Hello everybody! I think we’ve got a pretty good Review this week. I talk about three pretty good books, and there’s also some pictures from my trip to Portland. I have a backlog of reviews so it’ll probably be a packed edition next week, too! Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World
Cook, Charcoal
Macdonald, Based on a True Story
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: Gone to Portland!
REVIEWS
John Reed, “Ten Days That Shook the World” (1919) - I think it’s fair to say that literature has struggled with how to depict the Bolsheviks, especially in their “heroic” period- the Revolution and Civil War. Bolsheviks as monsters or robots, writers can do. But the thing is, no one honest, no matter how anticommunist or critical of the project, could look at the Bolsheviks in 1917-1922 and see the sort of comforting inability we project onto robots or monsters, no matter how scary they may be. Bulgakov was no friend of the Bolsheviks, for example, and his depiction of them in civil war era Kiev is sinister, chilling even- but they’re human, and winners, and deserve the W as much as anyone could, even to him. One irony of this literary issue is that the Bolsheviks succeeded, in large part, by sticking to a program- bread, land, peace, all power to the Soviets, and no substitute. Maybe that’s one of the depiction problems: literature as we know it thrives on dithering, indecision, and the comeuppance of belief and decisive action at the hands of irony and circumstance. You can say the Bolsheviks got their comeuppance, the reward literature assigns for anything like commitment… but not for some time.
John Reed made a crack at it. He worked as a war correspondent for a New York magazine that isn’t around anymore. He was a rich kid from Portland (where I sit and write this review!), entered the Greenwich Village bohemian milieu. It was an odd bunch, 1910s bohemia, that could go a lot of directions politically. A lot of them went plum useless, as artsy types tend to do. Reed went red, red enough they made a movie about him called “Reds” with Warren Beatty and Annette Benning (I’ll see it, some day). He showed up in Petrograd just after the first serious attempt by reactionaries to overthrow the nascent revolution failed.
You’d figure that’d be a unifying moment, right? Some shithead general almost taking over, who’d throw the softest socialists in the same jail (or mass grave) as the Bolsheviks? Not hardly. Alexander Kerensky, the moderate socialist leader at the time, continued to worry more about the Bolsheviks and others on his left than he did about ending the crippling war with Germany or preventing counterrevolution, increasingly seeming to actively favor counterrevolution as a way to get rid of his opponents. On the one hand, it makes sense- the Bolsheviks did indeed cook his goose and probably always wanted to even if he did much of what they wanted, and he must have figured that the Allies would help him out if he stayed in the war. On the other, here’s a good rule- if your plan involves the British being grateful, it’s not a plan, it’s a daydream.
Quite beyond anything else, the Bolshevik plan was the only sustainable one. They needed to end the war. The workers needed food, and the peasants needed land, in order to make a workable socioeconomic system of any kind other than the feudal one they already had and which was in the process of destruction in any event. None of the others had a plan that made any damn sense at all. That’s what Reed (and, in his way, Bulgakov in “White Guard”) conveys about his time in Petrograd. It was a revolutionary situation, which is a way of saying you could take the chaos of everyday life and dial it up times ten, the proverbial spilled ants nest. Reed shows us plenty of confused Bolsheviks but there was always a plan. Land, peace, bread, all power to the Soviets- stick together, encourage dissension in the other left groups, be in some sense “reasonable” but don’t give an inch.
Here’s one way in which this worked out for them, and which Reed depicts clearly- the Petrograd masses clearly preferred the Bolsheviks. Whatever distance they may or may not have had with the real mass of the Russian population, the peasants, the Bolsheviks had the trust and active participants of the working class in Petrograd, and whatever they might have been in terms of the total Russian population, they were strategically poised. Reed goes to a lot of political meetings in the course of reporting this story. The “committee for the salvation of the revolution” or whatever the moderate coalition was called (the book is three thousand miles away from me at the moment) were mostly meetings of political “types” - intellectuals, lawyers, trade union officials, etc. All of those types were well represented in Bolshevik meetings Reed attended, too. But so were actual workers, soldiers, and sailors. This proved crucial. A question, irrelevantly simple in some times and places but crucial and knotty in others (I think our time is the latter) - who is the infantry? The best the moderates could come up with was “Cossacks, the worst troops in the world and only good for throwing people like us in jail.” The Bolsheviks had a much better answer.
And they didn’t get it through pandering, either. So much of our conversation on class politics is debased cultural nonsense. Lenin and Trotsky weren’t, like, working class dudes being guys, cracking open a few cold ones and being casually transphobic or whatever the equivalent would be in terms of pandering to Petrograd workers a century ago. They were serious intellectuals from privileged backgrounds- but they were serious people and anyone could see it, and the people of Petrograd could see they were the only ones with a plan, certainly the ones with a plan that would benefit them.
