Hello readers! It’s been a busy but positive period. I’ve gotten a new (if temporary, possibly transitioning to something more permanent) job in a field I care about. The work is harder but more rewarding than what I had previously. I’m riding the wave of that energy into working on a few things.
I plan on extending the work I did in my last two birthday lectures into a book on Generation X and intellectual history. It will probably take a while, because I’ve got other stuff to do and I want to do a good job. I don’t know who would be interested in publishing such a book. But, it involves considerably less in the way of costly research travel than would other ideas I have for a nonfiction book, so it makes more sense to do this “on spec” as it were. I might have a “project journal” that I could extend to paying Citizen subscribers…
I’m also still working on that novel idea. As a good friend noted to me, I always have more than one book going, and that has worked out fine- why not do multiple writing projects, if I want? That, and I’m going to keep the podcast going, and still do recreational reading. So, good stuff on the way.
Please enjoy this installment of MAR, which includes my thoughts on a book that fell into my lap, quite by coincidence, that gets into nineties nostalgia in some very strange ways. This might be a good one to share around!
CONTENTS
Reading Notes: Murakami, Grandin
Review Essay: Alex Kazemi, New Millennium Boyz
READING NOTES
I listened to Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84… and listened to it, and listened to it. I sank a good sixty hours into that motherfucker! I’ll admit, I thought going in that it was letter-I Q 8 4, not number-1 Q 84. I thought it was about some future and/or alternate world where people were formally classified by IQ in some dystopian way, etc. Nope- instead, it’s about two thirty year old Tokyo residents getting zapped to a somewhat different version of the year 1984 and having to work out the whys, wherefores, and weirdness. At first I liked it a lot better than the other Murakamis I’ve read. I know a lot of fans of his, and whenever I bring up feeling so-so about Norwegian Wood or whatever, they point to another in his endless stream of novels. To be fair, they usually don’t point to this 2009 doorstop. But I had a look at it and at first it seemed more interesting and propulsive than his other books. There’s literary scams, assassinations of abusive men, depictions of the indigenous inhabitants of the Sakhalin islands, cults descended from Japanese new left groups. Murakami introduces the weirdness of the world little by little, in a nicely organic fashion, the different vaguely fae-folk-types who are causing interdimensional shenanigans and doing terrible things for inscrutable reasons. It falls apart halfway through, when Murakami has to stop building tension and providing background and make a plot happen. Naturally, the two dimension-jacked main characters need to get together in order to save the world or something, naturally they’ve been in love since childhood (which was also the last time they saw each other), and we’re supposed that’s good, not creepy. First though, male lead needs to have sex with an affectless seventeen year old fae-receptive (we hear a lot about her breasts), to like… preserve the timeline, or some shit. I don’t know. It got really dumb, Murakami dumb. Listen. I love love, as much as the next guy, probably. I’m not against love plots. But I think we could do with fewer “one Hollywood-style star-crossed couple getting together is literally the most important thing in the universe” plots. It’s trite.
Henry Kissinger! What a piece of shit! We probably don’t need to be told that at this point, but Greg Grandin’s Kissinger’s Shadow does a good job explaining what made the foul old toad unique, and why precedents he set are still relevant today. There were plenty of assholes among the cold warriors. If anything made Kissinger special, it was the special brand of continental philosophizing that he spun around himself. And that wasn’t special due to any real insight he had- he might have been more erudite than the Nixon coterie, but that didn’t take much. Whatever he took from Hegel, Spengler, and the tradition of foreign policy realism did not really influence his policy decisions. The only really consistent factors in those were violence, secrecy, and caprice, and you don’t need a fancy education to embrace those. No, what Kissinger’s philosophical noodling did for him had more to do with his sense of self, and eventually, the sense of collective self of much of the foreign policy elite. Kissinger’s much-ballyhooed “tragic viewpoint” was closer to self-pity than what the Athenians had in mind- it takes a special sort of person, he insisted, to ignore expertise, disregard the lessons of the past, and simply act, act in order to maintain an ability to act. And “act” always means “kill,” for these people. Normal people – the hoi polloi, the politicians who need their votes, intellectuals who didn’t get the program – simply cannot understand what it means to do what needs to be done. It’s that perspective, more than any particular policy, strategy, or even his personal network, that has been Kissinger’s legacy stateside, the sort of thinking that animates the “responsible” foreign policy elite on both sides of the aisle (the Trumpist yahoos have their own ideas, also bad). Kissinger had a way of making enemies into friends, which he would also excuse with his version of statesmanship, which is rank opportunism- Nixon, who he regarded as a boor but to whom he helped deliver the presidency by sabotaging Vietnam peace talks, the neocons, who cursed his name for over a decade but who decided they liked him once he cuddled up to their futile wars of choice. Of course, there’s that other legacy of Kissinger’s- the dead and the maimed, the tortured and disappeared, the children born deformed by chemical weapons, the unexploded munitions still killing decades after he saw to their deployment, the enmities he helped stir throughout the world. All this because some toad-looking nerd wanted to be important, probably because he couldn’t figure out a good way to get laid enough to maintain a sense of self. Fuck this.
