Hello all! Got a reasonably packed missive this week- a roundup of audiobooks I listened to recently — the good, the bad, and the ok — a reading election, and…
AN IDEA TO RUN BY YOU ALL
The idea is… zines!
I’ve been reading about zine culture for my Gen X/Turn of the Millennium stuff. Mostly, it’s kind of cute, but also depressing. All of this lost, like tears in rain… well, not lost. There’s actually a lot of zines around… in zine libraries, held by universities and lefty community centers. I plan on going to some for research! But blogs and then social media ate the do-it-yourself print culture that zines once represented, sucking it all into the algorithmic maw of the Facebooks and Googles. I hear they’re “making a comeback” in some areas, places that still have kids and music scenes. Good for them!
I think it might be kind of fun to do a Melendy Avenue Review zine! Just some reviews, some pics (of course including a Mithra pic), maybe an Ed’s Corner, maybe even some other friend contributions… print it up, copy it off, distribute! I actually kind of think what I do might make more sense as a print artifact than what a lot of people did and do in zines… my lack of visual chops notwithstanding. I might be wrong.
The zine would not be weekly of course. I’m thinking like… three a year. One in January, covering the Mithra Awards and such (where I send out awards for the best books I read in a given year in various categories), one in September with my birthday lecture, and then maybe one in May…
Here’s my question- how many of you would like such a zine? Among other things, it could make a nice thing to send to paying Citizens! I’d need your addresses. I might also try to drop some off places, either places that sell zines (there’s… a few?) or just places where I think they might be appreciated! That might reduce their value as an inducement to subscribe, but whatever…
Anyway, let me know what you think in the comments, and/or this poll!
READING ELECTION
Not “voted out” yet? I hope not because it’s time for another reading election. This one is for my “readings on the right.” I like to read stuff on the right! Sometimes it’s a “know your enemy” thing, sometimes it’s to “get in the mindset,” sometimes there’s other insights, sometimes they’re even just kind of good, even if wrong about things (in my opinion)! Check out the candidates and vote below within 24 hours of this post going out!
Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (2016) - This enterprising little libertarian made a splash during the Trump campaign, when the chin-scratching classes wondered if maybe democracy had gone a little too far in electing this terrible lout (they later decided that Trump was a threat to democracy — they’re right about that — and that Biden or Buttigieg or whoever was the solution). He’s an academic philosopher so I expect his toying with liberal-conservative antidemocracy notions will have about as much historical depth as any given episode of The Quantum Leap, but, hey, good to know what “these types” are thinking (even eight years late?).
Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White Liberals (2005) - I considered doing one of the grand old man of black American conservatism’s earlier, more serious works, and might at some point. But I chose this book of essays on the idea it might dovetail more with my work on Gen X and thought at the turn of the millennium. From the outside, it seems to coincide both in substance and in style with some racial “common sense” at that time- waving away serious questions with grab-bag analogies from bad history, use of clever catchphrases and wry observations of peccadilloes and hypocrisies to mask larger and more ambitious maneuvers, etc. We’ll see!
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus The State (1884) - This is more covering ideological homework- I should have read more Spencer a while back, he was pretty influential even on policy, for a philosopher, and much more influential on the future vocabulary of the Anglo-American right. He’s one of the original “the liberals left me, not vice versa” types, insisting that the Whigs from whence he came were embracing “statism” and that true liberty meant fighting the State (except the parts we like), etc etc. Nothing I’ve never heard before but good to get a look at the sources.
AUDIOBOOK ROUNDUP - THE BAD
For a while there, it felt like I was listening to nothing but garbage audiobooks, vexing my commutes and my cooking time. Marissa Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is probably the most well-known of the bad books I listened to. It’s about two video game designers, and it seems pretty transparent to me that the claim to relevance here is “look! A big work of literary fiction that takes video games and those who design and play them seriously!” To which I want to say… does it? Because I didn’t encounter anything original, or even conventional but passionate, about the creative process in this novel. Dude nerd wants one thing, lady nerd wants another, sometimes this also plays itself out in their shared personal life, they compromise and make a hit video game, or don’t, rinse, repeat. The dude nerd is overly rational, the lady nerd is… not overly emotional, you don’t do that in polite liberal circles these days, but hemmed in by feelings about her having feelings and how said feelings will go over in sexist design circles. Ironically, for a novel that attempts to elevate video games into art, it is one of the more artless big novels I’ve read in some time. I’m sure it’s not the worst case of wedging trauma into a character’s back story to explain (wooden) characterization, but it’s up there- I know plenty of male nerds who prefer video games to emotional conversation without having had a woman turn herself into street pizza feet from him at an impressionable age, but then, I guess they’re not literary characters! Zevin tries to summon up the same sort of “instant classic” sense, the generation of iconic imagery (or firm association of iconic imagery, like dorm room poster iconic, like that big Japanese wave painting, with your bullshit to make said bullshit iconic) out of thin air that some of our biggest pop stars, Taylor Swift say, manage for millions of fans, but that in novel form generally falls flat. Then there’s a dubious stab at relevance by introducing some Gamergate-style terrorists. It’s bad, folks! Want to appreciate video games as art? I say this as someone who doesn’t play them much- just play a video game, any video game, rather than read this.
