Hello readers! It has been a perfectly cromulent week for me. Some life issues have resolved themselves. And I finished a piece of fiction! I think it’s pretty good and I’m gonna discuss it below. I also have some reviews, including a review of musicians are probably “above my pay grade” as people say now, but I talk about them anyway. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Preview/blurb
“War Baby,” a novella by me
Reviews
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Lagniappe
Discographies: Steely Dan!
FICTION PREVIEW/BLURB
I wrote a novella! I call it “War Baby” but might come up with a different title. It’s about a man named Ray who lives in a society that had a reasonably successful socialist revolution around the time he was born. As a young man Ray, a by-blow of a famous revolutionary leader, gains an obsessions: war babies, children of counterrevolutionaries taken from their parents by victorious revolutionaries and raised by others within their “Free Zone.” Despite evidence to the contrary, Ray becomes convinced he is one of these.
I meant it to be a short story but it ran long! Depending on reactions I might cut it back, or else expand it to novel length? In any event, here’s your options for reading it:
Subscribe to Melendy Avenue Review at Citizen level or above! It’s five dollars a month or fifty a year. You can go into your substack and adjust from free to Citizen level with a few clicks. I feel like I should give my Citizen supporters something unique and for now, this is it.
Ask me directly! Preferably with some explanation of why you’re not doing option 1. Acceptable explanations: poverty (I’m poor too! Part of why I’m doing this this way); you deserve to be “grandfathered in” as someone who’s read my fiction in olden times; you’re family; you want to read my fiction but don’t want to pay me money, and here’s why: (insert convincing or witty explanation here).
Either way! I’m excited to be writing fiction again and there will be more stories! So get on that Citizen train if that sounds fun to you.
REVIEWS
Milton Friedman, “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962) - What’s worse- the pedant or the spin doctor? The bitter pill or the shitty candy coating? That’s what I found myself thinking reading this, probably the last libertarian book I’ll read for “general education” (as opposed to “get a load of this fucking freak”) purposes for some time, and comparing it to others I’ve read recently. Von Mises and von Hayek (I like to add the “vons” - let’s make sure everyone knows their class status), especially the former, wrote dense, stormy tracts. Von Mises especially insisted that all forms of knowledge other than that based on his “praxology” were suspect. They were going to tear down knowledge and build it back up from scratch on the basis of first principles. People say stuff like “you have to admire their ambition,” and you don’t, really, but it’s clear why people say stuff like that.
Milton Friedman had more or less the same social goals as von Mises or von Hayek- win the class war for the bourgeoisie, first by beating back the Keynesian alliance between (collaborationist) labor/left leadership and government institutions, then by making sure bourgeois interests would stay on top of what was left after that. But Friedman went about it in a different way. He didn’t assail the knowledge-order around him so much as try to correct it in his direction. He mastered a peculiarly American rhetorical mode where disaster — in his case, Soviet-style totalitarianism, economic collapse, or nuclear war — is always around the corner but the sun still shines through the discourse of the speaker (the master of this, of course, was Ronald Reagan). There’s no “praxology” here, just good old American common sense! Or, rather, what most American nonfiction book buyers want- nonsense dressed up as common sense, with just enough truth to sugar the pill and the little thrill of the counterintuitive. There’s a reason “Freakonomics” came out of the same profession as “Capitalism and Freedom.”
Thinking about the rhetoric of this book is a lot more interesting than thinking about the content. Business is freedom, government isn’t, blah blah. I try to make a good faith effort to project myself to the early sixties. The left as we know it — opposed to capitalism, and the government that serves it even if it also demands concessions from said government — is basically dead, even deader than it is now. People believe in a sort of militarized, big government Keynesianism in a way that’s hard to conceptualize today. The economic tide was rising and… no, still don’t really get it. I still can’t get how you could look at capitalist practices, except if you’re on top of or deeply sheltered from them, and say, “yeah, this is freedom. If I don’t like my job I can just quit! And not have any money until I find some other bullshit employer I also hate!!” “Hey, I can choose fifty bajillion types of toothpaste, and of the sodas that necessitates it’s urgent use! Get out of the way of my joyful choices, bureaucrats!” I guess, for a higher percentage of readers, the other half of the story — “but I can’t afford decent healthcare or housing” — wasn’t there, but like… it was also wasn’t for a lot of people outside of either the middle class or the really privileged sectors of the working class we’ve let stand in for “The Working Class” in that period (and, for all too many, our own).
And that kind of gets down to the nub, doesn’t it? Friedman was relatively sunny about it. People opposed to the free market solutions are just confused, that’s all. If they could just see their best interests clearly they’d be “classical liberals” like him, and that’s why he’s writing this book. That in and of itself is a measure of difference between him and von Mises and the von Hayek of “The Constitution of Liberty” (the old Austrian word-monger went more pop in “The Road to Serfdom”). The real old school Austrians aimed at the elite notionally smart enough to understand them. Anyone confused, especially if they weren’t devoted to their idea of greatness, wasn’t worth their time. Their real heirs would be people like Murray Rothbard and the Internet anarcho-capitalist those who came after them, squalidly looking for a vanguard of freedom to take them past the goal post and ending with “the red pill.” Friedman watered down the product by offering it to a broad educated public, but it got better results. It played better with American suckers.
