Hey all! I got some stuff this time!
CONTENTS
Project Update Reviews: Gordinier, Scott, Klosterman, Janisse, Carroll, Schulman
Reading Election: Batuman vs Kalfus vs Waite
PROJECT UPDATE REVIEWS
I’ve been reading some stuff related to my Gen X project (still need a catchy title). Here are thoughts:
Let’s get the disposable out of the way first. Jeff Gordinier — he appears to mostly be a restaurant critic? — penned X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking and published in 2008. This is a deeply disposable, forgettable book with such catastrophic timing you almost feel bad. Bitching about how boy bands and Britney Spears ruined the alt utopia of nineties music, just as poptimism became hegemonic in the world of cultural criticism is one thing that had to hurt. Trying to write a book about politics only to get it published just in time for the ‘08 crash, the Obama election, and its aftermath… the closest to useful this book comes is as a depiction of an older stereotype of Millennials, as pop-addled narcissistic phone zombies who are too naive and lighthearted to even ask for change. Amusingly, I kind of think even that spiteful caricature is closer to the truth than the stereotype emerging in some places of my generation, as grim woke Jacobins who can’t stop politicizing things. Either way- glad I downloaded this book and didn’t have to pay for it or give it shelf space.
I’m a good deal more sympathetic to Melissa Scott’s Trouble and Her Friends. Doing cyberpunk in 1994 was a bit like starting a grunge band- seemed like a good idea at the time, before Cobain killed himself and before the powers that be decided the internet would be used to make the world more mundane, not less. Scott is also admirable for making a cyberpunk, hacking-using-virtual-reality story about women and queer people. The internet has a lot of both, after all! But she doesn’t really have the writing chops to pull it off. The characters are cookie cutter, the worldbuilding is both laborious and poorly-fleshed-out (not the least of William Gibson’s miracles, in that first trilogy and in his early short stories, was sketching out complete worlds in elliptical phrases), and the action dull. I’m interested in what the changing fortunes of cyberpunk as an aesthetic and genre tell us about where people thought society, technology, and writing were going. I’m not sure this book tells us much- maybe if scifi editors were looking harder for queer voices earlier, we could have gotten something better (maybe even something better by Scott) in the “queer cyberpunk pioneer” slot.
At first, I thought I’d like Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, which would be a big departure for me, because I think he sucks. “Is this another instance of growing up from my late-adolescent tutelage of reading Exile articles, realizing they weren’t always right?” I thought, considering Mark Ames’ skewering of Klosterman (I know, not technically in the Exile), one of the most vitriolic pieces by a master of furious criticism. In this case… nope! Chuck Klosterman, still bad. And more or less in the pattern Ames, in between insulting Klosterman’s appearance and promising him physical violence (I admit- I still find those lines funny, in a Three Stooges eye-poke way, and you can’t say Ames was “punching down” here either), identified- contrarian point, middlebrow conclusion. I’d add “somehow turning these things into theories of history,” just what one wants from the author of “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs.” Bad George Carlin imitation into Andy Rooney with ironically framed glasses into galaxy-brained hack ala Rene Girard or any number of other social theorists who’d be disposable if rich people stopped believing them. Some of the contrarian points start out ok- there’s plenty to be contrary about in our pop criticism landscape. But when it starts getting into his effort to define how people remember and communicate… there’s a lot of nothing there.
Less disposable but still not as great as one was like is this collection edited by Canadian critic and filmmaker Kier-La Janisse, Satanic Panic: Pop Culture Paranoia in the 80s. Everyone wants in on talking about the Satanic Panic! It’s a juicy subject. Credit to Janisse and her contributors, the craze wasn’t really on by 2015 when this came out. That said, these essays by a crew of zinesters, bloggers, and various camp/cult culture buffs are distinctly uneven and tend to make the same points, usually in either “snarky” blog language or stilted academic prose. We get an introduction to the frame- backlash against feminism and the counterculture leads to Christian fundamentalist freakouts about various pop-culture artifacts (and, in the worst cases, jail time and destroyed lives as in the various day care trials over trumped-up charges of “satanic ritual abuse”). The essayist will then talk about the artifact — Dungeons and Dragons, horror novels, heavy metal music — and how various religious (and sometimes secular) quacks and hucksters ginned up media firestorms against them based on misunderstandings, lies, or likely some combo of both. Some weird dumb shit happens — boycotts, attempts at legislation or regulation — and the writer waxes about the ironies of ignorance. It’s not bad — they’re usually far from wrong! — but it gets repetitive and there’s not a huge amount of insight. It’s a useful source book.
