Hello all! It’s a packed week here at Melendy Avenue Review. Three reviews! Two of big time literature and one of recent journalism on fascism. A new video! A review link! A discography! Mithra pics! Let’s just get right to it. Please consider sharing this with friends, as it is a very good issue. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Video Content-
The Countercultural Vision of History
Review Link-
The Everyday Between Revolution and Reaction
Reviews-
Seyward Darby, Sisters in Hate
Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family
Discographies-
Cake!
Lagniappe-
Mithra, Work Companion
VIDEO CONTENT
My penultimate birthday lecture, where I grapple with the fascinating and frustrating Ishmael Reed and the countercultural vision of American history, is now on youtube. I plan on following up more with Ishmael Reed studies, if I ever get the chance.
REVIEW LINK
I reviewed this rather odd book about “the politics of everyday life” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s by a British “Blue Labour” (Labour people who think they should imitate Tories) policy wonk, and about how the good kind of British intellectuals in the thirties-fifties period “drew inspiration from everyday life.” A lot of Orwell. The author sees this as a model for the center-left going forward. Weird stuff! https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-everyday-between-revolution-and-reaction/
REVIEWS
Seyward Darby, “Sisters in Hate: American Women on the Front Lines of White Nationalism” (2021) - A fair few new books on contemporary American fascism and antifascism lately, which I’d be interested in reading even if I weren’t working on my own book about it. Seyward Darby works as a journalist, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and got extensive access to three of the most prominent women on the contemporary American fascist right. There’s Corinna Olsen, a former leader in the National Socialist Movement, the American Nazis who go the most out of their way to imitate genuine German Nazis of the 1923-1945 era. There’s Ayla Stewart, a leading white nationalist “tradlife” influencer online (the “what is tradition” question among your “tradlife” folks is so muddied I’ve given up worrying about it). And lastly, we have Lana Lokteff, a sort of younger, more-openly-Nazi Ann Coulter figure and cohost of the Red Ice podcast. All three, by interesting coincidence, were born in that year of years, 1979.
What can these three tell us about white nationalism and women’s place in it? That seems to be Darby’s thesis question. Good student she presumably once was, she dutifully returns us to the thesis question at points in most (all? I didn’t keep track) chapters, and answers “yes, Virginia, white women were always important to white nationalism.” That was a rude way of putting it, stemming with frustration with how little I’ve read lately, even good books, surprise me, in form or content. Darby’s thesis is both true and more involved in that. The role white women have historically played in white nationalism is that of normalizing the ideology. From the antebellum South to the Klan revival in the nineteen-twenties to the online influencers of today, white nationalist women do their best to associate their hateful, deadly ideas with home, hearth, children, nurture, and (a carefully modulated, don’t want any loose women here! Except when nazi men actually do) sex appeal. More than marketing (though it’s definitely also marketing), these concerns of white nationalist womanhood tap into the deep concerns of racism more generally, the notion of a zero-sum world of racial total war where the “home front” is of paramount importance.
The three subjects illustrate these dynamics and how they work today in different ways. Olsen is somewhat the outlier (Darby refers to these women by their first names throughout- I’m weird about that and so will stick with surnames. They are not my friends). If she participated in efforts to normalize all-out Hitler-imitative Nazism, it was only in comparison to what the men were up to. She was a lost Gen Xer (as were all three women, to a certain extent) in the Pacific Northwest when she got swept up in Nazism, specifically, to the promise of Kalispell, a whites-only intentional community out in the mountains. She liked the idea of getting into a primal, folksy domesticity (I found myself thinking of “Midsommar”) with her two daughters (the dad was out of the picture). Olsen also tolerates bullshit a lot less than the other two, and quit (giving information to the FBI in the process) after Nazi men routinely sexualized her daughters. She converted to Islam not long before Darby contacted her.
Lokteff and especially Stewart are closer to the thesis. Stewart identified as a feminist whose big thing was natural birth. Soft-leftism and relatively defensible but kook-adjacent positions, along with a desire for more attention and a lack of real values, led her down the primrose path to what was then called the “altright.” She joined an extra-conservative Mormon sect, started cranking out kids, and brought her white nationalist message to the “mommy blog” space. She took to the tropes and the conventions of the space — pastel aesthetic, aspirational lifestyle-ism, nostalgia, passive-aggressive sniping at other mothers, and most of all, the shocked, shocked! aggrieved tearful defensiveness that anyone would object to her ideas — like a fish to water.
