Speedy Pistelli
Major Arcana (2025), as scored by Major Arcana (2013)
In a sort of cosmic, occult coincidence that
might enjoy based on the way he writes on his blog and in Major Arcana, I feel somewhat similarly about his recently republished novel as I did about the same-titled Speedy Ortiz album from 2013 and decided to write a (sort of ridiculously long, spoiler-filled) book review scored by the album.Both of them are products of a very specific time and place that feels like it’s rapidly shifting into something else. Alternative comics: Speedy Ortiz is named after a Love and Rockets character just like Pistelli is obsessed with Alan Moore. Talking shit: Ortiz spends some of their first major profile in a music publication questioning the shift from guitars to synths in indie rock, while Pistelli loves to dish about how novels that are referenced on the back cover of Belt’s edition Major Arcana as an influence are actually terrible. Pitchfork was shifting in 2013 from snotty rockism to toothless poptimism, and Ortiz definitely fits in the old rockist vein. They’re proud of it:
[We] aren’t expecting anyone to care about rock music anymore. And it doesn't matter if they do care, because we're playing music that we like.
In the same way, Pistelli wrote a novel in the tradition of Walker (The Color Purple), Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) or Dickens (Great Expectations), and knows that such novels are deeply unfashionable at the moment and believes that more readers want them anyway.
Ortiz inspired a bevy of female-fronted rock bands with hyperliterate singers who would eventually offer an alternative to poptimism; perhaps Pistelli will inspire a bevy of bloggers to write their own sprawling, imaginative novels outside of the poptimism of the publishing industry.
Without any further ado, ten thoughts about Major Arcana (2025), each thought connected to about 10% of the novel (35 pages in the Belt edition I checked out from my local library, usually about 2-3 chapters) through the lens of the ten songs on Major Arcana (2013). Consider it as contingent as a tarot reading, an attempt to reorganize and randomize my thoughts about the novel to keep my attention (and hopefully yours).
I score this novel, and album, an 8/10.
“Pioneer Spine”
But you've still got your sound
And I see you staring down
I want a name
Even though you spoiled the one I came with
This song’s lyrics sound like an interrogation in a detective novel written by Phillip K. Dick and its music sounds like a mix of Sonic Youth and Sleater-Kinney. All of these descriptions could apply in some odd way to the first 35 or so pages of Major Arcana, as well. Jacob Morrow and Simon Magnus, the two main characters in this part, are a mashup of old school rock and roll and new ideas about androgyny and gender. Morrow is comically (this is a novel about comics) masculine (and thus sacrifices himself on the second page of the novel because this a novel in many ways about the power vacuum left when masculinity becomes an inadequate solution to the problems of the world); Magnus is comically (he’s a writer and professor of graphic novels) androgynous.
There’s a repeated lyric in the song: “I want a name.” I didn’t hate the way that the sections of Major Arcana centered on Simon Magnus respect the character’s wish to remain genderless by repeating the character’s name hundreds and by the end of the book likely thousands of times and used the character’s name in the reflexive form as “Simon Magnessself”, but it’s a gambit at least equal to the confrontational dissonant chords of “Pioneer Spine.” There’s something very online or at least digital about the gambit; it’s hard to imagine that a book written by hand would feature a character’s name that many times, but inside the screen it’s a simple matter of a CTRL-V here and there, or a search for all of the “he”s or “his”es or “himself”s in a chapter and a “find and replace” to “Simon Magnus” or “Simon Magnus’” or “Simon Magnesself.”
I’ll revise that (as revision is a key theme of Major Arcana): the gambit of Simon Magness is less like Speedy Ortiz using dissonant guitar chords, a technique which has been around in American music since critics started calling Black music “jass,” and more like sampling guitar feedback at the beginning of a song and then running the feedback through a random number generator and having a machine spit it out at prescribed random intervals. It’s annoying, but if the rest of the song is beautiful and there’s a reason for the noise, I don’t have a problem with it. And I don’t have a problem with it in the first part of Part One of Major Arcana because Part One as a whole is just about perfect as far as exposition goes: exciting, brutal, and surprising. “Pioneer Spine” isn’t as exciting or well structured: nearly two minute verse sections, interrupted by one quick, satisfying chorus in the middle and at the end. It’s a lot of verse. However, the song sets you up for all of the brilliance of this album that follows, and in that way is a proper exposition. Great rock albums never give you their hit singles in the first song. They save some of their powder for the next few songs, and Major Arcana is no exception.
