Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! We have some good stuff this week. I review a book of short stories by a Nobel Prize winner. I link to a review I published elsewhere. We have a Friend Link with more great writing to check out. Ed weighs in on the relationship between the pandemic and contemporary twitter outrages. No video this week- I wrote and recorded a doozy but it will take some editing, so it should be out this weekend and in next week’s Review. Stay warm (if you are in my climatic zone) and enjoy!
CONTENTS
Friend Link-
A Cool Dude’s Newsletter
Review Link-
A Pandemic Nurse’s Diary
Review-
Doris Lessing, Stories
Lagniappe-
Ed’s Corner: Just Give The People What They Need & Why People Were So Mad At The Bean Dad
FRIEND LINK
An enduring prejudice of mine that I often need to combat is the idea that cool people can also be thoughtful. For instance, when I was in seventh grade, I entered a poetry contest in my class and was miffed when a cool kid won, even though my poem was garbage and I didn’t even like poetry, it just seemed like something “smart kids” did, entering and winning poetry contests. I’m sure the other kid’s poem was better. Anyway, my friend David is a cool guy in the best sense, as in, has a sense of aesthetics and seems basically confident. I figured he was a smart guy when I met him in my grad program. He also turns out to be a thoughtful guy, and about cool subjects, like music and French language and culture, along with the dorky stuff I like like history and socialism. Give his newsletter a look, and if you like it, subscribe here.
REVIEW LINK
My latest for DigBoston is out, and is a review of a sort of future primary source- a diary by a pseudonymous nurse at a hospital serving the poor in New York during the (then) height of the pandemic last year. It comes courtesy of Hard Ball Press, a small press which does some pretty cool labor-oriented publishing. Check out my review here.
REVIEWS
Doris Lessing, “Stories” (1978) - I often find short story collections difficult to review. The lack of a single perspective or narrative thread throws me some, I guess. I also find Doris Lessing a little hard to write well about, which is odd because she is one of my favorite writers. Like a few other great writers I generally write short about — Primo Levi comes to mind — in her realist fiction, Lessing wrote, in direct, compelling language, about what she saw. She appears to have been mostly telling the truth, too, anyway the truth as she saw it. She didn’t have much of an “angle.” She was a feminist, but was never a movement person. She was a leftist, but left the Communist Party in the fifties and never got back into movement politics in that direction either. Her feisty, independent streak and extremely low tolerance for bullshit handicapped her in terms of following the ideologies of the time (arguably, any time). I’ve yet to read much of her science fiction, I plan on getting to that.
This is a collection of her short stories (except those about Africa, where she grew up in a South Rhodesian settler household, for some reason- maybe just length) ranging from a period from the 1950s to the late 1970s. With some exceptions — a great story about a boy determined to swim through a dangerous underwater tunnel, and another great one about British tourists creeped out by postwar West Germans — They cover many of the topics and concerns we see in her longer realist works, such as “The Golden Notebook.” We get some stuff about how being a communist was confusing, a fair amount of material about the hypocrisy and opacity of the British class system to which Lessing was something of an inside-outsider, and more than anything, we get Lessing’s depictions of women’s lives. The compilation includes stories of young women trying to find their way, middle-aged wives and spinsters negotiating the grind of marriage (or lack thereof), old women holding on to their dignity. In all of them, a combination of societal forces, internalized weaknesses, and the actions of inadequate men batter these women about, sometimes to their madness or death.
There are no plaster saints in Lessing’s work, no tiny violins playing for the victims of the world. The women are (almost) as cynical and self-dealing as the men- Lessing knows that oppression does not make saints out of people, it makes messes. Maybe this is one of the reasons I like Lessing so much. There is a lot of feeling in her work — love and it’s attendant miseries, grief, anger, isolation, fleeting stabs of joy — and there is no sentimentality, not even a whiff of it that I’ve noticed. Take, for instance, her notions on child rearing. Marriage has its compensations for women, in Lessing’s world; child rearing, almost none. She finds changing diapers and cleaning up after kids boring, a waste of a smart woman’s talents, and isn’t shy about saying so- wasn’t shy, in her own life, about leaving her children in Rhodesia to come up to London to start a literary career. A contemporary writer either wouldn’t say that, or hedge it in with so much self-analysis and back and forth it’d be rendered meaningless. Lessing says it, plainly, and explores the consequences of its truth. That is worth something, in this world. *****
LAGNIAPPE
Ed’s Corner: Just Give The People What They Need & Why People Were So Mad At The Bean Dad
I think I’ve finally come to terms with my own lack of serious rigor in this column. Sure I might have unrealized potential, or perhaps mere pretensions, of writing relevant and revelatory pieces on philosophy or culture. It wouldn’t be out of place next to Peter’s informed commentary of weighty works of literature, but personally I just don’t have the time for it and even if I did, no matter how gratifying having such a work of mine read by a receptive audience, it’s not really what the world needs right now. Now’s the time for novel, free wheeling explorations of interesting conceptual spaces, and not the solidly rigorous academics I aspire to.
