Jon

@thelitcritguy

writer. phd in gothic literature. writing on horror, utopia, the gothic nightmare of capitalism CAPITALISM A HORROR STORY out now, working on a new book about HOUSES

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Jon@thelitcritguy· 19d

Yeah, same.

Jon@thelitcritguy· 20d

Pictured, Hegelianism

Jon@thelitcritguy· 20d

I hate to say it, but... yeah same.

As Hegel's spirits improved in Bamburg, he pursued his passion for good eating and drinking; in his layers, he spoke of how good the Bamburg beer was and even grumbled a bit about how he feared the newly introduced Bavarian regulations might come to hurt the quality of that excellent local beer. (He also made references to drinking excellent wine, a taste that had been with him since his Frankfurt days). He asked Niethammer to procure a special "Rumford Coffee maker" from Munich for him - Hegel was an avid coffee drinker - and a few months later was joking to Niethammer (in a manner still recognizable among contemporary academics) about "how much my scientific activity is indebted to this coffee"

Jon@thelitcritguy· 23d

52. Graham McNeil, "Vengeful Spirit" - plot! Honest to God plot has arrived! An antagonist taking action! It's only taken 30 books!!

Jon@thelitcritguy· 25d

51. Terry Pinkard, "Hegel: A Biography" - Exhaustive, comprehensive but surprisingly very accessible (for the most part). Fluently places Hegel's philosophical development in the context of both European political and cultural changes and his own complex networks of relationships. Indispensible.

Jon@thelitcritguy· 29d

Neither Horus or the Emperor but galactic communism instead.

The Khan bowed his head.

All emperors are liars.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jul 12

50. Chris Wraight, "Scars a legion divided" - finally an interesting novel about a loyalist legion and Primarch. As outsiders, mistrusted by all, their ambiguities make a great deal of sense and add some much needed texture to the moral and emotional tone of the wider setting.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jul 12

49. Dan Abnett, "The Unremembered Empire' -- very good on its own terms but a novel that acts as a nexus point for at least a dozen earlier threads and plot beats and manages to extend them all coherently which makes it logistically rather impressive.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jul 5

48. Nick Kyne, "Vulkan Lives" - flashes of interest here but another case of taking an interesting character and not really knowing what to do with them in a narrative form which isn't "lore."

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jul 5

47. Deena Helm, "Our Cut of Salt" - a very impressive gothic debut, a novel exploring the haunting of property and occupation in Palestine. A longer review is forthcoming but a book I think everyone needs to read.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jul 2

This is maybe my favorite horror novel of the year so far.

For Arnault, money is something to be hoarded, to be counted and accounted for—in this, he’s perfectly in keeping with the classic representations of the Vampire, resting in their coffin full of gold. But the dramatic tension of Arnault’s relationship with the vampire siblings is that he is a vampire that is always-already nostalgic. At heart, Arnault is a crypt-dweller being left behind by the shifts underway in the mode of production. In contrast, money for Victor and Françoise is not to be hoarded but is to be put to work: a liquid, endlessly fungible tool for extraction and the satiation of desire. There’s a telling scene in which Arnault accompanies Victor and Françoise to one of Paris’s new department stores (an homage to Zola again—this time, The Ladies Paradise) and finds himself bewildered by the sheer quantity of commodities available in the same place and at such scale. Ultimately, the red sacrament of the title isn’t simply blood as human essence or life force but blood as the flowing operation of capitalism itself—its profits, its necessary casualties and its costs.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 28

back at it.

Part Three: Kierkegaard on Calth: Existential Crisis and the Problem of the Political

I am at present just about to start Book 26 in The Horus Heresy. At this point - still quite some distance from halfway through, I’m having a variety of emotional responses to each book.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 27

And yet....

Screenshot showing I bought Warhammer 40k: Rogue Trader on steam

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 27

46. Laurie Goulding (Ed) "Mark of Calth" -- another compendium and mostly a mixed bag though the Abnett short story is good. God there are still so many to go and I'm honestly struggling to find new things to say at this point.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 25

Thank you to comrades in Spain for telling me that Capitalism A Horror Story was part of Lucía Lijtmaer's culture show on national radio 😱 I love that book - a ghost that keeps appearing in the most unexpected of locations 👻

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 25

My newest piece for Current Affairs is out and I think this description of cognitive mapping helps illustrate why I think the film is so interesting. 🤔

The great Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson once argued that capitalism produces spaces so vast, abstract, and systemically interconnected that individuals can no longer form what he called a “cognitive map” of the world they inhabit. We try to make sense of our present condition by situating ourselves within it, but the world in which we exist is marked by constant change, globalization, and the erosion of all traditional structures, leading to an existential and political sense of dislocation. This mapping is not simply about navigating a changing world, but allows for both the exercise of agency and the development of politics. After all, in previous generations we might find the world easier to navigate, or make sense of—you might live in a particular community, shop at the store you could afford to go to, and work in a specific location.

