Happy Christmas friends and comrades. Taking some inspiration from xenogothic, whose blog and wider intellectual work I’ve deeply admired for years now, I thought it would be interesting to try and wrap up the year and collate all of the writing I’ve managed to publish this year. Much of the year I spent wracked with what is no doubt a very familiar feeling for anyone who writes, namely that I wasn’t writing enough but collecting everything has been a good reminder, if only for myself that even in moments where writing seems hard, distant or simply insufficient it was still possible. Much of what’s linked below is scattered across a plethora of different platforms and if I have any aims for the next 12 months I think I want to consolidate and condense where I’m writing, and spend more time doing it.
Much of the later half of the year was taken up with recording a frankly ridiculously long podcast episode (for the love of God, please listen) and much of the first half of the year was taken up with reading The Magic Mountain. The space in between was taken up with finishing a book proposal, which is now in the stage of refining, editing and polishing ideas and themes into something coherent for a publisher. In a way, looking back at this year is a useful exercise in as much as writing is always a reckoning with one’s own failures — this isn’t a bid for sympathy and a more banal point that writing is about the transformation of the possible into the actual and the concrete, ergo it has to contend with the inevitable gap between the idea and its realization. What gets thought of is always far more promising than that which has to be laboriously brought into being. However, something I’ve been thinking about towards the end of the year is the value of friction in the act of trying to create something — in an era where generative AI and LLMs promise a frictionless act of production (I won’t dignify their output as creative) there is something to be said for the struggle, the insufficiency and the visible traces of process that the links below constitute. If nothing else, a record of the friction of thought is something to celebrate.
The range of topics covered move from the early part of the year, where I wanted to originally write something more personal – inspired by Kate Wagner’s excellent essays on Wagner — but I can’t help but feel I fell short, lapsing back onto the familiar and safer ground of an exegesis of Lukacs, Jameson and the problem of realism. However, just a few days ago I read Brandon Taylor’s newest and very Lukacsian novel Minor Black Figures –a novel that moved me very much and one I’ll almost certainly write about in the next few months. It seems this year has brought me back to Lukacs in a way that I could never have predicted after Capitalism: A Horror Story. That book was also translated into another language this year which is a good reminder to please continue the boycott against the English language publishers. I also wrote about haunted houses a lot, and this is a series I’ll be continuing as much as I can through the coming year, and expanding it out to be more about the properties of property. I gave a couple of talks I’m quite proud of: one at the ACLA which went very well, on the political character of body horror, and the second was a kind of coda to my work on Bloch from 2024. I’d love to do more talks in ‘26 so if you, or your organization needs a talk, please do get in touch. And finally, the last link on this list represents my final piece of “academic publishing” some three years after leaving academia proper. There is still some grief on that front, but if there is one thing this year hasn’t been short of, it’s been its own reasons for grief.
Here’s to the future and more ghostly thoughts from the haunt.
Some of the links below are paywalled over at patreon.com/thelitcritguy – if you’d like to read them, and an archive which goes back a decade now, you can do so for just $1.
Film:
The Democratic Modernism of Peter Watkins
The Haunted House on Film Part 1
The Haunted House on Film Part 2
The Haunted House on Film Part 3
The Haunted House on Film Part 4
Literature:
On the new translation of “Capitalism A Horror Story”
Climbing Stories: A Series on Der Zauberberg
Climbing Stories II: The Problem of Realism
Climbing Stories III: Time and Death Atop the Mountain
Climbing Stories IV: The Descent and the Problem of Existence
Video Games:
WIP: Control and The Horror of Bureaucracy
The Rig is the Monster: Still Wakes The Deep and the Horror of Extraction
Philosophy:
On Gallerte: The Political Character of Body Horror
How Pure is Your Hate: A Review of “Capitalism Hates You”
Pop Culture
Publications:
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