But Friedman gets caught in the same place they all do, and why so many libertarians, once the bills started coming due circa 2008 or so, downed that red pill and became open, committed racists and fascists (the better ones fled into our increasingly weak-tea liberalism). A lot of people are distinctly unenthusiastic for “freedom” as they conceive of it, and many of them are people of color or otherwise marginalized. Friedman swears up and down that the free market is actually better for black people and everyone else than they sort of infringements on said markets they call for through movements like the civil rights movement then reaching a crescendo in the South. Segregation is irrational because it cuts off customers from segregated businesses, he insists. Strike down segregation laws but don’t “force” integration and let the market deal with it! Soon enough everyone can sit at the lunch counter.
But that doesn’t work. First, because you’d still have armed agents of the state hauling people out of public establishments because they’re the wrong race and that’s fucked up and wrong no matter how you look at it. Second, because it does what all free market thought does and ignores history except as a series of just-so stories (did you know that oppressed minorities like Quakers and Jews did better from markets than they did from nasty old politics?!). You can say all ideologies read history selectively and you’d be right, but libertarianism more than any other ignores power differentials — pretty much every single power differential other than who happens to hold public office and what they can do that non-officeholders can’t — and how they shape history, and the present. There’s a history in the South whereby the whites hoarded not just political office but also money and power. The struggle against de jure segregation in public accommodations was an attack on an instantiation of this system, one that struck at the dignity of black people and that everybody — everybody except utter ding dongs like Friedman, that is — could see was wrong. That was not the core of the system, and most civil rights campaigners knew it, and knew they had many more battles ahead of them.
That Friedman couldn’t countenance even that first battle… well, people talk about how nice and positive and non-bigoted in person he was. I can even believe it. But fast forward a few decades and you basically have to believe in some deficiencies of race in order to hold on to a belief in the free market. This is less in the face of long-standing wealth and income differentials based on race, though that’s part of it, and more on a simpler basis. Most people of color still don’t want what libertarians are selling, and neither do most working or poor people. Most people might like the stuff about decriminalizing certain behaviors or not getting in wars, but they still see politics, broadly speaking as a struggle over power, as necessary and even vital. And so, naturally, there has to be something wrong with most people. We wind up back with the more open elitism of von Mises. And there’s something more wrong with any given group the more it rejects the basis premises of the “free market,” therefore, there’s something very wrong indeed with most marginalized peoples. Most of the dysfunctions of libertarianism as a movement that we’ve seen since the Obama election, I think, stem from this dynamic.
Friedman says little of this, though the “market-based solution” to segregation would be enough to get him “cancelled” in most circles today. He, probably genuinely enough, saw it as a solution less to segregation and more to his real bete noir, disorder, or rather, two birds that could be killed with one stone. That runs like a thread through “Capitalism and Freedom,” and through most of libertarianism- fear of disorder, fear of disruption. I am well aware they like to present themselves as freewheeling, thriving on chaos, using “disrupt” as the most sacred verb in the dictionary. But try delaying their sushi delivery an hour and then tell them someone “disrupted” DoorDash with an brief work stoppage, and see how much they like disruption then. White people were really, really scared of the sit-ins and marches, as scared as they were of riots. In many respects, Friedman was assuring the “white moderate” King wrote derisively of to relax- once we get rid of those pesky laws (both segregation and labor) everything will work out. And Friedman would be dead by the time the jig was well and truly up and the libertarians dropped the mask. Lucky to the end, the wily little Econ-gnome. *
Sally Rooney, “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” (2021) (read by Aoife McMahon) - What does Sally Rooney, the great hope of Millennial letters, have for us this time? Well, once again, a story of two contemporary young Irish people having a mostly bad time. And once again, it’s pretty good. Does it live up to the hype (that Rooney makes plain in this book she wishes she didn’t have surrounding her)? Who’s to say?
As people have pointed out, this one is a little more directly autobiographical, as one of the two main characters, Alice, is a successful novelist, with many identifiers connecting her to Rooney herself. There’s also been speculation on some critics’ part that making Alice so baldly similar to herself was Rooney’s way of maliciously complying with critics who insist most of her female leads are self-portraits. The other main character, Eileen, is not a successful novelist, but toils away at a Dublin literary magazine. They write each other long emails about all kinds of stuff. I used to do similar email chains with people! Maybe, some day, again.
They both have men in their lives, and the men and their reactions to them and the men’s reactions to their reactions cause a lot of grief. Alice moves to the countryside after a nervous breakdown and starts hanging out with Felix, a working class guy. Eileen, for her part, is just one lover to Simon, a childhood friend who is very attractive and has lots of lovers, but both clearly want something more but various things keep them from getting it.
