Hello, and happy new year to all! We have a jam packed Melendy Avenue Review this week. There’s both a review and a review link. I also relate the best books I read in 2021. Roomie Ed gives his takes on the material conditions of cultural creation. And in a new departure, I have linked to a piece by a friend, and in a genre I never thought I’d include in this newsletter, to boot. Please enjoy, comment if you have anything to say, and share!
CONTENTS
REVIEW LINK
What Tech Calls Thinking
FRIEND LINK
Harley Quinn vs Cognitive Dissonance
REVIEWS
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America
Best Books Read in 2021
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Why I’m Still Doing The Same Thing & Why Comic Books Are Hung Up On Continuity
REVIEW LINK
Here is my latest from DigBoston. It is a review of a short critique of the ideas backstopping and promulgated by Silicon Valley. It’s a pretty good book, though for the historical background, you’ll want to read Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.” https://digboston.com/what-tech-calls-thinking/
FRIEND LINK
This is my first time linking to writing by somebody not me. Maybe I should have been doing it all along, maybe I’ll never do it again, who knows? But a friend of mine wrote a piece I think deserves broader attention. It is a piece of fan fiction. I normally do not read fan fiction. I read this basically as a courtesy to my friend and a light amusement, knowing he’d do something more interesting than the usual fan content. But what he did was use established characters from the Batman canon to explore ideas of the mind and of social progress, research methodology, and overcoming (or not) trauma and abuse. He did all this and also made it short and funny. That’s impressive. Even if you’re not into Batman or fan fiction, give it a read. https://m.fanfiction.net/s/13783151/1/Harley-Quinn-vs-Cognitive-Dissonance
REVIEWS
Eduardo Galeano, “Open Veins Of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent” (1971) (translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage) (narrated by Jonathan Davis) - I first became aware of this book during a walk in Harlem as a stripling grad student. I bought a copy of Elaine Brown’s “A Taste of Power” from a sidewalk used bookseller (one of the best things about New York, those booksellers), who, having spotted a fledgling white lefty buying a Black Panther memoir, tried to upsell me with a copy of “Open Veins of Latin America.” I’d’ve taken him up on it, too, if he hadn’t pegged me for the rich kind of grad student and charged full cover price for both (used) books. He was mistaken, and I went away with only “A Taste of Power,” which is well worth reading.
Either way, I knew “Open Veins” as an old lefty classic and finally got around to listening to it (changes in my work duties have me back listening to audiobooks for the time being). Eduardo Galeano, one of the grand old men of the Latin American literary left, goes through Latin America’s history and explicates a few simple principles that guided it from the Spanish conquest onward. Exploitation of Latin America’s natural wealth and the labor of its people enriched other parts of the world, mainly Europe and the United States; this exploitation left Latin America with a pittance and, seemingly intentionally, delayed its economic and social development; the Latin American class structure, topped by a numerically small landowning and mercantile bourgeoisie, prevents progress and only overthrow of this class structure from below can improve things.
Galeano drives these points home with gusto and, considering the geographical and temporal scope in play, with respectable elegance. American exploiters replace British ones who replaced Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos; cheap manufacturing (this was just as multinational manufacturers were figuring out the maquiladora strategy, perfected after NAFTA came into effect) supplemented cash crop cultivation which partially supplanted the mining of precious metals; civilian rulers, reformers, conservatives, and military dictators replace each other in varying rhythms and patterns in the different nations of Latin America; always, always the same dynamics. Always, exploiters plunder the land (often leaving it depleted, in the cases of mining and some types of destructive agriculture), and work the people to the bone for a pittance, brutally repressing them when they complain. Always, the exploiters overseas grow ever richer and cement their competitive advantage over Latin America. Always, the native elites of Latin America come up with half-hearted (and soon reversed) reforms at best, and at more frequent worst, gladly accept the roles of brutal lieutenants to foreign capital, to fund their lifestyles and keep society as it is. Nothing will change as long as they are in charge.
Relatively little of this was new to me (more would have been had I bought the book that day in Harlem and read it soon after); as a student of the history of American foreign interventions, I had learned much of it along the way. But it was well presented, combining history, stories from Galeano’s travels across Latin America, literary references, etc. The prose partakes some of the vaguely mystical Latin American literary trends of the day, evoking the outsized happenings, lavish booms and bottomless terrors, and endless cyclical repetitions that characterized the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other writers of the “Boom” in Latin American letters then going on. Galeano later indicated some regrets about the prose style he used, but I think it worked fine. The penultimate part of the book, describing how Latin America fit into the political economy of the time, is somewhat more technical and necessarily dated, but still interesting.
