Hey all! Sorry this one is a little late. It’s just kind of a lazy, cold, “wintry mix” day here today. I’ve got a couple of reviews and a Mithra pic for you. I’ve also got an update on my fiction work! Which you can access by upgrading your subscription to the “Citizen” level or above. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Update
Fiction writing update
Reviews
Bederman, Manliness and Civilization
Coetzee, Disgrace
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: The Black Watch
UPDATE: what is going on with my fiction writing?
Short version- I’m writing up a storm! Longer version- I have a LOT of ideas, and I’ve written substantially (as in, over a thousand words) for three of them. Titles tentative:
War Baby - this was the short novella I sent out last week, about Ray, son of a revolutionary who brought about a reasonably successful socialist state in the near-ish future. Ray’s trying to figure his shit out! Response to this was really generous and affirmed to me that I’m on the right track! So- I am working on expanding it into a novel. I’ve been writing a lot for it! I think my next update to the Citizens for this story will be… I don’t know! Maybe when the whole things done? I’m open to suggestions.
The All Too Public History - this one will be a short story! Or should be. I write long and you kind people have been encouraging my novelistic inclinations… but anyway, this story invites you into the enchanting, alluring, rather stupid world of early-aughts liberal arts academia, as a person relates their tale of seduction and hubris that owes nothing at all to a certain nineties novel… this one also has a framing story about near-future revolution, if that’s an inducement! I like to think I can wrap that one up in the next month or so.
The Sons - No revolution in this one! Two brothers find themselves trapped in the shifting realities of… hyper-advanced space alien reality tv show programming? Sandro is an aesthete who (tries) to embrace amorality, and the situation he’s in; his older and more conventional brother Joe wants to break free and get back to reality. Can either get what they want, or figure out what their parents might have to do with the situation, or even take any control over their lives? I intend this one to be a novel. I think I can put out a decent chunk — with good action, not just an introductory scenario — in a few weeks.
Like I said, I have a ton of other ideas. Antifascist detective fiction! Flipping the plot of “Con Air”! A story inspired by martial arts training! If you want to read this stuff, find your Substack profile and upgrade to Citizen! Your support help keep me going and writing.
REVIEWS
Gail Bederman, “Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Race and Gender in the United States, 1880-1917” (1996) - This is a good work of history that makes good points, but like some other recent(ish) historical works — thinking Herf’s “Reactionary Modernism” here — suffers somewhat from its own success, read twenty-five years after its release. It has somewhat an inversion of Herf’s problem: his book’s title became almost a cliche, but the arguments within it are varied enough to reach beyond the cliche. Bederman’s work constitutes a substantial pick-blow in the excavation of the sheer weirdness of the white world between 1870 and the outbreak of WWI. None of her phrases or ideas became cliches, and “Manliness and Civilization” still represents vital work, but the text itself tends towards a repetitive thesis-heavy show-and-tell. It probably doesn’t help that Bederman was publishing a decade or so after Herf, which is to say, a decade further into academia’s slide into caution and irrelevance. This was probably Bederman’s dissertation and those are generally cautious and schematic.
Wow! I’m making “Manliness and Civilization” sound bad, and also not saying what it’s about. It’s not bad! It’s good. And it’s about the extended freakout around race and gender that overtook the white bourgeoisie throughout the world in the last third of the nineteenth century, and running into the early twentieth. White men were in decline, people started thinking. They were under siege, supposedly, from the “lower races,” the lower classes, women, and most of all, their own comfort and prosperity. No more could manliness be understood as the sort of relatively sober-sided dispensation of responsibility. No, it had to get aggressive. It had to get primal! It had to rebuke femininity and softness and be outwardly aggressive. In many ways, we live with the masculinity we inherited from this period- it probably helps that mass culture as we know it came about during its high tide. The specifics fade in and out, or soft pedaled and hard-sold depending on circumstances, but the core is still there.
The great thought-worlds of the bourgeoisie draw strength from interactivity and choice-opportunities. I wouldn’t call the big bourgeois freakout “great” as in “good” but it was “great” as in “important and generative.” There was no one set way to participate in the freakout, to combine and recombine the elements. With education and platform, you could do what you wanted with them. Bederman discusses how four important cultural figures played with the central lineaments of the freakout.
Black journalist Ida B. Wells used racialized ideas of civilization to combat lynching. How can white men claim to have a monopoly on civilization (as they now did- earlier variants of civilization-thought were usually also racist but more involved) when they did such notably uncivilized things to black people? Psychologist Stanley Hall got in trouble for telling Chicago schoolteachers they had to let their boy children act like “savages,” on the basis of some needlessly complicated bullshit about how boys act out the racial past of their various races, and if they don’t, they get “neurasthenia” i.e. sad, soft, and potentially gay? Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of high school classic “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was apparently a racist psycho who thought that she had to stay unmarried so she could focus on uplifting the race, and that the problem with sexism is that it didn’t let women like her advance the white race? And of course, there’s Teddy Roosevelt, who LARPed his idea of white manhood all the way from a sickly boyhood to a belligerent presidency.