But don’t fret- I read some very good books for this project, too. Jordan Carroll’s Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature is one I probably should have read before my birthday lecture, though Carroll’s emphasis is on editors who worked mostly before the striking down of most obscenity laws on written material in the seventies. Far from being the reserve of the culturally marginalized, Carroll argues that since at least the early twentieth century, many editors who pushed the envelope in terms of “obscene” periodicals and books were, and were mostly considered by others to be, representatives of the educated professional middle class (the dread PMC- let’s be thankful we’re not stuck with that discourse like we used to be). Figures like H.L. Mencken, Hugh Hefner, and the people at Grove Press insisted that it was ok for them to publish obscene material because it was for mature, intelligent adult men, not the lower orders that might act on the obscene to do something bad (and certainly not women!). Indeed, looking at or reading at the obscene could act as a sort of test of the sort of mental characteristics a specifically professional middle class most valued- cool appreciation of form, ability to abstract otherwise quite concrete things, appreciation of irony, etc. Both editors and many of the judges and lawyers trying to define obscenity agreed on this class-based definition of the obscene! Carroll sometimes seems to come perilously close to agreeing with censors, but that mostly comes down to contrast to obnoxious, sexist, elitist men like Hefner and his other subjects. Another fine entry from the Post45 series of historical criticism.
I also read one of Sarah Schulman’s novels, Rat Bohemia, and I look forward to reading many more- the more of work, fiction and non-, I read, the more firm my belief that she is the great living American person of letters grows. It’s the mid-nineties and late into the AIDS epidemic in New York- even the most stalwart ACT-UPers are losing steam, death and illness has become banal. We follow the life of one of the lesbians who looked after those with AIDS, who works as a city ratcatcher by day, in the leadup and aftermath of the death of a friend of hers, a prominent gay writer. One of Schulman’s great strengths is that she gets across utterly gutting senses of feeling — loss, hopelessness, but love as well — with no sentimentality, no false notes. Among other things, it goes a long way towards demystifying and deromanticizing “found family.” A lot of the hardest passages are about the incredibly cruel familial rejection a lot of queer people suffered (and still do). Found families were made of this, and if they felt stronger, better than birth families, no one could escape the sense of rejection and futility involved. Would Rita and David even be friends if not for the plague? Do they actually care about each other or was it all just obligation, what you do to try (and fail) to manage mortality? Another thing dying is the demimonde to which the characters belong, both the lesbian and gay subcultures as they existed before AIDS but also the particularities of New York as gentrification ramps up. This is one of the best novels I’ve read all year. I know Schulman isn’t ignored, by any stretch of the imagination, but why isn’t she more often touted?
READING ELECTION
It’s been a while since I’ve done a reading election here! There’s two reasons: one, I’m more often assigning myself reading, to do this project, and it encapsulates readings in history, criticism, social science, literature, memoirs, genre fiction… two, I’m doing some elections on the Discord. Let me know (and let me know your email address) if you want to join the Discord! It’s a good scene.
But, here’s one for everyone- an election for my next set of contemporary fiction audiobooks. I like to see what people are reading, in and adjacent to literary fiction, these days (because I’m old and historically-minded, this usually means “any time in the last fifteen years”). Vote in the next 24 hours! Don’t let ignorance stop you! Judge on any old basis!
The Candidates-
Elif Batuman, The Idiot (2017) - I remember this being a big deal when it came out. It’s the story of an awkward Harvard freshman in the nineties. A Batuman-like (I think?) narrator has various misadventures. Do I really want to spend more time thinking about Harvard? No. Can you still vote for this? Yes. I’ll listen to it… eventually.
Ken Kalfus, 2 A.M. in Little America (2022) - Real heads know I tried to write a novel set in a camp for US climate refugee called Little America! It’s actually several shades more complicated than that — one of many reasons this novel wasn’t great — but there it is. Apparently, this Ken Kalfus figure does something similar, with more of the poignant angst of the exile and less skullduggery and shooting.
Thommy Waite, Any Day You Can Die (2020) - This is probably more “genre” than the stuff I usually do in this slot, but people are saying literary fiction is a dead category, so… anyway, it’s the story of an Australian finance bro who takes his small crypto nest egg to Medellin and gets involved in increasingly shady shit. My guess is, someone wrote about this in LARB or somewhere and I put it on the list. Is it actually good?
Mithra sez “thanks for hanging in with my human while he was busy and tired! We appreciate you!”