“Tiger Tank”
“Do you know what a haruspex is?”
Simon Magnus did; Simon Magnus always had a very large vocabulary.
“I’ll help you,” Simon Magnus said.
That is how Simon Magnus always ended the story when repeating it to the press as part of the Simon Magnus myth—that, and a jump-cut to the epilogue: her body broken on the train tacks, blood and bone scattered across wood and iron.
This is a song that connects with characters all over Major Arcana who throw each other into the “tiger tank” and destroy themselves. Some emerge limping, some don’t emerge at all.
“Tiger Tank” isn’t quite as hooky as some of the next few songs on Major Arcana, but like pages 35-70ish in the novel, it’s got a classic sound that sets up the nearly perfect ones that follow. It’s the inciting incident of the album. In the novel, Pistelli deftly transitions into his own climaxes by bringing in a Gothic energy that was absent from the first few pages of the book: dark forests, dusty books, and cruelty to minors.
Two bastards (Jacob Morrow and Simon Magnus) find spiritual homes in literature: the former in Middlemarch and other classics provided to him by the beneficent bookstore owner Mr. Penhurst (who later turns out, in a Dickensian twist, to have something of a dark side), the latter in the split mentorship of the ghost of Grandfather Magnus haunting Simon’s wrecked, Hawthorne-esque New England manse and Simon’s “first love,” the “Goth girl” Valerie Karns.
Karns is introduced by way of her later suicide and her status as the muse for all of Magnus’ later comic book writings. In the constant shifting of archetypes of the various characters in Major Arcana, Morrow is “Strength” (or in the Crowley deck referenced later on in the book, “Lust,” the “Beautiful Boy,”) while Karns, as the title of the chapter where she and Magnus build their relationship to its suicidal climax declaims, is the “High Priestess.” Morrow was vital, good, and lovable, and I desperately wanted to know why he kills himself in the beginning of the book after learning about who he was in these chapters of Major Arcana. Karns is bad in the most appealing way: bad because of the dark woods of her environment, bad because she’s messing with forces beyond her understanding or control.
“Tiger Tank” is also lovable and ugly. It’s got a theme of bodily abuse: she “smoked her senses,” her “gut absorbed the fiercest blows,” and she “don’t even care if they take my legs.” Similarly, Pistelli describes some memorably painful masturbation scenes in this section of Major Arcana, scenes that lead both Morrow and Magnus to look for satisfaction in literature and the occult, respectively, rather than in erotic connection with other human beings. Absent a few small moments, Major Arcanas are more about missed connections than seduction.
“Hitch”
Sell every bet on your hard horse
I won't go down
Though my knees spasm
Though I want to grey out
And you could call me a hard horse
Speedy Ortiz is a “hard horse.” A horse that “you” want to ride: “is that a challenge or something?” But you shouldn’t ride this horse: “keep below, I don’t want to throw you.”
This song is even more conventionally structured than the previous one, with a memorable but complex hook, and so are pages 75-109 of Major Arcana. They’re also both some of my favorites.
If “Tiger Trap” was all pain, “Hitch” certainly has some pleasures. Dupuis still shreds, but the shredding moves ever upward, towards a fun, memorable chorus. There’s plenty of dissonance, but her lyrics are a dare—they’re as close to seduction as she approaches in the first half of this album.
In the same way, the relationship between Simon Magnus and Ellen Chandler in this section is as close to conventionally satisfying as any in this novel. It yields Magnus’ Marsh Man (a thinly veiled version of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing) and Fool’s Errand (a thinly veiled The Killing Joke). I love the things that Ellen Chandler loves in this section (Virginia Woolf, Wings of Desire, Swamp Thing) and hate the things that Simon Magnus loves (Alastair Crowley, Contempt, The Killing Joke). In a brilliant stroke, this section of the novel also braids in the story of Marco Cohen, who becomes a third wheel in every sense: perhaps he is the “Wheel of Fortune” that drives Magnus and Chandler to new heights (and new lows), or perhaps he is the Hermit (there’s a scene later on the beach that confirms the Hermit interpretation), living outside of the small world that Magnus and Chandler create together, showing them a new way to enlightenment. He arrives in the novel at nearly the same time as Ellen Chandler and it’s not clear until later on why his story belongs inside hers, but when that revelation comes, it’s been well-earned.
