Review – Jay, “Downcast Eyes”

Martin Jay, “Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought” (1993) – This was more remedial reading, a book I was supposed to read for my oral comps, which happened ten years ago this fall! Martin Jay was, at the time, arguably the silverback of the subfield of intellectual history. He worked in the primary vein of “respectable” intellectual history – twentieth century European philosophy – and balanced theoretical sophistication with actual historical spadework, failing to go overboard the way some of the early adopters of critical theory in the historical profession were said to have done. There were maybe two or three of his monographs on my comps list, which is a lot. I meant to read this one- I just experienced my first adult depression episode mid-comps-reading and that disrupted my otherwise pretty good pace.

Approaching this ten years after I was supposed to, and not in the midst of a giant reading frenzy before a test that turned out to have little to do with my future prospects, was probably a better way to do it. Among other things, I tend to think distance from the academy and its greasy poles helps a historian take on board the actual content of intellectual history, because the ideas whose history you are studying stop having such immediate status/career relevance. Especially given that the fevers over “theory” and how historians and others should posture themselves towards it had yet to entirely break by the early tens – has it by now? Who knows? – intellectual history in that theory-vein could be tricky to really see. 

Ironic! Given that this whole book is about how intellectuals, French ones in specific, came to create whole frameworks around how sight is not, as they would never put it, “all that.” This is a funny thing to think about, for a few reasons. I’m a clumsy Anglo, and to me, disregarding sight, and not treating sight as our primary sensory input and sensory inputs as our main way of understanding the world (and not understanding the world as the main purpose of intellectual pursuits), is utterly non-intuitive. Moreover, it doesn’t really make a lot of sense that the French, of all people, would pursue an “antiocular” agenda, to use Jay’s word. Rene Descartes, one of the fathers of profoundly sight-based scientific methodology, was French; so, too, have been a disproportionate share of pioneers in the visual arts, from painting to photography to cinema, for centuries. 

Jay, in an endearing move, grants that he’s not too different- he, too, is a son of the Enlightenment, whose very name implies the primacy of vision. We can’t get away from vision metaphors and visual evidence. But, he says, it’s still worth understanding what is going on here, and he very quickly establishes the importance of antiocular or ocular-skeptic thought in French thinking and in thought more generally. We do have four other senses, and sight, whatever its wonders, is also possible – easy, even – to deceive. Our visual apparatus is pretty impressive – notice how long and hard engineers have to work to get computers to replicate it, versus getting them to vastly exceed, say, our capacity to do math – but it’s not perfect, and moreover, our reliance on it can make it hard to get another perspective to correct for what our sight might not see… as it were (there’s a lot of those “as it were” moments in “Downcast Eyes” as we stumble across – there’s a nonvisual metaphor! – our language’s seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of visual metaphors). 

Arguably, the French caught onto this quicker than the Anglos precisely because of the importance that vision played in their intellectual and artistic culture. If you were going to do something new in French thought, for a long time, that meant going against the prevailing Cartesian ocularcentric rationalism, that is, bringing into question the utility and reliability of sight. Religious anti-Enlightenment types emphasized the sense of hearing, namely, what one hears from God (the fact that, like, you can’t really record the voice of God, that it’s less “hearing” than “imagining”… well, it’s not like they record anyone’s voice, not back then…). Later on, philosophical rebels against positivism, like Henri Bergson, emphasized all four of the other senses, but especially touch. Moreover, being early adopters of photography and film, French intellectuals quickly caught on to how different the photograph was from what one sees with the naked eye, and the ways in which photography and especially moving photographs could be manipulated, and manipulate themselves. To say nothing of all the painters who either had to find new rationales after the spread of photography, or else rework and/or re-propagate older, non-documentary/strict representationalist rationales. 

All of this played into the full-bore anti-ocularism that came to characterize French philosophy in the twentieth century. This is also where I lose the thread a little. That’s not Jay’s fault. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (respectively highly and gently skeptical towards sight- though given how fucked up Sartre’s eyes were, can you blame him?) are tricky, not easy to read and comprehend. Bataille, Deleuze, and Guattari are pretty hard to understand. Lacan, I tend to think, I cannot grasp because there is nothing there to grasp. Yes, I’m aware that internet-borne children with much less education than I have throw around ideas from all those people (well, mostly the last four) like nothing. Well, I tend to think that’s because they are, mostly, nothing, that by the time you get to Lacan and his followers, it really is a game of meaningless postures that has no relation to external reality. People who learn about Lacan (via Zizek youtube videos, generally) before they knew what the categorical imperative is (or, you know, any history not included in a Paradox Games title) might as well be memorizing Pokemon stats and pitting them against each other, as many no doubt were with the same zeal they eventually took on theory. 

