Hello and welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review! Nothing wild this time, just some reviews and a cat pic. I’m also considering some changes to subscriber rewards. What would people be interested in, if they became paid Citizens of Melendy Avenue Review? So far, I have voting in what I read (less compelling than I would have thought, but some people like to do it), commissioned readings-aloud videos (not exactly burning up the charts!), and previews of works in progress, like my book about antifascism. Is there stuff I’m not thinking of? I’m less trying to “juice” sales — I know they won’t be huge anyway — and more just trying to make sure people feel happy with what they’re getting. I might also open up reading elections to everybody, if it won’t offend Citizens, because more votes are more fun… but do enough people care enough? I don’t know! You tell me! I won’t be offended either way. Anyway… enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Robert E. Howard, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Just A Nice Cat
Robert E. Howard, “The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian” (2003) - More genre homework. Lovecraft and Howard, Howard and Lovecraft, handing the torch (and a metric shittonne of baggage) down from the pulps to the nascent scifi/fantasy scene, subjects of adoration, exorciation, tribute, parody, pastiche, and endless imitation. They were friends, too! Penpals, natch- neither got out much. Howard killed himself when his mother died. People talk about the irony, this big, strong man, creator of rugged, devil-may-care heroes, living with his mother and unable to live without her. To me, it’s less ironic and more painfully sad. I’m close to my mom, too, though I think I can navigate the end of her life without terminal self-harm.
Anyway! Conan! He’s got thews, whatever those are (apparently it’s an old word for “strength” and not a weird word for “thighs” like I at first assumed) and he knows how to use them. This collection of Conan stories includes about half of the original Howard stories from the thirties, and nothing but Howard stories. This is somewhat rare- interlocutors, bearers of the torch (or handlers of the baggage), votaries of the cult, have interpolated their own work into the Conan mythos (and his other works, and Lovecraft’s stuff too), most notably fantasy writers L. Sprague DeCamp and Lin Carter but plenty of others too. Other Conan collections mix them in like you couldn’t tell the difference.
You can tell the difference. I wasn’t wild about any of the Conan stories. But there’s a sense of mystery, limitlessness, and foreboding in Howard’s Conan stories that just isn’t there in the various imitators. They say that Conan is a male power fantasy, someone for the nerds reading the pulps to project onto, and that’s true enough in both Howard’s and DeCamp/Carter/whoever’s versions. But the element of escaping into a different kind of world stands out much more starkly in Howard than in the imitators. This is ironic, as later fantasy worldbuilds much more extensively and generally more rigorously than Howard ever did (there’s a similar disconnect between Tolkien and later fantasy, though it’s hard to say that Tolkien did not worldbuild with rigor).
Conan’s world is loosely-jointed history fan fiction, the creation of a young autodidact stringing together evocative words, names, and dynamics from the emerging fields of archival history, anthropology, and archaeology. In it’s “gigantism and ineptitude,” to use Borges’ phrase, it resembles mythology and draws us more closely in, to a feeling if not to a reality, than the more schematic, “logical” takes on worldbuilding that followed DeCamp and the others and that feel like maps for theme parks much of the time.
Theme parks work better than mythologies if you want a real plot to follow. Plots aren’t something Conan does in the story. Conan is just Conan. He finds himself in situations- plots are something others weave, and Conan bashes his way out of them with strength and courage. This is because Conan is a barbarian, and barbarians are simple, strong, straightforward, whereas the civilized are complicated, individually weak if collectively strong, and tricky. This is drawn from various old historical ideas, some of which gained new currency during the extended bourgeois freakout about “degeneration” that was in full swing by the time Howard was born.
The starkness of the divide, along with being a little laughable to people who know history better, also “works” on an atmospheric level. Howard clearly prefers barbarians but doesn’t skimp on what the way of life costs- Conan is always confused except in battle, and lives a bare and frustrating life. He comes from an impoverished people, unimaginative to the point where even their gods are dull, to whom the Viking-manques Conan fights amongst in some of the stories seem opulent. Civilization could solve some of these problems but brings up others. Life is basically bad.
There’s also the well-known racism in the stories. It’s probably less bad, anyway less hateful, than Lovecraft’s. Howard’s register was less Lovecraft’s terror, and more rage. To the extent that rage had a real target, it was sophistication- wizards piss Conan off, even when they’re helping him. People being uncivilized, as the black people in Conan invariably are, isn’t a problem to Conan, but presumably is to the reader. It’s also worth noting that “orientalism” wasn’t a critical term of abuse at the time, but a mode of entertainment (not unlike “minstrelsy”). It makes sense- living in a coal-smoke town or lonely plains shack, without movies, tv, or radio, hearing tales of the sumptuousness of some other part of the world, studded with intrigue where yours was dull and workaday, would be compelling. The Conan stories are orientalist to the hilt, in both that sense and the (degraded contemporary version of) Said’s sense. It doesn’t justify anything, necessarily, but the lines of superiority-inferiority aren’t always that clear (as they generally were in minstrelsy), and I think one could go into it with relatively good intentions… but yeah, it’s jarring to modern sensibilities.
