Melendy Avenue Review 2023-07-27
Hello! Busy times in the Petersphere. I have much to contemplate! But I do have “content.”
CONTENTS
Reading Election: Graves vs Pynchon vs Rizal
Reading Essay: The Decadents and Me
ELECTION
Hey! Vote for which fancy literary novel I should read first! You got 24 hours! Vote on any basis you like, you don’t need to have a well thought out opinion!
Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934) - After surviving World War I, Robert Graves wrote this novel about one of the less popular Roman emperors! What was his deal, anyway? Will I understand this if I didn’t have the immersion in classics educated Brits took for granted?
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009) - I kind of liked the movie, I basically saw it as doing The Big Lebowski but highbrow. I understand the way Pynchon used to do that bothered people, back before nerd culture ate the world. I get why! Still curious about this.
Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (1887) - This is the great Filipino anti-imperial novel! Rizal was executed by the Spanish for his fight for freedom, and this novel has been an inspiration to anti-colonialists ever since.
REVIEW ESSAY: The Decadents and Me
I like to joke, sometimes, about my lack of visual aesthetic sense. I’ve never been able to arrange or decorate a room pleasingly. If I try to dress according to any principle beyond cost, comfort, utilitarianism, and/or very direct symbolism (like DSA-shirt-at-a-march direct), I can make one or two meaningful choices – I don’t like pinstripes, for instance, only like the simplest tie patterns in those occasions where I have to wear one, and try to avoid styles that look embarrassing on fat men – but beyond that it’s all gibberish to me. I draw like a child- the last time I tried to draw consistently, when I was a teenager with a crush on a girl who spent a lot of time in the art room at school, it would be easy to mistake my drawings with those of a seven year old who likes history. Whatever relationship is supposed to be there between my eye, my mind, my will, and my hands… it’s not there and never has been, except insofar as I can memorize a few rules.
What visuals move me? The Book of Kells, the Manhattan skyline when you’re coming in on the Amtrak from the north, seagulls wheeling in the sky (yes, seagulls- they’re graceful flyers if you bother to watch). The others I can think of to list imply a promise of some sort of other sensory delight, like taste or touch, or else an opportunity to engage an interest: a table spread with good foods, a beautiful woman, a good picture of a historical city (separate from the Manhattan skyline- those skyscrapers do not promise delight or interest to me), a good shot or sequence in a film, bookshelves. I suppose seeing my cat, or other cats, is a bit of both- beautiful in and of themselves, also promising the delight of stroking their fur or of watching their amusing behavior. How about space? I love looking at pictures of planets, stars, galaxies, nebulae, etc. How much of that is visual aesthetic and how much the holdover dream of a scifi lover, even one who doesn’t believe that humanity will ever get much past Earth’s gravity well? Does it matter?
One reason I’m thinking about this is because for the last little while, I have dabbled some in the world of critical communities, people who interact with culture together, discuss it, apply valuations to it, often enough clash with rival critical communities. Naturally, now, much of this takes place online. I like to read good criticism, along with writing it, and also like to know what kind of critical conversations are going on as part of my interest in intellectual history. It can be irritating to say anything about these communities and sometimes these critics. In part, I imagine, because so much of this discourse takes place online, rhetorical strategies that thrive under conditions of glibness and information overload often prevail there. This is a fancy way of saying that dismissiveness – often amounting to playground/cafeteria favorites like “I know you are, but what am I?”, “Why are you so obsessed with X?”, etc etc – is a lot easier than engagement… and dismissal of a vast range of what you read and see online is a necessary survival skill. So, it’s very easy to dispute the idea that there’s any resemblance between X and Y critics or writers, that group Z is actually a group, much easier than proving the case. In most online settings, who looks more dignified- the one saying “this group advances this idea” or the one saying “there is no group, go touch grass?”
Well, I don’t really give a damn, at this point. I imagine my dozens of readers can forgive me, or can present actual instances where I overread (or underread!) that I can engage with, or… eh. Anyway. Let it be known I understand the risks and move forward.
Comparatively few commentators I read think that the period we are in right now is a particularly good period for any given art form. One possible exception is people really into nerd culture, especially either franchise nerd culture – Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc – or cultural productions that resemble these franchises, but the bloom might be coming off the rose even for them.
That said – and despite what I’ve said about the adverse rhetorical conditions in which contemporary critics operate, to say nothing of the much, much worse material conditions! – it doesn’t seem to be an entirely awful time for criticism. There’s a lot of bad criticism out there. But there also seems to be a fair number of pretty talented and often bold younger critics and communities of people engaging with writing and other art in interesting ways. I think it looks better, in that regard, than the culture did a decade or so ago. Minerva taking wing at dusk, or something.