REVIEW ESSAY
Alex Kazemi, New Millennium Boyz (2023) - A polite young fellow on goodreads, who seems to work for this book’s publisher, asked me if I wanted to read it, and sent me an advanced copy. I had a look at the description- a novel about kids being edgy circa 1999, written by what appeared upon googling to be a Canadian fashion journalist born in the mid-nineties, with a lot of emphasis on how “raw” and “provocative” the depiction is supposed to be. While I know how advanced review copies work, and know people who work for publishers know it too, I still felt obliged to tell the polite young man that I might not be able to write a positive review. He, of course, told me he just wants an honest take. I believe him!
And listen… I didn’t want to dislike this book. No matter that its main selling point seems to be Bret Easton Ellis calling Kazemi “my favorite millennial provocateur” - I tried to keep an open mind. I’m not trying to play an old fart character. I’m not trying to do “kids these days” nonsense. So I get that this isn’t exactly “for me” but I’ve enjoyed books that aren’t before.
On the positive side, I figured someone could make something interesting out of the premise. One of the reasons I keep track of anything contemporary is historiographical- I want to see what the first drafts of historical depictions of the recent past look like, as they come along. So, a book by a young(ish) fellow, born in 1994, about adolescent boys in 1999, is the sort of thing I’d want to look at for my purposes. I turned fourteen in 1999, not much younger than our protagonist, Brad, and his (term used loosely) friends. If we’re getting historical fiction set in that period I’d like to know how writers depict it. I get the impression there’s a good amount of nostalgia for the period among younger people now, and that cultural entrepreneurs attempt to harness that nostalgia to various aesthetic and/or political ends, usually foolish and regressive ones.
I don’t think that’s what Kazemi is doing here, exactly, and part of me thinks it’s not notably relevant if he is. Incoherence isn’t an obstacle to a cultural artifact catching on (lamp-stink is: in googling Kazemi, finding mostly articles about him being an enfant terrible in the Canadian fashion press, I found reference to the imminent publication of this novel… in 2017, as I recall). But you want at least the coherence of a sales pitch if you’re trying something like steering the zeitgeist in a given metapolitical direction. That’s not here, for better and for worse. I doubt Kazemi would claim it is.
Look- I’m not a stickler for historical accuracy. As nineties kids once said, “been there, done that”… as a preteen. Moreover, I’d actually be quite tickled if I found the youths (this guy is like 28, but you follow me) were creatively recasting the time in which I was young in some image of their creation.
But if you’re going to drop cultural references at the rate of dozens a page, like Kazemi does in New Millenium Boyz, it would help if they didn’t take any reader within five years of my age out of things immediately. Here’s an example: these late nineties teenagers make much of “pop punk.” That wasn’t a genre at the time and wouldn’t be for a while (until the author, if the birth year one finds for him online is right, was himself in his teens or early twenties). Circa 1999, if you put the words “pop” and “punk” together, it would likely be a punk insulting another punk as being “pop,” not, as the man said, “a name anyone would self-apply.” Hell, I do not come from the scenes that cared about that kind of thing, and I know that. There’s a lot of anachronisms like this throughout the book.
There’s a relatively charming explanation to some of these gaffes- I don’t think our author grasps, in any meaningful sense, subculture, or for that matter, what “alternative” meant at the time. I think a lot of younger people don’t. There’s a good reason for this: kids who grew up with broadband internet their whole lives tend to be culturally promiscuous, in the best sense of the term. Kids still snob each other all the time over taste, it seems, but don’t develop the sort of identity with a given music scene that sociologists used to call “tribal,” when describing the attitude of youth in the nineties. Instead you get, sometimes, adoptions of this or that “aesthetic,” and there might or might not be cultural or social connotations- but it’s expected that you’ll change these aesthetics when and how you please. At least that’s what it looks like from the cheap seats of age and disinterest. And I think either these kids never learned that grunge and associated culture was supposed to be a game-changer, a radical turning over in values, or else they just learned to be skeptical of the claim because, well… it didn’t.