I’m not some pragmatist intellectual luddite. I think plenty of figures from “French theory” had a lot to contribute and I even enjoyed reading some of them, though I do think they could have been clearer. That being said, I think even Jay’s lucidity wasn’t enough to lead anywhere productive when it entered the labyrinth of Lacanian nonsense, and Deleuze and Guattari are only a little better. I get that Jay couldn’t afford to ignore them. In many respects, these and their epigones are the end result of the whole project, that they disregarded sight as both a tool and as a symbol, a back-door monkey-paw victory for the counterenlightenment (though, as Jay continually points out, visual metaphors are utterly inescapable, especially given how many different registers – the sight that measures external reality, the flash of insight within the mind, the vision of imagination – in which it operates) in favor of… as far as I can tell, in favor of meaningless palaver. I don’t know- it sounds to me like a case of worthwhile questions leading to whole towering structures of useless non-answers that we’re expected to take seriously because we don’t want to sound like fulminating culture warriors insisting we all go back to “the canon.” So, these star ratings are based in part on enjoyment and utility, and I didn’t get a ton out of the back half of the book. Still, an impressive feat of intellectual history. I can see why they made such a big deal of the guy, back when I was in school. ****

Review – Emezi, “Freshwater”

Akwaeke Emezi, “Freshwater” (2018) (read aloud by the author) – Readers and reviewers spoke of this book as a revelation. I didn’t find it to be that, entirely, but I have an advantage: I’m a genre fiction reader. The idea of a fractured self expressed through mythological/religious tropes isn’t a new one on me, or the juxtaposition of ancient belief systems and contemporary living. So when Nigerian author Emezi has their autobiographical stand-in, Ada, experience possession by multiple spirits – ogbanje, not exactly friendly, not entirely demonic – as a way of explaining what someone steeped in western psychiatry would call multiple personalities, I wasn’t as blown away as the sort of person who usually reads somewhat-experimental fiction given big pushes by mainstream literary publishers with pastel covers might be.

It’s still a decent idea, though. Ada starts her (the character uses she/her pronouns and mostly identifies as a girl and a woman, even if one of the spirits inside her is a man- Emezi is nonbinary, though doesn’t deny the autobiographical element here) journey with the ogbanje early in her childhood in Nigeria. She’s not just a third culture kid, she might be a fourth or fifth, with an Igbo Nigerian father and a Malaysian mother who raise her in a variety of places, even if Nigeria anchors her childhood and America her young adulthood. She’s sexually assaulted by a boyfriend in college (which she starts at sixteen) and that’s when some of the ogbanje come to more or less take over her body for extended periods of time, putting Ada in the backseat. 

Most of the book is written from the first person perspective of one or another of these spirits. They relate their perspective, the actions they either see Ada perform or foist on Ada, their conversations with Ada and sometimes with rival spirits inside of her. The spirits are insightful, dependent on their human host while somewhat contemptuous of her (but more so of other people), possessed of some virtues, like loyalty, but no morality to speak of- and hungry for blood and suffering. Ada appeases them mostly by cutting herself and by getting into bad relationships with men. Sometimes, Ada tries to destroy the spirits or rout them from her, other times, the spirits try to get Ada to let them loose into the spirit realm, i.e., kill herself. Neither succeed, and Ada eventually learns to live with the ogbanje, as well as other, less identifiable spirits who seem to have her welfare, or a version of it, more in mind. 

At some point, and maybe someone has started already, but someone will have to write about the impact of post-1965 US immigration policy, specifically as it relates to favoring highly-skilled knowledge workers and students, on literature. Immigration, sojourning, exile, etc. have always been themes in literature, and structural aspects of the creation of literary communities. I do think there’s a prominence to immigrant literature, and especially to the literature of immigrants from middle-class (or above) backgrounds today, of third- (fourth-, fifth-) culture kids, in contemporary English-language letters, that’s worth studying. Among other things, this may be the work of a contemporary black author that I’ve read that has the least to say about race, though it has a lot to say about Nigerian and Igbo culture. If anything, the spirits contrast Ada’s experiences and attitudes with those of black American schoolmates more than white people, though Ada does meet plenty of those- though, mostly it seems, international students from Europe, including her main love interest, a dreamy Irish fuck-boy named Ewan. Ada came to America when she was sixteen, and moves across oceans and continents perhaps not in perfect comfort… but her discomfort comes more from being inhabited by spirits and having bad interpersonal relationships than from bigotry, homesickness, dislocation, or the usual woes one associates with immigrant experiences. 

