accompanied by short reviews. In the future, I may end up splitting the updates and the reviews into separate posts - especially as both the updates and the reviews are getting longer …
(*I’ve changed the name of this series from Delinquent Links, which I never liked).
Here’s Notes from the Delinquent Underground #1 and #2.
… 100% Updated
I had planned to post one non-fiction piece and one fiction piece; but I ended up just posting two non-fiction pieces. The first was a short reflection on how the boomer-driven ‘mastering one thing’ ideal is becoming dangerous in the volatile and insecure world we live in, and instead we should become skilled at many things in order to survive:
The second was a longer, narrative driven attempt at persuading art-lovers to become Micropatrons by supporting burgeoning artists outside the mainstream, collectively called the Microculture. I argue that if we don’t, the CEO techbros amongst other things, with replace independent artists with AI, as is currently happening at Spotify:
I almost forgot - I also went on a podcast! A little while ago, my friend Victor who studies in my Social Psychology lab, asked me if I wanted to review some TV shows and films in his new show. “Fuckin’ aye!” Was my answer. Both of us have no idea what we’re doing - but big ups to Victor for not only setting everything up, but getting out there and giving something new a try. In the show, we discuss the opening episode of Victor’s favourite TV shows, POWER, and of course, DUNE: PART II:
…
Because of the time difference between everywhere else and New Zealand, something interesting has been happening where I’ve woken up with a few notifications on the app - likes and comments from readers on my work. One of my desires in creating this Substack was not only in sharing my Delinquent views on the world, but helping facilitate a community and network of independent, passionate thinkers that will discuss a variety of fascinating and important topics. Every comment I can respond to and like I see thrills me; because, wherever you may be, whatever your life is like, whatever kind of paths you’ve tread; we are connecting about an issue that moves us both.
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July and Beyond
Next month, I will post one narrative driven non-fiction post, and either the short story that I had planned to do this month in June, or the beginning of a short serial. My next review series with be entirely composed of Substack fiction; something I’ve seen others do, like the
, when they reviewed Substack fantasy. My next PhD update might come next month, but I’m still awaiting ethics … and I’ll need to write up results and methodology (graphs, bro, graphs), so more realistically, the month after. For the podcast, we’ve filmed episode two already, which reviews the rest of season 1 of POWER; that’s coming soon. And finally, I have a secret project I’m working on that you may see next month but most likely the month after.Anyway, here’s my reviews of what I’ve been reading.
Chur.
Notes from the Delinquent Underground #3
My picks for the month are EXOGENESIS by Peco Gaskovski; THE REENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD by John Carter; and DRY SEPTEMBER by William Faulkner.
For the two fiction pieces, I will NOT spoil it for you, unlike in the past. So don’t worry.
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EXOGENESIS by Peco Gaskovski
Exogenesis is a dystopian novel set about 200 years in the future, in and around the city of Lantua, which is the capital of a wider technocratic classist society, built in the wreckage of post United States and Canada in Northern America. It is a moving meditation on what it means to human, but more specifically - and I didn’t expect this when I bought the book - a moving meditation of what it means to be female.
The narrative centers around a technology called Exogenesis, that allows a man and a woman to generate hundreds of tiny fetuses, grown externally in bags, and then choose the one they believe is best. Beside from that small difference to how we currently live, there’s the fact that children are raised together in care homes …
This all happens in Lantua, the technocratic state, but is contrasted with the Benedites, a religious and cultish group of anti-technology traditionalists that live in the Northern provinces in the woods and hills. They reject Exogenesis, and desire to live in God’s image, which of course includes giving birth to babies and raising them in the traditional Western way.
The central conflicts of the novel stem from the characters from both of these two lands. The main character, Maelin, is a woman from Lantua, and is a special kind of military therapist called a counselor that actually does very little therapy. Instead, she protocols - sterilises Benedite girls and young woman, so they stop having babies. The Lantuans are especially afraid of these religious nuts outnumbering them in future generations.
The novel twists and turns, mostly in delightful ways; though I was quite dissatisfied with how the third act was dealt with. Up till then, I was kept intrigued - and although not a thriller - excited about slowly moving this way and that with the story. The third act felt substandard to the rest; mishandled and forced, resulting in a finish that I felt deserved more. On the blurb it says there is ‘hope’ in the story. That is misleading. There is, but it is minuscule. To be clear, this is a dystopian story and not a triumph of good over evil - although I wouldn’t call it technically a tragedy either. … So maybe someone could argue against me.
Anyway, as a dystopian novel, it was also masterful in places. No one character can be easily placed into simple ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories. They are all real and multi-dimensional, beside from one ‘sociopathic’ teenage girl that felt contrived. I was most impressed, probably, with the world. It was so real and believable; immersive. The characters reflected that world - and it seemed like they would have created it in the past too. I can’t remember a time being this convinced about a possible future.
