Hello! Welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review. It’s been a week. Was it a good week for you? It was an ok week for me. I’ve been working on some things that will be published extramurally and eventually linked in later editions of this newsletter. For this week, I have a review of a scifi novel and another of a Russian classic. We also see the return of Ed’s Corner, where my roommate Ed says what’s got to be said. If you like Melendy Avenue Review, please share it with friends!
CONTENTS
REVIEWS-
Andy Weir, The Martian
Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
LAGNIAPPE-
Ed’s Corner: Why You Can’t Be Trusted and the Taxonomy of Conspiracy Theories
REVIEWS
Andy Weir, “The Martian” (2011) - A scientist friend of mine described this novel as “engineering fan fiction” and I think he’s more-or-less right. In fact, “The Martian” started life on software engineer Andy Weir’s blog, where he parlayed a lifelong fascination with space travel and interest in the hardware involved into the story of astronaut Mark Watney, accidentally left for dead on Mars and forced to survive on his own. People liked it enough that he turned into a 99-cent-a-download Amazon read, which got picked up by a publisher, becoming a bestseller and a movie with Matt Damon. It’s a nice story.
Most of the story is told through Watney’s log. It’s a series of ups and downs, engineering feats and then failures that need new feats to compensate, etc. A botanist along with being an engineer (astronauts typically have multiple specialties), Watney figures out how to make soil and grow potatoes, only to lose much of it due to explosive decompression in his habitat. He picks up a previous Mars probe and uses that to communicate with NASA but then accidentally shorts it out, etc. In the end, he needs to trek across thousands of hard Mars miles to rendezvous with an escape vehicle and meet up with his old crewmates. The rhythm of challenges met and renewed keeps up pretty well throughout the book.
Watney himself is something of a cipher, a regular-guy ubermensch as understood by a male Gen X STEM guy. He makes a lot of wisecracks, few of them particularly funny. His isn’t unpleasant company to keep for a few hundred pages but it’s not really the point. The NASA people who make up most of the rest of the viewpoint characters are basically interchangeable less one defining trait apiece- the Hard Charger, the Cautious One, the Woman Concerned About the Press. But I guess that’s not the point, either. Maybe it’s just having read some pretty shitty examples of novels of interiority -- Sheila Heti and Mike Ma -- lately, but I couldn’t fault Weir for having more interest in the stars, or, anyway, the mechanics of Mars rovers and the like, than in his navel or the navels of fictional people. I’m not exactly a gearhead but I can appreciate other people’s enthusiasms. This is a basically enjoyable light read. ***’
Mikhail Lermontov, “A Hero of Our Time” (1840) (translated from the Russian by Paul Foote) - I was supposed to read this book during my first semester of college! I skimmed it at best- I wasn’t a very disciplined reader at the time, even though this is a slim volume. I guess my old history professor had in mind teaching us something about Russian romanticism and imperialism in the Caucasus. Maybe something about framing devices in literature, too. The book is about an officer named Pechorin- first, another officer relates hearing stories about him, then the officer finds and transcribes Pechorin’s diary after the subject dies.
Pechorin is a Byronic hero (Byron and other British romantics like Walter Scott are referred to throughout the text), a man apart from society, cynical about its pretenses but passionate about his feelings, enamored of big landscapes and death, both of which the Caucasus provides in plenty. He is depicted as being irresistible to the ladies but caring only intermittently about one, who “got away.” Banished from St. Petersburg for scandal(s?), he stirs up trouble amongst the provincial/vacationing society in the Caucasus as well. He seduces a princess (as a lark- he’s basically indifferent towards her), angers fellow officers, fights a duel. The story is basically told backwards, we find out about his last exploit — kidnapping a (local, tribal, this time) princess and marrying her before she gets revenge-killed and he flees for Persia, where he dies — first.
One element of interest here is the self-awareness and even irony of romanticism here. Pechorin knows he’s posturing, based in part off of models like Byron, and so do many of his interlocutors — the officer reading the diary, Pechorin’s second in his duel — but he plays it entirely straight anyway. It seems pretty early in the historical game for Lermontov to be making such a point about romanticism, but I guess Byron had already been dead for a while. It probably helps explain why this work is enduringly popular in literary circles. Lermontov basically lived a Pechorin-type life, dying in a duel (one key difference between him and the character, I guess) at age 26. Even people who can see through some of romanticism’s premises can be sucked in by it, I guess. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Why You Can’t Be Trusted & The Taxonomy of Conspiracy Theories
I’ve got a secret, that I’m not sure I can trust you all with. It’s not some small matter like who I have a crush on, or what my Social Security number is, that I’d trust you with. No, it’s a big secret, a piece of information I’ve uncovered about a determined, organized and highly capable group consisting of anonymous individuals that have interest in many events of political significance lately. They’ve got ties to President Trump supposedly faking his recovery from covid, they’re all over the suspicious death of Jeffery Epstien while in police custody, and have their digital fingerprints all over information exposed through WikiLeaks. They aren’t a government agency, or QAnon is, they’re... well I’m not sure I should tell you.
It’s not that I think you’ll tell, it’s just that these people have eyes all over every little bit of electronic communication anyone could put out, especially social media. Not that I expect you to post a big secret like the one I might reveal on the timeline, but in knowing you’d have to fight your instincts to post about important information you hear on the timeline. You’d have to consciously not talk about it, which would create a perceptible change in your posting style, something those watching would notice. Once they detect an irregularity, the subtle shift caused by the information you were trying to hide they’d start digging into every little interaction you’d ever had before this day. They’d know you knew of me from your history on the internet and social media, and then their intense scrutiny would be on me, exactly what I wished to avoid by keeping this dark and dangerous secret. I shouldn’t trust you with this information, I can’t trust you with it... except it wouldn’t be much of an article if I didn’t tell you.
