Excellent lecture as always; more importantly I had an absolute blast reading Invisible Man for this for the first time since age 16 (really for the first time at all, since when I was 16 I had a lot of things on my mind more important than my reading assignments).

Sometimes you just have to state the obvious, so I’ll do it: Invisible Man is crazy good. Absolutely goated. It’s in the special category of classics that have not lost a single step and feel like a ball of lightning in your hands. Reading it feels like getting repeatedly smacked in the face with a 2x4 while Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers Live at the Cafe Bohemia Volume 2 is playing at earsplitting volume, but in a good way.

John admires the book but has slightly more reservations than I— one of the best parts of following this project has been discovering where our tastes differ, making my own canon. Anyone who has read my work will know of my admiration for this sort of jazzy midcentury picaresque, whether Herzog or Gravity’s Rainbow or Invisible Man. I just can’t get enough of it, it’s everything good about novels to me. Meanwhile it’s been just as instructive to know what parts of the canon I admire but don’t exactly light me on fire. Like I admire and respect the last two subjects, Faulkner and Djuna Barnes, but I don’t fiercely LOVE them the way I love Ellison or Melville or Joyce (I reserve the right to change my mind ofc, I have before).

I think perhaps a lot of it has to do with music. Like Ellison, before I was a literature head I was a deep and serious music fan (though a very bad musician, hopefully a better writer). And there’s a kind of writing that is just, for lack of a better world, very musical and rhythmic. And there’s a kind of writing that is very lush and sensuous but lacks a certain swing, a certain backbeat, at least in my aesthetic program. Anyway, point is both the books I love in these lectures and the books I didn’t love have been equally fruitful, and you should go throw John eight bucks a month if you aren’t already doing so.