Melendy Avenue Review 2023-06-02
Hello! Welcome to this week’s Melendy Avenue Review. I don’t have a ton of critical stuff today, because I’ve been doing a lot of fiction writing, and I include some discussion of what’s going on there. New readers might want to look at the previous installment to get a better idea of what I’m talking about. Also, new readers, welcome! Thanks for reading. Please consider subscribing at the Citizen level! It helps keep the Review afloat.
We also have a reading election and at least one critical note. I’m still reading a lot, but much of what I’m reading will come up in future podcasts! I’m arranging some awesome guests, don’t want to spoil them. Enjoy!
CONTENTS
Election: Literary reading, Carpentier vs Rodoreda vs Williams
Reading Notes: Murata
Work in Progress Essay: The Atlantic Confederation
ELECTION
Hey all! Please vote for which literary fiction I read next. Just pick whichever you want! No need to be an expert.
THE CANDIDATES
Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World (1949) - This is an account of the Haitian Revolution by one of the great Cuban writers and an initiator of “the Boom” in Latin America’s global literary reputation.
Mercè Rodoreda, Death in Spring (1986) - This is one of the major books by the woman considered the great Catalan writer of the twentieth century, whose works had to kind of duck around Franco’s suppression of regional identity.
John Williams, Stoner (1965) - No, not a novel about a guy who scores a lot of weed, but about an academic named Stoner, his victories and sadness, etc., that’s had a big gain in its reputation in the last few years.
READING NOTES
I listened to Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman. It’s the tale of Keiko, a woman who never figures out a way in the world until one day, during college, she happens upon a convenience store that needs workers. She hires on, and stays for eighteen years, because everything makes sense in the convenience store. All she needs to do is show up and follow very specific, clearly stated instructions. She was a bit weird on the outside, in ways that seemingly no one could handle, but at the convenience store, she slots right in. She receives praise from her managers and coworkers, even as she becomes an object of concern for her family and ex-classmates. As part of Japan’s middle class, she’s supposed to get married, or else get a “real job.” I realize Americans, especially American women, face this, too, but I get the idea the pressure is more consistent, more open, and stated with much less (sometimes fake, I know) concern for the preferences of the women involved. Keiko can excuse her supposed failings due to health issues, but not forever. The store hires an asshole incel type who’s always going on about stone age gender roles, and how about he’s doomed because he’s not a “successful hunter in the village” (the only male role) and Keiko’s doomed, too, because she hasn’t had any kids and likely won’t (the only female role). The dude gets fired from the store for sucking, and for a little while, Keiko thinks about faking a relationship with him so they can both go about life without judgment, a fake functional Japanese family unit. But in the end, the convenience store calls to her. I was a convenience store worker, in my youth! Though an American one, attached to a gas station. I get the impression urban Japanese convenience stores are pretty different. Way more emphasis on prepared foods, for instance, and no one buying gas, cigarettes, or lottery tickets, which was my store’s bread and butter, and the managers in Keiko’s store expect much more performance of enthusiasm than good old Ahmed did at mine. Still, I see the appeal of a simple job with simple rules- I liked gas station work a lot better than my other teenage jobs. I get that Keiko had a lot more going on than I had, and I’m supposed to see her love of the convenience store as partially tragic, but I say let her fly her flag, and let’s have a society that rewards her socially necessary convenience store labor!
WORK IN PROGRESS ESSAY: The Atlantic Confederation
I’ve been doing a lot of fiction writing this week. It’s been feeling pretty good. That’s not to say it’s been flawless! Among other things, I’ve been thinking about this story, and the world it’s set in, for a while. Even when I can discipline myself from inserting the world-building I dream up on my commutes, I need to regulate the flow of information about the story itself. It’s not exactly a detective novel, but the main character, Ray, does some investigating to find out some truths about his world, his family, and himself. The story is told from Ray’s perspective, mostly in the past tense- he is reporting what he found and how he came to find it. So it’s easy to just have Ray blather forth exhaustive detailed descriptions of his encounters, his thought process, etc. I need to figure out what fits where. So what I often do is just free-write, let stuff out, then leave it for a bit, look at it again, and kind of “reel it in” - figure out the main kernel and snip the rest, saving it in a different file in case I want to use it somewhere else.
Not exactly mind-blowing new technique, I know! I guess I better include some world to fill in this little essay, huh?
Who runs the Atlantic Confederation? Good question! Different people will give you different answers. Some will say, “whoever is on the spot to deal with a given issue.” Others will say, “Special Circumstances,” the name for the body committed to defend – and where appropriate, expand – the revolution that brought the Confederation into being. Many will point to formal governing bodies, the councils of workers and the parliamentary bodies where representatives from all of the Member bodies, which range in size from vast Ontario to the tiny Azores, which set policy and draft laws. In a sense, all of these people are right. Power rests in all of these places, and whatever larger values the Confederation embodies – freedom from want and coercion, democracy, pluralism – it was founded in large part on the harried pragmatism of people scrambling to preserve what they could from an ongoing chain of disasters, where the natural and man-made blurred into one continuous web of fault found with the old world.