As I write this we continue to be, interminably, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, and as a matter of general public health it’s in everyone’s best interests to remain in their homes as much as possible and avoid social contact with others until the virus is brought under control. Staying in and around the house for extended periods of time require engaging but non-taxing distractions, which I hope my articles provide. Now you might say that you’re the type of person who finds deep analyses of philosophical or cultural topics of great interest, but matters of deep study need to be balanced out by at least the potential to socialize. The necessity to unwind after serious sessions of deep study likely inform the “party scene” as exists on most college campuses just as much as the impulse to experiment socially in an environment away from one’s home, but likely not as much as the resulting alcohol dependence that comes along with those other reasons. In either event, even if you’re the kind of person who likes heavy mental engagement, you’ll also need the opportunity to take a break from your studies now and again, and this will serve towards those ends in addition to serving as an idle diversion for those who need that.
So now that I’ve justified this all to myself, let’s jump into the shallow end of analysis and rewind the clock to three weeks ago and talk about the public reaction to the Bean Dad saga. For those unfamiliar with story, Seattle area musician of some acclaim, and serial podcast host (in that he has been host to a series of different podcasts, not that the podcasts that he hosts are of a serialized nature), John Roderick went on a long twitter thread about how he attempted to have his nine year old daughter work her way through operating a can opener in the midst of quarantine by just setting a can of beans and a can opener in front of her and telling her to figure out how to open the can so she could sate her hunger herself. Here’s a tweet consisting of screen grabs of the thread: (
), the originals having been deleted by Roderick along with his entire account. Many online took issue with the concept of Roderick withholding food from his daughter for an extended period of time for the supposed sake of helping her to learn a new skill, and he received a deserved backlash for his tweets.
I’ve no interest in litigating the morality of his actions, mostly because it should be obvious on its face that this isn’t something you should do, and if you do attempt to teach your children in this way, you definitely shouldn’t brag about it. For the purposes of this article I’m willing to believe that this was an unfortunate series of decisions arrived at on Roderick’s part due to the ongoing stress of quarantine and misplaced resistance to taking an “L” online that escalated to his being twitter’s main character for the day. It’s easy to dunk on the man for his actions, and I do intend to pepper a few choice dunks into this piece as we go. But equally important is attempting to understand exactly why the online community reacted so vehemently to his method of teaching his daughter.
Many have pointed towards the obvious empathetic argument, that leaving his daughter to figure out the mechanics of a can opener so she could eat was highly reminiscent of parental neglect, and they’re certainly not wrong in their analysis. I do, however, think that the outcry over this was touching something more deeply seated than latent memories of neglect within our society. While triggering experiences might’ve set the tone as an angry one, it doesn’t fully explain the tidal wave of response Roderick received. There are any number of people posting about shitty behavior they undertake online at any given time, and anyone with a wide enough audience will eventually come to the attention of someone who would take serious issue with that behavior. It’s rather easy for more members of the community who would have traumatic associations with the behavior to come in contact with it and engage with it in a negative fashion. You see such phenomena every day on twitter, and this didn’t quite match the character of such strings of interactions on there. There was the expected anger, but the responses also drew notes of derision and exasperation, where if it were merely the case of carelessly triggering traumatic responses engagement with the thread would trend more toward mere anger or attempting to seek redress.
Another element that might explain the mockery and frustration with Roderick is the smug tone he took in the thread and his initial responses. Keep in mind Roderick is the one telling this story about himself, he thinks it makes him sound cool. In his mind he not only thinks he’s doing right by teaching his daughter problem solving skills and rugged individualism, but that he deserves to be praised by the general public for having done so. Never mind that anyone with any sense of pedagogy will tell you that the best way to teach anyone something, especially a young child, is to show them by doing it yourself and only *then* have them try it for themselves after having seen your example. In his original thread he admits to never having shown her how to operate the can opener, and just sort of expects her to inuit its function, and insists that she must learn to grasp mechanical operations cold because to paraphrase “what if we were in a zombie apocalypse scenario and her survival depended on figuring it out?”
