Melendy Avenue Review 2022-09-02
Hello! I’ve got three reviews and a Mithra pic today. I know I said I might do an observed life of my work camping trip. But it wasn’t that visually interesting, and I’m not a very good photographer. I am working on getting my birthday lecture together- I delivered it from somewhat parenthetical notes, so I need to turn it into, you know, paragraphs. More anon! Enjoy for now.
CONTENTS
Reviews
Russell, A Renegade History of the United States
Kuang, The Poppy War
Mann and Gardiner, Heat 2
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Cat Days of Summer
REVIEWS
Thaddeus Russell, “A Renegade History of the United States” (2010) - We’ve burnt through hyperbole like fossil fuels, and it too creates an obnoxious smog: this is the worst, that’s the best ever, etc etc. That said, on careful consideration, I am pretty sure this is the single worst work of history I’ve ever read, certainly the worst work of history by a historian serious people have praised to me. One of the smarter people in my grad program had “Big Bad Thad” (as she informed he was nicknamed) Russell as an undergrad instructor. She disagreed with his politics — back then, near when this book came out, more or less down-the-middle libertarianism, strolling down history’s lane to its rendezvous with Trumpism — but thought he was a good instructor and that his book sounded interesting.
Well, I could kind of see the instructor thing. Russell’s out of the academy now, a podcaster, looks like he’s backed by someone’s money, and given that he’s tight now with “Moldbug” Yarvin, it’s probably Peter Thiel’s money. He’s trying to be some kind of “intellectual dark web” don, sitting his high table with “race realists,” various reactionary mystics, and other purveyors of the “renegade” and forbidden. I haven’t listened, but there’s certainly a tone in this book of his — conversational, imaginative, committed — I could see getting across to both podcast audiences and undergrads.
In that year of years 2010, Russell published this history that purports to tell the history of the United States from the perspectives of “renegades.” This isn’t any Howard Zinn stuff, though, or a retelling of slave rebellions and labor uprisings. Russell, as it happens, did write an earlier book on the labor movement- specifically, about how Jimmy Hoffa was actually a great labor leader, more or less because was a crook. “A Renegade History of the United States” is about, more or less, how laws regulating various pleasurable activities rose and fell over the course of US history, specifically from the point of view of the “renegades” who did not allow “reformers” – here understood as a straight up pejorative – who would regulate them to do so easily.
Would it be possible to write a good history from this perspective? Good histories have been written from worse ideas, or anyway, readable and informative histories, histories that reflect some kind of thought worth having. There’s definitely a lot of historical material in the political battles over assorted recreational activities in American history, and you can probably do a good synoptic history of that, too- I bet someone has. But that’s not quite what Russell did here. In attempting to tell this story as the story of American history, he is trying to advance various deeply stupid and tendentious ideas, where the stupidity and tendentiousness involved reenforce each other in such ways that you probably couldn’t get anything like a good work of history out of Russell’s project.
The bullshit begins in the presentation. You don’t want to be a dweeb, do you? A bluenose, all offended at the raunchy pleasures of the poor? Do you want to be like John Adams, the fattest and least glamorous of the founding fathers, who Russell depicts for us walking through Philadelphia circa 1787 and wrinkling his nose at all the wonderful sin Russell details- the taverns, the brothels, the streets full of glorious, dirty, interracial life? You don’t want to be like the right or the left, right, with their self-righteous insistence on their moral values? You’re smarter than that- importantly, you’re cooler than that. You’re a renegade.
Don’t buy it. Never buy it. Because if you have a brain in your head, you know what’s next, the same kind of come on that untold generations of hucksters and missionaries have been using forever. That inevitable “therefore…” To the extent Russell has a claim on anything other than a line of shit that can hook undergrads and “intellectual dark web” habitues (I wonder if he cried when that stupid Times article about the IDW didn’t mention him…), it’s a slightly more adept shell game than many libertarian ideologues… back then, at least, I think he’s gotten less subtle as time has gone on. Accepting his positive vision is comparatively unimportant, and mostly an easy ask- after all, Prohibition was a bad idea, a lot of regulators of public behavior were bigots or petty tyrants, etc. But the idea is to slide in his negative vision with the positive vision: that anyone who has politics beyond “let me smoke weed and/or pollute this river in peace” is a nasty regulator type, an enemy, and moreover, an enemy sans any pathos, almost sans humanity.
