Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! We have some good stuff this week. There’s a review I published in DigBoston about a big news history book. Video content returns with a guest! I review a book about bureaucracy. I discuss blues music. There’s a picture of my nice cat!
Also! In the next day or two, I am going to hold a reading election that will be open to all MAR subscribers! That’s right, you’ll all get to vote on my “beach reading,” where normally, that is a privilege restricted to paying Citizens! See how fun voting is! I am also coming up with other Citizenship rewards. Look in your email folders today or tomorrow for the word “OpaVote,” as that is the voting service I use!
CONTENTS
Review Link
What We Talk About When We Talk About Cold War Culture
Video Content
What is a Thriller? with Jack Mahoney
Reviews
Eugene Lewis, Public Entrepreneurship
Discographies
Junior Kimbrough!
Lagniappe
Mithra pic- what is going on with treats?
REVIEW LINK
My latest for DigBoston is about Louis Menand’s new book, The Free World. I remember being a teenager and being weirdly drawn to his then-new release, The Metaphysical Club, tracing American progressivism to the abolitionists via the American pragmatist school of philosophy. Professional historians — Menand is in the main a critic, with a perch at The New Yorker — have demolished his thesis but I still think the book is pretty good. Similarly, I’m not sure about the thesis of The Free World — that the period between 1945 and 1965 was one of unique cultural freedom and productivity in the US — but can’t deny the intrigue and power of his writing and thought. Sometimes I like a good, thoughtful, well-written chunk of history, even when I disagree. See the review here- https://digboston.com/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-cold-war-culture/
VIDEO CONTENT
I said I’d get guests for my YouTube channel, and I have! In this instance I have on thriller writer Jack Mahoney. This is part one of a two-part series where I explore the two genres of popular fiction I know the least about, which happen to coincide with the proverbial “two genders”- the male-coded genre of thrillers, and the lady-aimed juggernaut of romance fiction. My romance episode should come in about two weeks. But don’t sleep on the thrillers! Jack and I break down the genre, talk about where it’s been and where it’s going, and why it is — or isn’t! — the “dad rock” of genres. Enjoy!
REVIEWS
Eugene Lewis, “Public Entrepreneurship: Toward a Theory of Bureaucratic Political Power” (1980) - I have a feeling the Citizenry (become a Citizen of my newsletter, it is rad) voted for me to read this book out of two motivations: a minority are genuinely interested in how bureaucracy works, and a majority who thought it would be funny to make me read and review something with a title that sounds this boring. Joke’s on them! I love this shit. I tracked down this book and bought the cheapest but still rather dear copy I could find with some stimmy money. I had known about it for at least a decade, after seeing it in some “works cited” of interesting books.
I probably would not have noticed this in “works cited” were it not for the second subtitle (I basically refuse to have second subtitles in the headlines of my reviews, nonfiction authors should count themselves lucky to have subtitles, let alone fiction writers getting subtitles!): “The Organizational Lives of Hyman Rickover, J. Edgar Hoover, and Robert Moses.” What a trio! Hard charging bureaucrats who gave precisely no fucks and ran important parts of American state power at roughly the same time, Rickover was the “father of the nuclear navy,” Hoover ran the closest thing to a nationwide secret police force America ever saw, and Moses was “master builder” of New York, basically in charge of the city and state’s public infrastructure for decades. They weren’t the gray, colorless figures we associate with master bureaucrats. They weren’t exactly flamboyant like the politicians they coexisted with, like Roosevelt or Johnson, either. They were their own thing- the titular public entrepreneur.
This book belongs to what you’d call “historical sociology,” that odd by-blow of two fields you’d figure would maybe have more in common but reached a real nadir of mutual misunderstanding not long after this work was published. I’ve read some good historical sociology (like this book) but it’s not a good way to rocket up the field in either history or sociology, specializing in it. Essentially, what Eugene Lewis (a political scientist, according to his short, eccentric, one suspects self-written Wikipedia page) tries to do here is use historical examples to prove a social scientific point. He doesn’t do primary research (a big history no-no) and he doesn’t do anything quantitative or any fieldwork (a substantial social sciences no-no). Mostly, he talks about the careers of the three men, based on secondary sources (including Robert Caro’s legendary biography of Moses, “The Power Broker”), and fits them into a definition of public entrepreneurship. Public entrepreneurs both fit (uncomfortably) into their organizational molds and break them wide open, they expand their domains, they present a face of apolitical technical competence, they get old and stumble on new political realities, etc etc.
