Welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! Truth be told it’s been a lousy week, suffused with heat, humidity, indigestion, and stupidity that has probably, among other things, eaten into my reading time and ability to deliver content. But we persevere. We have two reviews this week, one of a work of music journalism, the other of a crime novel. There’s a link to an interview I did with a strange English fantasy author. And in this week’s lagniappe, we introduce another member of the Melendy Avenue crew, with our inaugural “Ed’s Corner.” Enjoy this feast of prose, and please subscribe and share!
CONTENTS
EXTRAMURAL WRITINGS-
John Whitbourn interview (San Antonio Review)
REVIEWS-
Ryan Walsh, Astral Weeks
Andrew Vachss, Flood
LAGNIAPPE-
Introducing: Ed’s Corner
EXTRAMURAL WRITINGS-
John Whitbourn interview
When I heard somewhere long ago about an “green counter-reformation anarcho-Jacobite” fantasy author, I knew I had to track him down. To indicate how long ago this was, this was before such a description would ring alt-right alarm bells. John Whitbourn is not an alt-right guy, but he is a unique and fascinating figure. His counter-reformation alternate history fantasy novels are rich, action-packed, dark, and wry. He found me via my blog and assented to this interview, which finds him in a “valedictory” mood (which is to say, among other things, it’s a long and meaty interview). We discuss the writing process, historiography, games, and other things. Enjoy!
https://www.sareview.org/pub/sar3whitbourninterview
REVIEWS-
Ryan Walsh, “Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968” (2018) - Van Morrison’s second solo album, “Astral Weeks,” seems to come out of nowhere. Those accustomed to the overplay of “Brown Eyed Girl” on oldies radio and assuming that’s what Morrison is all about — even if they like that version — are in for a surprise if they turn on “Astral Weeks.” Better essayists than me, most notably rock critic legend Lester Bangs, have already expanded at length on the album’s musical qualities, with a lot of words like “transcendent” thrown around. It really is worth your while to give it a listen.
One of the things that provokes discussion about the album is the contrast between the art and the artist. It’s not that anyone’s surprised that Van Morrison could create something like that on a talent level- from his early work with Them, everyone knew Morrison had talent. The contrast is between the emotional range of the album and that presented by Van Morrison the person, and much of his subsequent work. In short, “Astral Weeks” is a deeply felt, empathetic piece of work, and Van Morrison was and is… a piece of work. He himself has spent the last fifty years insisting “Astral Weeks” isn’t representative of his work or personal in any way. He’s something of a sour old man and always was, even when he was making brilliant music in his early twenties. This wasn’t rock and roll grandiosity, great talent and great failings (and great stories); he was just a low-grade, petty prick to everyone around him. You don’t need to believe great souls make great art but… the going theory seems to be that Morrison got in touch with something around the time he made “Astral Weeks.” Some of the magic lasted into subsequent albums, but it was mostly gone with a few years, and he never touched anything like it again, and it burnt something out of him.
Musician and music journalist Ryan Walsh puts forward the novel idea that there could be a Boston connection to that “something” Morrison touched in this book. It’s notionally about the album, but really it’s an attempt to summon a gestalt. Boston isn’t commonly thought of as one of the epicenters of “the sixties” as a phenomenon, but Walsh makes the argument here that maybe it should?
There’s a few different strains of narrative he follows and tries to string together. Van Morrison was indeed in Boston in 1968, Cambridge more precisely, trying to get out of a bad record contract, playing gigs, and writing the material that would go into “Astral Weeks.” He was attracted in part by the Cambridge folk revival scene, which was in collapse by then and an erstwhile member of which, Mel Lyman, was setting up a folk-music-labor-and-sex cult in Roxbury, the Fort Hill Community (or Lyman Family). This all sort of came together around the creation of the Family-backed Boston Tea Party, a concert venue which became a favorite for the Velvet Underground among others. There was a lot of psychedelic stuff going on, from Timothy Leary’s early experiments at Harvard to trippy public tv on WGBH to the countercultural press — like the Fort Hill Community’s magazine “Avatar” — pushing the envelope and getting in free speech fights. There was also the more earth-bound concerns of the time, and Walsh retells the story of how the Boston mayor’s office got James Brown to play a special concert to help keep the kids occupied and not rioting after the MLK assassination.