And that regulator type extends to just about anyone pressing for any kind of power, regardless of the power differentials involved. It’s not just John Adams and J. Edgar Hoover. As elsewhere in this book, tendentiousness and sloppiness reinforce each other. So the abolitionists were just out to ruin everyone’s good time on the plantation (the opening riff of The Rolling Stones’ slave-rape anthem “Brown Sugar” kept coming to my mind unbidden in that section- though at least the Stones were talented) and the civil rights movement was the same but with ghettos, largely through the device of defining both movements through decontextualized moral exhortations by some of the preachers involved. He extends that game to just flat out ignoring any movements for suffrage, including the extension of the suffrage to poor people, who presumably could have used the vote to stop the busybodies from telling them not to be drunk all the time?
I tried to get at this in one of my birthday lectures (I should have read this book for that- I didn’t realize quite what it was at the time), but there is a sort of countercultural take on American history that holds that the American past was not just more free than its present – this is common enough, mostly with conservatives, and has been almost since the country’s founding – but also weirder, funkier, looser. Russell also despises the counterculture, because it was anti-consumerist and consumerism is one of the pleasures he goes to bat for, but he gets at the mood of this school of thought, and really, it was always about mood more than anything. Russell wants to get across the idea that everyone was just getting down, drinking and fucking and spending money, in the taverns, men and women and white and black having a true, unforced equality in the absence of formal rules or even serious discussion about the matter. Anyone who brings up power or organization or anything like that, it’s like a record scratch ending the party. “Aww man, who invited this square?!”
It’s stupid, but it’s not an altogether uninfluential vision of history. That Russell manages to export this vision, always questionable, to goddamn slave plantations… whatever else it is, this book represents what happens when tendentious assholes with stupid ideas they’re trying to get over on suckers walk through the doors opened by scholars with naive ideas about structure and power. Like a completely open internet forum, it gets taken over by racists and creeps.
All of this, with the sloppy argumentation and sourcing of an undergraduate term paper and a tone by turns smug, revelatory (he really thinks he did good spadework here, but relied largely on other secondary sources), and faux-outraged by the depredations on freedom by the political types of the world. I can do evil, and I can even do stupid if it’s interesting enough, but every aspect of this that’s morally and politically bankrupt hooks into some aspect of the book that is stupid and sloppy. It’s no good saying I’m not a bluenose, because you automatically are to Russell or anyone who takes him seriously if you object to anything they say, but frankly, after this, I kind of want to be. No more whiskey and squalor for you fucks, because we know that the likes of Russell and his masters will use the nth-generation copy of a copy of a bad understanding of what that looked like to convince people that black people don’t really need to vote. Especially when you consider Russell defends possibly the least compelling set of pleasures imaginable, i.e. those preferred by American blockheads – bashing your own brain in with booze, sex with equally gross and poorly-bathed people, spending money on shit you don’t need and that doesn’t generally work as advertised – the spiteful position is awfully tempting.
Russell is pals these days with Yarvin and other open racists and homophobes (had both Red Scare gals on his show, individually! He’s definitely the type of older Xer know-nothing who goes gooey eyed over nothings like them) now, but still postures as though he’s the defender of the little guy against. Generally, the trash bigots he has on are the kind who like to pretend they want what’s best for those lesser types (invariably, the opposite of what said types fight and struggled for, historically). I haven’t bothered to listen to his podcast, but I feel I can almost see through some shitty version of The Force that he got “redpilled” by people like me not immediately giving him all of the awards for his book on pleasure (though he got serious historians, like Alan Brinkley and Nancy Cott, to blurb it, along with historical trailblazers like the guy who wrote “The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History”). Who could be against pleasure, and a book defending it? Who wants to be a dweeb? Globalists with agendas, that’s who! Well, honestly, I’d be down to play the villain if this pathetic charade is what needs heroes to save it. ‘
R.F. Kuang, “The Poppy War” (2018) (read aloud by Emily Woo Zeller) - Man… this is just discouraging. I don’t really have a lot to say about this that I didn’t have to say about the similarly wildly-hyped “Black Sun,” except, if anything, this is even weaker and more rote. Once again, we’re promised a new take on fantasy, inspired by a global setting, not the usual post-Tolkien Europe-based world-building, and changes in perspective that come with both that and from authorship by a woman of color. Once again, we get paint by numbers cliches borrowed from Harry Potter, shonen anime, and the maybe, what… five? Six? Other strains that go in to contemporary big ticket narrative entertainment media. And once again, the speculative fiction industry has piled honors and money at the author’s feet.
