Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! We have a jam-packed edition this week. Four reviews! One is one of my long-promised publications, about a shitty war book. Three are exclusives: one on a book of criticism, another on a French classic, and the last on a popular current-ish scifi book. There’s a fresh video. Ed chimes in about a movie he hasn’t seen and what it might mean! It’s great. This would be a great MAR to share with friends. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Review Link-
Reviewing the Next World War
Video Content-
tradition and Tradition Amongst the Chuds
Reviews-
Michael Trask, Cruising Modernism
Émile Zola, L’Assommoir
James S.A. Corey, Caliban’s War
Lagniappe-
Ed’s Corner: Opinions About A Movie I Have Not Seen & The Time Economy
REVIEW LINK
I had a look at two “liberal hawks” prognosticating war with China and Iran in the near future for San Antonio Review. I wasn’t expecting high literature, and I knew I would disagree with the politics. But between just how dull and stupid this book was (isn’t the liberal elite supposed to be smart??) and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes motivated in part by fear-mongering about China, this one managed to make me mad. People tell me they like it when I write angry, so you might like this one: https://www.sareview.org/pub/sar5berardnextww/release/1
VIDEO CONTENT
I’m not going to express regret about not getting guests (I’m working on it) as this one is probably my favorite birthday lecture. It’s hard to explain, it has to do with fascist “traditionalism” and the construction of history. Just give it a watch, I don’t think you’ll regret it. I am a little sad I can’t get Matt Johnson’s introductory remarks from my 2018 birthday party (I always have an introductory speaker for my lectures) on there, he is truly the champ of introductory speakers. Enjoy!
REVIEWS
Michael Trask, “Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought” (2003) - I enjoyed Michael Trask’s latest two books, “Camp Sites” and “Ideal Minds,” so thoroughly I decided to have a look at his first book, “Cruising Modernism,” which examines notions of sexuality and class within American modernist literature and social sciences between the nineteen-aughts and the twenties.
It, too, is quite good, and I say this as someone with next to no connection to the literary writers Trask takes on: Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, and Willa Cather. I’ve either tried them and not liked them (James) or just haven’t tried them and should. I’m something of a cartoon-addled little kid when it comes to literary modernism, preferring the flashy (and wicked) Celines and Wyndham Lewises to the rest, but who knows, maybe I’ll like the others? Either way, Trask makes some compelling points. It’s not enough to talk about these writers as being on one “side” or another of a contemporary culture war read back into the past (this was written in the gay-marriage-fight era). Trask would probably take me to task for my lumbering historiographical take — he’s got the finesse (and digs) of a literary critic who knows his business — but I see all of the writers he talks about as responding to dynamics that upset established class and sexual hierarchies.
The sheer speed and dislocation of movements of people, capital, goods, ideas, etc. that defined the early twentieth century posed problems for both literature and social science. Both fields were used to thinking in terms of “statics”- fixed rules of society, fixed ideas of what literature was, fixed morality (that a lot of these fixes were quite new didn’t seem to bother them, or did it? They don’t seem now). Then all of a sudden (i.e. the Second Industrial Revolution hit) everything was “dynamics” and people didn’t know whether to shit or go blind. Social scientists located mobility as a major source of numerous “ills,” from labor agitation to homosexuality. They weren’t shy about sort of stirring these ills into one big degeneracy stew, and locating these in specific people, namely hobos/tramps and immigrants, especially the newer waves coming from the Mediterranean. Good (poor) people stay put, quietly work for (whatever offered) wage, and marry someone of the opposite gender. Bad poors wander around, looking for kicks.
Writers had different reactions to these bad poors and their cousins, the neurasthenic and newly-extra-mobile (witness Henry James and his characters flitting across the Atlantic) rich. I’ll be honest here and say I didn’t fully keep score and the close readings of writers I haven’t read and probably wouldn’t like that much threw me a little, but the chapters still held my interest. As far as I can tell, Henry James thought the new mobility made people sad and weird and got them in bad marriages. Gertrude Stein (and many social scientists) preferred nice, reliable, obedient dogs to flighty, self-motivated people (she would have loved doggo memes, I bet, the more misanthropic the better). Workers made Hart Crane horny, and Cather had something going on with the erotics of Catholicism? Either way, interesting stuff to think about. I will grant the work is a bit “dissertation-y” in places, but Trask already showed the ability to play with schema while getting his points across brilliantly that would characterize his later work. I’ve invited him to chat with me on zoom for a YouTube video- hopefully he replies! ****’
Émile Zola, “L’Assommoir” (1877) (translated from the French by Margaret Mauldon) - My understanding is that “L’Assommoir” was Zola’s breakthrough, as far as selling the series of which it is the seventh volume, the Rougon-Macquart novels, to the public. He was popular, but this one was a real hit. Whether this is down to the French public finally getting behind Zola’s experiment in extended-form literary naturalism, prising what he saw as the hereditary and environmental factors determining human existence out of the web of mystification around it, or just that people like depictions of low life and few had been served up to them like this before, is for wiser commentators than me to say.