Charlie Jane Anders is one of the editors at the scifi blog vertical whatever i09, which is a fine enough site as far as it goes, and Anders is a fine enough editorialist, too. It’s probably my fault that I didn’t realize that All the Birds in the Sky, a novel about super-scientists and witches fighting over an increasingly climate-ravaged world, is more or less a young adult novel. AFAICT what distinguishes YA fiction of the more adventurous sort is that you have big, even apocalyptic events happening, but the writing, in prose, tone, and structure, does not convey any meaningful consequence. The closest to a real interest in these books is how casually they insert their characters into lethal violence, into completely different realms of reality (suddenly magic or monsters are real, suddenly they’re gods), into numerous high stakes situations… but it seems more due to laziness or disregard for their audience, the titular young adults, and their ability to handle tonal change. This one was actually structurally similar to Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow in a lot of ways- rationalist boy, magical girl, conflict, intertwinedness, will they won’t they, emphasis on a sense of wonder the author seemingly thinks they can summon by stating it’s there. No, thanks.
I listened to a bad thriller about sixties Orange County, A Thousand Steps by T. Jefferson Parker. Apparently he grew up in that time and place! But it didn’t come to life for all his references to real people and groups like the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, nor did the characters, and neither did the generic thriller plot.
Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow isn’t “Cletus Safari,” like a lot of books about Appalachia, I’ll give it that. It’s also not especially good or persuasive. Stoll is a peasant studies guy. The Appalachians before the coal industry, he tells us, were peasant proprietors, self-sustaining to a much greater degree than those whose lives depend more on market exchanges, especially the labor market. Most everyone was a peasant pre-capitalism, and will have to be post-, both for ecological sustainability reasons and because it’s actually better. Well… I do agree that we shouldn’t flatten the entirety of the pre-capitalist past into a Monty Python-esque vision of mud-bound squalor. I also don’t think we need to flatten it into the other direction. We are, all of us, regardless of wealth and power, at the mercy of “the land,” of nature, to one extent or another. I don’t bemoan it, but I’m not going to act as though I’m happy about it, or that we need to fetishize this nature, either. And I kind of think slapping these flattened picture onto a region of a country whose entire existence coincided with the rise of market systems – inhabited by people who’d probably throw a rock at your head if you called them peasants and who played land speculation like a sport – helps anyone. He also said something about no one treating land as a commodity pre-Enclosure in England. Is that right? No one sold or bought land? I get it was a more complicated process, in terms of who had rights to what, but that doesn’t sound right. Is it?
AUDIOBOOK ROUNDUP - THE OK I GUESS
I also listened to some I can’t quite call good or bad. There was Gary Rivlin’s biography of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, Fire on the Prairie, which was basically competent political journalism, nothing to write home about but not bad either. Grinding accounts of positional warfare within the Chicago machine (and Chicago black politics, and the Chicago progressive movement, no strangers either to backbiting and maneuvers). I also listened to The Philosopher Kings, the sequel to grand old scifi/fantasy lady Jo Walton’s novel about the goddess Athena using time travel to pluck a few hundred Platonists, a few thousand kids, and some supplies, plopping them on an island, and having them try to do Plato’s Republic. Naturally, things went awry in the first book, and the second involves the incarnated God Apollo (he joined because he wanted to understand humans better) and some of his kids getting into adventures, settling old scores, and convincing Zeus not to nuke their experiment for the sake of the timestream, sending them to space (and another sequel) instead. There’s interesting stuff there but also a lot of pointless wandering, investment in characters it’s hard to care about, etc. Lastly in this category, John Ford’s spy novel Scholars of Night has some bravura moments, and the sheer nerve to place game nerd-ery and other pedantic activities at the center of Cold War espionage derring-do. An every-nerd English professor, who plays Diplomacy with big wigs who like his steeze and name-drops several other then-current historical board games, gets sucked into some plot involving an old dead mentor and some kind of advanced computerized weapon system. It was published in 1988, when computers were considered more mysterious and the Soviets were still considered scary. It’s not bad but the plot suffers down the home stretch, always the hardest part of action-y novels like this.