Anyway! Reed depicts Petrograd ahead of the October Revolution, when Lenin said “yolo” and the Bolsheviks seized power, in all its chaos. It verges on hero-worship but doesn't quite get there, in my opinion. He does a good crowd scene and a good chaos scene- neither are easy to write. The actions of the Bolsheviks run like a red line of rationality — notice, I do not say morality, though I happen to agree with most of their actions in that particular context (knowing me, I’d be some Left SR quibbling but shrugging- I’m always a degree or so off the main line) — through the chaos. You can see why they were so attractive, to the Petrograd working class, to Reed, to so many others. It’s a compelling story, a compelling reality. Cards on table: jokes about weird-alternate-universe-early-20th c Russian Peter aside, I do not trust vanguard parties to not degenerate into tyranny. But they’re pretty good at making revolution, and it’s not like any other group of people who seize power have such a great track record of —not— degenerating into tyranny. What to make of that? I don’t know. This was a pretty good book. The end… for now. ****’
Garrett Cook, “Charcoal” (2021) - I got this book as a special preorder from Clash Books, which puts the “lit” back in literary, as they say! It’ll be out for the rest of you hoi polloi next year. I knew to order it because I’ve been following Garrett Cook’s career since our days at the dear departed Marlboro College. Lit and Garrett promised a literary horror experience, and delivered.
We begin in the scariest place of all- art school! Shannon Rodriguez is a student MassArt who has talent and drive but also substantial self-doubt. This is made worse by the fact she’s a Dominicana in a largely white male dominated space and someone with a lot of childhood trauma. Professors skeeve on her, “that guy” that’s in every class doesn’t take her seriously. Art is hard.
What for it but to become part of a Faustian lineage? Thomas Kemp, a nihilistic artist in Victorian London dedicates himself to wickedness and sadism, making art out of other’s pain, eventually going so far as to inflict as much as he can himself in order to depict it. He has his ashes, when he dies, made into drawing charcoals. A skeevy professor suggests Shannon use them (for a consideration, of course) to really bring out the artist in her. She does, and it does, but it threatens to bring her down. Kemp himself was part of a chain of artists sponsored by a shadowy supernatural force, one interested in pushing art and evil to its extremes. The opportunities and costs are high, as is usually the deal with your Faust situations.
One good thing Cook does is vary up prose style considerably between works. There is none of the flippancy found in his earlier “bizarro” (roughly, surrealist horror) work. That’s not to say everything is self-serious, and the close attention to interpersonal detail in one or two relationships that you can see in other works comes out here- dorm room romances amidst communal couches and cheap weed. But Kemp and the charcoals bring Shannon to another world, as manifested by the murders of crows that follow Shannon around — in reality? In imagination? — consuming her traumas, past and present, making her…
Well, here, Cook presents few easy answers. Just what is the relationship between monstrosity and art? Is Shannon producing better work under Kemp’s influence, or is that just something her douchebag professors and peers say? What exactly is the potential cost to Shannon (note, it involves murder, but mostly of people who suck)? “Charcoal” was written and published in the midst of numerous debates about the relationship between art and artist. It also comes from a scene, horror fiction, that has not altogether handled these questions well (on any “side”) and depicts an art world that’s pretty bad with reconciling morality (or just functional, non-harmful behavior) with its ideas of genius. At some points in the book, Cook seems to come down on the side of the idea that artists of sufficient evil do deserve to be cast aside, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the point, or the only perspective taken.
I don’t want to spoil the ending, but in the end, Shannon has to reckon with her own power and agency, and when she does, this opens doors. It’s not a direct splitting off with the evil engine behind her artistic rise- it is not a “cancellation.” I’m not entirely sure what it is. A reconciliation, perhaps? In any event, this was a thought-provoking and well-written work, and you all should buy it when the publisher starts putting it out for more wide release, especially all you horror heads. ****’
Norm Macdonald, “Based On a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016) (read by the author) - Norm Macdonald was probably the funniest motherfucker I have shared this planet with thus far. My roommate and I had tickets to see him perform in Boston when we learned about his death. Like everyone else, we had no idea that he was sick. From the cheap seats, Macdonald was what I think of as “pure comedian.” He wasn’t notably charming, or handsome or compellingly ugly, he didn’t push envelopes in terms of hot button content or naughty words, wasn’t from a fresh identity category (don’t think Canadian counts), didn’t have an angle to him other than being just extraordinarily funny and utterly committed to the bit, to making people laugh. I’ve known of a few people a bit like that, not as successful as Macdonald, naturally, and they can make the lives of the people around them hell, but it really is it’s own kind of art.