Lokteff, for her part, also started out vaguely left-of-center. Granddaughter of an emigre from the Russian Revolution (let’s pause and pour one out for nana’s stolen serfs) and also raised among a lot of vaguely spiritual nonsense, she got into white nationalism via the sort of aimless skepticism that characterizes… some people, we’ll leave it at that. She had a kid around the time Darby started interviewing her (commenters on her shows let her know how she was failing the race). She couldn’t do the domestic goddess thing Stewart does, but she could do the “I’m a woman who likes ‘traditional’ masculinity” thing. Interesting, given the way she has, in many ways, sidelined the Swedish Nazi she married and whose show she basically took over, but that’s how it goes. How must Phyllis Schlafly’s husband have felt? Fine, probably, the prick.
At this point, faithful readers must be as used to me bringing up the shortcomings of liberal analyses of fascism (and antifascism) as I am of the theses in these thesis-heavy books I read. Well… tough. The shortcomings in “Sisters in Hate” aren’t damning and the book is still well worth reading. They can be summed up as the effects of a liberal understanding of politics as having more to do with personal affect than it does. Such an outlook probably makes for better profile-writing than a more rigorous outlook might. I look at these three women and see marks. I want to know how they can affect a strategic situation and how best to neutralize them. But they are, indeed, humans (Nazis are human- just bad humans). Darby brings that out in discussing their assorted personalities: Olsen’s sharpness and oddness, Stewart’s desire to belong and capacity to swallow her own snake oil, Lokteff’s cynicism.
I’m not even saying Darby shouldn’t do that. I just think a more structural approach might have done more to link up these affects to the political situation, if we’re going to give them political weight- the affects and the effects, if you will. For example, it would have been cool to spool out more the historical context, given they were literally all born in the same year. This critique extends to the solutions- can’t have a liberal political book without some solutions! These mostly involve white women doing the work of challenging racism themselves, of helping women who seem to be falling off into white nationalism, donating to ex-Nazi recovery groups (Darby cites a mediocre one, not an actively hurtful one). These suggestions are varying degrees of helpful, but don’t really get to the root of the problem. Moreover, it cuts across the grain of her thesis. She uses the metaphors of “falling” into nazism and needing a “handhold.” Did they fall, or did they walk, intentionally, into what they did (and do)? Well, as always, probably a bit of both, and prevention is worthwhile, but it deserves more of a discussion. In any event, this is a pretty good book on an underexplored topic. It’s just the critiques are a little more interesting to write (and, I’d guess, read) than “good profiles!” ****
Marilynne Robinson, “Housekeeping” (1980) - This novel answers a question I didn’t know I had, lingering in my mind: “what would a serious literary novel look like if it were written by someone who could check all of these boxes at once: white, American, sincerely believing Protestant, writing after the 1960s?” I think some part of me, before looking in to Marilynne Robinson, basically assumed no one fit the bill. Serious WASP novelist, pre-sixties? Plenty. Serious contemporary PoC American Protestantism? Sure. Contemporary white American Protestants that don’t really believe it but like the community and do-gooding? Still kicking, here in Boston, original HQ of the kind of thing, especially, and probably some of them write novels. Serious contemporary American Protestants? Well, yes, though recent events call into question the sincerity of their belief versus their tribal affiliations… In any event, they don’t write “serious” novels (I’m racking my brain to think of them writing good “unserious,” i.e. genre, novels either… James Ellroy, I guess, but he’s the definition of a “special case”). They don’t do rigorous abstract thought. That’s why the right fills its jurist and serious functionary seats with Jews, Catholics, Mormons, and if the Trump movement continues, whackjobs from the Internet.
Look, I know, I get it. I shouldn’t focus on that. I should focus on the unpretentious spare beauty of the language, the meticulous but unostentatious concern for the worlds made by women, and the simple-yet-thorough humanity of the characters. Well, among other things, those attributes are probably among the reasons why I never thought to read any Marilynne Robinson before now. It’s not that I’m against them. It’s just that those things are prized by creative writing students. I have taken one writing course in my life and it was spring semester, 2005. Robinson doesn’t seem to get involved in controversies or other stuff that might grab a non-writing-student’s attention (well, she gets praised by Oprah, but that’s not a good vector for my attention either). She's respected in such a way that she never became a punching bag, ala Jonathan Franzen or (her former student) David Foster Wallace, so I didn’t get to know about her that way. I knew her name for a while, and would see her stuff in bookstores. I knew people in writing circles who talked her up, big time. Eventually I edited a review of her latest book for San Antonio Review, and figured maybe I should have a look. Here we are.