A reader expecting solely a deep dive into Van Morrison’s world and process might be disappointed by how much of the book isn’t really about him, but Walsh does get the goods in terms of tracking down his collaborators. He also paints a vivid picture of Boston’s music scene at the time, when record company people tried and crashingly failed to promote a “Boston Sound” as a geographical counterpoint to a San Francisco seen as fading out. He gets seemingly every old Boston rock hand talking. One person Walsh doesn’t talk to is Morrison himself. I have it on reasonably good information from a friend of the author that Walsh held out little hope for his subject’s cooperation, knowing that “Van the Man” has driven numerous other rock journalists, like his biographer Clinton Heylin, to distraction and hostility with his evasions and crabbiness.
How successfully does Walsh summon his Boston 1968 gestalt? Does it get across the emotional overtones he wants it to? He’s reasonably successful, I’d say. You don’t get quite the sense of cosmic connection out of the coincidences and crossed paths Walsh documents that you do out of “Astral Weeks,” but it’s harder to do that kind of thing with prose nonfiction. I’m not sure I buy the notion of “Astral Weeks” as a “Boston album.” Yes, Morrison developed the songs in Boston. But he recorded them in New York, with the vital backup of New York jazz session musicians. More importantly, the songs themselves reflect Morrison’s youth in Belfast. “Astral Weeks” has been called the last culturally significant portrait of Belfast before the Troubles. But this, thankfully, is not a thesis heavy book. Mostly, you just sort of take in the gestalt, and Walsh’s efforts to reconstruct it. ****’
Andrew Vachss, “Flood” (1985) (narrated by Christopher Lane) - This crime novel, published in the year of my birth, catalogs many of the going fears of the time, most of which bled into my early childhood. The first of what seems to be a long series of novels starring Burke, an ex-con private eye who specializes in shaking down the “freaks” of his native New York City and protecting children, “Flood” capitalizes on the panic over organized child sexual abuse then raging unchecked. Vachss himself, according to wikipedia and his introduction to the novel, at any rate, considers himself first and foremost a protector of children. He apparently has a law practice that only takes on juvenile clients, and once ran a juvenile prison (honestly, seems to contradict the whole “child protector” thing right there, but what do I know?). Eye-patched and given to eccentric statements, like how his “personal religion is revenge,” he cuts a vaguely Moshe Dayan-ish figure.
I listened to this book in part out of general interest in crime fiction, and in part out of an interest in fictional depictions of this era of moral panic. My birthday lecture this year is in part on Dennis Lehane, another crime writer who draws from the well of corrupted childhood innocence. Cards on the table: “childhood innocence” talk from adults, especially adult men, creeps me out. I am indeed aware there are those who prey on children- growing up when and where I did, this is unavoidable. I’m also aware that these are crimes of power imbalance, and posturing as a protector of the weak is a good way to ensure that the power imbalance stays where it is, regardless of good intentions on the part of the “protector”. I also know that in the vast majority of instances, the power imbalances that generate child abuse come from socially-enshrined institutions, the kind you’re not supposed to question, like that of the Catholic Church or, most pertinent of all, the heteronormative patriarchical family. The local fascists like to posture about how opposed they are to pedophilia, as though such a stance makes them brave. They still support Trump and never touch the Church. I’ll believe a social worker or a survivor when they talk about this shit, not a rando vigilante wannabe.
Vachss (and Lehane, for anyone keeping score) acknowledge this power dynamic, partially. Child abuse exists in the sanctified spaces in the world of Vachss because, well, it exists everywhere, kind of rendering the point moot. Still and all, the “freak” Burke hunts in this book finds his victims via, where else, day-care centers, in this instance day-care centers run by liberal churches who buy a freak’s fake traumatized Vietnam vet schtick. He’s hired by the titular Flood, a hot young lady who wants to do a karate duel with the bad guy (who calls himself “The Cobra”). It’s that kind of a book.