Pistelli also sneaks in one last character in this section who doesn’t appear again for a while, and by then has completed his three-card Tarot spread. Diane del Greco is a model in Marco Cohen’s art class, and she finally busts through the hermetic seal he attempts to place over his feelings and artistic practice. As he draws her, he abandons his strict representationalism and draws her with “an ink wash, gray gradients.” His art teacher, Anne LaMar, who has frequently encouraged him to adopt a less rigid style, chides him:
“No boundary lines, Mr. Cohen?” Anne LaMar asked over his shoulder. “What would your Mr. Blake say? I’m glad our new model has roused you to experiment.”
He blushed, said nothing, went on distinguishing the darker gray of her lips from the lighter gray of her face—except that Diane de Greco, who had caught Anne LaMar’s remark, curled those lips in a little snorting giggle, and Marco Cohen lost control of his breath.
Hitch, meet horse. Or, as Speedy Ortiz might say in “Hitch”:
Though his knees spasm
Though he wants to grey out
I heard them call me a hard horse.
Cohen is the hard horse, greying out as he meets The World through the form of Diane del Greco, who we already know will become the mother of Ash del Greco, the destroying angel of death from the beginning of the book. Cohen, Chandler, and Del Greco all circle around Magnus as he creates the art that will hold millions in thrall, though one of those millions will not be Cohen, and it definitely wouldn’t be Speedy Ortiz, fighting back the hitch at every step.
“Casper (1995)”
And the sicko police
Gave me perfect marks
at the sycophantic academy
Diane del Greco is one of Pistelli’s perfect characters, and she owns this section. She’s The Empress. She seeks pleasure. She wants it all, but knows she’s missing what Simon Magnus, Ellen Chandler, and Marco Cohen have: the knowledge gained through suffering and alienation. She’s attracted to these artist types (first Cohen, then Magnus, then Chandler) and she wants to nurture them, and while they want to be nurtured, they also…all hate their mothers. It’s a classic setup, but Pistelli doesn’t make it feel trite.
One way he makes it work is through Chapter 9 in this section, which details del Greco’s first infatuation with a girl named Ashley Bradley. Their relationship functions as yet another double or mirror for the one between Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow from later in the book, though we already know how that relationship turns out from the beginning of the book.
Bradley is a minor character, but her deception of del Greco shows how easy it is for a strong personality to convert Diane into a sycophant. She’s surrounded by “sickos,” a pattern that begins with her pothead parents and moves onto evangelical Christians like Bradley, then onto the artists who are creating Overman 3000, and finally the ultimate sicko Ash del Greco (her “daughter”).
But unlike in "Casper (1995),” del Greco never gets “perfect marks” from the sickos for her sycophancy. They get tired of her, and she gets tired of them. In these forty or so pages, Diane is thrilled, disappointed, thrilled, disappointed, and thrilled again. It’s not hard to predict what’s going to happen next.
“Casper (1995)” is also one of the great songs of this album. It’s spooky (the background vocals are a perfect touch) and rocking, funny and sad. I’ve seen the movie and I don’t remember it, but I doubt that Speedy Ortiz are rehearsing plot points in this song. It’s more of a half-remembered dream of adolescence, like the Ashley Bradley section: “kids keep trading spectre stories/just to get each other horny.” The guitar line ascends like a staircase up to an attic and then drops into the basement, hiding away in the dark like Casper.
“No Below”
Simon Magnus fell asleep in her lap. In Simon Magnus’s dream, it was the day of Valerie Karns’s funeral again, Simon Magnus was in mourning clothes again, Simon Magnus had again snuck to her room to rescue her dresses, her scent, whatever remained of her presence. In life, tears had dimmed her final Tarot spread in Simon Magnus’s eyes. In the dream, the center of the Celtic cross glowed, brighter than day, iridescent, and Simon Magnus could read which card crossed the other. Simon Magnus woke up crying in an empty bed and smiled for almost the first time in months.