I’m not going to engage with the zombie apocalypse bit, that cultural idea deserves its own deconstruction in a future Ed’s Corner. But I kind of doubt the wisdom of bragging to other people that my family tribal unit is more prepared for the total collapse of rule of law than yours, so when they do get around to releasing the T Virus my daughter has the mental capacity to improvise a way to kill you with a corkscrew. I wouldn’t want to reveal my advantage as the Dad in that scenario, I wouldn’t want to hear it as a member of the community even if I did believe in the zombie apocalypse, and I certainly wouldn’t want it said about me as a daughter. It’s a messed up thing to say, and I think his proclivity towards podcasting informs a tendency of his to expect praise for saying any old thing that enters into his head. Honestly, I’m less mad than I could be at him because I half believe he only said all of this dumb stuff because he was desperate for content. He was casting about for something interesting to say, and when his daughter approached him asking for something to eat Roderick heard the siren song of potential content and opened his twitter drafts when he should’ve been opening that damn can.
But that’s also the problem, and the real reason I think the twitter community got as mad as it did about the whole affair. Roderick is applying the model of his own worth to his daughter: that you must demonstrate cleverness in order to receive attention. In a certain sense the twitter thread is saying, “I’m teaching my daughter how to open cans the hard way, let’s watch!” but it’s also saying, “I’m a clever and interesting person as you can see by this clever and interesting thing I just did, and what’s more I’m teaching my daughter to be clever and interesting just like me!” There’s a baked in assumption that personal value must be demonstrated before attention or necessities is furnished which strikes most of us as wrong in human relations in general and family relations in particular. Telling someone that they must apply all of their wits to working out the contraption in front of them to ensure their own survival while dispassionately solving a sprawling jigsaw puzzle isn’t so much the relationship we envision between a father and his daughter, as the relationship we envision between The Riddler and Batman.
It’s simple enough to say that Roderick has a warped vision of personal worth, but where did he get it from? Roderick’s sentiments I think can find their roots in mainstream liberalism especially of the kind we’ve seen in recent times. Roderick ran a cornball City Council race in his native Seattle where he pitched a bunch of private-public partnerships to offer cute and clever technocratic solutions, like a fleet of driverless electric cars and a billion dollar monorail to problems that could have been solved far more practically by raising taxes a little and doing boring straightforward public works programs like better funding for already existing public transit. Roderick is more of an adherent than an innovator, though. The tune of “do a clever trick to have your basic needs met” has been called by the US government, and liberal lawmakers especially, for the last 20 years. Much in the way that the Affordable Care Act provided access to health insurance to those who couldn’t afford it, John Roderick provided his daughter with access to the beans, all she had to do was work a complex device she’s never seen before to get them.
The other element of it too was that his daughter was already hungry when she approached him at first. It’s possible to intuit the workings of a can opener, but having to do so over a rumbling stomach is not a good way to be set up for success. This parallel with modern liberalism is the element that inspired the outsized response. Many of us, in the midst of the pandemic have similar material needs that just aren’t being met, and expected to show our value before we get the support we need from those supposedly responsible for our welfare. We need stimulus funds to get us through the economic effects of the pandemic, but the refrain from liberal politicians is we might get it, if we can figure out how to deliver longshot senate races, or prove we’ve been good by helping out the economy, or abiding by mask regulations without any support. We’re dying, we’re either sick, stressed or both. We don’t have the capacity to be means tested to prove our worth. We resent needing to do a clever trick to receive attention to our needs, and Roderick openly bragging of having demanded the like from his daughter provided an outlet for that resentment at just the right moment. This twitter moment is interesting because it briefly brought this dynamic to the surface. While they have once again been buried in the discourse in the midst of the insurrection at the Capitol shortly thereafter, those resentments have not gone away. It’s only a matter of time before they reveal themselves again, unless our lawmakers demonstrate a clever trick and change their way of relating to their constituents in the grips of dire material circumstances.
People get mad if there’s no Mithra pic, so here she is in warmer times, pancaking out on the table.