I don’t know whether the story that someone asked Macdonald for a celebrity memoir and he handed in this comic novel is true, but it would make sense that Macdonald would seize the opportunity such an opening would give him. Your pure comic, more even than most comics, relies on the absurdity of life in general for material. What’s a more compound absurdity than the celebrity tell-all memoir and the life it kinda-sorta depicts?
So, Macdonald tells “his” story, using one of his go-to joke modes, old-timey phrasing and anecdotes summoning up hardscrabble pseudo-wisdom, as a tone and even plot structure for the whole book. This version of Macdonald is both a wholesome son of the rural great white north and a deviant of the first order. He regales us with cliches of rural life at least as funny as Stella Gibbons’ in “Cold Comfort Farm” before bringing us to Star Search and Saturday Night Live, where he makes his way via threats of violence, strategic illegal morphine sales, and sheer delusional self-belief. There’s a brief stint in prison for stalking Sarah Silverman, then he gets caught up in gambling.
This is where “Based on a True Story” comes relatively close to living up to its name- Macdonald was a problem gambler. He talks about it as hinging on that one moment, after you’ve thrown the dice but before they land- the moment of hope. I’m not a gambler, but that made me relate. Macdonald decides to throw away the credit he had built in Las Vegas in one last gambling spree, either making millions of dollars and buying a ranch in Montana, or losing it all and killing himself with dilaudid. He forces his (irl friend and cohost) Adam Eget, depicted as a manchild gambling prodigy along for the ride, winds up in hock to a mysterious figure in the Salton Sea, meets God but doesn’t pay much attention to Him, and tries to kidnap his ghostwriter, a fallen intellectual who occasionally bursts in to tell his version of the story.
Macdonald read the story himself (except for ghost writer parts- I thought they were Judah Friedlander, but were not) and so nails the delivery on every line. Not everything is a laugh line, of course, but he masterfully builds the tension and plays bait and switch with expectations to lead to gut busting laughs throughout. Things never go to the place, emotionally, you’ll think they’ll go. He’s never sentimental — part of his genius was the way he played with sentimentality but never gave in to it — so it meant that when I felt nice hearing his voice after his death, there was no bullshit heartstring tug to cheapen it. It was just a hilarious, well-written comic novel that played with memoir, celebrity culture, and crime fiction. It was funny, the one thing Macdonald wanted to be, and the one thing he was more than anyone. *****
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: Gone to Portland!
I went out to Portland! Portland, Oregon, that is. Strange town! It’s fun, in terms of having a lot of interesting places to eat and drink, and nice walks to take. It is also an incredibly self-aware town, and one aware that it’s dream of harmless quirky living both involves destruction — the starkness of the gentrification/homelessness problem is extreme — and lacks the political/intellectual resources to do much about it. In any event, my hosts were gracious and I am glad I went. Here are some pictures.
This is the entry way to a place where you donate old electronics and they fix them up and resell them! A sort of artificial forest.
I didn’t catch them full unfurl but that’s a Cascadia flag and I think an Oregon flag. Regional identity seems strong here, but it’s the identity of people who have escaped and dreamed, not necessarily of “deep roots.” Cascadia is interesting, the idea of an independent, environmentally-conscious country in the northwest, potentially including parts of Canada. Some Cascadia believers are progressives, others are Nazis.
Many pretty trees line the residential streets of the parts of Portland I saw, including fruit trees.
My host and dear friend and her boy under some nice trees. I’m an idiot and didn’t realize the northwest had deciduous trees. I assumed those stopped at the Rockies! A naturalist, I am not.
Tasty Swedish breakfast. There were eggs and smoked fish here but I gobbled them up before I thought to document it.
View from the Max train
Residential southeast Portland, near where things get more “Oregon”-y, I’m told.
Some friends took me to a food cart (Portland is all about food carts) that specializes in ball-shaped foods. It was better than it had any right to be.
I met this nice cat
I went to Powell’s, a justifiably famous bookstore. I didn’t take many pictures because it wasn’t odd or quirky, just very big and pretty good. I saw this tshirt calling Portland “Bridgetown” because it has a lot of bridges. One wonders what the people of Barbados think!
The sphere of public discourse, alive and well
I saw a lot of corvids in Portland.
Portland was nice, but I’m always glad to come home to Mithra!