“No Below” is one of the best rock songs of the 2010s. It does sound a lot like Pavement, who Speedy Ortiz reference in their Pitchfork profile, but Pavement’s lyrics are too often blankly ironic, while the lyrics here are genuinely affecting: a story of teenage alienation and suicidal ideation that shifts into a desire that an adult romantic partner “knew you when you were a kid.”
The song was featured in a video game and it’s by far the most streamed song that Speedy Ortiz ever made. It’s probably not streamed enough to make them any real money, but it’s almost certainly the song that haunts them in the tiny clubs that they play like the one I saw them in two years ago with about fifty or sixty other people. I don’t recall anyone yelling a request for it, but they dutifully played it in the encore.
The description of the video game featuring “No Below” is eerily similar to a proper description of Major Arcana (the novel). And so this section of the novel is of course where the novel shifts from Simon Magnus (the Stephen Dedalus of the novel, its antihero) to Ash del Greco and Jacob Morrow (the novel’s Leopold/Molly Bloom, the doomed and then redeemed protagonists). I’m aware that many of the attributes of those characters are reversed in Ulysses, but like Joyce (and Speedy Ortiz), Pistelli is playing with perspective, and it betrays a superficial reading to say that Magnus is the protagonist of the novel (see footnote three here):
“No Below” moves from “I was better off being dead” set to an earworm of a guitar hook mirroring the syllables of each word to a redemptive climax where the narrator emerges out of the ice, healed and swimming. This section of Major Arcana moves from Simon Magnus using all available resources (people, plots, drugs, occultism) making create Simon Magnus’ great gesamtkunstwerk to an utterly abased anti-climax where Simon Magnus loses everything and ends up drunk and crying in the arms of a prostitute in a hotel, dreaming of Valerie Karns. And yet Simon Magnus emerges from the dream with a smile. Simon Magnus touched the Universe, and it didn’t kill him. He became Overman 3000.
Hopefully, Speedy Ortiz was paid well by that video game company. Maybe that’s why they’re still touring mid-sized American towns and playing small clubs: they can afford it. By this point in Major Arcana, we know almost everything about why the book started the way it did except for one thing: who’s Ash del Greco?
“Gary”
When a play date ends
do you call your other friends or do you go home?
Do you lock your door?
Do you lay down on your carpet
Counting threads till you get to one?
Ash del Greco has some of the best parts of Major Arcana and some of the worst. These 35 pages (what Valerie Stivers contemptuously called “backstory”) is the best part. All of the accumulated genius and neuroticism of del Greco’s four parents (Simon Magnus, Diane del Greco, Marco Cohen, and Ellen Chandler) is synthesized in various ways in one character, and this section lays it all out there: she’s got Magnus’s ambition and attraction to darkness, del Greco’s tendency to be utterly subsumed by others (Ari Alterhaus and Jacob Morrow), Cohen’s misanthropy, and Chandler’s deadpan irony.
The generational wheel has turned, and the knot of parental cruelty and neglect that bound the backstories of Ash’s four parents together has been reproduced in Diane del Greco’s treatment of her daughter. Ash isn’t an artist like Magnus, Cohen, or Chandler; she’s a fan like her mother Diane. Pistelli is slyly commenting here on what nature and nature can do: did Ash gain her critical, editorial eye from her true mother Chandler, and the lack of artistic confidence from her adopted mother Diane? At least in this section, she doesn’t really create anything: she just consumes. She begins to consume Jacob Morrow, she consumes (melancholy) classic literature, she consumes graphic novels, and she consumes a Tumblr from someone named “Undergirl.” And by the end of this section, she prepares to consume Ari Alterhaus.
In “Gary,” Speedy Ortiz is also a misanthropic, homebound critic like Ash, obsessed with someone named “Gary.” It’s a perfect song for this section: it’s full of menace, but it’s also propulsive and nearly joyful. Speedy Ortiz is rushing headlong into disaster, and so is Ash.