Practically speaking, to remain in good stead in the Confederation, a given geographically-defined Member body has to agree to certain governance standards. It will allow all adult residents a vote, all workers will be represented in the union that governs their industry, certain services (health, childcare, etc) will be provided by the Confederation if it is found the Member is not providing them up to Confederation standards, it will more-or-less follow Confederation foreign policy, etc. What that means, practically speaking, for who actually runs things varies, from place to place. In most places, the unions are the fundamental building block of governance. These often shade into the Confederation service bureaus, because these bureaus which deal with healthcare, utilities, etc. are, themselves, made up of workers, and hence unionized. But the Confederation is not purely syndicalist, though there are parties that would like it to make it so. There are issues other than the economic, and parties form around these issues. These parties elect people to parliamentary bodies, ranging from neighborhood boards to the Confederation council. Political conflict within and between unions sometimes bleeds over into conflict between parties and vice versa, and there is, shall we say, often “creative tension” in terms of which type of body has charge over which area of administration.
Special Circumstances started as the clandestine body for the revolutionary organizations that first fought the old governments – named after a similar body in the utopian space society in the novels of Iain Banks – and has become a sort of spy agency/secret police/revolutionary council. This scares a lot of people, and inspires others, but, in keeping with the ways in which the Confederation’s shape owes more to the years of disaster than anything else, everyone agrees, it’s just… there. The Confederation is a pluralist society, but not an “anything goes” society. Some of the boundaries are clear, some are less so, and some vary from place to place. But press hard enough, in a way that local bodies can’t handle, and Special Circumstances will take an interest. Moreover, like any good unaccountable revolutionary body, SC plays the space between mystery and public relations masterfully. The SC chief will occasionally show up on popular livestreams to opine – “unofficially,” of course – about political matters of the day, usually to judge which course of action is best for “the continuance of the revolution,” with a few winks about what the organization has been known to do on the shadier side of the street.
Special Circumstances keeps its place in Confederation society in part due to the inability of others to dislodge it- but also because it is not the only armed body in the Confederation. Almost all of the unions maintain militias, and it is Confederation default that every member of a union is in its militia- many find ways to excuse themselves, but not all. The Confederation also maintains the People’s Army, founded during the war, a standing army that the militia supplement, or is it the other way around? Among other things, People’s Army maintains more advanced technical parts of the Confederation military, such as the Navy, but some skills that would be seen as quite advanced today, like directing drones, are pretty commonly-spread by the union militias. Special Circumstances does not run the militias or People’s Army (“or do they?!” some demand to know), though, as with so many other systems in the Confederation, there are many gray areas, areas of convergence/conflict in terms of who, exactly, runs what.
“Decapitalization” is the official policy of the Confederation, and creating systems whereby the goods of life are taken out of market dispensation systems and made free to all is one of the main goals of the body at large. Practically, especially in areas hit hard by war or disaster, this involves systems of distribution, and in some cases rationing, of consumer goods by official bodies, but as the economic system recovers from the bad times, this increasingly resembles a system where most things you might want are effectively free, or rather, it’s understood you have already paid for them by helping create the society that has created the conditions for the things you want to be made. Some consumer goods are kept in a market system, where citizens may pay for them using Confederation-issue “Funbux,” and this is understood as both a way to distribute rarer, niche consumer goods, and a way to channel people’s desire for buying, selling, and sometimes gambling. Sometimes, there’s a “black market” in rarer goods, but most of the things on the black market today are easily available, regulated more by social systems – the Health Service, which might try to keep users it is treating away from drugs that you could otherwise easily secure, the militias who keep stocks of weapons – than by law. The speed at which the historically-richer parts of the Confederation – northeastern North America, the Celtic parts of the old UK, Buenos Aires, etc – distribute enough goods, technical assistance etc to the historically-poorer – the Caribbean, West Africa, the Nordeste – parts to get them off ration systems is a topic of political dispute, but most will grant it is happening.
The Confederation is attached to democracy and pluralism, but recognizes, practically speaking, that it cannot foist the same governing system on all of its Members. Part of the commitment that binds the Confederation is the free movement of people and accepting any refugees who are willing to help them build. As of the time the novel takes place, the Confederation has taken many millions of refugees from the world over, many of them going to the rapidly warming parts of North America that had previously been thinly-populated. But historical justice is part of the Confederation equation, too. Negotiating that has been a classic Atlantic Confederation muddle. Poorer Members are not expected to take massive flotillas of refugees, or when they do, it comes with a major infusion of resources from the richer Members. Historically oppressed Members, like the Haudonosee, Cree, and Inuit areas, are technically open to at least some refugees, but between the many inducements to refugees to go elsewhere in the Confederation and various rules and regulations put in place to protect smaller, historically-oppressed populations from being swamped… well, it creates conflict, but usually arguments and delays, not shooting… usually.
One adaptation from the non-democratic political tradition the Confederation has taken on can be seen in its ritual executive, the Hegemon (a term also cheekily taken from a scifi novel- the combination of deadly seriousness and playfulness that Confederation governing bodies often display is something the world has had to get used to). The Hegemon has almost no practical power, but serves something like the ritual role that Presidents play in some parliamentary systems, and monarchs in others: meeting foreign dignitaries, convening governing bodies, expressing values. The Hegemon serves five years, and isn’t so much elected as argued over in online fora (the Confederation internet being a very different critter from ours). When it looks like they’ve more or less agreed on someone, a new one comes in. This means the Hegemon is someone broadly popular, which means they’re usually either a hero of the revolution, or, increasingly often, a beloved pop star. They get to swan around for five years as a sort of ironic/post-ironic monarch, reigning out of the Montauk House in Brooklyn, while a bemused world looks on.
Well! I think we all know who is Hegemon on Melendy Avenue.