“Housekeeping” is the story of a kid named Ruth, living some time in the mid-twentieth century in a town called Fingerbone somewhere in the mountain west. One day, her mother drops her and her older sister Lucille off at Grandma’s house and drives her car off of a cliff into the deep mountain lake nearby. Previously, this lake had claimed a whole train full of people, including grandpa, slipping off the railroad bridge into the deep. It’s a scary lake. Grandma is old, tired, strong, respectable, and befuddled by life, what with its lake-taken loved ones and sudden responsibilities for children. She dies and some eccentric great aunts take over the house. Also thrown by their new responsibilities, the great aunts fly the coop when the girls’ aunt Sylvia returns to Fingerbone to take over the titular task of keeping house with the kids. Sylvia is an eccentric who lived for years as a drifter. She does whacky stuff like eat dinner in the dark and collect random shit. Ruth is basically down but as Lucille grows older and gets into adolescence, she is not. By and by, the law takes an interest in the supposed neglect of Ruth, and Ruth and Sylvia flee into the night.
Robinson’s prose is, indeed, quite fine. I especially enjoyed a passage where Ruth talks about the sort of not-asleep not-awake state you can get into if you stare into deep dark long enough. Robinson is good with sensate stuff like that. There’s a little bit of “the ands” — unnecessary usage of the conjunction “and” in lists instead of commas to, I don’t know, give emphasis or something, you see it all the time and it bugs me — but for all I know, she invented that tic and passed it down to her workshop epigones. She makes differences in terms of house cleaning and the like between the women who make up the story stand out and not in some obvious symbolic way. As for the simple humanity bit… well, I guess that’s where we get back to how I began. Her version of humanity is hard for me to recognize. Not that that makes it wrong, or false, or that I’m going to start bitching about how I “can’t relate to the characters,” that obnoxious cliche of readers who treat literature like a consumer experience. I felt I could relate to the characters.
Where I had trouble was connecting to the philosophical stuff Robinson put in Ruth’s mouth. I’ll give just one example- she has Ruth say “[F]or need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and it’s shadow.” And a bunch more in that vein- no more feel the need for someone to touch your hair as to feel it. In what world is that the case? Whose experience is that? Is that what it’s like to be one of the serene middle aged ladies at a UU church? I’m not trying to be rude or dismissive here. That’s just utterly foreign to me- not just to me, but to more or less everything I’ve read. It’s actually kind of wild. But it also makes me arch an eyebrow. What the hell is literature for in a world where desire and satisfaction are the same? What’s the point? A bit like asking what’s the point of being good if our fates are predestined, like Robinson’s homeboy (not being flip here, she has written extensively praising) John Calvin…
How much did any of the doings in the book interest me? How much do straying bourgeois wives interest me? Not much but I enjoyed “Madame Bovary.” “Housekeeping” held some interest for me but less- Flaubert is pointed, mean, and Robinson isn’t, not here anyway. So I amused myself in two ways. First, I played “find the contemporary workshop lit tropes.” Robinson reigned over the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for some time, and stuff from here crops up in “that kind” of fiction over and over again, from the NYT bestsellers list to your writer friends google docs. Siblings with a spooky bond? Check. The woods as source of meaning, Walden redux? Check. The “ands?” Check.