The idea here is that the main character, Rin, a put-upon foster child in a rural province of a secondary world society based on China during its pre-1949 century of humiliation, studies real hard and gets to go to hogwarts I MEAN battle school I MEAN, the academy, whatever it’s called, for special military children. People are mean to her because she’s poor. The instructors are harsh beyond what seems necessary or advisable even for a military academy. But, lo and behold, Rin is the special child, the only one who can do the kind of shamanism that can keep the kind-of-Japanese at bay when they attack again. Presumably, in the sequels, she battles going crazy (shaman magic makes you crazy) and the stand-in westerners.
Look. I shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but I will. I would love to see a big fantasy epic based on Chinese history. Same with Mesoamerican history, same with African or Polynesian history- really, anywhere. If these epics were written by women of color or other people historically marginalized within publishing, so much the better (Kuang belongs to other demographics, like Georgetown and Oxbridge graduates, that aren’t so marginalized, and it’d maybe be nice to get some diversity on that axis, too, but the point stands). The reason I would like to see these things is because I think that good writing can accomplish that double-miracle- the exploration of difference, many-fold ways of thinking and living, alongside the recognition of human concordance across differences. Sometimes, a triple miracle- those things, plus entertainment!
“The Poppy War” fails on all these counts. The closest thing for a justification for its existence, outside of the balance sheets of its publisher, is what I think of as the Clayton Powell principle. Asked about the illegal small-time numbers gambling game that was everywhere in his Harlem district (and was beginning to be violently taken over by Italian and Jewish gangsters, after generations of being run reasonably peaceably by black and Hispanic operators, often women), Congressman Adam Clayton Powell said, “I’m against the numbers in any form, but until the numbers are eradicated from Harlem, I want the black man to have the same chance to run the numbers as the Italian.” So, yeah- if we’re doing this chintzy, bloated, overrated, same-same hero’s journey bullshit over and over again, then yes, women of color like Kuang, Rebecca Roanhorse, and N.K. Jemisin deserve the same chance to see their work wildly overblown as boring white dude hacks like Patrick Rothfuss have.
But what a missed opportunity! Rothfuss didn’t promise as much, or more to the point, waste as much as the supposed deliverers of the field from “white farm boys going on quests” have. A fantasy novel based on the dynamics of Chinese history is a really fucking good idea! I was looking forward to this! I had some forewarning it was a little trite from people I trust, but other people I trust (a little less if I’m being honest) spoke quite highly of “The Poppy War.”
But what’s the goddamned point of it’s the same old shit, with somewhat different personal names and aesthetic details in the scenery? Especially when those aesthetic differences are indifferently conveyed and aren’t in an audiovisual medium to begin with? It’s like someone slapped a reskin on a well-known video game and declared it not just a whole new game, but a subversion of all previous games in the genre, a step forward both for game design and, in some way, social justice. And it works, over and over again! People fall for it!
“The Poppy War” in particular was possibly the most predictable single book I ever read. Every character is who they seem to be, if not to the other characters — they can’t see that Rin is special, generally, or that the crazy old herbal medicine teacher actually knows shamanism — but to any reader over the age of eight. Every turn of the story you can see coming well ahead of time, including the setups for the inevitable bloated sequels.
This would be less of a problem if the premise delivered more, if Kuang successfully immersed us in another world, a world dissimilar to those in which we usually find ourselves as readers. Fantasy plots don’t need to be scintillatingly original. But the world and atmosphere of “The Poppy War” was so familiar it felt like going to the office (honestly, NBC-The-Office worship is a disease, but it feels like less like going to work and probably has more real world-building than most Hugo candidates for best novel in the last five years). You can’t just have everyone eating rice flour dumplings instead of beef stew and call it a subversion of Eurocentric genre tropes. Put upon decaying kingdom, sure. Long-dead magic arises despite skepticism of decadent ruling elite, you bet. And always, always, the magic one proving themselves. No one thinks different, no one talks different, nothing is really arranged, socially, politically, economically, all that different than in the “white boy” Tolkien-deriviative fantasies with which this book shares shelf space.