Galeano received the honor of having his books banned in the military dictatorships of the Cono Sur, including his native Uruguay. The right never forgave him for making his points about Latin America clearly, poetically, and to a mass audience. Pundits grumbled when Obama accepted a copy of “Open Veins” from Hugo Chavez at a conference in 2010, and no less a literary light than (ex-leftist) Mario Vargas Llosa contributed to a volume which called “Open Veins” “the Bible of idiots.” But really, how much has changed since Galeano’s day? Most of the Latin American countries are now at least notional democracies. Drugs have joined the more traditional cash crops as drivers of the patterns he relates. The “pink tide” promised much, delivered some, and has not broken the class structure Galeano saw at the center of the whole thing. The work remains undone. As that bookseller in Harlem made clear, the book still has relevance- he could’ve tried to upsell me on some other volume, after all. ****’
BEST BOOKS I READ IN 2021
For some time now, I’ve been making lists of the best/my favorite books I read in a given year. People seem to enjoy them reasonably well.
FICTION
10. Olaf Stapledon, “The Star Maker” (1937)
Possibly the most moving document written in the form of a report, this is one of the ur-works of galactic-scale scifi.
9. Ngugi wa Thiongo, “Devil On the Cross” (1980)
An angry polemic against the broken promises of post-colonial Africa by one of it’s great literary voices.
8. Primo Levi, “If Not Know, When?” (1982)
A novel by the greatest memoirist of the Holocaust, this work about Soviet Jewish partisans avoids both nihilism and sentimentality.
7. Marguerite Yourcenar, “The Abyss” (1968)
A strange and haunting novel about a wandering sixteenth century European doctor/alchemist.
6. Muriel Spark, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1961)
This dark comic novel treats narrative time as a plaything as it tells the story of the titular Edinburgh schoolteacher and the lives she alters.
5. Ursula Le Guin, “The Lathe of Heaven” (1971)
One of the great scifi masters delivers again with this story of wishes come true and Taoist/anarchist meditations on power.
4. Larry McMurtry, “Lonesome Dove” (1985)
An 800+ page cowboy novel produced the purest genre joy I knew all year.
3. John le Carré, “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (1963)
Widely considered the best spy novel ever written, this Cold War document provides both the genre goods and deep character study.
2. William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vanity Fair” (1848)
One of the great satires of the English canon both chastises the sins and self-dealing of its subjects and revels in it, the classic Tory literary pose.
1. Toni Morrison, “Song of Solomon” (1977)
The best novel I read this year was this tale of coming to grips with history and selfhood, and the ways neither can liberate a person on their own.
Honorable mention: Rooney, “Ordinary People” (2018); Mishima, “The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea” (1963); le Carré, “A Call For the Dead” (1961); Azuela, “The Underdogs” (1915); Wyndham, “The Day of the Triffids” (1951); Waugh, “Vile Bodies” (1930); Rushdie, “Midnight’s Children” (1981); Hansen, “Fadeout” (1970); Jones, “The Only Good Indians” (2020); Mahoney, “Fair Trade” (2020)
NONFICTION
10. Vincent Bevins, “The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World” (2020)
Aimed at a broad popular audience, this work of journalism shows the long-term chilling effects of Cold War anticommunist massacres on progressive politics the world over.
9. Federico Finchelstein, “Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945” (2010)
A former professor of mine parses the relationship between fascism and religion in both Italy and his native Argentina.
8. Sylvie Tissot, “Good Neighbors: Gentrifying Diversity in Boston’s South End” (2015)
A finely-grained, and in some instances funny, sociological examination of the process of gentrification undertaken largely by liberals in my backyard.
7. Peter Gay, “Weimar Culture: the Insider as Outsider” (1968)
This is an extended essay on the main themes of cultural life during the Weimar Republic, and a cri de coeur for the continued relevance of social democratic “Weimar values.”
6. George Mosse, “The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich” (1974)
One of the master intellectual historians of the twentieth century catalogs the ways in which the German masses were harnessed to the project of nationalism.
5. Michael Trask, “Camp Sites: Sex, Politics, and Academic Style in Postwar America” (2013)
A brilliant and arch critical examination of mid-twentieth century American culture through a lens of sexuality, encompassing a vast array of literary sources.
4. Phil Neel, “Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict” (2018)
A radical geographer and “outside agitator” urges us to center rural areas and dying suburbs as nodes of resistance to capitalism.
3. Silvia Federici, “Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation” (2004)
This is a new classic of Marxist feminist historical scholarship, vast in scope for its relative slimness and radical in conclusions.
2. Perry Miller, “The New England Mind” (1939-1953)
This two-volume intellectual history of the Puritans who settled New England shows, in almost excruciating detail, both their similarities to us and the alien aspects of their mindset.
