No Right, No Wrong, Simply a Process, a Wheel Turning

Brady Brickner-Wood — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:38:40 GMT

For this week’s column, I wrote about the Graham Platner fallout—you can read it here, at The New Yorker.

There’s a profoundly tragic quality to Platner’s eleven-month stint in politics, one I know a lot of people in Maine, like me, are struggling to comprehend and come to terms with. To have believed in Platner was to believe in a set of principles and policy ideals that infused life and hope and light into an otherwise dreadfully bleak time in American politics. For it to have ended this way feels particularly cruel. I tried to write a bit about why the heartbreak stings a little worse on this one.

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, I’ve been reading Doris Lessing’s terrific 1962 novel The Golden Notebook. Below is a passage I thought captured the helplessness of falling in love with any political upstart or movement, and the encroaching cynicism that builds after becoming wise to the cyclical patterns of corruption and disenchantment—how revolutionaries become bureaucrats before the revolution can even begin. John Butte, who Anna Wulf, the novel’s protagonist, refers to in this passage, is a senior official in the British Communist party. He was once considered brilliant, a passionate public speaker and a wily intellect who wrote a well-received novel about the French Revolution. The man Anna knows now, however, is a crusty establishment blowhard, someone who’s had every meaningful idea sucked out of him.

No, there’s a group of hardened, fossilised men opposed by fresh young revolutionaries as John Butte once was, forming between them a whole, a balance. And then a group of fossilised hardened men like John Butte, opposed by a group of fresh and lively-minded and critical people. But the core of deadness, of dry thought, could not exist without lively shoots of fresh life, to be turned so fast, in their turn, into dead sapless wood. In other words, I, ‘Comrade Anna’—and the ironical tone of Comrade Butte’s voice now frightens me when I remember it—keep Comrade Butte in existence, feed him, and in due course will become him. And as I think this, that there is no right, no wrong, simply a process, a wheel turning, I become frightened, because everything in me cries out against such a view of life, and I am back inside a nightmare which it seems I’ve been locked in for years, whenever I’m off guard.

There is a new Hatchback song in the world and it’s called “help.” I really love it. You can listen to it here.

I recently picked up a great record at Moody Lords Vinyl/Vintage, in Portland—a 2009 reissue of music recorded at Double U Sound, a DIY recording studio in suburban Detroit that was active from around 1967 to 1981. The studio allowed local and amateur musicians to try their hand at professional recording, and the results are wonderful, enlivening, frequently exceptional. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Til next time—

Brady

Novels, Novels, Novels

Brady Brickner-Wood — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:30:35 GMT

Hi—

Thanks for being an early subscriber to my newsletter, which I’m planning to use sparingly. I’ll share my published writing and offer some occasional reading and music recommendations. Occasional and swift, I swear.

I’ll be writing the Infinite Scroll column at The New Yorker this summer, and my first piece is out today, which you can read here. It’s about the novel always being both alive and dead, literary fiction, Don DeLillo smoking cigs and staring out the window, modern book publishing, the new literary criticism fomenting on social media, and what we want when we read books.

^{Illustration by Ariel Davis}

I’m a hundred pages into Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and am quite moved. I really loved this Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Harper’s essay “Backsliding.” I just finished Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady and I must say—I dig.

And, like many right now, am floored by the new Nirosta Steel record, My Skyscraper.

Til next time—

Brady