That being said… I am pretty well orthogonal to most of it, in terms of my taste and my agenda, except in terms of wanting a more interesting culture, and that the morass of contemporary art has something to do with larger social structures. It is this experience of ambivalence I am talking about, here. I started with visual aesthetics, because I think my lack of them might have a lot to do with the chasm I see.
Probably out of everyone and everything I’m talking about here, the artifact most established in the firmament is the work of A.V. Marraccini. I see her bon mots shared on twitter, her book, We, the Parasites, praised around. I got a copy. For a small book, there’s a lot going on: extended discussion of Homer and Cy Twombley, covid memoirs, above all a metaphor of the critic, or anyway Marraccini and whoever is in the “we” with her, as parasite. She refers to a few parasites here, but mostly to the fig wasp, which relies on digging into figs in order to reproduce, making the fig a part of its reproduction and also allowing the fig itself to reproduce (by some process I can’t quite remember).
“I burrow into sweet, dark places of fecundity, into novels and paintings and poems and architectures, and I make them my own.” That’s the nut line that leads off a lot of reviews and promotional material for “We, the Parasites.” There’s a lot of that, in there, a lot of the appeal of the strange, the decadent, the bodily. Marraccini is part of, what? A third, a fourth? Generation to take up Susan Sontag’s call for an erotics of art, as opposed to a hermeneutics… but something tells me this Yale classicist is no slouch in the hermeneutics department, either. So, we get intertwined readings of texts ranging from Homer to Genet to Updike, a lot about art and architecture, memoirs of growing up arriviste (Florida folk, it seems) and lesbian in fancy schools, all quite artfully woven together.
Marraccini, Yale classicist (but, she informs us, not one of the fancy lad kind), isn’t about to put it like this, but in other emerging areas of criticism “sicko” has become a term of praise and endearment. I think it comes from a place similar to Marraccinni’s parasite ideation, a repudiation of the same-same pseudo-beauty, pseudo-health, pseudo-sanity that’s the default in the culture, corporate, university, or otherwise. I don’t interact with Marraccini (I follow her on Twitter- she’s a pretty good poster), I interact a little with some discursive communities that also follow her, some. I’ve run into a lot of people, some writers, some critics, some aspirational in both or either direction, some people all those people encounter on social media, who call for a culture that is darker, deeper, weirder, more bodily, sexier, and so on.
They make some good critiques against both mainstream culture and contemporary nerd culture, to the extent the two can be separated anymore. It really is troubling, for instance, how rote and boring a lot of science fiction has gotten in the last decade or so, and rather insulting that a common response to critiques of the culture is to tar the critics as political undesirables. It’s possible to think things aren’t going the right way in some areas without being reactionaries. There’s a whole long complicated history of beef in scifi, which radiated out to nerd culture at large, but we don’t need to rehearse it all here.
I think the sensibility I’m describing has produced some good criticism, in outlets like Blood Knife, the podcast Rite Gud, both the criticism and fiction of Gretchen Felker-Martin. And my interactions with the people involved have been entirely positive. They’re a hell of a lot kinder than a lot of people who broadcast their niceness, their inclusivity, their harmlessness to the world with every word and gesture. It’s an old saying, but there’s truth to it: punks were kind people pretending to be mean, hippies were mean people pretending to be kind. This logic can be extended outwards, to other groups, I find.
Still and all- the sensibility isn’t quite mine. Among other things, one thing that unites the sort of… emerging neo-decadent/“sicko” aesthetic/outlook/scene/whatever you want to call it, is an immersion in horror. I’ve said it before- so many of the cultural touchstones of people I know, often people I like and admire, I just whiffed on, missed like a ship in the night. Anime, most video games, Simpsons (I liked the classic seasons a lot… when I watched them as an adult, long story), Star Trek… horror, though, was less of an accident that I missed it. It’s not so much that I don’t like it, though I don’t love it. It’s that I had something in the place where a lot of people have horror: history, especially the history of war and crime. I used to be snooty about it. Maybe I still am, somewhere. I try not to be.
Similarly… “We, the Parasites” was… fine. I liked the parts about criticism and Marraccini’s experience of literature (and academia). The parts about the pandemic were ok for what they were, but I honestly don’t want to read pandemic narratives, and I’m not sure why. Marraccini is an art historian. I could believe she’s a good one (what do art historians call… regular historians? Philistine historians?). She talks about classical architecture, which I can see the appeal of, and about the work of Cy Twombly, which I can’t. I never know what to say about modern art. I don’t like it, mostly. I don’t get it, and the only feeling I get from a lot of it is confusion and resentment. I’m not convinced there’s much to get, in a lot of cases. I look at Twombly’s work and see scribbles and noise, I look at Rothko and think somebody’s putting me on. But it’s tiresome, being that guy. It's played out, it’s mostly pointless, it arguably helps reactionaries and philistines. I think it makes more sense to acknowledge I haven’t got a dog in this fight and move on, like with horror (and anime and and and etc).