All in all, these stories really aren’t great in and of themselves — the sameness of the plots, such as they are, the frequency of deus-ex-machina resolutions, the thinness of the characters and needless multiplicity of indistinguishable cultures (Koths! Hyboreans! Etc) — but it’s worth reading these to understand the shape of the genre more, maybe move on to other sword-swinging writers inspired by Howard, ala Charles Saunders, Fritz Leiber, etc. Maybe I’ll try out Solomon Kane one of these days, too. ***
Jesmyn Ward, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” (2017) (read by Kelvin Harrison Jr., Rutina Wesley, and Chris Chalk) - This is a perfectly decent example of contemporary literature! Ward tells the story of a young mixed-race boy named Jojo, his black mother Leonie, and some bad trips, both physical and psychological, that they take. The story is set in more or less contemporary Mississippi. Leonie and Jojo live with Leonie’s elderly parents in a rural part of the Gulf Coast. The two take a trip with Jojo’s toddler sister Kayla and a friend of Leonie’s north to Parchman, the ex-plantation prison where Leonie’s lover and Jojo and Kayla’s white dad, Michael, is being released after serving a stint for drug dealing.
Parchman, Angola, Sugarland… I’m aware that the prisons of the north, your Atticas, Sing-Sings, Norfolks, are no happy valleys, but those old southern plantation-prisons skeeve this New Englander right the fuck out. Ward leans into that haunting feeling. Jojo’s grandfather did time in Parchman and tells the boys stories that never seem to come to a conclusion. On the way up to the prison, the travelers encounter many of the inconveniences that come with life when you’re poor. Car trouble, police trouble, drug trouble, above all puking baby trouble. It is a genuinely uncomfortable ride, in a highly relatable, human way that Ward gets across effortlessly.
Leonie was the most interesting character for me, especially because she is a rare thing in literature: a bad mother, portrayed unsentimentally (the voice actor puts a little “poet voice” in her, all breathy, but it comes to work for the character) but sympathetically. Is there any more agreed-upon villain than the bad mom? Whole theories of crime, of civilizational collapse, have been placed on her head! Murderers can be made cool and relatable, terrorists, thieves, seemingly every crime under the sun, but not a shitty, selfish, indifferent mother (as someone whose mother is none of these things, I relate to why people would be repelled). So Leonie is interesting- she’s those things because she is weak. Aspects of her life that tried to make up for her weakness just mire her further: she genuinely loves Michael, and so has babies with him that she can’t properly care for. Guilt over that makes her mothering worse. Guilt and trauma — her brother was murdered, her lover arrested and imprisoned — drive her to drug abuse, which doesn’t help anything. Some people don’t have what it takes to raise kids. It doesn’t make them evil. They probably shouldn’t then have kids, but people make mistakes. Ward conveys well the weird lassitude of the structurally fucked.
Ward’s humans are humans, and so are her ghosts. The family is immersed in the supernatural traditions of the black people of the Gulf area. Leonie’s mother (dying of cancer- no one has a good life in this book with the possible exception of a crooked white druggie lawyer) practices conjurings and prays to the divine feminine in various forms. Leonie sees her brother’s murdered ghost when she gets high. Jojo has a more impertinent ghost problem- the ghost of a Parchman inmate, who did time with his grandpa, following him home from the jail. Jojo doesn’t want to deal with ghosts, he’s only thirteen and has to take care of a toddler most of the time because of his weak mom and absent dad. He tries to find ways to get rid of him. Terrible revelations from his granddad are what the ghost is after, but he doesn’t go away, and soon enough Jojo is seeing more ghosts, all the black lives ended by violence in that cursed part of the world.
All in all, “Sing, Unburied, Sing” was pretty good. Being me, I preferred the human parts to the ghostly. But the ghosts weren’t too much of an intrusion. Mississippi is probably roughly midway on my list of states to visit — mostly as a fan of blues music, I’d like to see the Delta — but this didn’t exactly light a fire under me to go, more due to its painfully vivid summoning up of inconveniences (you really, really want to get that baby some pepto or dimetap or something) than its horrors. It’s good to see literature carrying on. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Just A Nice Cat