I shouldn’t give such short shrift to Lewis’s theory here, but A. it’s not why I read the book and B. it didn’t go anywhere. My understanding is that “Public Entrepreneurship” is respected in its field but that field isn’t huge and this didn’t spark a big, long-lasting conversation. It also came at an interesting time- 1980, just as neoliberalism was coming down the pike and bureaucracy went from being seen as a necessary evil to… well, here the story is funny. Neoliberalism is a famously slippery term, and people tend to associate it with a rebellion against bureaucracy and rules-bound organizations in favor for “thriving on chaos” in the marketplace, but recent research and arguments have gotten across the point that neoliberalism in fact thrives on, proliferates, rules and bureaucracy. But in any event, those bureaucracies wouldn’t look that much like those of the heyday of the mid-twentieth century. A “theory of bureaucratic power” that made a Weber-inflected take on those bureaucracies in 1980… that’s just bad timing.
But really, I mostly just found the descriptions and comparisons of how the three principals worked interesting and written in quite lively style, remarkable for social science. All three were tough- interestingly, the one from the actual military, Rickover, while a hardass when it came to his agenda, was probably the least of a son of a bitch of the three (then again, he probably wouldn’t have hesitated to flip that nuclear switch if the order came down, so…). Moses routinely destroyed neighborhoods to build highways, and Hoover, arguably, would be the one man to erase from American history if you only got one (I’m aware other people did worse stuff- but most of them would have been replaced by equally bad, roughly equally competent people, not the case with Hoover in my opinion). While Lewis makes notes of things like the lives destroyed during the red scare, he is ultimately more interested in bureaucratic form, how the three men managed new technologies and techniques and played politics, all while appearing apolitical. In many ways, that is the most appropriate portrait of these three men and others of their type, and I’d argue the type is worth understanding. The siren call of “just getting shit done”… not always enough to get an elected politician over the line, but it can provide a basis for power that slips the bonds of what is usually associated with bureaucracy (i.e. the notional source of the apolitical nature of the bureaucratic entrepreneur). Lewis admits his book is more of a jumping off point than a set of definitive answers- alas, I don’t know what jumped off from it.
One thing I found myself wondering- is this sort of power exclusive to liberal capitalist states? Would other bureaucratic setups nurture similar people under similar dynamics? It would seem they could- surely clever people played communist and fascist bureaucracies pretty well. I guess I’m wondering A. would such power dynamics inevitably exist in any system with bureaucracy, and could (should?) they be prevented and B. could you have, if not socialist, then social democratic public entrepreneurs within a capitalist system? Frankly, I have my doubts, though I have fewer doubts about the technical feasibility — some AOC devotee landing in charge of Head Start or something and cancelling their opponents on Twitter until they ran all of the country’s pre-K or some such — then whether it’d actually be helpful to socialism. I don’t hate bureaucracy but it’s not my preferred way to play the game. In this case, I very much am asking for some friends who I could see seizing upon such an arrangement were it possible… people love some sewer socialism… maybe my navy-man alter-ego in a work of fiction (who would no doubt greatly admire Rickover!)… anyway. An interesting and evocative book. ****’
DISCOGRAPHIES
Junior Kimbrough! Most of the music I like has some relationship to the blues, and usually, within blues-influenced genres — rock, metal, hip hop, reggae, even country — the bluesier it is, the more I like it. Lose me with your synth-pop or your operatic metal, I like riffs. One funny thing with listening to the blues as such though is that it’s often treated as a museum piece, that is, with a certain degree of reverence, but with the indelible dye of the anthropological. “This is what people did, once, and see how like (but utterly unlike) it is to stuff people do now?” Blues men became the subject of books and PBS documentaries as the audiences for the music waned but as a boutique customer base for “authentic” Americana picked up on it.