I wrote about this some when I discussed Jhumpa Lahiri a few weeks ago. I feel like foreign students and young professionals have been a part of my life more or less since high school or college, if not before, and are a fixture of life for most Americans who go through higher education, probably most inhabitants of the other rich countries as well. The paradox is that, coming from hundreds of different cultures all over the world, they’re the most heterodox bunch imaginable in some ways… but given the ways that schools and employers select, they tend to be much more homogenous in terms of class background, and of course, the experience of migration, of adaptation to the host country, of embedding in institutions that have now, in some cases decades hence, made adaptations to the presence of immigrants, migrants, guest workers and so on, has a certain group-making effect, too. 

Here’s a trope I see in both the literature and in conversations both had with friends and acquaintances from the sort of international-student/knowledge worker milieu and have overheard them have themselves: Americans are generally blander, less interesting, less emotionally-alive than “internationals.” The internationals live, the Americans (usually, but not always, white) kind of shuffle through life in a cloud of privilege and occasional disaster. This tracks, I’d say. Among other things, you have to have some initiative to bother schlepping all the way over here. Generations of life as the global hegemon will tend to make the upper-middle-class-and-above scions of said hegemony a little dull, I bet. Combine the aftereffects of WASP culture and the hollowness of consumer culture, and you get people who put their surface feelings up front for all to see (and hear!) but who you don’t really get to know, if there’s anything to know, for years or decades. I sometimes wonder if the real divide in the world is between people whose countries have meaningful historical memories of defeat and occupation, and those who don’t. The unflattering emotional depiction of Americans I just painted can be applied to the next most prominent group of people today who haven’t seen a military occupation for almost a millennium, the English, and inhabitants of its other settler colonies. You could paint it positively – people from countries that haven’t experienced that kind of defeat as more optimistic, or whatever – but it’s hard to sell that pretty much any time after 9/11. 

So, Ada lives in America but barely notices Americans. I don’t say this as a complaint, but I do think it’s notable, and I also think it relates to how Ada (and Emezi) treat the ogbanje. Every now and again Ada worries that she’s crazy. But less than you might think! She worries more that she’s in pain, she’s depressed, she has terrible relationships, she can’t find a place in the world. Yes, the ogbanje try to kill her- but they also protect her and give her an odd sort of power. This, whatever else it is supposed to be, is an interesting way to express how a young woman with one foot in a modesty culture and another in hook-up culture might experience her sexual power (and its strict limitations vis-a-vis extracting humane behavior from the men in her life). She doesn’t need to be rid of the ogbanje. That’d be American nonsense, the ogbanje would say, and which it seems Ada, and perhaps Emezi, would accept. Such is life for the alive international versus the dead single-culture and/or Anglo. 

The flip side is, in a story told by quasi-demons with little in the way of consistent framework beyond momentary sating of desire, there’s not a great need for continuity. Characters pop up, one of the ogbanje explain that they are very important to Ada, big stuff happens to them, and then they’re gone, for someone else to come along and reflect the relationship between Ada and the spirits for a chapter or two. On top of this, if you’re expecting anything particularly spectacular, even within Ada’s head, as she and her demons battle it out (including demons battling with each other), you’re going to be disappointed. A snake shows up in her bathroom as a baby, there’s some somewhat distended writing, the spirits and Ada argue in the “marble room” of her brain- a fancy waiting room, essentially, Basically, it does seem like the daring-concept tail wagging the literary-execution dog, at times. In keeping with the point I was making earlier, “international” navel-gazing, even from international rich kids, is generally better than the same produced in the Anglo-American world, but it only ever delivers so much without the injection of something more. ***’

Review – Sapkowski, “Blood of Elves”

Andrzej Sapkowski, “Blood of Elves” (1994) (translated from the Polish by Danusia Stok) (read aloud by Peter Kenny) – Three possibilities, here: the first is that you really should read the Witcher short stories before starting this, the first novel in the Witcher series, the Polish fantasy epic that has taken the world by storm via video game and netflix adaptation. The second possibility is that Andrzej Sapkowski just really expects you to be very heavily invested in his characters, especially titular Witcher (freelance mutated monster hunter, more or less) Geralt of Rivia (pronounced like a townie saying “Revere”) and his sometimes lover, the enchantress Yennefer, and that reading the previous short stories won’t really give you much more reason to care about them. There’s also the possibility of “both” – the earlier stories will give you more background, and Sapkowski has an exaggerated idea of how compelling his characters are.