A friend of mine likes to say that a lot of the problems in contemporary genre fiction stem from meritocrats – and most contemporary big name writers come, at the very least, from decent universities, and often enroll in highly competitive and expensive workshops to hone their craft and make industry connections – staging endless vindications for versions of themselves, the lonely striver revealed as being as special as authors generally imagine themselves to be. My addendum: a really different world, and certainly the different consciousness you would see in a genuinely different world, like those built by Tolkien, Le Guin, Butler, Herbert, et al, would interfere with the clarity of this vision… to say nothing of taking much more time and effort, if nothing else reading weird old shit when a tired grad student would rather be streaming (speaking as a grad student whose career failures probably had something to do with preferring reading weird old shit, I know whereof I speak). To the extent smart people I know like this book, it seems they like it for a somewhat depressing reason: they’ve enlisted in an online war with SFF enthusiasts who embrace what a friend calls “toxic-posi vibes,” “hopepunk” types who smilingly try to ruin the careers of anyone less posi than themselves. That means that “The Poppy War,” which is unrelentingly grim, humorless, free of the quips, squee moments, and familial sentimentality we’ve picked up from Joss Whedon et al, is on their side in the pointless series of cafeteria brawls that is speculative fiction social media.
A dispiriting spectacle all around! Somewhere in the stacks, or online, there’s probably someone who’s written actually good, new scifi or fantasy based on historical China. I feel confused by the situation we see in contemporary SFF, even though the basic dynamics are as clear and sleazy as in any of our decaying institutions, and I guess the confusion stems from that. Good writing doesn’t cost that much more than bad. So why don’t they take a good writer out of their slush pile and elevate them? That probably comes down to some kind of sleazy bullshit surrounding workshops and who you know, too. Still! **
Michael Mann and Meg Gardiner, “Heat 2” (2022) - I yield to few in my admiration for Michael Mann, my favorite director, and like most Mann fans my age, I first got into him from seeing “Heat.” I don’t look for perfection in artists and works I admire (stupid I have to say that but there it is)- Mann isn’t “perfect” and “Heat” is no longer my favorite Mann movie. I see it as being great, in the sense of having a lot going for it and some huge flaws. “Heat” adds and forgets at least one major plotline (serial killer Waingro) to an already over-stuffed script, the characters are needlessly wordy to the extent that Pacino especially almost becomes farcical, and it’s the nadir of Mann’s uneven ability to depict women. But it’s still compelling- the actors, the action, the pathos Mann never sneers or winks at. In a time when we’re all encouraged to be either shitty little stand-up comics inflicting our not-so-tight-fives about everything to everyone, or else woofing, yawping nincompoops, Mann’s deadly serious, but not self-serious, stories of connection and tragedy constitute signals from a better world. This is as true for his misses (like “The Keep”) as much as it is for checkered successes (“Heat,” “Public Enemies,” “Miami Vice”) and indisputable masterpieces (“Thief,” “Manhunter,” “Last of the Mohicans”) (note- I actually –like– some of the “checkered” works better than the masterpieces- enjoyment is more subjective, to me, than mastery).
So, on the one hand, I get the jokes that rise to the mind when one hears that Michael Mann, with help from bestselling thriller writer Meg Gardiner, wrote and published a book called “Heat 2,” both a prequel and a sequel to his 1996 film. Chris Fleming, a comedian who almost fills the role in comedy that Mann does for me in film, described it as a government program to get adult men to read (considering the last book that you could make that joke for would be “American Sniper,” I think we can agree this is an improvement). Moreover, being a follower of Michael Mann’s work, I know this is part of a “comeback.” His last film, “Blackhat,” was a massive, almost inconceivable flop (I think it’s kind of good), and for years the studios wouldn’t let Mann near another movie. I think now they realize enough dads out there will buy stuff with “the guy who brought you Heat” on it, especially if it’s a sequel, to let him out of the doghouse a little- he got this book out, and now they’re letting him make the Enzo Ferrari biopic he’s been talking about forever.
So, I do think there’s some calculation here. But I also know Mann’s work well enough to know, from the first page, that this stuff was going to be cask-strength Mann, an immersion into the Manniverse, if you will. He’s known for writing extensive biographies for his characters, most of which don’t come up in the movies, and you know he’s just been dying to get all of that, and the research he does for locations and criminal dynamics, out there somewhere, too.