“L’Assommoir” tells the story of one Gervaise (yes, it took a while for me to stop seeing her as Ricky Gervaise in a dress), a low-ranking member of one of the titular families (the Macquarts, for anyone keeping score) of the series. She starts out poor, working as a laundress in a north Paris slum, with two little kids from a dude, Lantier, to whom she wasn’t married and who ditches her early on. Life in the slum is crowded, dirty, and violent, not just physically but emotionally. Everyone is in everyone’s business. It’s the worst of both worlds in terms of people engaging in disapproved behavior — drinking, illicit sex, petty crime — but everyone still being highly moralistic about it all. Like I’ve said before, poverty and trauma don’t, on their own, ennoble- they fuck you up. People in “L’Assommoir” are pretty badly fucked up.
Towards the middle of the book, things look up for Gervaise. She gets married to a roofer, Coupeau, and makes/borrows enough money to open a laundry shop of her own. Zola understood himself as a naturalist, not a sentimentalist ala Dickens. There is, supposedly, a logic to what happens. It’s too much to say it’s the opposite of Dickens, that morality doesn’t enter into it, it definitely does, but in some weird late-nineteenth-century way I don’t fully grasp. So when the downfall starts, there seems to be multiple reasons. One is that Coupeau falls off a roof, hurts himself, and finds out he prefers chilling (and, eventually, drinking a lot even by prevailing standards) to working. If that were all, it would imply that Zola was making a commentary on bad luck. But there’s more to it. Gervaise can’t stop herself from “greed,” which in Zola’s usage means it’s old sense- she wants to eat a lot, and good food too. She also wants to laze and gossip with her workers rather than really attend to the neighborhood’s dirty laundry, and she likes throwing parties, even with her in-laws who hate her.
So as you can see, there’s a weird mix of dynamics going on in this Petrie dish Zola set up. Things get weirder when Lantier re-enters the picture, with mysterious money, political opinions (opposed to the Emperor, but not in an especially helpful way), and good lines of shit. Zola depicts Lantier as a sort of boarder-parasite (not a few social scientists from this period described the horrors that come in the wake of having to take on boarders, especially men) who men and women both find irresistible. He takes back up with Gervaise and also starts borrowing money from her. Coupeau doesn’t care, but he doesn’t care about much by that point besides going down to L’Assommoir, the lowest dive in the neighborhood, and swilling rotgut. Eventually, between Coupeau’s drinking, Gervaise’s laziness and gluttony, Lantier’s depredations, and factors like the utter lack of care options for elders or children, Gervaise is pretty badly fucked. Zola strings this out for hundreds of pages, not sparing details: humiliations at hands of vicious in-laws and former enemies, madness, free-falling standards of appearance and hygiene, eventual demise.
What to make of all this? Well, it held my interest pretty well, more than in-jokes about Second Empire politics or weird Genesis-allegories like you got in earlier installments of the series. Zola claimed this was “the first novel about working people that does not lie” and it scandalized many readers for its (relatively) frank references to sex and low life. The French is, supposedly, in the slum argot of the time, not just the characters’ dialogue and thoughts but much of the omniscient narration as well. The introduction warns this makes “L’Assommoir” notoriously difficult to translate. The translator of this edition made the interesting choice to basically turn it into cockney, which took me out of it some. I’m not sure what a better choice would be, but constantly hearing things described as “not half” this or that, “bleedin’” as a modifier, etc., felt wrong.