In any event, “Blood of Elves” could probably use more context than I had to fully enjoy, but I also admired that it didn’t hold the reader’s hand too much. You get plunged into… I’m not sure that the world or part of the world in which it is set has a name, or if I just haven’t remembered, but anyway, a continent sort of like a mish-mashed medieval Europe. People describe the Witcher series as based in Slavic myth- I don’t know enough Slavic myth to say, but it makes sense, though from the names, institutions, etc., it doesn’t seem like Sapkowski is shy of dashing in cultural influences from all over Europe. It’s a fractured land with many kings ruling minor principalities, and there are also elves, dwarves, gnomes, and other sentient fantasy creatures running around, living in uneasy peace with the humans who are relative newcomers to the land. Looming over it all (like how Russia and/or Germany have loomed over Poland, historically, one is tempted to say) is Nilfgard, which tried to take over the whole area a few years back and did a lot of damage in failing to do so. 

There’s a little girl, Ciri, who’s a refugee from the last war, and heir to the throne of one of the kingdoms (since occupied by Nilfgard). For both reasons of state – others of the royal lines want to use her as a symbol, or marry her into their families to establish a claim to her former realm – and reasons of prophecy, she is a Special Child. She hangs out at Witcher academy for a while, which is where we run into Geralt. She gets trained in Witcher stuff, like fighting, but they don’t zap her with mutagens to give her Witcher powers, super strength etc., and also the Witcher’s separation from humanity. She also trains some in magic with Geralt’s on-again off-again lover, the enchantress Yennefer. 

There’s a lot more training, scheming, and portents – a lot, a lot of divining portents, most of them to do with Ciri’s special destiny and how it relates to Geralt – than there is real action, here, which again, might have been cooler had I done the preliminary reading. Geralt swears to protect Ciri, and there’s something about Ciri being “promised to him” in prophecy, and it’s unclear whether that means marriage or protection or what (the former is a little creepy because she’s a kid, and Sapkowski doesn’t stint on grown-up characters commenting on her “development” as she enters adolescence, which is about as fun to listen to as it sounds). One of the portents means she has to leave Witcher academy, though I’ll be damned if I could figure out why. They have to travel through a countryside with a pretty well-depicted guerrilla insurgency/counterinsurgency war going on between elves and humans who used to be chill together. Geralt has to do some derring-do monster fighting on a boat, and some spy stuff. Then there’s more portents and that’s more or less it. 

There’s cool stuff in here but it doesn’t really gel- though again, I’m not sure if that’s the style, or if I’m just missing the context of the earlier books, like if I tried to start “The Lord of the Rings” with the second or third book. I kind of doubt it would blow me away anyway, but it’s fun enough to pick up the series again sometime, this time, at the proper beginning. ***’

Review – Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”

Ben Fountain, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” (2012) – I came at this one precisely backwards. I saw the Ang Lee adaptation of this Iraq War film – really, more of a movie about surviving the Iraq War – with my roommate. We had heard it was very peculiar and a box office disaster, in part due to Lee’s decision to film at a very high frame rate. My roommate had just gotten a Blu-Ray player, or whichever technology it is, and so the painfully sharp images, which remind me of nothing so much as certain PBS productions, were right there in the living room. I didn’t even know it was based on a novel until I started asking around for good literary depictions of chaotic crowd scenes. A friend recommended this book, I found it used, here I am.

It’s good! The titular Billy Lynn is a nineteen year old private in the Army infantry. He’s there because he got in trouble back home and because he wasn’t sure what else to do with himself- his family isn’t exactly poor, but it’s not very functional. Billy’s squad was involved in a firefight in Iraq that wound up becoming a symbol of American courage (and lethality) as the Iraq war soured, won his squad and himself medals, and killed Billy’s best friend and mentor, Shroom. The Army brings the squad back to the US to be shown off at various events (especially in battleground states- this was 2004). The tour culminates at a Dallas Cowboys thanksgiving day home game, in Billy’s native Texas, where the squad is expected to meet and greet various big wheels and take part in a halftime show with Destiny’s Child.

Fountain weaves numerous threads — the squad’s efforts to get decent pay for selling their story to Hollywood, Billy’s sister (who was the origin point of the trouble that sent him overseas) desperately trying to get Billy out of going back to Iraq in two days, Billy finding unlikely love with a cheerleader, weird fights with roadies — around Billy Lynn. He skillfully keeps the threads wrapped around a central concept- the war sucks, but it also became the squad’s home. They can only really understand and be understood by each other. They’re not “boots” (to borrow a term from Marine, as opposed to Army, culture)- they don’t think the Army is great or civilian life without merits or the war good. They just are what they are — infantry grunts — and they can no more walk away from that than abandon selfhood. It changes their consciousness, not just their loyalties.