It’d be too much to say that narrator Brad bounces between aesthetics and subcultures. Even if Kazemi depicted subcultures in their dour, exclusionary non-glory, Brad mostly spits out a grab bag of vaguely period-related (except when Kazemi slips into anachronism) cultural references, as do the other youths, and none of its coherent except that most of it is trash. It’d be one thing if this kid tried out various subcultures — goth, preppy, punk etc — at a rapid clip. That was definitely a thing. So was incompetently trying to appeal to kids in a subculture you wanted in on: like proudly displaying a CD by Lit, a very frat-y band who sang songs of drunken partying, to a gothy nu-metal kind of boy.
What you wouldn’t see is the kid with a million accessories, from haircut to shoes and back up to his glower, screaming his disdain for what was considered “mainstream,” being impressed by someone’s Lit CD. Hell, even if he liked the band, he’d pretend not to, definitely to some stranger on a bus. So right from the opening page, we have Kazemi blasting the reading with a never ending firehose of references to late nineties culture that just fall flat- if you were there, they clang like bad notes, if you weren’t, the names won’t be relevant except, maybe, in some poetic sense, like made-up far off country names in a fantasy story.
This would be more of a tic than a structural problem with New Millenium Boyz if this lack of coherence didn’t extend to what there was of a plot. If Brad ping-ponged between subcultures, you’d have a plot- maybe not a good one, but something. Instead, Brad goes to camp, meets some people including a girl he has something between sex with and sexual assault towards, leaves camp, goes to school, experiences ennui, and winds up in the orbit of Lusif, short for Lucifer, a wannabe school shooter. Lusif drives Brad and another friend further and further down a path of transgression and evil until Brad reaches a “point of no return,” to use a cliche term for a storyline that probably seemed shopworn when the preachers first tried it out roughly two thousand years ago. The whole time, we get Brad’s inner life and monologue, mostly consisting of anodyne sex fantasies and feeling that no one can relate to him- an appropriate enough mental landscape for a teenager, it’s true.
I think the idea here is supposed to be that Brad and his lack of an inner life is supposed to make him a contemporary sort of everyman and also explain his horrifying fate, why he meets one random mean kid and decides to follow him into disaster. It doesn’t explain why we should care, and Kazemi appears incapable of giving us any other answer. Brad isn’t an antihero out of Philip Roth, he’s not even a reality tv character, he’s just kind of… nothing but the gravitational point around which various unpleasant attitudes, events, and cultural references orbit. Nothing in the story or in the writing has any weight, which means that the terrible things that happen just seem like arbitrary efforts at shocking the reader. And then, on top of that, Kazemi tries to milk bathos out of it all. There’s none of the chill with which the likes of Didion and his acolyte Ellis used to get across moral degradation, the inability to feel and empathize, on the part of their characters. Kazemi all but breaks out the violins for the Chick-tract-level string of fates worse than death he sets up for Brad.
Take that, and then consider that this book is, once again, meant to depict the inner life of young white American boys in 1999, and then let me hit you with the ways in which Kazemi writes dialogue between said boys. Here’s a little sample:
“Dude, shut up,” I cut in. “Daria is funny as fuck. The new season of Daria was chopped. The world is a fun place because of mean and sarcastic people like that. I fuck with your push doll, Shane. I support you in this purchase.”
He lights up. “See? This guy gets me! And yes, it sure as hell came with an exclusive twenty percent off coupon on the brand-new Daria’s Sick, Sad Life Planner CD-ROM that’s available this November. Fucking eat it.”
This took place, if you couldn’t tell, in the context of one of the boys deciding to attach a little stuffed Daria doll to his backpack. Let’s leave aside the fact that nobody did the stuffed doll keychain thing, certainly not teenaged boys deeply concerned with appearing masculine and cool, back then, or that the way one boy uses “fuck with” to denote approval only migrated from AAVE a few years ago, definitely not by 1999. Let’s focus on the dialogue. You know what I remember most about the late nineties, more than the AOL discs or the neon decorative motifs? Grunts. Young people, teenage boys especially, communicated largely in grunts and glowering. You might get verbal outbursts, mostly composed of curses and slurs, every now and again. That’s what Mike Judge captured in Beavis and Butthead. A big part of his brilliance was in capturing the humor in how less-than-wordy people like dumbass teenage boys from the nineties talk. The grunts were a big part of it!
