Hello all! So, it’s been weird here at Melendy Avenue. There were layoffs at the plant! A bunch of us got the pink slip including yours truly. I get the impression this might be happening at other tech companies, too! I got some severance, unemployment, job leads, the sympathy of many good friends, etc. It’s not that I loved my job so much. But it does contribute to a feeling of futility regarding the things in this world. Maybe I’m also just a bit “burnt-out” in general. I’ve been going pretty hard with working, writing, organizing, hobbies etc. these last few years! I might try to slow down a little. But I think I should be able to put out some good stuff here on the newsletter. If you want to help make my funemployment time a little more sustainable, consider become a Melendy Avenue Review Citizen! That involves upgrading your subscription and paying some money. That gets you access to our rad Discord group! In any event, here’s some reviews.
CONTENTS
Reading Notes: Schlesinger, Sorokin, Gibson
READING NOTES
I read Arthur Schlesinger’s The Vital Center. What a weird book! Though, to be honest, the weirdness is probably reading it now. What to make of a defense of centrism from the late 1940s, when the center was well to the left of where it is today for the sort of people who regard themselves as “the vital center” (and who sometimes namecheck Schlesinger, likely without having read him)? What to make of Schlesinger’s truly intrusive gender politics, the most well known example of which might be his comparison of communism to boarding school homosexuality (sweaty and secretive!) but is present all over the place in the text, where he consistently judges political movements and ideas on their “muscularity” and “toughness”? Especially rich coming from a pencil neck nerd who made his career sucking up to the Kennedys… There is some amazingly dopey stuff in here, including an extended analogy between soft-pink progressives ala Henry Wallace and pro-Southern Northern Democrats, ala Franklin Pierce, during the leadup to the Civil War (y’see, they both think they can reason with a slave power, be it the USSR or the southern planters). He spits the phrase “doughface” (old insult for pro-slavery northern democrats) with the ritual repetition of a scared dork repeating insult words to himself (“f****t” being prominent among them) as he psyches himself up to start a fight outside a bar… all this in the service of conjuring up a tough, manly liberalism to fight and win the Cold War, which he eventually found in the person of a certain pill-addicted skirt-chasing rich kid. Still and all- silly though this was, it was pretty amazing to read a partisan hack with a baffling agenda and bad historical analogies who actually seemed to have read something themselves, and took meaningful care with their writing and argumentation. Schlesinger didn’t distinguish himself as a thinker according to the standards of the time by anything other than yapping-terrier-relentlessness and good connections, but that still puts him miles ahead of writers in similar areas today in terms of erudition, articulation, and commitment. Even his masculinity politics, sweaty and absurd though they are, are more human than the yawping self-lobotomizing variety you see today. All around, a strange, frustrating, but interesting artifact.
Vladimir Sorokin is apparently considered one of the big Russian dissident writers, and one whose dissidence bridges the gap from Andropov’s day to Putin’s. I picked up his 2006 novel, The Day of the Oprichnik, not knowing anything about his reputation. It’s about a near-future Russia where modern (even ultra-modern- laser guns, etc) technology meets a social and political order that harkens back to the time of Ivan the Terrible, complete with a special Czar’s goon squad, the Oprichnina, that runs around doing violence to anyone who threatens the Czar, be they noble or common. Andrei Komiaga is a high-ranking Oprichnik who drives his Mercedov around (and talks on his mobilov, and that’s the only two of those “ov”s I can remember, thankfully) getting into situations. He kills, burns, tortures, rapes, all in the first half of the titular day. He takes some drugs – weird little hallucinogenic fish you put in your bloodstream – and has weird gestalt hallucinations with his fellow oprichniki. My understanding is that part of Sorokin’s reputation is his tendency towards outre flights of fancy, and we certainly get those. The Oprichniki, and Komiaga among them, present themselves as the model men of this new-old Russia, dedicated to “the work and the word” and every contemporary-ish culture war bugaboo the new Czardom uses to rally and rule his people and keep the outside outside… except, of course, among themselves, they ritually transgress the rules all the time, including in spectacular (but secret) acts of collective drug-fueled homosexuality. On the one hand, Sorokin proves pretty deft at getting inside a certain fascist mindset, one perfectly at home with the contradictions involved, fueled even by his awareness of them. On the other, there’s not much of a plot, the future world isn’t the most rigorous (why laser guns?), and there’s probably a lot of references to specific Russian literary and political stuff from the period I don’t get. Not a bad book but not great either, not as great as the premise.
I’ve committed to reading the William Gibson canon, in chronological order. This got a little grim after… well, I’d say after Mona Lisa Overdrive, the conclusion of the eighties trilogy that began with Neuromancer, though honestly, the fall-off from Neuromancer (and a few of the Burning Chrome stories) to any other Gibson work, or even any other work of long-form fiction in the cyberpunk genre, is so substantial… well, I plan on maybe getting into the fate of cyberpunk in this year’s birthday lecture. I’ll just say, Neuromancer was kind of a weird miracle, the other eighties Gibson novels were decent, and his nineties trilogy, the Bridge books as they’re known, was… bad, in a way I feel almost bad shitting on, because I think they really are William Gibson following his artistic vision at the time. It just so happens that Gibson’s vision, in the nineties, was mostly dull crap, interesting primarily because it was consistently about fifteen to thirty degrees off the center of the zeitgeist, so if you want to know what writers were thinking about in the nineties, the Bridge novels are worth looking at. I expected the trajectory to continue into Gibson’s aughts trilogy, starting with this one, Pattern Recognition. I was pleasantly, if not overwhelmingly, surprised! Pattern Recognition isn’t great. If anything, it’s even more zeitgeisty than the Bridge books. It’s the story of one Cayce (pronounced “Case” - he likes that name!) Pollard, a “cool hunter” for marketing companies with an “allergy” to pronounced branding. Yuck, right? But, I think Gibson eased more into his lackadaisical plotting, noodling around the edges of the culture and how culture and technology interact, around this time. It’s agreeably shaggy, not overbaked and boring like the Bridge books. Sure, it’s about a brand-allergic cool hunter trying to track down a weird mysterious fractured movie being released clip by clip online, so more or less the lowest stakes possible from our perspective, and wrings pathos out of 9/11 (it was published in 2003), and Cayce basically doesn’t have any character, isn’t even a sexy ninja blank of a lady detective, just a blank in a world of blanks (less some old calculator collectors, who were kind of fun). But I don’t know. Maybe it’s the reappearance of one of Gibson’s peculiar love: nebulous, mysteriously-created cultural artifacts expressing a formless nostalgic yearning- robot-constructed nostalgia boxes (the kind of thing you’d sell as a subscription box now!) being the big maguffin a few books ago. The mysterious movie clips are very much in that vein. I don’t see what he sees in that particular cultural form, but he gets across the yearning, both in the products and those obsessed with them, and that does give some of his later work an emotional core, some stakes. All told, it’s an affable time waster. Maybe my expectations were just low! In a year or three I’ll get around to Spook Country and we’ll see if I feel the same way.
Mithra is intrigued by these books, but not as intrigued as she was by a certain window ledge visitor…
Sorry to hear about the pink slip. Hope you find something better soon, not just something else. Mithra is darling as ever.