It’s not enough to say that Billy and the squad despise civilian America, like 21st century freikorps types. Pretty much all of them want to go back, when their hitch is through- they see themselves as, and are, hardened fighters, but not necessarily as a career. But there is a lot to despise in a 2004 patriotism-themed Dallas Cowboys outing- waste, ugliness, fake piety and endless fairweather patriotism. The aughts were a time when you could see America as a blind giant, monstrously strong but utterly incapable of using its strength in a sensible way, whether in the Middle East or just, maybe, giving the PTSD-suffering infantry squad some hint of what they’re expected to do during a halftime show in front of thousands and broadcast to millions. The halftime show was, presumably, the chaotic mob scene that my friend recommended I look at, and it is a fine scene, all of the endless money, noise, and sex of civilian America turned up to 11 and whirled around a group of confused teenaged soldiers. 

From the cheap seats — mine, and that of Ben Fountain, who does not seem to have been in the military (he thanks people in the acknowledgment for filling him in on service life), it seems that the life of the grunt is the life of a young man, distilled. Put him into a tribe of young men, isolate him from others, and then put the group into extreme situations. There’s power there — who has gained or exercised power in this world without putting young men in isolated groups, putting arms in their hands, and directing them against those who stand in their way? — but that power gets put in the hands of others, who are generally indifferent to the grunts’ fates. Billy and his comrades try to tap into a little bit of it- to sell their story and make some money (typically, just enough money to get their families out of some lousy situation, not enough to be rich), to get laid, to slack off, to drink and gamble and live the life most young men want to lead amongst other young men. But the structures around them — that they take part in, by coercion but also by accepting default — channel most of their power to the structure’s end. 

I guess if I had a criticism of this book, it’s the comparative lack of narrative thrust and, basically, stuff happening. Two fights — including one involving lethal violence — with a bunch of random roadie stagehands forces along the action, and feel wedged in. In general, though, limited agency on the parts of grunts makes a certain degree of sense. Even when offered a way out, there’s a certain extent to which Billy simply can’t take it, can’t be other than what he is. He and his sergeant can spite some money men looking to exploit their story, to finally bite back at a civilian world that has used and confused them, but that’s about it. Still- that seems reflective, of the lot of life of those who serve, and, if I dare make a comparison between (sacred) troops and (profane) civilians, of most of our lots. Fountain deserves a lot of credit for taking risks — setting the story during one day (with flashbacks), playing around with format in some places, having an important character be dead and only exist in Billy’s memory and imagination — and making this story as compelling as it is. ****’

Review – Schou, “Orange Sunshine”

Nicholas Schou, “Orange Sunshine: The Brotherhood of Eternal Love and Its Quest to Spread Peace, Love, and Acid to the World” (2010) (read aloud by Stephen Bowlby) – Due to various life decisions, despite not being a user of psychedelics (at this point I’m not even really opposed, it just seems like more bother than it’s worth) I have read a reasonable amount about the social history of their use in the US. Not as much as I could! The psychedelic scene is really, really well-documented, or anyway the early scene around figures like Timothy Leary, before LSD became as profoundly, absurdly illegal as it would become! But a fair amount. I thought it would be interesting to have a look at the business end, so I gave a listen to this account of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, an Orange County, California-based group variously described as a cult, a “hippie mafia,” a circle of men with similar spiritual ideas, etc. The Brotherhood might be best known for, at one point, dropping thousands of doses of LSD over a rock concert by airplane, and for commissioning the Weather Underground to bust Timothy Leary out of jail and smuggle him to Algeria.

Author Nicholas Schou is an Orange County-area journalist who tracked down a lot of old Brotherhood members to get their stories. Like most long form crime journalism I read, there’s more in the way of anecdote and name-dropping (visits from the likes of Jimi Hendrix and a lot of involvement with Timothy Leary) than I’d prefer and less detail about organizational culture, strategy, etc., though I will say it’s actually better in terms of analytical detail than most similar books. To me, the most interesting stuff wasn’t how high anyone got, or all the ways the group found to smuggle LSD, hashish, and regular old weed into various places. There’s a cultural transition you see in the very beginning that intrigues me. 

The core of the Brotherhood was made up of a group of fairly nasty young low-level criminals. These were the flotsam of the (white) Southern California dream, kids who born to families who washed up in working-class suburbs (though it’s worth noting “working class” in white Southern California in the fifties still meant cars, surfboards, plenty of leisure time at the beach) and seemingly had no ambition other than making small-time criminal deals and fighting. There’s a lot about fighting here, future Brotherhood members just beating the hell out of people for the temerity to be from another high school or beach town. 