Junior Kimbrough lived to become a museum piece at least in part for a very “blues man” reason- simple bad luck. He came from the northern hill country of Mississippi and played a droning, stomping blues, maintaining a drone throughout his songs with thumbs on the bass strings of his guitar while weaving the rest of the music around it. He slurred and whined and drawled, vocally. He went to Memphis to make a record in the late sixties, when the blues was doing well and Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Muddy Waters were stars. But after recording, the record people decided he was “too country”- he confused them. Chicago blues was going in a more highly produced, soul and Motown-influenced direction, with brass sections and all. There didn’t seem to be a place for hill country blues. They released a single or two of Kimbrough’s and misspelt his name. He wouldn’t make another studio record for over twenty years.
He kept playing, in bars and so on. He had some success in Europe where his tapes would be passed around. He got back in the studio in the nineties after he was “discovered” by the wandering musical anthropologist/documentarian crowd. That drone, sounding like it came from a land time forgot (and to a New Yorker, North Mississippi would look that way), or the grave, worked just fine for them. He became something of a musician’s musician, and his records were influential on the blues rock revival you saw in the aughts, especially with The Black Keys, who recorded a tribute album to Kimbrough. He didn’t live to see it- he died in 1998, and his record company saw fit to announce he was mourned by no fewer than thirty-six children. His widow liked The Black Keys album, apparently, which is a nice denouement I suppose.
It’s not like I’m immune from the weird relationship between white people and black music more generally, or white pedants and old forms of black music like the blues more specifically. I first found out about Kimbrough from my Black Keys station on Pandora, after all. I, too, search out that voice from the grave because much of the living, vital music of my time alienates me. I guess I split the difference, as usual- I don’t see Kimbrough — broke, unsuccessful most of his life, dozens of children — as any more or less “real” than Howlin’ Wolf, who taught himself to read, got a GED, invested his money wisely, paid his bandmates well, and was faithful to his loving wife the whole time he was singing about cheating… I just like the blues, pretty much no matter who makes it.
Anyway! Guess I should talk about the music. Some musical scholars argue that the hill country blues Kimbrough plays is especially close to styles found in West Africa. I’m no musicologist but I have enjoyed listening to some of that and especially gnawa, the Sufi devotional trance music made by West African holy men who moved to North Africa, Morocco and Tunisia mostly. The drone, the stretch of the music, is there in Kimbrough as well as in gnawa, and here I’m going to stretch my writing capacity- there’s a sort of relationship between the drone and the melody or tune, the constant ongoing noise and the varying (but often cyclical) sounds that contrast to it, that makes me think of the relationship between eternity and contingency. Like the symbolism of the Celtic cross, as Borges pointed out- the cross, implying time with a definite beginning and a definite end, and the circle, symbolizing time as a loop… some of the Celtic music I like better has that same quality, between the drone of the pipes, the beat of the drum, and the playing of the fiddle. That’s what Kimbrough makes me think of, more than any other blues man.
A lot of his albums contain re-recordings of earlier songs, given his weird recording life, so it’s hard to pick a best or worst. I also like the plaintively straightforward titles of many of his songs and albums: “God Knows I Tried,” “Most Things Haven’t Worked Out,” “I Want To Know What’s Wrong With You,” etc. I don’t know, just put his name or one of those phrases into Spotify and see what you think.
Next up on discographies: a father, a son, tragedy
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: What Is Going On With Treats?
Temptations cat treat bags often have odd art. The shrimp varietal has a scuba diving cat looking at shrimp playing jazz instruments, but this “mixups” varietals has even weirder art. Some manner of “funky chicken” doing a totentanz with a cat undoubtedly all disco’d-up on catnip, it raises more questions than it answers. Mithra doesn’t care, she just wants the treats already! Don’t worry, I have her one.