Fortunately for both of us, I’m exaggerating the danger of this cabal of electronic snoops for dramatic effect. They’re actually composed of a group you’re likely already familiar with, everybody on the internet. Yes the secret that connects all of the alleged conspiracies, and it’s not so much something that is covered up but rather something that is merely overlooked, is that they all share the common element of a dedicated community of online “enthusiasts” who follow any minute development in their story much in the same way I outlined above. Now there’s nothing wrong with wishing to read the tea leaves of social media and leak sites, especially where it concerns such important matters of state like the potential cover up of a huge sex trafficking ring that implicates many rich and powerful people, or the health of a highly contentious president on the eve of an election. In some cases where you find yourself in a position where business or government forces might have reasons to actually conspire against you, such as in organizing protests or other political or advocacy work, it’s sometimes downright necessary to have every shred of information you can dig up on a subject no matter how trivial. However, in the modern day there are plenty of people who at least somewhat view “investigating” these possible conspiracies by poring over various social media platforms as a form of entertainment and that’s okay too. This period of coronavirus social distancing leaves us with very few options for entertainment. While professional sports kind of limps along, you can’t really watch it without some amount of concern that the players might catch the virus, or otherwise be put in harm's way, whereas there’s very little chance that the shadowy conspirators you’re obsessing over on a subreddit are going to catch corona, and even if they did they probably deserved it for all of the grand deception and crimes they’ve committed.
There does come a point however where the search for obscure truths can go too far. We need only look at the various plots of QAnon believers to go on shooting sprees or abduct their children out of their separated spouses custody to see that at a certain point it’s no longer all fun and games. Obviously QAnon is just one of several different styles of harmfully obsession inducing hyper-visceral conspiracy theory next to the folks who got sucked into the Satanic Panic in the late 80’s and early 90’s, or those that believe that lizard people from the center of the earth control everything. While the previous example of the hobbyist interest in various conspiracies should be thought of as fine, we need some manner of terminology to differentiate them from the dangerous conspiracy believers, and to do that we’ll have to figure out exactly where the two differ.
The path to a dangerous relationship with conspiracy theories, I believe, comes about when the theorist can’t grasp the system the supposed conspiracy exists within. Most conspiracies have some basis in at least apparent reality, QAnon isn’t wrong in thinking that there is a clandestine sex trafficking organization that caters to the rich and powerful as we can see from the facts of the late Jeffery Epstien’s arrest. Where they err is failing to place them within a larger system, by for instance ascribing the existence of these sex traffickers to the influence of satanist, or the Elders of Zion rather than the obvious idea that whoever ran such an organization would have a great amount of political leverage over some very powerful people that could be put towards any number of real world projects. It’s a correct observation that business interests in the United States have undue influence on the government, and that the basic fundamentals of the economy are becoming ever more shaky, but it all falls apart when you attribute that to shapeshifting lizardmen from the center of the earth, or at least to shapeshifting lizardmen from the center of the earth who don’t have realistic political objectives. The problem isn’t speculating on clandestine activities by itself, any number of American intelligence agencies are working to destabilize governments around the world, and by the classified nature of their work any discussion of their work is going to have to involve at least some amount of guessing. Wondering what US operatives are up to in Caracas is theorizing about a conspiracy, wondering which politician has had their face stolen by a reptilian doppelganger is engaging in conspiracy theory.
Coherent motivation is what separates the two categories. Most conspiracy theorists attribute nearly all motivations to the people behind the scenes to either control (or a desire for money, which is just a means of control), or even more nebulous “conflict.” In the minds of QAnon Trump is a good guy merely because he’s in conflict with the deep state One World Government, and so is their shadowy leader Q for that matter which by extension makes everyone involved with QAnon one of the good guys. What is never answered is why Trump, Q, or the QAnoners themselves are in conflict with these conspirators in the first place. Even if the shadowy cabal Trump is supposedly tracking down has immoral motivations, Trump might have the exact same motivations. The vague motive of “control” in fact would invite such conflict, if one force of evil wants control, another might as well, and there’s only one world for the both of them to control and they’d inevitably come into conflict. In the QAnon conception of things, the deep state is launching all manner of bureaucratic attacks against the President because they are locked in conflict, rather than thinking that these maneuvers originate from the system of bureaucracy itself attempting to preserve itself from the disruption of their operation that Trump’s unexpected election brings with it.
A conspiracy theory arises when systems are subsumed and attributed to some grand conflict, rather than conflicts being contained within and caused by systems attempting to perpetuate themselves. Conspiracy theories, as distinct from theories about conspiracies, proliferate in these times because the nature and operations of the major systems that govern our lives are largely obfuscated from the general public, and what little we are told comes in the form of pleasant lies. Because most people don’t have the knowledge or context to grasp how the systems of society work, they come to invent massive and elaborate conspiracies to explain why their lives keep getting worse when the government and the news claim they should be getting better. Conspiracy theories are also a potent outlet for our collective imagination, an innate human quality that has little place in our practical minded society, although our cultural relationship with imagination and rationality is something best addressed elsewhere. Until then remember, you’re not paranoid if they are out to get you, but you better know why they’re out to get you if you want to do something about it.