So a good example to understand the importance of cognitive mapping can be through the simple question: where do you work? In an era of gig-economy employment, insecure housing, and a 24/7 “just in time” economy, the answer to that question for many of us might as well be, everywhere and nowhere. So many of us are just like Clark, living and working in the same place—a place which isn’t really suited to either of those things. In the era of Slack and Microsoft Teams, work doesn’t stay “at work,” but follows us wherever we go. For Jameson, culture and art that was conducive to cognitive mapping was an essential part of any socialist or leftist politics, because it allows people to collectively grasp the truth of their political, economic and social situation. As he put it in his famous book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism: “‘Cognitive mapping’ was nothing but a code word for ‘class consciousness.’” In other words, you can’t participate in a class struggle if you can’t even see the dimensions of the battlefield.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 23

45. Aaron Dembski-Bowden, "Betrayer" - honestly this is a banger on a level that matches and even surpasses the very good book on Lorgar. Dembski-Bowden seems to specialize in adding pathos and real emotional resonance to characters that in lesser hands would be cliche, stock and uninteresting.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 20

Yeah it's interesting

Modern horror is always a revelation about the world that produced it, but few of our contemporary myths feel as precisely calibrated to the present moment as the Backrooms. The Backrooms are not a haunted house, nor an abandoned ruin, a cursed forest, or any of the traditional thresholds through which the uncanny once entered human life. Instead, they are a vision of horror stripped of enchantment: an endless, fluorescent purgatory assembled from the leftover materials of late capitalism. In the Backrooms, the mystery is not supernatural but rather infrastructural, a place where the hidden architecture of modern life from its storage spaces to industrial offices swallow the individual whole. It is a nightmare born from the aesthetics of contemporary capitalism’s logistics, a world in which even our terrors have been flattened into endlessly repeatable, industrial modularity.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 20

Now watching

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 19

44. Graham McNeil, "Angel Exterminatus" - a McNeil book! Fulgrim is back! A huge relief! The plot is honestly complete nonsense if you look at it for more than five seconds but the characters, body horror and emotional melodrama carry the whole thing.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 17

Utopia is real, and you can find it in Shakespeare & Co in Paris 🎉🎉

My book, a primer on utopian philosophy on the shelves of Shakespeare & Co. in Paris

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 15

43. Christian Dunn and Nick Kyne (Ed.) "Shadows of Treachery" another compendium and probably the best in terms of the writing quality thus far with authors investing characters with some clear emotional angst but god over 20 novels in this is starting to feel very much padded out.

Christian Dunn and Nick Kyne "Shadows of Treachery"

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 14

The first in-person meeting of the Hegelian Heresy Research Group in Amsterdam counts as a tremendous success @laboringleon.bsky.social

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 12

42. James Swallow "Fear to Tread" - frankly, a complete slog to get through - Sanguinius stop aura farming for two seconds challenge (impossible). A very exciting premise completely squandered with boring action and some of the worst dialogue in all the books so far.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 7

41. Graham Greene, "The Quiet American" - something of a counter part to "England Made Me" -- a novel scathing about American exceptionalism, the paternalistic imperialism of the USA and the trail of bodies that follow all bright eyed Americans in Asia. What a book!

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 7

40. Christian Dunn (Ed.) "The Primarchs" - god there are still so many of these to go. Honestly, I've read so many of these I'm finding it hard to say if this one is good or not, but this collection of four novellas are functionally effective which I guess what more can we ask for at this point.

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 5

getting back into warhammer research

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 4

I also read Dan Abnett's afterword to the novel and yeah I think we can say the novel is a success

Oh, and it was great to make the previously rather square and un-hip loyalists (by comparison with the über-cool badass traitors) look great for a change. I mean, Guilliman punches a Space Marine’s head clean off… in space… without a helmet on… in space… holding his breath… clean off… one punch… I mean, come on!

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 4

39. Dan Abnett, Know No Fear - a step up from the last novel and a good example of how to do war writing. Relentlessly present tense and all well choreographed but lacking the usual character work (I don't know maybe I just find ultramarines a little dull)

Jon@thelitcritguy· Jun 1

I'm writing about Obsession.