I’m also not sure what Zola meant me to carry away from the book. I should reign in my habit of compulsively politically classifying literary writers, but I guess I’d slot in Zola as a left-Republican (in the French sense, though American Republicans were a bit closer to that sense circa 1877). He’s sympathetic to the poor but also thinks they by and large do it to themselves. Character, as transmitted by heredity and shaped by environment, will out. Gervaise and Coupeau’s kid, Nana, subject of a later novel, is the result of slum breeding and slum environment, neither of which can result in anything good as far as Zola is concerned. Workers’s self-assertion in the world of “L’Assommoir” is usually either empty boastfulness, as in the case of the slacker Coupeau, or a grifter’s cover, like with Lantier. Meritocracy and striving don’t do much either. Would Gervaise had made it with a better husband? Zola definitely gets across that women are screwed way worse than men in the slums, structurally screwed. Well- it seems a thing with French social novelists they don’t do much with solutions. A lot of French social theorists used to, at the time, and their solutions were novelistic enough (see Comte, Fourier). This was a pretty good book in any event. If you’re not a weird Rougon-Macquart completist like me, there’s worse places to jump in, despite the translation issues. ****
James S.A. Corey, “Caliban’s War” (2012) (narrated by Jefferson Mays) - The second installment in the “Expanse” books marks a substantial improvement from the first, which wasn’t bad itself. The improvements in this yarn of adventure in a human-settled frontier solar system will make me explain parts of the world! Which I didn’t feel that much compelled to do in reviewing “Leviathan Wakes.” I guess the important thing to mention here is that the big plot point in “Leviathan Wakes” was that an evil megacorp recovered an alien weapon called the “protomolecule.” The protomolecule is like a germ that kills anything it touches and then reanimates it, but all mutated and fucked up. At first I kind of rolled my eyes at what seemed an obvious zombie play- 2011 being around high zombie season. But to the authors’ credit, the protomolecule is weirder than that- it disassembles life and reassembles it into strange shapes, towards some unknown purpose it is pursuing methodically.
We shouldn’t make more of this than it is- in the first book, it was mostly an occasion for zombies and some body horror. In the second, someone has weaponized the protomolecule to make monstrous super-soldiers. They’re pretty “Alien”-y — silent, black, big heads, big claws — but why mess with a proven concept? At the beginning of the book, one of these monsters takes out a bunch of up-armored space marines on Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons. This causes Earth and Mars, the two big solar system superpowers with interests on Ganymede, to get in a shooting war, because each thinks the other fragged its guys.
This leads to a chain of reaction we follow through our viewpoint characters, most of them new to the series. Martian space marine Bobbie survives the Ganymede monster attack, but through various circumstances winds up in fish out of water situations working for Earth-bound UN (the UN runs Earth, a bit of a laugh but whatever) apparatchik Avasarala, another viewpoint character. Ganymedan botanist Prax finds his daughter kidnapped just as stuff collapses on his moon- coincidence?! No, obviously. And of course, there’s Holden, captain and dad-figure to a crew of misfits on the space corvette Rocinante. They all find themselves in assorted races against time — stop the Mars-Earth war, stop the polymolecule which even those who want to weaponize can’t control, find Prax’s daughter. Naturally, these all come together, as do the characters.
The new characters are a mix. A lot of Bobbie’s character is “she’s a woman, and a badass, and physically huge!” which is cool but not a big deal. Prax is analytical, unused to adventure, dedicated to finding his kid, the kind of NPC you need to keep safe on escort missions in a lot of video games. I liked Avasarala, it was cool to have an old lady bureaucrat as a main character in this kind of story, doing political machinations and shit. She wore a little thin as the book went on — we know, she swears a lot and likes her husband — and she’s basically beat for beat Olenna Tyrell from “Game of Thrones” (one of the writers was George R.R. Martin’s assistant!), but is still pretty good. There’s more of a wrinkle to Holden — being involved in violence messes with him — than in the first book but he’s still what I think of as a “perspective dullard.” Ever notice how often main characters are way dull? Harry Potter is the king of perspective dullards, but they’re everywhere, and Holden is one.
That’s fine, though, I’m not here for a character study. I’m here for action, and the authors — “James Corey” is a pen name, it’s two dudes — deliver pretty well. The action isn’t all violence, either. Prax is at his best showing us Ganymede experiencing an ecological collapse after Mars and Earth start shooting each other in its atmosphere- turns out, space colonies are fragile! Avasarala does some fun political maneuvering with people (men, mostly) who underestimate her, but not so much as to make her actions low stake. Bobbie is slower to come to her own but does in the end, with some pretty cool space/Jovian moon battles. And Holden ties it all together, a little tiresome at times, but shepherding the action out to the moons of Jupiter for a big showdown. Then there’s a pretty good sting at the end to set up the inevitable sequel. All in all, a good ride.