I gotta hand it to Rooney- she really does nail a lot of the neuroticism, here defined as psychological inability to get what one wants, that defines a lot of millennial life, among really verbal people. Felix isn’t as formally educated as the other three but he’s smart and online a lot, so approaches things in somewhat similar ways. All of them somehow manage to think themselves into misery and inability to reach for things, mostly meaningful, honest contact with others. Alice and Felix circle each other like new cats, each convinced the one looks down on the other (and like cats, both are right). Eileen invests tremendous meaning into her relationship with Simon, to such an extent she scares herself into acting indifferent, which then “let’s” Simon go date much younger beautiful women, despite the fact it doesn’t make him happy and a real relationship to someone who knows him well might. What a set of predicaments! They’re not the most exciting or original emplotments in the world. But there is a reality to them I recognize in the people I know, complete with self-aware self-hatred of these predicaments, and how it doesn’t help). Like a lot of stuff I both read and encounter in the emotional life of my age group, there’s a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God (well, really, medicine and “finding my people” early and holding on to them)-go-I quality. It’s tough out there.
Rooney arranges some decent set-pieces- bad parties, bad parties where some good stuff happens, travel. There’s some good will they or won’t they. It’s less will they or won’t they bang — they all have sex, that part is understood — but will they or won’t they make an actual effort to be with someone who makes them happy? For a little while, I was wondering if Felix was a hustler, looking to get money out of Alice, maybe Rooney being a little self-consciously outrageous by summoning up the shade of the class-inappropriate lover. But no, nothing like that. The book was sufficiently interesting and well-written, in a spare and matter-of-fact sort of way, that I wasn’t disappointed that Rooney missed the turn-off into Crime Fiction Land.
Alice and Eileen email back and forth about the Bronze Age Collapse, and how it resembles our times, and how irresponsible it is for them — and for culture — to obsess over individual feelings and relationships when the world is at stake. One of them reads something other than the Wikipedia article on said collapse, and finds that a lot of people in the Eastern Mediterranean probably barely knew it when the palaces who took some taxes from them collapsed, or were occupied by new Sea People or whatever. They went on living their lives. The four protagonists more or less figure their shit out. She doesn’t come out and say it, but each relationship has one person with a lot of money (Simon comes from money), so, that helps with the whole moving-on-in-life thing. Anyway! This book was pretty decent. I don’t think Rooney has to save literature, or be the great leftie millennial writer. She can just keep doing what she’s doing as far as this rando is concerned. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Discographies: Steely Dan! My first time being aware that I was listening to a Steely Dan song was when I was in a car doing some donuts with friends in a parking lot, and listening to “Dirty Work.” Lines from that song became a kind of in-joke between that friend group for a little while. That was more or less it for me and Steely Dan, for a while.
Some of my friends got into them as I got into my thirties, which makes sense. Theirs is a music of disillusionment! Two perfectionist obsessives spun off by the California rock and roll/blue-eyed soul dream, with the insight to see the industry’s secret weapon: session musicians. I understand session musicians, who play every day all the time, are generally “better at music” than rockers, who spend a lot of time doing drugs and having sex and make up for their musical deficits with charisma. That, plus advances in sound editing technology, how you get that “smooth” sound for which “yacht rock” is renowned.
Steely Dan took that sound, arguably “perfected” it (I don’t know what makes music technically “perfect”‘and don’t care- but people who know these things think highly of the band), and added a distinctive thematic spin. People call their lyrics “cryptic” but it’s not too hard to figure out, usually, they’re talking about past regrets, current regrets, likely future regrets, etc. Things you think might make life fun — sex, drugs, fame, etc — don’t. Usually that kind of rock star whinging sucks. But Fagen and Becker are good enough storytellers, in their indirect way, and are skilled enough with irony, self-effacement, and looking situations in the face that they don’t come off as annoying as most rocker laments. They are perhaps the definitive “smart” band of their era- clever, controlled, ironic, not exactly dispassionate but not some giy hopped up on god knows what howling old blues lyrics into the mic either.
The emotional arc of listening to Steely Dan’s studio albums in chronological order was mostly excitement at first with their early seventies records, followed by steadily growing boredom with some upticks of interest as they made their way towards and into the eighties, then their twenty-first century two comeback albums which I did not like. Those early albums, “Can’t Buy a Thrill” and “Countdown to Ecstasy,” bopped pretty good, and “My Old School” is arguably a perfect song, it’s been bouncing around my head for days. Then things get foggier. I get that what they were doing was in some sense “innovative,” messing around with song structure and whatever. I like some music that does that. And I liked some of those songs, and the album “The Royal Scam” is up there with the early albums for me- among other things, arguably the most scathingly angry, at self and others, out of them all. I get that “Aja” is supposed to be a monument of musicianship and it was a perfectly pleasant listen but not exciting. I guess I’m the sort of idiot that wants hooks and grooves and stuff in my songs, the kind of guy Donald Fagen would no doubt have some sick burns for. The last two albums are bad, in my opinion. The bad parts of Steely Dan without the good parts. But hey, they were old by then, and I’m glad they got to do their thing some more. All in all, I think I am more into dumb music than smart music but smart music has its place.
Next up on discographies: three (and a third?) Bs!
Mithra wishes you a happy bombogenesis, for those who celebrate!