Second, I cooked up a scenario where Robinson is a satrap. I’ve noticed that in the publishing world, sometimes an author is basically crowned king of their community, the spokesman (gendered term used advisedly) who’s on call to represent their ethnos and advance their protégés, stymie rivals, etc. Junot Diaz was that guy for Dominican and to an extent Latino writers; Sherman Alexie played that role for Native American literature for a while. I think of these as “satraps,” the term for governors of what used to be independent kingdoms absorbed by the Persian empire. Both Diaz and Alexie ran afoul of abuse scandals clearly abetted by being treated like little dependent kings and both probably held back the literature of their respective communities (Diaz was quite spiteful towards Carmen Maria Machado, a much more talented writer). I think the white publishing industry would have loved for Ta-Nehisi Coates to be their African-American satrap, but he doesn’t seem interested and that literary space is (and always has been) too big and diverse to manage that way. I found myself thinking, what if there’s hundreds of good white Protestant writers — they’d have to be evangelicals, there’s not enough juice in “mainline” Protestantism anymore — and we just put Robinson out there as their symbolic figurehead so we don’t have to confront their energy, like how Diaz’s literary machismo was probably threatened by Machado’s perspective? Is Marilynne Robinson fake news?? Well, no, that’s silly. She’s just a decent writer I don’t relate to much. Don’t worry- I’ll give “Gilead” a try, one of these days. ***’
Karl Ove Knausgaard, “A Death in the Family” (2009) (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) (narrated by Edoardo Ballerini) - It must be a real bonanza for small-language translators when a Karl Ove Knausgaard or a Halldor Laxness or an Ismail Kadare comes along, huh? Like all the Norwegian or Icelandic or Albanian translators coming out of the woodwork, getting their big moment…
Anyway, this is the first in a six-novel series where the author, an artsy Norwegian Gen Xer, relates his life in excruciating detail. The series gets a lot of Proust comparisons. I never got into Proust, I should probably try again. I didn’t get into Knausgaard either. I listened to it because every third audiobook I do, I try to listen to “important” “contemporary” literature. I remember when everyone was talking this guy up, and even the official dumb guy in the most prominent “dirtbag left” podcast talks about reading him, so, I figured I’d give it a try.
In the Proustian mode, Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel goes back and forth in time, following eccentric paths of association. For the most part, the first half of this book depicts Knausgaard’s childhood, roughly from age eight to age sixteen. The second half concerns what happens when his dad dies when the author is about thirty and just getting started in his literary career. The dad looms over a lot of the book- he’s a jerk, emotionally abusive, degenerates into alcoholism. But nothing can overshadow the great big I of Knausgaard himself. It’s Karl Ove, his feelings, his inner experiences, his minutely detailed recalling of his experiences: weather, clothes, the little mundane movements of people he converses with, that’s the attraction.
Ego can be a good thing for writers. Arguably, it’s a necessary thing, even for non-memoirists, the idea that your words are worth reading. But here’s the thing: Norwegians might be the most humorless people in the western world. In twenty-two hours of listening, I caught one (1) joke, and it was about Chekhov. Literature doesn’t need to be a laugh-a-minute to be legitimate. But A. Come on and B. Let’s talk tragedy. I know it has different meanings for different people. I’m somewhat old school in that I prefer the oldest meaning I know about- irresolvable conflict, brought on by what’s best in the conflicting bodies. You can argue Knausgaard’s series (called “My Struggle” because he’s a cute little prick, in spite of his perpetual long face) is about the greatest tragedy of all, in that sense, the tragedy of lived existence and its inevitable disappointments, culminating in death.
It was an interesting play, on the part of one faction of modernist writers, to roll the dice and try to sell normal life as tragic. Sometimes it pays off, artistically speaking, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s surely not what the Greeks had in mind, and another strain of modernism, following Nietzsche, went quite the other way in terms of their attitudes towards normal life, with, errr, interesting results. Of course, Knausgaard is a twenty-first century man (and a Gen Xer, if that means much in Norway), so awareness of his own consciousness, posturing and tragedy-seeking, is very much part of his deal.
What does it all add up to? One of my least favorite things in any kind of cultural production is the equation of “tragic” with “sad.” I know some people who do that and I don’t criticize them — they’re on their own journey — but I do not like it, especially from people who should know better. To be fair, Knausgaard is far too canny for that. But he basically only goes one notch above and makes an easy equation between “tragic” and “boring.” He makes pretty clear that this isn’t an abuse memoir. The point isn’t “my dad was an abusive prick and so I can’t enjoy life.” It’s just, “I can’t enjoy life, also, my dad is a prick” (I don’t think he uses the word “abusive” in relation to his father).