And then, sometime around 1966 or 1967, they discovered acid. And here, depending on how much you buy the Brotherhood’s nonviolent rep – Schou mostly buys it, other journalists less so (and cops much less so, but who cares) – acid transformed these guys from an obsession with random violence to something resembling inner peace. They stopped wanting to beat up everyone not from their clique, and wanting all of them to take acid and feel the oneness of the universe or whatever. Failing that, they wanted to go to a tropical island somewhere and have a Huxley-inspired island utopia. 

In order to achieve both ends – and, one suspects, because it’s what, other than brawling, they knew how to do – the Brotherhood became some of the major dealers of acid, marijuana, and eventually refined marijuana product hashish, in Southern California and beyond. Somewhere between getting in a new market and native business savvy, they turned Laguna Beach into a hub of drug trafficking. They worked with legendary counterculture chemist Augustus Owsley Stanley to develop better and stronger varietals of lsd, culminating in the titular “Orange Sunshine” (one anonymous Brother confessed to giving some — a lot — to the Hell’s Angels at before they killed a guy at the Altamont pop festival, in an effort to calm them down!). They pioneered smuggling hashish out of Afghanistan and into the US. One group bought a yacht in the Caribbean, loaded it with high quality Mexican marijuana, almost died crossing the Pacific, and brought it to Maui, where it became a parent to some famous strains. 

Alas, the Brothers never got their island utopia- the ones who settled on pre-tourism industry Maui came the closest. One of the leaders did set up a sort of commune camp in the mountains outside Palm Springs, but that ended poorly- they didn’t maintain the camp, people left, internal divisions, the leader eventually died there, though the location seems to be incidental to the cause of the death (overdose of psilocybin, which I have never heard of before, but I know it makes you puke so it makes sense I guess). Timothy Leary was happy to make use of them as evangelists, Front men, and a get out of jail free card, but by the time Leary was pronouncing himself the most evolved human of all time in Algiers (just before the Panthers put a gun to his head and made him declare himself in favor of violent overthrow of the US government), the Brothers lost most of their interest in him. In the seventies, the newly-formed DEA caught up with the Brotherhood, a number of them went down, and the group drifted apart.

This is reasonably decent narrative history/journalism. To tell the truth, the individual Brothers tend to merge together- from tediously aggressive beach bum goons to tediously enlightened trickster smugglers. Some of them cared more about the money than others- and all of them did a certain amount “for the cause,” which was one of the things that both brought them to fed attention with their evangelism, and helped keep the group together. If acid really did lead these guys to go from wannabe killers to dudes who just really, really liked acid and surfing, more power to it. There are intimations of darker things — connections to the Manson Family, and something tells me that many Brothers didn’t spend that much time in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey without some connections to US intelligence (which helped take some of them down in the end) — but Schou doesn’t really track them down. He doesn’t show them as angelic, even post acid-conversion — there were some creepy cult aspects to their behavior (weird biblical patriarchal gender rules, for instance), they were fine with turning on and then screwing underage girls, etc — but isn’t willing to show them doing anything the group itself would consider really wrong… well, maybe it’s truth, maybe it’s stenography. I don’t know. ***’

Reviews – Vidal, “Burr”

Gore Vidal, “Burr” (1973) – My first Gore Vidal novel! Without quite meaning to, it seems that Gore Vidal set himself up pretty well for posthumous approval. I don’t know how many people my age or younger actually read his work, but plenty of them quote approvingly encounters with his long list of enemies: William Buckley, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Henry Kissinger. He was also on The Simpsons that time! Enough to endear yourself, much more than similar big white chiefs of midcentury American literature have done with twenty-first century literate types.

I got “Burr” from a library free pile, and hence, am violating my usual practice- I like to read series in chronological order. I didn’t know when I picked it up that “Burr” is part of Vidal’s “Chronicles of Empire” series, where he does his thing by following American history and writing scabrous thing about respected patriotic idols. “Burr” is the volume that takes place earliest in American history, but is not the first published. Rats! 