“Fun”
She didn’t know if she believe in God or the god. The manifestation gurus always hedged on this topic by referring to God, if they ever did, as synonymous with “the Universe” or "the Source.” As for other gods, the only manifestors who mentioned them were the ones who also spoke of Tarot or astrology. Ash del Greco spent a few days trying to learn these occult sciences, but she quickly abandoned them on the same principle that had led her to abandon novels: stable archetypes, determinate personalities written in the stars, a panoply of emperors and priestesses and magicians to keep track of—these violated her sense of contingency and her attraction to intensity.
The part of Major Arcana that begins and ends in Chapters 5-9 of Part Three reminds me of Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, though I’m 99% sure that both Pistelli and Schoenbrun haven’t seen or read each other’s work and would have some serious misgivings about each other’s work. The plots and the engagements with the internet and fandom and the media are all eerily similar in all three texts. They’re both relentlessly dark visions that play with symbols and archetypes but ultimately reject those schema as inadequate for the problems that Zoomers face as internet babies. As the section of Major Arcana above indicates, Ash turns to manifestation as the only solution to the problem of Ari Alterhaus, but it’s a solution that can’t possibly be as satisfying as the ones her parents found for their art problems in Part Two of Major Arcana.
I am comfortable with the “magical realism” in both this section of the book and in Schoenbrun’s films because the dyads in all of these works are profoundly psychologically damaged. I don’t need to return to realism to explain what happens in their plots, but if I did, it’s not hard to explain how Ash and Ari, Owen and Maddy (TV Glow), or Casey and JLB (World’s Fair) simply had psychic breaks because the pressures of identity formation in adolescence are impossible to withstand for kids who don’t fit into a gender binary and who grow up with neglectful or abusive parents. I don’t expect that “most of this plot didn’t actually happen, they just aren’t living in the established reality of the film/novel and neither is the viewer/reader” is either necessary or sufficient to convince viewers or readers of Schoenbrun or Pistelli who don’t like these characters or don’t think that “magical realism” is an appropriate way to approach issues of gender identity that they’ve misinterpreted what’s happening here. But revisiting this section reminds me that Pistelli succeeded at shoving one more world into his novel, a world that feels vital and relevant for our tortured present.
“Fun” could be how a kid with an ambiguous gender presentation feels about being the object of some much discourse and scrutiny over the past five years or so. Of course, Sadie Dupuis already “identified as panromantic and demisexual” back in the old days of Tumblr 2013, so she/they was/were ahead of the curve.
The best stanza in the song is at the end:
I don’t understand what makes you want to shoot around me Because I'm just made of clay
I go and puncture the clouds instead with a limb or a hand
First you paved, so I can
And I'm getting my dick sucked on the regular
On the regular
This quote is a combination of the repeating chorus (the part about being clay and getting shot at and carving out clouds with their limbs) and the hilarious coda. The protagonist of the song is a “criminally twisted/puny little villain” like Ash del Greco, one who brims with the same kind of misanthropic confidence. I wonder if there’s a draft of Major Arcana out there that includes Ash telling thanking someone for paving the way for them to get their dick sucked.
“Cash Cab”
I wanna be with somebody just like me
Someone who laughs at a crashed car rental
Someone who hurts in an accident
Someone as scared of abandonment, ooh
Unlike Ash del Greco, I haven’t abandoned novels, but like her, I’ve got a strong aversion to Tarot and astrology. However, I’ve got to admit that this project has spooked me a bit: this album really maps well on to my feelings about this book. “Cash Cab” is a tough listen, and this is a tough section of the book for me. Though the “internet novel” began in the previous section of the book, the relationship between Ash and Ari was combustible and vivid, even if both of them hated their bodies and sexuality.
Here we live instead inside Ash’s world, and as Jacob Morrow enters and exits it, we find nothing but a blankness, a black hole, the dreaded uzumaki, which is, of course: the Internet. Morrow’s death meant something if it was some grand sacrifice in the (super)heroic tradition, but in the (post)modern world, it can’t mean anything. Just like Junji Ito’s manga comic, this section of the novel spirals around and around but doesn’t quite achieve liftoff. I remember reading Uzumaki and thinking it was one of the most viscerally disturbing pieces of art that I’d ever consumed; here, the endless descriptions of Ash’s decaying and sickening body created a similar feeling. This is a horror novel, scored by chat rooms and YouTube influencers.
