Hello, and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! I’ve been all right. I hope you’ve all been well. It’s been a two-book week here. We have a review of a work of queer theory/literary criticism, and another of a fairly lousy “experimental” literary work on audiobook. As I mentioned last week, it will probably be my last audiobook for a while, due to changes to my tasks at work. We also have a recipe! Truth be told I don’t have that many recipes left. I need to think of new lagniappe ideas. We’ll see. If you like this newsletter, please share with your friends, and feel free to leave comments!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS-
Michael Trask, Camp Sites
Sheila Heti, How Should A Person Be?
LAGNIAPPE-
Recipe: Party Ceviche
REVIEWS
Michael Trask, “Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America” (2013) - Not sure how to review this, it’s been a while since I read a book in this experiential category: a nonfiction book I enjoyed greatly but am not fully sure I “got.” This is a work of queer theory, something with which I have little experience. They kind of train historians to deal with theory with a semester-long sampler at the beginning of their doctoral programs, where you get your Marx week and your Foucault week, etc etc. They then let you follow up with whatever framing you find compelling on your own (notionally- most of us just go to the archive with just enough theoretical framing to cover our asses). I don’t recall us getting a queer theory week, maybe it was kind of subsumed under feminism week, who knows, it was a while ago.
So there’s vocabulary and hermeneutics that went over my head. That’s ok. What I got was interesting and not the kind of thing easily explained in a sentence. The idea seems to be that American universities of the post-WWII decades were thoroughly steeped in the philosophical pragmatism developed earlier in the century. It wasn’t just an adopted ideology (indeed, they’d insist it wasn’t an ideology at all), but a way of approaching the world and expressing themselves that Trask calls “the academic style.” This style meant detachment, independence from institutions (even when materially dependent on the university), opposition to ideology, and an emphasis on experience. There’s more than a hint of make-believe, here- you’re supposed to act as though you really believe in things even while maintaining the intellectual flexibility to change these beliefs with experience. Trask compares this to the role-playing that became popular at the same time in Cold War defense exercises designed by some of the same intellectuals.
Notionally, the New Left was the sworn enemy of the academics and administrators who acted as the high priests of the academic style. But Trask convincingly argues that the likes of Mario Savio and Tom Hayden shared more assumptions with Seymour Lipset and Clark Kerr than either side would like to admit. If anything, the student movement was more “committed to commitment” and to the primacy of experience than anyone. Trask never goes the easy route, analytically- he doesn’t make this a “they were therefore exactly the same” thing or a “student outstripped the teacher” thing. It was a matter of emphasis and mode- the “expressive authenticity” of the students versus the “knowing artifice” of the professoriat. Just tearing each other to shreds over what “commitment” looks like…
Well, they agreed on one thing- what they were doing was manly, and there was no queer campy funny business about it, no sir. Both the academics and the student rebels patrolled the boundaries of their respective intellectual/stylistic demesnes to keep the gay out, or anyway, in its proper place, and like any boundary outrider, felt constantly at risk from the repressed outsider. For the academic style, there had to be assurances that their treatment of ideology as suspect and lionization of serial experimentation in modes of thought and perspective had nothing to do with the queer style of camp — entertaining ideas or postures to satirically explode them — or the queer mode of serial, noncommittal sex. The new left, for its part, formally, kinda-sorta embraced gay liberation, so long as it was a matter of gay people who seemed like them and who rejected “playing roles,” not a bunch of screaming queens (much like how most academics had little issue with discreet homosexuality). Academics dismissed the queers amongst them in campus novels, where basically queers were like them but just too much; student radicals raised the joint specter of the closet queen and the bureaucrat. You had spectacles like Norman Mailer “coming out straight” and insisting that “the system” wanted to make emasculated queers of us all, that the most radical, committed thing you could do was have kids… shades of the Proud Boys and their “western babies…”
I’m trying to present this all programmatically, largely to keep it all straight in my head, but that’s not what reading “Camp Sites” is like. It is an incredibly rich 220 pages or so- let me be a straight (to say nothing of fat) guy for a minute and compare it to some rad ice cream with all kinds of chunks in it, all disparate but unifying into a satisfying experience. Trask reads a vast array of texts- Ralph Ellison, Sylvia Plath, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Patricia Highsmith, Gore Vidal, Erica Jong, “The Valley of the Dolls,” John Waters, RAND corporation analysts and business writers, radical manifestos, just all kinds of stuff. He draws together seventies feminism and the new, comparatively structure-light meritocracy concept emerging in the Seventies. He promulgates a theory of “mean camp” in response to Susan Sontag’s theories of good and bad camp, where mean camp just rips through all the assumptions of uplift and does… something, I don’t know.
Like I said, I’m not sure I fully “got” everything. If I were writing this for an academic audience I could go back and try to dope out the mean camp thing, or whatever. But I suppose in my own little Savio-lite version of a rebellion against academic style that still uses many of its assumptions, I’m trying to get across a little of what reading this book was like for me. What it was like (along with the ice cream thing, I guess) was a series of brain teasers — I am not “native” to the types of reading Trask used — and swimming in a pleasant stream of ideas, at the same time, if that makes sense. Challenging and relaxing all at once. He has a new book coming out on the seventies that involves Philip K. Dick, and I’m pretty stoked about that. Expect an equally compelling review, nerds. *****
Sheila Heti, “How Should A Person Be?” (2010) (narrated by Allyson Ryan) - This was bad. I get that I’m not the target audience here. I’m a man, for one, and I don’t give a shit about painting or theater, the two arts to which most of the characters are notionally dedicated. How did I come by this book? As best I can piece it together: I had decided to, every third audiobook I listen to, listen to a contemporary big-name literary figure. I got it in my head that Heti was one such based on her being published -- excerpts from this book, if I remember right -- in n+1. I think seeing her relatively new book about being a mom reminded me of that, and so, there I am. Truth be told, extending “contemporary” to 2010 might be stretching it a bit, but whatever, who do I need to justify these categorization schemes to?