1. Isaac Deutscher, “The Prophet” (1954-1963)
The great classic of radical biography that delivered the life of Leon Trotsky to new generations does not disappoint in scope or literary bravura.
Honorable mention: Sundiata, “Brothers and Strangers” (2003); O’Connor, “Blood Red Lines” (2020); McCann, “War and an Irish Town” (1973); Hopkins, “The False Self” (2006); Walsh, “Astral Weeks” (2018); Trask, “Ideal Minds” (2020); Robin, “Fear” (2004); Galeano, “Open Veins of Latin America” (1971); Scott, “The Common Wind” (2018); Dubois, “Haiti” (2012); Wright, “Going Clear” (2013); Morgan, “The Puritan Dilemma” (1958); Naipaul, “The Return of Eva Peron” (1980)
SPECIAL LITERARY NONFICTION DUAL PRIZE
Carmen Maria Machado, “In the Dream House” (2019)
This harrowing account of abuse in a lesbian relationship distends established narrative forms and delivers deep insight and empathy.
Varlam Shalamov, “Kolyma Tales” (1973)
A classic account of life in Stalin’s gulag, which refuses cheap moralizing in favor of unflinching reflection of life as the author lived it.
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Why I’m Still Doing The Same Thing & Why Comic Books Are Hung Up On Continuity
When I first started writing Ed’s Corner, the world was a much different place. COVID-19 had been going on for awhile, but it seemed like something that could be handled eventually. I remember thinking that it would end up like the SARS outbreak of a few years ago, potentially dangerous, but ultimately containable and thought no more of it as I went about writing my lightweight article about media theory. Things have since broken from bad to worse, and we’re all living in a much different world with new challenges and perspectives. With everything going on I doubt you’re all wondering how I end up choosing the content for these articles when I have the time to write them. There are far more pressing concerns in front you at any given time. But I got to thinking about why I haven’t shifted the content into, say, an in depth analysis of how COVID has affected popular culture, or perhaps something else a bit more high minded than the surface level cultural analysis I’ve been working with so far.
If this were a classic millennial confessional type essay I might search my feelings and say that I don’t really feel qualified to comment on that just now. Who am I to tell you what to think and feel in this ongoing worldwide catastrophe? In a certain sense I stand by this gut check analysis of my actions, but not in the sense that I feel inadequate in the face of the task in front of me, so I take the easy road of cultural commentary instead. Rather, I’d already adopted a tone and writing style for this column, one that suggests a studied understanding of the subject matter. I couldn’t really deliver that promise when offering commentary on the pandemic, because I’m in the middle of it just like everyone else. Media theory lends itself to commentary in the style I’m trying to capture because there’s already some set up distance inherent in the artifice of presenting it for mass consumption, allowing a more complete view of the subject. Not that it’s impossible to come to understand larger historical moments with such completeness, but to achieve the same distance you either need a very keen sense of the world around you, or the natural distance of the passage of time. Lacking the precience to take the whole sweep of current history in at one go, why not wonder at this or that aspect of popular culture to kill some time during quarantine?
That makes about as much sense as any explanation, and if I wanted to try and frame myself in the best positive light I could argue I’m providing a service for you all by giving you a nice distraction in the midst of these worrisome times. That doesn’t really fly with me though, especially since I really don’t care too much about my own motives except in how they can be generalized across culture at large. Looking at the situation from a more strictly material standpoint, it could be noted I really don’t get paid to write these articles, and since popular culture saturates the landscape, it’s a ready material for commentary because I’m exposed to it and thinking about it anyways, and I might as well get some utility out of it. In fact this might go on to explain the whole industry of media commentary as a whole. Across the board there’s very little money to be had for the humanities, so why go to any length at all to find material to write about or analyze if you’re exposed to popular culture all day every anyways?
In fact, elements of culture are so ubiquitous that it’s essentially a second job keeping up with culture in general. You don’t want to be exposed to the latest round of celebrity gossip or that online thing that everyone is mad about now, but that information is packaged in the media machine so closely next to information you actually need, like in advertising emails surrounding that one email from your work that lists your schedule for next week, or as segments in the news right before they tell you what the weather will be tomorrow, that if you have to know it you might as well get paid for that knowledge, or if not paid then at least do something “constructive” with it. There’s just so much cultural content these days that much of the creative content of this era is just an attempt to do something with the dearth of content we’re exposed to on any given day.
This creates a sort of a negative feedback loop because the cultural content is almost never completely processed into a fully creative frame, the cultural artifact still exists as itself in some form or fashion within the creative content, and the raw undigested piece of cultural content stuck within creative content just return to our collective mental landscape as more cultural content to be processed in the same way. If material conditions changed to reward delivering creative content that was distinct from cultural content then this self reinforcing system would at least somewhat start to correct itself, but in fact the economic incentives are opposed to doing so. It is added value to both create “brand synergy” by including a cultural product within your creative product, and of course to pay your content creators poorly.