There’s a bit of the “Chamber of Secrets” problem here. The first two Harry Potter books ended with confrontations with various manifestations of Voldemort in the school basements. So far, every Expanse book ends with a raid on a remote protomolecule-infested lair. I remember wondering if Harry Potter books would always end that way, then I read “Prisoner of Azkaban,” the best Harry Potter book, which broke the mold. “Abaddon‘s Gate,” the next Expanse book, should maybe mix it up, but the action in “Caliban’s War” beats anything Rowling came up with. ****’
LAGNIAPPE-
Ed’s Corner: Opinions About A Movie I Haven’t Seen & The Time Economy
If you told me that a four hour cut of a movie that had already overstayed its welcome in the theatrical two hour theatrical version was the movie everyone was talking about these days, I’d say, “well of course.” They’d been hyping the Snyder Cut of Justice League for well on two years now, of course people are going to talk about it now that it’s out. However, what I might not have believed is the seeming general consensus that it’s good, or at least not bad. Now it may be possible, again with a runtime of over four hours, I don’t doubt that there are good and interesting bits in it, to fill four hours of screen time nearly every concept both good and bad will have to have at some point been on screen, but I don’t think this reaction is objectively correct. As I’ll outline shortly, I think the Snyder Cut has a lot of unique circumstances surrounding it that only make it enjoyable relative to the current moment. A year or so out anyone who does go back to it, or worse experiences it for the first time, will have no idea what all the fuss was about. I can’t say this for sure though, because I haven’t seen it and don’t intend to.
I did see the first Justice League, and the theater I watched it in felt more like an operating theater, as I watched the now rightly canceled Joss Whedon try and amputate the ungangly mess he’d been left by Zack Snyder into something someone would be willing to sit through for two hours. It felt rushed, I didn’t like very many of the characters except for Aquaman, it was never quite clear what the stakes of any given scene were. This was, perhaps, not helped by the fact that we’re essentially being introduced to this world, but from the jump the stakes for the story made it clear that it was possible any given scene could end with an apocalyptic alien invasion. Then an hour and a half in you’re wondering why they never pay that off. The jokes don’t land, every fight scene is either the good guys all punching one really strong guy to no effect, or punching an indeterminate number of bad guys, to equally no little effect, essentially there’s a lot of punching but it’s never clear what it accomplishes and it’s never clear how any characters actions lead to the next beat in the story. The group of friends I went to see it with seemed excited about it at the time, and not wanting to ruin their enjoyment I buried my complaints about the film so that they were perfectly preserved to be deployed here all these years later.
With regard to the Snyder Cut, you could attribute all the problems in the theatrical version to either Whedon’s ineptitude, or just the studio’s attempts to reign in Snyder’s artistic vision to begin with. While four hours sounds like an ungodly amount of time to sit down to a movie of any length, let alone the turgid funeral dirges the last three Snyder-directed comic book movies turned out to be, it turns out that in what is perhaps a bout of prophetic foresight on Snyder’s part, the extended cut came out right in the midst of a pandemic where people have nothing but time on their hands. They’re essentially begging for something to come along and kill some time for them. Staying home and cracking open a few strong drinks and spending all day getting into the weeds about what exactly Zack Snyder was thinking when he got to hour three and said “we’ve still got more plot yet!” is just what the doctor ordered, it would seem.
So it seems two factors conspire together to make the Snyder Cut the superior version of Justice League. The Whedon cut is so inept, and the need for distraction is so deeply felt at present, that the Snyder cut both compares favorably to what came before and is well suited for the time and place where it came out. Beyond just eating up the hours, it’s rather novel to sit down and watch a sprawling four hour movie outside of epics like Lawrence of Arabia or a few of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies back to back. The audacity to attempt such a thing at least must seem novel. Also, even on a technical level, I think between the two bad films Snyder’s auteurism probably wins out over Warner Brothers coming to Joss Whedon, pointing at Avengers with six hours worth of captured footage in hand and saying, “here’s a hundred million dollars to do reshoots and CGI, make this into that.” The modern desire to make everything coming out of Hollywood into a “shared universe” movie really restricts some of the more eclectic film makers, and while Snyder isn’t always good, he’s generally the one being imitated and not the one imitating. I don’t recommend watching it, I know I didn’t, but I feel confident saying the Snyder version is probably the better of the two, at least for this time and place.