“Cash Cab” is somewhat more successful, though it also documents a relationship like del Greco and Morrow’s that is doomed from the start: “as above, so below.” It has a spiraling, stop-start structure, with repeating, high-pitched guitar squeals throughout and nearly inaudible vocals. Someone’s in distress! However, the crunchy pop-punk power chords that cut through the morass during the song’s choruses and the in the breakdown at the end of the song offer a respite from the noise. They’re a respite the reader never gets in the Major Arcana.
“Plough”
Marco Cohen, who hadn’t believed in magic or religion, didn’t reply, unless the fury of the agitated air was his riposte. Who would he be now if he’d lived? Ellen Chandler wondered…Would he have become a potbellied, graybearded paterfamilias going twice as year on the comics convention circuit in an Hawaiian shirt and making most of his money in commissions? Would he in his middle age have started voting Republican at last? She couldn’t imagine such a fate for so passionately earnest a young man…She voted Republican now. Christ, she thought, with the chaos our country was in—the crime, the prices, the wars, the gender theory in preschool and all the rest of it—how could you possibly not?
I appreciate the realism of the unlikability of Ash del Greco and Ellen Chandler in the latter part of Part Three and in the beginning of Part Four of this book. Most artists curdle. They can’t ferment forever. However, this isn’t a novel about realism, it’s a novel about fantasy, and so I wish these sections didn’t exist.
Things aren’t wrapped up in a neat bow, but they’re wrapped up anyhow, and that section above stuck in my craw. If Chandler knows that “passionately earnest” people don’t vote Republican, then why does she so earnestly give a shit about the culture war bullshit of the Republican party? I get that there’s something classically conservative about Chandler—the love of literary modernism, the discomfort with drugs and sexual promiscuity, the prim Englishteacherness. But I know (and I am) some of these people, and I’d either refuse to vote or still vote Democratic if I felt like Ellen Chandler about any of those issues. There’s nothing conservative about the Republican party. Pistelli’s maybe just provoking here, but it’s cheap. He’s already brought in the world of contemporary American politics in the stories of Simon Magnus and Ari Alterhaus, and he successfully poked at the woke and anti-woke tendencies with those characters. Why bring Ellen Chandler into the mess? The less said about Chandler’s fling with a former student, or her reunification with Magnus, the better, but it all feels a little forced and weird to me.
Similarly, I find “Plough” unsubtle. Since when did our band care about virginity, or actual Tarot readings? All of these themes are better explicated through implication in the other songs on Major Arcana. “I was never the witch you made me to be/still you picked a virgin over me” pales in comparison to many of Sadie Dupuis’ lyrics throughout this album. I do like her shaky vocal on “stop shaking, why you freaking the fuuuuck out,” but mostly, I’d recommend nearly all the songs on this album over this one.
“MKVI”
Why you take and take me, my friend?
I've got nothing, I've got nothing
Moral is, you're moral-less
But you left something on my lips: a mark so sick
We are left, at the end of Major Arcana, with nearly nothing, and certainly not a moral: Ash del Greco’s famous spiral mark, and a mark on Speedy Ortiz’s lips. The new child replaces the sacrificed one (as in Overman 3000). The new song replaces the old one. Put on a new album tomorrow. Strike a match, begin again.
Both works have ended well: in the album, a blast of noise shaking the roots of my eardrums, like a plane delivering Ash and her child to someone new, off to parts unknown. The song starts as a dirge but ends up in the clouds; similarly, the ending of Major Arcana carves an impressive denouement out of a falling action that I considered the worst part of the book.
Like Cohen, Magnus, Chandler and Diane del Greco with Overman 3000 or Ash del Greco with Ulysses, I’ve tired myself out with this project, which ballooned far outside of what I’d wanted to attempt. I wonder if the same thing happened to Pistelli in the end of Part Three and much of Part Four of this book. I often think that third act problems are seeded in the first act, and the too-onlineness of Ash del Greco in the beginning of the book might have come back to bite Pistelli by the end. He shows in the last few chapters of the book that del Greco could be redeemed in some way, and I wish he’d done it a little sooner.