The style was literary in places, though not experimental. I was reminded of Kazou Ishiguro. Such simple and authentic sensitivity. Yes, it doesn’t grab ahold of you and keep you thrilled; but it puts you in a warm bath and hums a soothing song. The only negative with the prose was a bit of over-writing. I felt plenty of explanation needn’t be there; and the thoughts of the main character sometimes got a bit much (yes, I get it, she’s sad - you don’t need to keep saying it).
Although there are many beautiful parts to this book, the thing that moved me most, was what I said earlier - the meditation on being female. Though this is far from my area of fictional interest - I cannot remember reading or watching something that deals with the subject of pregnancy and motherhood so deeply and authentically. Yes, I never liked the main character - I thought she was a bitch all the way through - but the tribulations were real; her motivations, emotions, and reactions to the theme of motherhood seeming as true as an author could deliver. It makes all the amazing that the author was a male, Peco Gaskovski, who writes one of my favourite Substacks along with his wife, Ruth.
I recommend.
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THE REENCHANTMENT OF THE WORLD by John Carter
Bruh, it looks like I’m linking you an article … but I’m telling you now, it’s closer to a small book (it even has a contents page!) Take note, this took me a couple of hours to read - though I am a slow reader, and often reread things.
The Reenchantment of the World is a long, brilliant, and quite obviously a bit autistic investigation into the political, religious, and mythological underpinnings of our current time. The author’s words summarise it best:
Modestly enough, it describes, or attempts to describe, a way out of the spiritual desert in which our society has wandered since the Enlightenment, without simply rejecting the Enlightenment wholesale in a quixotic attempt to restore the cultural operating system to the last working version (which led to the Enlightenment in the first place). It is a survey of where we are, how we got here, what is already happening, and what therefore may happen in our culture next. It is meant not as a program of action but as incitement: to look at the world with both of your eyes, and both of your minds; to do what you are already doing, but more consciously and deliberately.
The way
writes, his incisive and often funny phraseology inside a narrative that - intriguingly - feels like one is being drawn through a dimly-lit cave system, combined with his incredible and esoteric insights - makes this one of the most original and awesome things I’ve ever read. And to be perfectly honest, the combination of its theoretical depth and bloody length, means I’ll just preview some chapters; inviting you to dive in and experience his work yourself.Carter, like myself, believes the atheism causing our current malaise is the result of the left hemisphere of the brain overpowering the right hemisphere in culture. For the left hemisphere, analytical, function, and survival based, “God is simply an irrelevant hypothesis”. For the right hemisphere, that takes “in reality in all its simultaneity, immediacy, and synchronicity”, it is instead the default hypothesis.
As Carter notes, this is Iain McGilchrist’s idea, and I have touched on it in my piece How to be a Micropatron, when I discuss function (left-brain) versus beauty (right-brain).
Carter says that scientists, without a holistic moral order to follow, have inevitably degenerated. Not only is this expressed in winning over truth - the competition of bullshit citation status games and complete unadulterated scientific fraud - but in what we see all around us; the ugly vomit of steel and concrete in our cities.
The other day, I showed my girlfriend, who lives in nearby town, around the small city I live in, Dunedin. Though New Zealand is not known for its architecture, far from it, Dunedin as the oldest city in New Zealand, has many beautiful Neo-Gothic buildings that the English, Scottish, and Irish settlers constructed over 150 years ago. Now, sadly, you find these squished between monolithic concrete stacks of idiocy that seem to have been designed by an 11 year-old in the first edition of CAD - with one hand behind his back. In fact, that’s wrong, because a child is by definition more attuned to wholesome beauty - that’s why they find fantasy stories so delightful. Instead, it is better to describe these buildings as ‘low openness perversions’, engineered by the same tasteless geeks that now rule our world - the CEO techbros.
Carter goes on, to suggest our sickness of the soul is also expressed in our refusal to have children. An alien race descending upon Earth may scratch their heads - wherever they are on their body - at why those seemingly at the pinnacle of human achievement, have decided to stop doing the most important thing a biological organism can do - reproduce. He then critiques new ‘designer religions’ that are attempting to fix this problem, like Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires.
After discussing the potential pitfalls of returning to a religion dominated society - a problem I think about a lot, Carter describes ‘The Church of Woke’, a designer religion constructed with ludicrous ideas so those in power stay in power:
… the goal of the Davos men is retaining social cohesion, with themselves remaining at the top of the pile. Their Church of Woke is the secular faith of progress in the name of social justice conceptualized as liberation from all unchosen bonds of birth and biology, all watched over by the purity spiraling judgement of the eschatological Eye at the End of Time. Pride parades are its festivals; the succession of Days of Remembrance and Days of Celebration its liturgical calendar; the prismatic pennant of pederasty its sacred banner; transsexuals, its monastic flagellants; bottom surgery, its mortification of the flesh; the Climate, its Earth Mother; the enslavement of Africans, its Original Sin9; Civil Rights, its Exodus; the Holocaust, its Passion; the Austrian painter, its devil; The Science, its scripture.