I should probably explain why I’m writing about the Snyder Cut of Justice League if I haven’t seen it, and it’s mostly to illustrate a point I’ve been struggling with in regards to media recently. The answer is fairly simple: it’s four hours long and I don’t think I’d enjoy it. I simply don’t have the time, it’s a wonder I’m able to squeeze these articles in every three weeks or so as I keep a pretty busy schedule, at least as far as the current pandemic conditions allow. While people working from home throughout the pandemic might need something to take their mind off of things, I’m apparently an “essential employee.” Taste in media is entirely subjective, and anyone can like what they like for any reason, but I hope anyone consuming media at least puts some thought into what exactly they like about the things they like, and attempts to identify if the things they like about the media are intrinsic to the media experience. For example, you might have had a good time hanging out with your friends as you all watched the movie, but if the experience was good because of the jokes and camaraderie you enjoyed between yourself and your friends, then it wasn’t really the movie that was the good part of the experience, was it? In fact that the movie was so disengaging that you could pal around with your friends and still not feel you were missing much of the feature might be some indication as to its quality. Not that misidentifying why exactly you enjoyed a particular experience is the worst thing there is, but these days I keep getting the sense that much of the media commentary in the general culture is more and more removed from elements intrinsic to the media itself.
The earlier example of a movie being a great group watch, while instructive, is not exactly the most apt. Some movies are expressly designed to be fun group experiences, and that can take a commendable amount of craftsmanship. Perhaps a more exact example of an extrinsic positive association someone might have with a piece of media is when a movie is hyped up through extensive advertising, and everyone wants to see it so they can talk about the thing everyone else is talking about. That’s fairly typical, but a new dimension of extrinsic media enjoyment is becoming more apparent in recent days. Having the time to watch these hours-long epics is a luxury in and of itself. I imagine many essential workers like myself, who have to go into work day after day in this pandemic are struggling to find any time whatsoever to watch much of anything, being worn out from both the stress of work and constant fear of exposure to Covid while out in the working world, and focusing on very basic forms of entertainment to just fill out the small hours where they have the time to turn their brain off. I wouldn’t have the mental energy to follow any sequence of events that took four hours to communicate, even if it were detailed instructions about how I personally could get a free car and all of my student loans paid off, let alone a grim slog about how “you just can’t save them all.”
In contrast, more middle and upper class folk, who can ride out the pandemic in the safety of their homes, have the time to get caught up on all of their shows, even these long drawn-out blockbusters that don’t have much merit to them otherwise. The better off you are in terms of financial security, the more time you can afford to spend keeping up on entertainment, the more content you can be up to speed on, the better to advertise the security of your circumstances. Sitting down to watch the Snyder Cut, that absolute brick of a movie, is essentially a case of conspicuous consumption, frittering away hours of free time that many could only hope of having access to. This isn’t even a dynamic borne out of the pandemic itself, it existed beforehand. The motivating force behind the release of this film now was the months and months of clamoring from a certain subset of the movie consuming public to have it released, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that those clamoring for the extended cut to a certain extent are, in some way, gratified by the cultural signifiers I just outlined. This recent turn to expansive, reference-heavy comic book and extended universe type movies plays directly into the type of person looking to impress others by demonstrating how much free time they have access to. Keeping up with all the other movies in the series, and reading up on the source material that these movies are based off of, are performative investments of large amounts of time into these media properties.
Essentially what this boils down to is a flaunting of an access to free time. The service economy is transforming into something quite ugly, and the pandemic has accelerated this. A certain set of the population is managed to the point of having a minimal amount of free time or spare mental energy to process media. Meanwhile, more “skilled labor” professions use the time savings the service economy provides to accrue a greater and greater supply of free time, which they use to consume media products. Being up on the latest HBO high gloss drama series or extended universe CGI movie is in some way a sign that you’re better than a common laborer. It’s not even a matter of money. There’s probably plenty of instances of a service worker raking in wages hand over fist in overtime charges, but doesn’t have the time to spend any of the money they’ve made, while a media savvy middle class office worker is financially over-leveraged, due in part to consumer habits they picked up just as a matter of trying to kill time, but the markers of social class are still apparent. To a certain extent, these sorts of cultural attitudes towards media diet have always been with us, with distinctions made between the high arts of opera or ballet, and the more easily consumed media of TV or low budget movies. But these days the squeeze on our time is so exaggerated that the phenomenon is especially noticeable. The one problem with this imbalance of media consumption is that media is essentially meant to distract people from thinking along these lines. But this starving of certain segments of the population out of a media diet gives far too much room for them to step back and take greater notice of the apparatus as a whole.
I have reason to believe Mithra has seen much of the Snyder cut, but if she has an opinion, she’s not saying.