Another example of this failed processing loop caused by the material conditions of the industry can be seen in the medium of serialized superhero comic books, at least from the big two publishers of Marvel and DC, and that is the overreliance and impenetrability of comic book “continuity.” Continuity is when a serialized story refers back to previous elements of the plot to introduce new material for the story. Obviously there should be some amount of continuity in a story, having none at all would just create a disjointed series of images that didn’t relate to one another and could hardly be called a story at that point. That said, more continuity doesn’t necessarily mean better story telling; if someone draws a gun in the midst of a previously calm conversation the narrative of the moment has been advanced whether or not we know where exactly that gun came from. In fact it would probably hurt the pacing of the drama to stop and explain where exactly that gun came from, or to point out to the audience that the gun in question is the same one some other unrelated character used to win a trick-shooting contest several years of serialized storytelling ago, unless you took great pains to set that up well in advance. Such things could be interesting, but if the whole story was just call backs to other events like that, if every time someone drew a gun in a comic about the Wild West we had to have a detailed discussion about how the gun got into the sheriffs hands and when it had been used before, at the very least the pace of the story would absolutely slow to a crawl. Pulling a gun in the middle of a calm conversation is exciting because you’re introducing a new unknown element into a situation and you’re not sure what the outcome of introducing that element will be. If you know everything about that gun, and the outcomes of every time it has been used up until now it’s not as exciting.
There’s a certain appeal in keeping track of information like this. The TV show Lost, in fact, took great pains to make sure every gun a character uses throughout the course of the series came from somewhere and passed through various people’s custody, so that one never came from nowhere, and it can be satisfying to follow that whole line to the end. Lost, however, had the benefit of occasionally introducing new guns, and for that matter new characters to the cast, something that doesn’t happen that often in serialized comic books. Serialized superhero comic books tend to just churn through the same characters over and over again for reasons that can be identified through the same material analysis we did above. Comics creators rarely benefit financially from creating new characters, and from the earliest days of the comic books industry, the publishers have always had the advantage over the creators as far as intellectual property rights go. Any characters created for a comic owned by a comics publisher is considered “work-for-hire” in terms of intellectual property, and generally the royalties for the likeness of those characters goes to the publisher and not the creator of the characters. Legendary comics writer Jack Kirby was famously treated poorly by both Marvel and DC, even though he came up with possibly thousands of classic characters that are still published in both comic lines.
It’s not that hard to come up with a new character for a superhero comic. You can make your own Batman villain at home just by personifying some psychological reaction Bruce Wayne might have to seeing his parents die, (go stark raving mad? The Joker, become emotionally detached? Mr. Freeze, develop a split personality that feels guilt and anguish while he presents a normal face to the world? Two-Face), and then give them some kind of Dick Tracy gangster gimmick. For Spider-Man villains, think of an interesting way to move in three dimensional space, and then put somebody in a crazy suit who can do that and you’re good. Comic books are not the “myths of our era” that speak to deep seated truths and narratives that live within us all, they’re well tuned formulas for creative content. Honestly part of the appeal of the serialized comics is the potential they have for creating more characters from their simple formula, the entire team of Spider-Man villains The Sinister Six was fully assembled by the first Spider-Man annual. It’s entirely possible you could keep coming up with interesting characters every issue on into infinity, but once it became clear that the writers weren’t going to make money by working the machinery of serialized storytelling as it was set up, the stories became about throwing back to those times when the creative worlds of those comics had that potential, about examining all of the different combinations of interplays of dynamics from the characters that have been created so far.
Other issues follow on from that initial problem. Because you can’t afford to lose a character after you’ve created them, being that new characters are in short supply, the cliche that nobody is ever actually dead in a comic book began to take its form. If nobody could ever really die, then the dramatic stakes are lowered, and you also have to go through great contrivances to explain why these people haven’t died, or how it only seemed like they died, which only raises more questions and so on. Also if nobody is really making new characters then the characters within the comic can’t really go through too many great changes themselves. It’s a rare person who makes radical changes to their living situation and then just keeps seeing the same old faces everyday from their previous life. While there are plenty of hack writers in the comic book business, the cliches of the genre flow from the structure of the industry and not just poor writing skills, and better comics would come if the way intellectual property was awarded or handled changed. As the material conditions under which writing changes, the content of the creative output will change as well. If this newsletter ever gets a Patreon or the like going, you’ll likely see the change in content yourself, that doesn’t mean we’ll have sold out, (although it doesn’t mean we haven’t), just that the conditions have changed, and conditions can be analyzed and improved to create better creative works.