Much of the book is a tour through the slime-pits of Burke’s New York. Vachss enumerates in loving detail Burke’s scams, security arrangements, and network of allies. We don’t know what Burke went to jail for but we do know he sees himself as being above both the square society of “citizens” and the “freaks” of the city- he sees himself as a meta-predator, preying on those who prey on others. Though to be honest, when he’s drumming up business for shyster lawyers or running his other penny-ante scams, he seems more like a scavenger than anything else, and Vachss’s descriptions of his security systems get tiresome too. For those playing the game of trying to dope out an ideology here, Vachss is complicated, though I wouldn’t say “complex” in the sense of “nuanced.” He’s disgusted by the society of freaks, but right-wingers are freaks just as much as anyone else in his book. Scamming the mercenary pipeline to Rhodesia winds up being a key part of how Burke finds his man, and Burke is pals with Puerto Rican militants and a trans woman who’s relatively sensitively portrayed, given the era and the context.. Moreover, there’s little appeal to lost innocence on a societal level- Burke and Vachss don’t look back to the fifties or whenever. Ultimately, in a fallen world, there is no society, only men and women and their -- in this instance, chosen, like Burke’s posse -- families, to borrow a phrase from a contemporary figure. Crime fiction doesn’t generally set out to solve the structural woes of the world, but the way they choose to portray these structures can tell you something.
How to rate this book? It was certainly an interesting glimpse into a time and place. Vachss’s work might form a building block going forward in thinking about the era, and I do plan on reading and writing more concertedly about the late twentieth century. I also found it markedly unpleasant to listen to. Vachss himself would presumably put this down to my incapacity to deal with the reality of the streets, but if I may speak for myself in this hypothetical conversation, I don’t think that’s it. For one thing, I’m not sure how real any of this is, between the karate duels and the friend of Burke’s who invented a laser as a kid and the open-air child slave and pornography markets. For another, it just ticked a lot of boxes of unpleasantness for me and I think for many readers orthogonal to the premise of child abuse existing, starting with the creepy protector-of-the-youth bullshit you need to accept as the price of entry, and including the choice of the voice actor to do ludicrous dehumanizing Asian and black dialect voices (his Hispanic voices were relatively restrained- thank god for small favors I suppose). In the last analysis I rate these books based on whether I liked them, like goodreads says (this all started with goodreads, for better or for worse), and in the end I would not say I “liked” this weird, scuzzy book. **
LAGNIAPPE-
Introducing: Ed’s Corner
Ed is one of my two roommates. Sometimes, he has something to say, and we here at Melendy Avenue Review provide him with a platform. Listen up!
Hello, I’m A Media Theorist & Are Meme’s Art?
Hello out there, newsletter readers. I’m Peter’s roommate Ed, and Peter’s asked me to write a little piece here and there to fill out those column inches in the newsletter. I wasn’t really expecting the chance to write a regular column when approached to do so, and I’ve never been good with deadlines, generally I like to put a lot of research into anything I put out there for general consumption. So to solve the twin problems of not having any set topic in mind, and to frame the content of this column in such a way that steers us away from something that would be prone to over-research, I’m going to stake out the wild frontiers of media theory as my domain. Media theory is a study of both the content and effect of mass media, and what it has to say about the culture of those who both produce and consume it. The big names of the field, such as Marshall McLuhan, never much bothered to back up what they were saying with such things as factual evidence, so I think it’s the perfect field for me to just sort of dash off a few thoughts on this or that matter and place more value at least the appearance of interesting insight over scholarly rigor. Be warned up front that these are just so much guesswork and idle wonderings, and that I have no interest in discussing whether I’m right or wrong about anything here after I write the column.