But these kids talk like redditors. If you said that many words in a row around average nineties high school dudes, they’d beat the shit out of you on general principle. If you spoke in as persnickety and specific language as Kazemi has everyone use — the kind of speech, that is, that obtains online and has since influenced spoken conversation — they would assume that you were gay and then beat the shit out of you, making it that newly-denoted thing, a hate crime. And I’m pretty sure nobody, in history, has ever said that penultimate chain of words regarding coupons and CD-ROM day planners, or anything like them, in the nineties or any other time. Along with being unrealistic, it clangs on the reader’s inner ear, is deeply annoying, and shows almost no sign of being a considered choice. I think the guy just doesn’t have the writing chops to write dialogue (or inner monologue for that matter) any other way.
I say almost no sign. There’s one sign pointing to a considered choice, and that points to Daddy Bret, whose name that nice young intern spoke to me before he got around to the author’s, and specifically to American Psycho. “They’re doing nineties American Psycho! Do you think people really thought like Patrick Bateman?! Why are you insisting on realism??!!”
Well… I’m insisting on merit, of some kind. Realism is one, but not the only one. I’d be happy with artfulness, and there’s almost none of that here. I don’t think American Psycho was that great to begin with, but it’s a miracle of consistent tone and coherence next to this mess (presumably, it helps that it was its author's third novel, not his first). I have no idea whether American Psycho accurately depicts the eighties or not, even controlling for its satirical elements (some of the celebrity blurb-providers of New Millennium Boyz call it a satire, but under no meaningful definition of the word other than “people act outrageously” does it constitute a satire of anything). But Ellis could at least sell it. Maybe were I as conscious of the eighties as I am of the late nineties, the sales job would’ve been harder, but among other things, at least Ellis could control his tone — all that time at Didion’s feet earned him something — and Kazemi cannot.
I joked with the nice young fellow from the publisher that, if I wound up not liking the book, he could still pull quotes from my review and run them as “see what’s making uptight millennials break out the GRE words in shock and disdain!” Well, “shock” might be a bit much, but, marketing. I’m pretty sure, insofar as this book has a purpose, it’s to show kids behaving badly, in a way meant to offend sensibilities (a lot of slurs, a lot of sex with questionable consent, mistreating the disabled, etc), to play to some of that nineties nostalgia I mentioned, and to see if maybe it can get banned somewhere or something, get some attention. The blurbs – this book is riding a lot on blurbs – emphasize the honesty and harsh truths that New Millennium Boyz supposedly tells. One blurb-giver, a lady who used to crank out big cheap sort-of novels about teenaged drug use and its pitfalls, even proclaimed how willing she is to “forever defend Kazemi’s ability to write this book and entertain his intended audience against those who’d torch all three.” I guess the three are the book, Kazemi, and intended audience? This is a novel with a chip on its shoulder, when what it could use is a thought in its head or just a pair of functioning ears.
If there’s a more complicated game here – and there might very well not be – it would be to compare the supposed and loudly proclaimed honesty and edginess of this book (as proven by its offenses against, if you will, sense and sensibility), as well as the nineties it depicts, with our supposedly canting, hypocritical, moralizing age. You can pit nineties nostalgia, associated with the youngest millennials and zoomers, against us older millennials and our culture, built as it was in reaction against a lot of ideas associated with that decade. Probably, as far as an almost-30 Canadian fashionista, pop-occultist, and bad novelist is concerned, there’s not much difference between what I do and that stereotypical millennial SJW scold. Similar vibes- a scold who wants you to censor you, a critic who wants you to try writing halfway intelligently, both with some sort of political agenda, or anyway, both saying words vaguely having to do with politics… “same difference” as people said in roughly this book’s era!
If anything links together a politics driven by backlash against “SJWs,” nineties nostalgia, the world of fashion/celebrity culture, pop occultism (most occultism, I’d say), and just plain bad writing, it would be a joint insistence, by producers of all of the above, that the superficial ought to be treated as co-equal partners with the thoughtful, so co-equal you have to come up with some other, less pejorative name for it. Why anyone from the “no thoughts, just vibes” crowd would bother themselves with as interior-focused, thought-driven an art form as the novel never made sense to me, but then, for some, novels are more to be displayed than read. If you come across New Millennium Boyz, I’d surely recommend displaying it rather than the other option.
Then again, why display any book when you can display… Mithra legge
Bookmarking the Kissinger review for a repost when that toad finally croaks