Basically, this is a long way around the barn of saying this book was boring. The language was nice. It probably would have bored me more in the hands of a less talented prose stylist. Not to get political, but contemporary Scandinavians are possibly the most comfortable, coddled group of people in human history. I know the Nordics are no utopia — have read enough Swedish crime novels to take that on board — and I know comfort is no guarantee of happiness, but you need to do more than Knausgaard does to make boredom interesting. It is possible. To me, this doesn’t manage it. I may look up the second book one of these days, but I’ve decided against going through the whole series sequentially in my audiobook-literature listening slot. You know, for those of you hanging on my reading selection news. **’
DISCOGRAPHIES
Cake! The very first CD I bought with my own money was Cake’s 1996 release, “Fashion Nugget.” I bought it because I heard the song “Going the Distance” on the radio and/or MTV and liked it. I basically only played that song, as children do. I might as well have bought the single- I think CD singles were a thing back then? Cake’s tales of break-ups meant little to me, and I couldn’t relate much to Frank Sinatra singing “Stormy Weather” and the flies and spiders getting along much better. I was a kid, it was the nineties.
I kind of want to say it’s always the nineties as far as Cake is concerned, even in their latest release, 2011’s “Showroom of Compassion.” Singer/frontman John McCrea is always deadpan in his delivery, and the lyrics he sings are always sarcastic even when they’re getting across quite sincere feelings. They grapple with sincerity and irony, the classic Gen X topics, in lyrics and in style. The guitars go hard but not too hard, the trumpet blares, the weird theremin-sounding thing does its thing, from Contract-with-America era premiere “Motorcade of Generosity” to “Showroom of Compassion,” released when the idea of Occupy was occurring to Graeber and crew.
But that’s wrong in some other ways. In a lot of ways, Cake was reacting against nineties music. The guitars are a little fuzzy at times but there’s nothing very “grunge” here. McCrea seldom shouts or screams. Lyrical references to Sinatra and car culture aren’t idle- it’s too much to say Cake is a nostalgia act (like the wretched swing revival acts that also came out in the nineties) but I think we can say their songwriting, especially early on, has a warm relationship to distinctly non-underground musical lineages, the “great American songbook” et al. From the beginning, like their first single “Rock ‘n’ Roll Lifestyle,” Cake revealed they were over “the scene.” I guess that disillusionment is reasonable “nineties” as well, and a product of the usual irony-sincerity tail-chase, but we’re not exactly dealing with Pearl Jam here.
More to the point, here’s a way Cake both differs from their nineties rock peers and in a sense fulfills their promise: it’s suboptimal to listen to their albums as albums, I found. This is because their individual songs, even ones I didn’t like, are well-crafted little nuggets that it’s very easy to imagine being used in movie/tv soundtracks and commercials (as indeed plenty of them have been). This might sound familiar to you, as this is basically what I said about Beck’s latest albums in my first Discography. The difference is, Beck did some weirder things before, whereas Cake has basically been doing songs that could be in Target ads from jump. That sounds meaner than I really intend it. A lot of them are really quite good. But there’s not a ton of meat there. Listening to a Cake album is a bit like watching a string of really good movie trailers. It gets old. It’s too much to say Cake is a band made for “greatest hit” albums. You could probably randomly select a dozen-odd songs from their whole oeuvre, call it an album, and you’d have something basically as good as any of their actual albums.
They’ve only got the six albums so I guess I can call them out individually. Their first one, “Motorcade of Generosity,” has some good songs, like “I Bombed Korea,” but the band seemed to be really leaning into the whole “this is stupid, life is stupid, music is stupid and yet we persist” thing and I’m not down. “Fashion Nugget” has a lot to recommend it, among other things, Cake seems to have found something they cared about: disappointing relationships. “Prolonging the Magic” is fine, I guess, not especially memorable. “Comfort Eagle” has a lot of good tracks, and “Pressure Chief” does too. “Showroom of Compassion,” the creaks are showing and better 2010s production values don’t cover it up. Best album: “Fashion Nugget.” Worst: tempted to say their first one on nihilist grounds, but it’s gotta be “Showroom of Compassion.”
Next up on Discographies: “Half Punk, Half Metal, Half Rock”
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra, Work Companion
Yesterday, Mithra took special interest in my work. She often hovers around my work station while I eat breakfast but generally loses interest. Not yesterday!
She was demure after I started taking pics, or maybe was just scoping out my socked feet for a post-breakfast snack.
As she often does when she sits, she curled her tail around her feet.