These are all interesting and compelling stories. This would probably get a higher rating if Bederman allowed their stories to breathe a little more away from the schemas she cautiously laid out in the introduction (which is mainly about boxer Jack Johnson, who became an obsessive focus for many of these questions- could have used more on him, his case is fascinating). Race, gender, and ideas of “civilization,” the three frames and by god each section will laboriously bring in all three, cite the relevant authorities, tie in with earlier examples, and then say that all that was said, no matter what it does to the flow of the book. Class gets wedged in there with the slightly panicked air of someone who forgot to add the bay leaf to the roast (can you tell this a feeling I have experienced, because I have?). And I’m like… just let loose, Professor Bederman! I believe in you! Hell, I’m probably a victim of having thought too much (and I bet too loosely- I am no expert on the period) about this freakout. If I had read it back during comps when I was supposed to… still. A good and important book! ****
J.M. Coetzee, “Disgrace” (1999) - This is my first go at one of the living Anglo Nobel Prize winners in literature. Coetzee had moved to Australia by the time the Swedes bestowed the big medal on him, but lived most of his life in his native South Africa, and life in that country seems to be the subject of most of his literary work. A sensitive soul (you’d figure more writers would be, but they’re not), the contradictions and tensions of his homeland press themselves, along with other dilemmas that haunt writerly types, upon his consciousness and that’s how we get this novel.
The main character, David Lurie, is a mediocre man convinced that greatness, at least by association, is his due. A professor at a university in Cape Town, he lectures indifferent students, writes books about poetry which nobody reads, and carries on affairs. His inner space, as related by third person narration, is the endless self-justifying monologue of the overeducated, but not necessarily that bright, man with the usual banal urges for sex, power, and sexualized power. Most of this comes via bowdlerized applications of the ideas and life events of the romantic poets, especially Byron, to his own seedy situations. Eventually, he sleeps with one student too many, and gets the boot. Having no one else in his life, he heads to rural East Cape, where the adult daughter of one of his failed marriages lives on a small farm.
David loves his daughter, Lucy, but doesn’t understand her and is a little bored with her (not unlike how Byron grew bored of one of his own daughters, produced by one of his affairs, and packed her off to a nunnery to die of malaria). We only have David’s judgments to go on, but it seems she’s something of a hippie, a back to the land type, and I don’t know a lot about the course of the counterculture in South Africa. She grows flowers, goes to market, sells them. She partners with African farmers nearby and volunteers to raise and kennel dogs. Apparently roving stray dogs is, or was, a problem in East Cape?
It doesn’t seem too bad, but the air of dread Coetzee continuously conjures doesn’t allow for an idyll. A small gang attacks the farm, steals a bunch of stuff, and rapes Lucy. The attackers are black, and David is convinced that they had help from one of Lucy’s African neighbors. Lucy provides just enough assistance to authorities to make an insurance claim and then clams up, doesn’t make rape charges, doesn’t inform the police when one of the attackers shows up at her neighbor Petrus’s housewarming party. She has decided to blank the whole thing. She won’t change, she won’t move away to somewhere safer, and all of that means working hand in glove with neighbors who tacitly (perhaps actively) helped her rapists.
David decides this is her form of reparations, her way of adjusting to post-apartheid South Africa and expiating her guilt (this is before “privilege” talk became common). Lucy isn’t saying- she knows the old bastard won’t listen or get it anyway. David, with nothing else to do, winds up staying in the little town as well, strumming a toy banjo as he tries to summon up an aria for an opera about one of Byron’s lovers and helping an animal shelter dispose of dead dogs.
Bleak stuff! Some of the critical comments on the back talk about Coetzee “weaving light into the darkness” or words to that effect. I think they’re either wrong or just talking about the prose. Everything is pretty wretched. All the characters are tragic, not just in the debased sense of “quite sad” but in terms of existing in boxes of misery they helped create for themselves. This aspect is amplified by the ways in which David views things from a (self-serving version of) romantic ideology which, if it ever fit any time, does not fit nineteen-nineties South Africa. Even when he makes something like an understandable call it’s for dumb reasons that make you hate him again. When a commission at his university comes together to investigate his harassing a student (and maybe sweep it under the rug), he immediately admits to what he did and accepts the consequences… because of some nonsense about the priority of eros or whatever. Coetzee underscores the uselessness of everything that the academic/intellectual tradition brings to most situations.
Coetzee was vocally anti-apartheid, at least according to online sources, but not especially political- this scans, according to the bleak vision of life presented here. He’s gotten in some trouble with political figures in South Africa who like to paint him as an out-of-touch white man slandering post-apartheid black self-assertion as sexual violation. Well, white self-assertion in the person of David Lurie doesn’t look too great, either, and reaches well into sexual assault territory as well. I do think Coetzee chooses to twist knives sometimes (though, in keeping with highbrow literature, he doesn’t get especially graphic) to get his points across. It’s hard to say what would produce a better situation in his home country (Coetzee has said he moved to Australia in part because of the crime situation in South Africa) and it’s made harder by the way people, mostly on the right but in other political directions too, turn what happens there into a referendum on black-white racial politics more generally. One wants to rattle off the usual solutions, and they’d probably help more than most things. But “Disgrace” hits, at least in part, because of how unflinchingly it looks at the types of inhumanity that seem ineradicable, maybe inseparable from humanity itself. ****’
LAGNAIPPE
Mithra Pic: The Black Watch
Mithra, keeping an eye on me, as she does.