Anyway. This book is about Sheila Heti (the author, or a ~fictional character??~ are you impressed yet??), her inability to write a play, and her friendship with a woman named Margaux (apparently a real painter, but I don’t care). Sheila ponders life, including the titular (stupid) question, and has little vignettes with Margaux, their various artistic friends in Toronto, etc. The closest thing there is to a plot is the rise and fall and resurrection of the Sheila-Margaux friendship.
The characters, including the author’s depiction of herself, are so thinly-drawn that I started to entertain dark, vaguely conspiratorial thoughts (perhaps because nothing else, like the audiobook I was listening to, was entertaining me at the time). Is Sheila Heti a closet reactionary, like an anti-feminist or something, looking to get across an idea of women of her generation (she’s about ten years older than me, a Gen Xer) as vapid, pretentious idiots? That would explain her characterization of herself and Margaux. They get in a nearly friendship-ending fight because they buy the same dress at a boutique! What the fuck is that? Sheila also portrays herself as helplessly dependent on men’s sexual attentions. She has a big fling with a shitty artist named Israel, leading to an extended sequence with her using the phrase “getting fucked by Israel” a lot, which just makes me think of the Gaza situation which only reaffirmed that no, I’m not the reader she presumably had in mind. Target audience or no, I found the “Heti as anti-feminist mole” reading more interesting and in a way, happier, than the “Heti as genuinely this bad of a writer” explanation.
I’ve been thinking about recent intellectual history and the ideas of Gen X lately, and the idea that people are idiots who don’t really deserve rights or a future does seem to be pretty prevalent in that cohort. Of course, very few can really hang with that kind of nihilism- bad for the old career track. The path back to doing all the normal bourgeois shit anyway -- work, mate, spawn -- is illuminated by self-consciousness: if you’re merely conscious of how fake and shitty everything is, and comment on it ironically, then you’re a superior person who can go forward with things, like how Weber’s Calvinists believed that their ability to make money was a sign their God was ok with them. Even that was too much of a bummer for many, so eventually you got various rainbow-colored versions of the same idea, where I guess we get a future after all despite not deserving it, because dammit, people can LOVE, or something. Heti belongs in that latter category. I wonder if she gets mad when people suggest ways to make things better than can’t be subsumed into a lifestyle change, the way a lot of Gen X intellectuals do? I guess there’s limits to how much I can blame them. No one’s dignified when they’re horny, and no one’s dignified when they’re trying to find their way out of the basic existential quandaries. But all because we all have belly buttons doesn’t mean I have to be interested in the contents of yours.
I can’t really shred the book too much, not because it doesn’t deserve it but because I listened to it and so couldn’t take notes. Truth be told, there’s not much point. Writers like this and their respective readerships (thinking David Foster Wallace here too) just kind of absorb most critiques and are like “well, of course my work was a pointless waste of time, because that’s LIFE, but at the same time it’s BEAUTIFUL and everyone plays SQUASH without keeping SCORE like in the end of this stupid BOOK” etc. etc. Margaux says she’s uncomfortable with the concepts of beauty and ugliness, and you know, I don’t see myself as the authority on those things either, but whatever beauty might be, I’m certain this book lacks it. I’ll give it the extra half star on the idea I’m maybe missing something as a big dumb man, but something tells me I can afford to miss whatever it is on offer here. *’
LAGNIAPPE
RECIPE- PARTY CEVICHE
This is a dish I serve at parties sometimes, like my birthday party. It was the only non-dessert dish out of the usual birthday party stuff I make that I served at this year’s “party,” which was only two people plus my roommates here and everything else online. This is a big bowl of ceviche, meant to be served to a lot of people at a party. This year, it was the main food for five men (we all had our own bowls and bags of chips so no covid cross-contamination) with enough left over to be my dinner the next day. It stays good for two or three days- the fish keeps cooking with the lime juice and salt, I’m told. You can mess around with what fish you use, as long as it’s on the lighter side- I don’t think it’d work with salmon, say. You can also try different juices- I see people using lemon/lime mixes and even throwing orange juice in.
INGREDIENTS
1 lb tilapia, chopped into roughly 1-inch cubes
1 lb red snapper, chopped into roughly 1-inch cubes
1 lb medium shrimp, shelled and chopped in halves
1 medium red onion, chopped
4-6 serrano chilies, chopped
2 16 oz bottles lime juice
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons cilantro, minced
1 avocado, chopped
INSTRUCTIONS
Place chopped fish, shrimp, onion, chilies, and salt into a bowl. They say to use a metal bowl but I find it works just fine with plastic or ceramic. Pour in lime juice. You might not need to use the entirety of both bottles, just make sure to cover. Stir.
Cover bowl and place bowl into refrigerator. Leave there for at least two hours. Stir occasionally to make sure chunks get evenly marinated.
After at least two hours, inspect ceviche. The fish should be white, not translucent. Take a fish cube from near the top of the bowl and cut into it. If it’s still raw in the middle, the ceviche needs more time to marinate. If not, you can probably proceed, but maybe check one or two more cubes first.
Drain off excess lime juice in colander. Dump remaining ceviche into serving bowl.
Add cilantro and avocado and stir.
Serve with chips and/or saltine crackers.