Because that’s kind of the crux of what I’m trying to say. I’m glad the world has an A.V. Marraccini in it, that she loves the things she loves and writes about them as she writes about them, for all of us to think about. I’m very grateful for the newer wave of artists and critics out there elevating the weird, dark, and messy. I don’t mean this in an abstract “man, isn’t the world great, in its diversity” thing, either. I think these constitute real steps forward. Lord knows we need something.
Moreover, happily enough, I’m reasonably politically sympatico with the people I’m talking about. They’re usually on the socialist or anarchist left. This is pretty distinct from edgy subcultures of my youth, like goths, who were apolitical at best, in my experience! There’s more than a little “first day communist kid” syndrome with some of the people who find their way there via this or that social media algorithm, but that’s only to be expected.
Let’s put it this way: along with some aesthetic principles, what puts Marraccini and Felker-Martin in roughly the same trajectory is rejection- rejection of what we’ve been offered, told we already like, in aesthetics, politics, everything. Very punk, in this regard. Moreover, it’s rejection in favor of something, in favor of what they really love and what is real to them.
This, I can relate to. It’s just that their symbols of what in specific they’re rejecting, and what in specific they’re embracing, are different from mine. Not necessarily antagonistic! Especially because, if nothing else, I’ve long since learned to not make my aesthetic differences an opposition in all cases. I could not have survived the tens if I had!
Visual aesthetics and horror… I think that’s the core of it, and maybe why I really can do a “it’s not you, it’s me.” I know my sense of visual aesthetics is poor. I’m a little less convinced I’m missing something in horror fandom — I mean, I do like some, like the aforementioned Gretchen Felker-Martin’s “Manhunt”! Though I basically enjoyed it as an action novel — but, I also am not so arrogant as to say there’s nothing there.
One more element, and this can serve to get the obvious out of the way: I’m a straight cis dude. At other recent moments in the criticism field, other points of identity might have mattered more. But a lot of what Marraccini is doing can be called queering critical practice in a new way, developing the “erotics of art” as Susan Sontag put it (it wouldn’t surprise me if Marraccini had a much more sophisticated take on how her work related to that call, but, hey, I’m a regular historian, not an art one, I’m doing my best). So, too, in their own, generally poppier and more accessible way, are the “sicko” critics. And I think that’s cool. But it’s not me. No one wants that from me, least of all me. I’ve been in leftist organizing long enough to know how to stand aside and let people from the long-neglected marginalized sides of life take the stage. Moreover, whether this is a reflection of straight-cis-maleness or not, my relationship with my body doesn’t feel especially literary, to me. And my actual artistic interests mesh well with this, as it happens. But… it means I don’t really find my aesthetic, there.
I don’t know if I’m part of the “we” in Marraccini. I don’t need to be! If anything, I feel more like an intruder, sometimes. Who’s this guy who doesn’t feel it, for whom the gothic does little and the slashers do little and the art does little? Why’s he even here? I did the pull up and opine to the disinterested thing, in my adolescence, like a lot of nerdy boys did. I try not to do it now. I contribute where I can, in those groups, and then go back to my little corner of things, where people sign up to hear it.
Among other things, I’m less of a naturalist than Marraccini, don’t know animal behavior too well. I couldn’t tell you what sort of animal I’m closer to in my critical practice, what way of life they might have. Maybe a scavenger. Maybe a bear, like much of my iconography uses! Rambling through the environment, trying to get enough calories to keep my big corpus going, poking my nose in places, capable of mauling if needs be, taking long naps, occasionally winding up in situations I don’t really understand when I smell tasty trash… “someone hyperconcentrated fats and salts… and left it out… for me?? And now they’re yelling?!!”
Or maybe I’m another type of critter, one that started out scavenging, scrounging, and skulking on the savanna. Like the critics and writers I’m talking about, I reject a lot of what has been foisted on us, about what people should be, how they should relate, what our possibilities are. I can see why, if that is human, so many others want to be anything but, to get past “man,” part of a long and honorable line extending back to Foucault and Nietzsche and who knows who before them. But maybe one of the differences is I still rather like that mean little savanna ape, or anyway, I find him and his doings interesting. Trust me, I get he’s not everyone’s cup of tea- I see him in the mirror every day. But he’s what I’ve got. I’m glad enough to meet up with other critters and see what they see, even if circumstances compel me to wander and ramble, in mind and scene if not in physical location.
I gave Gretchen Felker-Martin a Mithra Award for best 4H (horror, humor, historical fiction, and/or hombres (westerns!)) work, and she sent a nice email back! Who can say no to this cat??