AUDIOBOOK ROUNDUP - THE GOOD
I actually did listen to more good audiobooks than bad. I think it was the one-two punch of listening to Tomorrow Tomorrow Tomorrow (yes, I know there’s “ands” and commas in the title and I’ve stopped caring) and All the Birds in the Sky back to back, and Ramp Hollow was also in close proximity, that made me feel like my ears were conspiring against me. I was most pleasantly surprised by Claire Vaye Watkin’s 2015 novel Gold Fame Citrus, a near-future tale of dried-up California and desperate people. Watkins seems like a good literary person to watch, she doesn’t operate entirely outside of the norm – subset X, “intentionally difficult white woman” category – but she writes well and actually has some interest in the world around her. She grew up part of the time around the Mojave desert (child of a Manson family member!), and desertification suits her and her prose style down to the ground. The novel tells the story of Luz, a twenty-something former model and once literal poster child for failed efforts to Do Something about California’s drying up. We find her living with AWOL soldier of the forever wars Ray in scuzzy apocalyptic LA, living in a starlet’s abandoned home (Laurel Canyon, natch) and bartering for government cheese (the government wants Californians to stay put so they don’t flood the other sort-of functioning states) with pseudo-tribal Angeleno survivors. Luz is The Contemporary Subject, “intentionally difficult (this time not white) woman” version- capable of little, willing of much, somewhat more interesting than her male counterpart for committing to some kind of commitment. In the “inciting incident” this takes the form of kidnapping a neglected and weird baby from some very irresponsible apocalypse-survivor-stoner types. Pursued, Luz, Ray, and Baby Ig take to the road. Of course, they get stranded, then separated, in the desert, on a massive shifting dune sea/mountain of blown away topsoil and sand. Luz and Ig fall in with a desert guru (hmm wonder who he could be based on) and his community of weird hippie fremen-types who think that the Dune Sea speaks to them, that it’s full of cryptid life, etc. Obviously, all is not well in hippie-fremen-cult wonderland, and soon dire choices must be made. The story’s tight but doesn’t stint on atmosphere, the writing has bite, all told, quite cromulent.
Not quite as good but decent and in a similar vein is The Atmospherians by Isle McElroy. Who’s gonna fix men?! A cult run by two childhood friends, Dyson and Sasha, who have both failed, after initial early successes, at acting in commercials and in becoming an instagram influencer and blogger, respectively. Sasha in particular is vexed by toxic men, having become a target of “men’s rights” types after telling a cruel, bigoted internet troll that the world would be better off without him, and said troll taking the hint (for once!). Well, the world is increasingly vexed by men, too, and not just in the usual ways- they’ve started forming “man hordes,” where groups of men all perform some traditionally masculine task together – ranging from mowing lawns to violent pranks – in a weird collective hypnotic state where they’re not conscious of the act and don’t remember it. Dyson, after his Hollywood failures, finds some signally failed men – Sasha, the sort of liberal misanthropist pretty common among the scribbling classes, does not distinguish between actively, willingly bad behavior and simple failure, either social or personal – and invites them for “job training” (the one thing that will hook these losers) at an old campground in New Jersey. There, he puts them through a series of strange rituals involving mass bulimic vomiting, a certain amount of “consciousness raising,” and eerie theatrical set pieces depicting their failures. This is “The Atmospherians,” and things start unsettling and get progressively worse. Neither Sasha nor Dyson are especially trustworthy. Isle, an AMAB gender nonbinary person, sees even less hope in “solutionism” – we see multiple quite grim versions of “workable” communities meant to reform modern personality woes – than they do in the contemporary gender mess. Nicely sharp, even if the plot wanders some towards the end.
Somewhere straddling “good” and “ok” are two journalistic books I listened to. Kathleen Hale’s Slenderman veered perilously close to lame true crime territory, giving us the “blow by blow,” so to speak, of the “Slenderman stabbing” - two twelve year old girls, one a full blown schizophrenic and both obsessed with online ghost story character Slenderman, stabbing a third twelve year old girl almost to death in suburban Wisconsin. I expected a little bit more about the origin and etiology of internet “creepypasta,” as this kind of lore has become known, why it would be inspirational in this sinister way, but I think at the end of the day Hale is right and there’s not much of a story there. The real story, and what makes the book good, is the depiction of the equal parts indifferent and depraved way the courts (with a lot of help from the media and politicians) dealt with this case. Did you know that in Wisconsin police are allowed to hold and question children without calling their parents or guardians, or bringing in a lawyer or social worker, unless the child thinks to ask to call for someone? And did you know that hole-in-the-ground Wisconsin cops are really, really bad at interrogating kids? Everyone comes out to parade their moral indignance at two little girls, one of whom is out of her fucking mind (the other is, frankly, more of a creepy bully, but hell, she’s fucking twelve), on the news and especially in social media comments. So brave, to express your severe disapproval of attempted murder by demanding blood from pre-teens! As far as I can tell, the schizophrenic girl at least is being treated, and might be able to get out in middle age, and the other girl is also in treatment. The excuse for all this public bloodthirstiness, the girls’ victim, whose scars and surgery creepy “wholesome” “law and order” types lingered long and creepily on when demanding their pound of flesh, had a long road but has forgiven the two. Nothing makes a situation like this “right,” but we can at least avoid the many ways we make it worse.
Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca had fewer surprises but good storytelling fundamentals. In 1979, as Iranian militants held US embassy employees hostage in Tehran and the Islamic calendar turned to a new century, a group of Wahhabi militants who believed themselves to be joined by the Mahdi – a sort of Islamic messiah figure referred to in the Hadiths – snuck guns into the holiest shrine of Islam in the city of Mecca, shot a bunch of people, and then holed up in there, waiting for their prophecy – armies of unbelievers coming for them and being swallowed by the earth, mysterious transfigurations, etc etc – to come true. How much their leader, Juhayman, believed that his brother-in-law was really the Mahdi, and how much he just wanted to put a thumb in the eye of the House of Saud and maybe lead to its overthrow in favor of an even more extremist Islamic regime, is anyone’s guess. The Saudi royals had irritated the most sincere Wahhabis with their playboy lifestyles, rapproachment with the United States, and just generally being weak and difficult to respect- I imagine it as how your really hardcore Nazis would have looked at a postwar German regime led by Goering types, sinister and skilled infighters but visibly decadent, embarrassing. Juhayman had a few hundred militants with him, and they made mincemeat out of the notoriously overpaid, over-equipped, ill-motivated and terribly led Saudi troops that went in after them, spilling even more blood in a place where the guards only carry dowels, what’s supposed to be a place of peace (even if an exclusively Islamic peace- nonbelievers aren’t allowed in the town, much less the shrine). The Saudis tried driving in their American-made M113s, but anyone who’s read much about Vietnam knows what dogs those are- at one point, one of those oversized minivans got wedged in an archway, some poor brave Saudi officer and much poorer, much poorer conscripted Pakistani construction worker had to drive a construction tractor in and pull it out with a tow winch, under fire. Meanwhile, the Islamic world is in a state of agitated confusion. Khomeini blames the seizure on Israel and the US, and a lot of Muslims believe him, leading to the burning of the American embassy in Islamabad and numerous other riots. Shia in the east of Saudi Arabia rise up, unaware or not caring that Juhayman probably hated Shiites more than he did the Saudi royals. Throughout, the Saudis are vindictive, exploitative (both the government and the militants basically enslaved pilgrims, especially black and brown ones, to do logistical tasks on site), and more concerned with image than concrete goals. The only difference is that the militants have prepared ground and can shoot straight. In the end, the Saudis bring in French aid – Trofimov, a militant centrist type as far as I can tell, insists that Carter and the CIA couldn’t be trusted, after having been “defanged” by congressional investigations – and French GIGN men train the Saudis in the use of poison gas to flush the militants out of the shrine’s many crevices (the one guy with blueprints was Osama’s contractor daddy!). It was a bloody end but it ended, and the Sauds decided they needed something to distract these Wahhabis- something like Afghanistan, and spreading their creed abroad. Trofimov tells the story well, despite many sources being closed to him (the Sauds don’t love talking to non-paid-for reporters, and they didn’t leave many militants alive), and it’s a good, grim story.
Lastly, a good word for The Ask by Sam Lipsyte. Milo, a failed painter, works in the development office of his alma mater, Mediocre University (somewhere between NYU, Fordham, and the New School, I figure), until he tells off the rude spawn of a donor and is shit-canned. He’s an overeducated, underwhelming prattler of a man and we get a pretty good, funny inner monologue from him, in a voice that sounds real for someone like him. His wife is pissed at him and probably cheating, his toddler son is growing up vaguely monstrous (or is he just a boy toddler?), and they’re running out of money when one of Milo’s college frenemies, Purdy, a scion of wealth and internet investor type. This was published in 2010 and lives in the shadow of the 2008 collapse (and contains some “America used to be great and do stuff and now we’re a failed state” jive, and one wonders how much of that is Milo and how much Lipsyte), and nails the register pretty well, as I recall, and that of a certain kind of Gen X bemused premature agedness – they were never supposed to grow up, or they were supposed to have always already been grown up, and now they’re being faced with the sorts of situations that make them helpless again, etc etc – as well. Bleak and funny, I liked it a good deal, but could easily have been an awful slog in the hands of a lot of contemporary writers who might be tempted by similar characters and material. Your mileage may vary- humor is funny that way, especially long-form literary humor.
Mithra says she’s thankful for all her admirers!
I’ve got a how-to on Zines I picked up in Seattle if you want me to send it. Happy to give it to someone who will make better use of it.