Anyway, as the title implies, Aaron Burr, revolutionary war hero, lawyer, vice-president, guy who shot Alexander Hamilton, alleged would-be conqueror of Mexico and/or the American west, all around scoundrel and bon-vivant, is the central figure in this book. The book takes place in the 1830s, after Burr has returned to the United States after being pseudo-exiled for treason and murder. He’s old, now, and has worked for some time as a lawyer in New York, leveraging his reputation for clever wickedness to his professional advantage. The narrator, Charlie Schuyler, is a young lawyer with literary dreams who is tasked with taking dictation of Burr’s memoirs, but with a hidden agenda. Various political poo-bahs in New York want Charlie to prove that Martin Van Buren, current president Andrew Jackson’s heir apparent, is Aaron Burr’s illegitimate son! Charlie is a somewhat angsty, weak-willed type, so he never quite commits to either Burr or to his handlers, or to the political passions that roil the city, or to anything other than a bad “Captain Save-A-Ho” fantasy in his love life. He’s a good receptacle for Burr’s story. 

Burr details the Revolution, his politicking in New York (he helped found Tammanny Hall, among other deeds), forming the Democratic-Republicans with Jefferson, almost becoming President, fighting the duel with Hamilton, and his shenanigans out west in fine high style. Burr prides himself on being an eighteenth century-style gentleman: urbane, disinterested, something of a scoundrel, adventurous, horny. In this, he sees himself as vastly superior to the rogue’s gallery we call the Founding Fathers: through Burr, Vidal depicts Washington as a vain blunderer with a gigantic ass, Jefferson as a sinister egomaniac who believes his own ever-changing lies, and Hamilton as tragic in large part through his failures to be the upper-class gentleman he desperately aped and sucked up to, despite the talents Burr acknowledged he had. 

In general, Burr and Vidal depict the era of the American founding as less of an epic of genius and more as a rather grubby tale of ego and greed. He reverses most of the conventional valuations of the period, not just about personalities. Burr didn’t mind the Articles of Confederation and saw the Constitution as a scam. Gentlemen as Burr understood them continually lost, and schemers – a class reading would say “proto-bourgeoisie” or vaguely caesarist/ideologue types ala Robespierre and Jefferson – won out. Out of the first five Presidents of the US, Burr has the most time for John Adams, who was at least a straightforward and intelligent opponent, and James Madison, whose brains Burr acknowledges but pities for letting himself become an appendage of Jefferson. 

Jefferson is the heavy for much of the book, and really, he makes a good one. A gentleman is always himself- Jefferson makes himself whatever is convenient for Jefferson. Burr depicts the various twists and turns in Jeffersonian thought — from borderline Rousseauian anarchism when he was in opposition, to interpreting the Constitution to mean he could buy a third of the constitution — as having even less to do with principle than most scholars now, emerging from decades of filiopiety towards the founding fathers, would find in it. Jefferson wanted power, wanted to throw red meat to the mob so they’d approve his tyranny, and only his incompetence — Burr carefully notes his shabby dress, his broken down houses with unworkable “inventions,” his generally ungentlemanly demeanor — kept him from being a Robespierre. 

Burr, for his part, models himself after that other half of the French revolutionary (shitty) outcome coin- Bonaparte. I’ll need to read more of Gore Vidal to really make this call, but in this one, Vidal comes off as squarely an American Bonapartist. It’s not so much that conquering Europe is good. It’s just that out of bad options, a smart dictator is preferable to feeble febrile weirdos like Jefferson. Burr considers himself a gentleman above the democracy- but his honor and good humor doesn’t allow him to despise the people, like Hamilton does openly or Jefferson does on the sly. To the extent Burr had a politics beyond frank (as opposed to secret, hypocritical) self-advancement, it was giving the people what they wanted- glory, conquests and adventures to either participate in or live vicariously through, and beyond that, being allowed to live their little lives in peace and relative prosperity. 

This is where Burr’s western adventures come in. Vidal, contrarian that he is, still can’t quite land on treason as being cool- if nothing else, that would cut across the rep he builds for Burr as being an honest crook. So he doesn’t represent Burr as trying to break off the (then-) western parts of the US as a private empire, or to sell it to Britain or Spain, with which the Jeffersonians accused him. Instead, Burr recounts a somewhat confused but fun tale of trying to gather armies of western pioneer folk to take over Mexico, and make him King or Emperor Aaron. He would have gotten away with it, too, if not for that lousy meddling James Wilkerson! But really, he implies, what gentleman of character wouldn’t want to get out from under Jefferson’s Virginian oligarchy and light out for conquests new?  It’s no coincidence that the major political figure of the time that Vidal paints in a relatively positive light is Andrew Jackson, who, it seems likely, at least paid Burr’s schemes some attention before Burr got pinched. Jackson’s a rougher-hewn, less interesting Burr, as far as Vidal is concerned, the best we’re going to get. But Burr was in Europe for most of Jackson’s career, exiled as a traitor (even if he was cleared by a federal court) and murderer (he argues Hamilton basically set himself up as a martyr for… well, a martyr for the elimination of Aaron Burr from polite society). He can’t get the real Napoleon interested in any schemes, alas, so he slinks back to New York to practice law and romance widows out of their money. 