Anyway, guess I should say what happens in the book, a little! We first catch up with Chris Shiherlis (the only place I’ve seen that surname outside of the universe of Heat is actually here in Watertown- wonder if it’s Greek or Armenian), Val Kilmer’s character, hours after the botched robbery that formed the pivot of the movie. He’s been shot, his wife is working with the cops (but no so much she doesn’t find a way to warn him out of a cop trap), his best friends have all been killed. Jon Voight’s character smuggles him out of the US and gets him a job in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Real Mann heads know that Mann loves places like that, weird nether zones exposing both capitalism’s darkness and it’s potential for adventures for Mann to dramatize. Ciudad del Este is more or less openly run by smuggler clans, and Chris gets in with one of them.
Zap back to 1988! Neil McCauley, Robert DeNiro’s character, is still alive, and something like the crew is still intact, and in Chicago. They take a big score there, but also pick up an enemy in the form of the leader of a crew of home invasion robbers. Those of you who know Michael Mann, or really who read/watch a lot of crime stories, know that home invaders are bad news. Neil, Chris and crew are criminals, sometimes violent, but never do crime to sate their violent desires- they’re professionals. Otis, the leader of the home invaders, on the other hand, makes his already violent crimes more violent intentionally. He’s a creepy sadist on top of everything else. Meanwhile, Al Pacino’s detective character, Vincent Hanna, is in the mix- he was canonically a Chicago cop before moving to LA, so he’s trying to find Otis (he’s not on Neil’s tail yet- Neil’s Chicago score didn’t involve violence).
The score they do in Chicago leads the crew to taking down a cartel stash house in Mexicali, on the border. This was probably my favorite part of the book, the best heist of the bunch (and there’s a few, enough for pretty much any heist-head). But Otis, despite not being a “professional” in the sense of Neil et al, is dogged and lucky, and he finds them. Specifically, he finds Neil’s love interest, a Mexican smuggler lady who helps out with the crimes (over time, Mann has gotten better about having women who aren’t victims or shrews in his stuff, and one imagines Meg Gardiner probably helped here too). Tragedy ensues, one of the things that helps lead Neil to his “have no attachments you can’t walk out on in 30 seconds” credo from the movie.
Back to the future! By 2000, Chris is in with a Taiwanese-Paraguayan smuggler clan. Despite still having his wife, Ashley Judd, back in the States (they can’t talk much because Chris is extremely wanted), he gets together with the business-minded daughter of the clan, who sees the transnational criminal entrepreneurial possibilities of the future. This takes them back to LA, where a concatenation of weird Chinese-Paraguayan dynastic politics, and our old friend Otis, somehow combine to create big time problems that Chris and Vincent Hanna, still on the force, need to navigate/shoot their way out of.
Those of you who know Michael Mann’s stuff (and even more so those of you know his stuff and then lick the boom up) will recognize the story, it’s themes, and much of its background as a melange of elements Mann used in any and all of his crime movies. It’s not just “Heat,” but especially “Miami Vice” and “Blackhat” with their emphases on interconnected global crime, “Public Enemies,” “Thief” (especially in the Chicago parts), even “Manhunter” given how much pivots on sociopath Otis, whose motivations aren’t all that different from the Tooth Fairy in that move… all present and accounted for.
It’s not so much fan service for fans of Heat — you get more of Kelso, Tom Noonan’s wheelchair-bound hacker, but kind of more a plot device, and not people you’d rather see like Tom Sizemore’s Cerrito, Wes Studi’s Casals, or Danny Trejo’s character, named after the actor — as fan service for fans of Michael Mann as a whole. It won’t surprise you to know that I follow Michael Mann’s Facebook page, and his fans are now talking about a “Michael Mann extended universe,” which you gotta figure is exactly what the publishers/studios want. I try not to do this in reviews, but it’s a very strong case of “this is the kind of thing you’ll like, if that’s the kind of thing you like.” Michael Mann’s work is so stuck in my brain it’s hard to tell if other people will respond to it. There’s definitely enjoyable crime material, here, and it’s also encouraged me to check out Meg Gardiner- while the vision is definitely Mann’s, I could see her doing a lot to make a real novel out of it. Anyway… I’d call this middle-rank Mann, which means it’s better than high-ranked stuff from lesser mortals. ****
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Cat Days of Summer
This summer was characterized by a pretty mellow June and then brutally hot July and August. A few days ago looked to be… maybe… the last really hot days until Fall comes. So, I’ll take the spread-out existential-crisis Mithra I can.