The first step to being a media theorist is to just declare yourself one and then theorize on some media before anyone can raise a reasonable objection. Marshall McLuhan was a professor of Medievalism before he one day wrote a coffee table book about the deep social meaning of various soap advertisements, and YouTube is lousy with unaccredited media critics who think you care what they think that “The Joker really means,” so I think I’m more than qualified by those metrics. That settled, let’s go ahead and tackle a big question right out of the gate: Are memes art? I assume everyone reading this is familiar with the concept of the meme; a meme is a repurposed visual element, like a stock photo or an animation cell that may or may not be altered by the addition of white Impact text captions, that expresses some thought or idea depending on the context it is found online. Importantly memes express more than just an emotion or basic concept, a smiley face or other emoji is not a meme in and of itself, although it may be an element of a meme. Certainly there are .gifs that are reaction shots from some reality TV show that are essentially just the people in them reacting with joy at something, and while the .gif would likely constitute a meme, it’s not just the idea of being happy that’s being expressed. The .gif would be expressed in response to something online, and the context of the .gif would communicate that rather than just being generally happy, the person posting it would be happy because of whatever created the context they were posting it in. If you posted just the reaction .gif, without context it would not be a meme until some context was added later.
Given all that, are memes art? I generally ascribe to the theories of Marcel Duchamp, that the definition of what is or what isn’t art depends entirely on how it is presented and who is viewing it. In general I’m of the opinion that anything someone wants to call art is art. But there’s a little wrinkle where it comes to memes. Art generally aims to express a sense of emotion, there is by the very virtue of the medium, room for inference and interpretation. Art allows an interplay between the viewer and the artists emotional state at the time of viewing and creation respectively. Memes attempt to communicate information in a different way than art. Art creates a connection through referencing emotional content, memes create a connection through references to contextual content. Memes are also meant to be iterative, any given meme will be adapted and translated in new contexts depending on the new context created by the initial meme. Essentially the form is different, art creates an open ended connection of emotion that cannot be fully placed within a particular context, memes are open ended connections of context that cannot be fully placed within a particular sense of emotion.
The iterative nature of memes, along with their contextual specificity makes them more akin to words or phrases within a conversation than the emotional spaces created by works of art. I suppose taking a sentence from a conversation, writing it out and framing it would constitute a work of art, but there’s still problems with this distinction in terms of memes. Duchamp, in championing the recontextualization of art, “created” several “readymade sculptures,” wherein he’d find items from the garbage, or otherwise cast off items that formerly served a different purpose and recontextualized them as art. His most famous of these works was “The Fountain,” where he signed a pseudonym on the side of a thrown out urinal and called it art. These readymades became art because they had been removed from their previous functions and only held out to be art. If you took an old beat up stop sign that you thought had a lot of character and hung it on your wall, you could rightly call that art, but the exact same sign wouldn’t be art if it was still in use in its intended function of instructing drivers on the proper flow of traffic along a road, at least within the context of it performing that function. Memes run into the same problem, because they’re intended purpose is a means of communicating over the internet is to communicate a set idea to an impersonal mass audience. Even if moved into the context of the museum or other art view environment it would still be performing it’s practical function of communicating to a mass audience, the only difference being the one mass audience was on the internet and this one is in a museum.
The meme cannot be recontenxtualized into art because by its nature it is a response to the context it’s placed in. In order for a meme to become art it either needs to be entirely stripped of context, in which case it is no longer a meme, or the context must be bent to the point where it would not really be considered art. To a certain extent a meme can exist as both a meme and a piece of art at the same time, but it can never be a “pure” work of art, however pretentious that sounds. No amount of aesthetic excellence or artistry would render a meme a pure work of art. Carivaggio himself could render a meme with the highest quality of artistic skill, but if it still functioned as a meme it wouldn’t be purely a work of art because it would still serve another purpose outside the context of art. Not only that, but placing the meme in a museum would actively run counter to the intended function of the meme, which is to exist on the internet and propagate itself through mass media. Sure, Grecian urns and exceptional specimens of silversmithing might have also had functions outside of the purely aesthetic, and are totally at home in a museum, but in bringing them into a museum they are removed from their context, nobody is still storing olive oil in that Grecian urn, or serving meals off of that filigreed platter. But a meme is designed to be looked at, so by looking at it even in the context of a museum, the viewer cannot help but to interact with it along the lines of its original function to at least some extent. So, are meme’s art? Yeah, a little bit, but never entirely. It might be a disappointing answer, but it’s the one the facts, or rather bunch of unsubstantiated stuff I said, point to.