Carter does not believe the The Church of Woke will inherit the wreckage that is Christianity, because of its superficiality and therefore utter inability to address every human’s subsistent psychic energy. It cannot solve the “problem of meaning in a meaningless, disenchanted world.”
As a way out on the individual and community level, he suggests finding your own decentralised religion or cult - whatever it may be - or simply devising your own personal one that offers meaning and purpose (the latter is something I do in the mentorship of my father). Though, Carter warns, fragmented transcendence can never be the solution to the central problem - the impending collapse of the wider spiritual society; our fast-approaching Dark Age.
But he wonders if the Dark Age is necessary for Rebirth:
Perhaps our civilization must decompose through a process of demographic collapse and dysgenic decay, the competency crisis breaking down our fragile complex systems of distribution, manufacturing, and communications, until all that is left is a scatter of agrarian communes whose grimy, slope-browed subsistence farmers keep a nervous distance from the hills of haunted, vine-choked concrete left behind by a fabled race of sorcerers, men who summoned demons into sand and taught it to speak, who held obsidian mirrors in their hands with which they could view every corner of the world, who soared inside the bellies of birds drawn out of the marrow of the bones of the Earth, shining beasts which drank the blood of dragons, and laid eggs that hatched devils bred in the heart of the Sun.
Though, even if this is necessary, rebirth implies death again; a cycle, and repetition of what we have just seen: “a progression from the naive dreamscape of barbarism into the naive dogma of civilization, whose brittle certainty in its native religion will once again shatter under the spreading cracks of skepticism.”
Carter wonders if we needn’t enter another Dark Age, “because we are already in one.”
That’s all I’m going to summarise, I’ve previewed about half of it. There’s so much interesting depth I’ve had to leave out. Reading John Carter has introduced me to many new ideas my New Zealand brain will meditate on as I walk up mountains and through forests and simple towns that populate our landscape.
Now, because of his use of metaphor, double-meaning, and other literary devices, combined with my mythological and religious knowledge being minimal, may have meant there was plenty in this I might, as I later learn, disagree with. However, those ideas I have highlighted, at the very least, I find as plausible hypotheses.
Overall, it is one of the most interesting and fascinating things I’ve read in a very long time. I hope what I’ve summarised doesn’t do his work an injustice. And funnily enough, Exogenesis could be one possible future Dark Age John Carter is predicting.
Anyway, I recommend.
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DRY SEMPTEMBER by William Faulkner
Ganapathy Kumar
I was going to review Exhalation by Ted Chiang, a science fiction short story instead, but … it confused the hell outta me, and I think I’ll have to read it again .. this time in the morning with strong coffee and a sleep behind me, not half dead in my bed, my eyes like trench sockets.
Dry September is a short story published in 1931 by William Faulkner, an author I am thoroughly unfamiliar with, I’m sorry to say. I came across it in a short story collection my parents gave me. Because it is very short, I won’t say too much.
Like is usual when reading authors of the past, especially literary minded authors, and especially one who uses long, long sentences and dictionary worthy words like Faulkner (in fact, he had a famous spat with Hemingway about how the latter “has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary”), I felt I had to adjust my brain to the style of writing from another time. Here’s the first paragraph:
Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of sixty-two rainless days, it had gone like a fire in dry grass - the rumor, the story, whatever it was. Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro. Attacked, insulted, frightened: none of them, gathered in the barber shop on that Saturday evening where the ceiling fan stirred, without freshening it, the vitiated air, sending back upon them, in recurrent surges of stale pomade and lotion, their own stale breath and odors, knew exactly what had happened.
After rereading the first page a couple of times, and sinking into the man’s prose, as one often does with fiction, I found it incredibly compelling. Faulkner uses imagery, sounds, and smells to mirror the rising emotion of his scenes, and the general feeling around the small, desert laden, American town.
The characters and their environments are incredibly dynamic and vibrant; and the way he shows the reader what viciousness and brutality is, by what he describes and importantly, what he doesn’t, is masterful.
Like is often said with art, if it stays, if it lingers in one’s mind, even if one can’t articulate why - in fact perhaps it’s better if one cannot articulate why because it suggests deep abstraction - then there’s something fundamentally true about the human condition in what you’ve just watched, read, or listened to. The morning after reading Dry September, I woke from a dream state of the last scene, disturbed the animalistic instincts of the antagonist. Here was a sign Faulkner was onto something; and something deeper than the simple and superficial theme of ‘racism’ many probably describe this story as aiming at.
I recommend.
Thank you all for reading.
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Chur, and have a good day and night,
The Delinquent Academic
Good morning! Sending you a wake-up comment to say how much I enjoyed this. I do like Faulkner, including his prose style, and can't stand Hemingway. Nice write up on the other two items also. Gotta look them up sometime if I ever get a moment to read stuff other than what's here on Substack. I was an avid reader in my younger years but now focus on writing. Best wishes with the PhD pursuit.
I'm happy you'll be reviewing Substack fiction, I've plans to do that regularly from now on, but am very glad to see another picking up the cross so to speak. And John's article was brilliant if I may say so, I quite liked it also.