This book is a little over seven hundred pages in my edition, and quite action packed. Charlie has his own life, involving literary and political intrigue, trying to “redeem” a working girl, and bloody murder, and beyond the political there’s shocking personal revelations about both Charlie and Burr. These are a little less interesting to me, and the big one about Charlie you kind of see coming. Most of these come down to questions of birth legitimacy and illicit love, and you can see why Vidal would incorporate this into his historical vision. The real America, he implies, is the one from the other side of the sheets, not in some Howard Zinn history from below sense (though there’s a soupcon of that), but in the sense of a subversion, sometimes just a plain inversion, of the received story. Burr is a devil figure in the sympathetic version of “Old Nick,” as a gentleman you can rely on to be naughty, and it appears Vidal has taken bits and pieces of old American lore, the Progressive school of history that would have been coming out of favor around the time Vidal was in college, with its emphasis on the venality of the great figures of the American past, some personal grudges (there’s a sort-of funny Buckley pastiche character), and his own interest in transgressive sexuality and behavior to make a sort of devil’s dictionary of American history. I look forward to reading the other installments. ****’

Review – Anolik, “Hollywood’s Eve”

Lili Anolik, “Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A.” (2019) (read aloud by Jayme Mattler) – One of the reasons my birthday lecture this year was quite long was because I tried to explain my interests and methods. My chief area of interest is what I call intellectual history in the vernacular- ideas produced, propagated, and/or applied by people outside of the academy and academy-adjacent spaces (establishment literature, etc). I want to get at just not what people believe and why, but how ideas, people, and circumstances interact. I think that to really get a grip on that, it’s imperative for scholars to look beyond histories of academic ideas (as fruitful as such histories often are!). I think you can get a better idea of the dynamics of thought by examining it in the wild, so to speak, in the vernacular.

So, I wind up studying various corners of thought and discourse, from military planning to cults to “extremist” political ideologies to various literary movements. Here’s the thing: the people who write about these things tend to be… enthusiasts. They really love the topic, whatever it is, and feel both giddy liberation and grinding resentment towards “conventional” history for relegating said topic to the margins. They, in short, “geek out.”

I won’t deny that it is fun to dip into the worlds of seventies head scifi writers, backwoods occultists of old upstate New York, and underground fascists, especially when compared with another go-round with the usual cast of characters from Socrates to Foucault. But… I’m here for the relationship of ideas to each other, the dynamics of how they grow, spread, change, die. I’m not here to geek out over the mere existence of weird shit. I know there is such a thing as weird shit. I’ve known that forever. I want to parse it, get what makes it tick. And for the love of the dialectic, I am not looking to get converted to enthusiasm myself, to defend the honor of sovereign citizens, of Rastafarianism, of counterinsurgency theorists, and I’m annoyed when writers imply I ought. Let’s put it this way: I often look to histories of crime for insights into social history and even organizational dynamics, so I get annoyed when books about famous criminals, crimes, or gangs linger on the details of murders and shortchange the social structure and culture questions involved. 

You would be surprised how little sympathy this problem gets, even from friends who are generally “on side.” I have made my peace. 

All that is to say, when someone promises me a “secret history” about a rediscovered cultural figure, my hopes get high despite themselves, and are almost often disappointed. As it happens, I think the author of this “secret history of LA” through the lens of the life of an Angeleno writer/socialite was written by someone who I think has actually done some fine vernacular history. Lili Anolik hosts the “Once Upon A Time…” podcast, which tells interesting stories about recent cultural history with great big heaps of crunchy context, just like I like it. The two seasons so far are “Once Upon a Time in the Valley,” discussing the San Fernando Valley porn industry and the Traci Lords scandal, and “Once Upon a Time at Bennington College,” which focuses on a time at my now-gone alma mater’s soccer rival when three major figures of Generation X literature — Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Lethem, and Donna Tartt — were all on the same freshman class in the eighties. I often disagreed with her stances, and she is no uncertain terms an enthusiast, but that did not impede my enjoyment or the degree of insight gleaned, a rare feat. I eagerly await a third season. 

I also was pretty eager for this book, Anolik’s biography of Eve Babitz. I do love a good, highly-contextual biography, a real “life and times,” and Babitz certainly had a lively life, lived in interesting times. She was a Hollywood brat who started cruising various scenes in the early sixties. Both beautiful — and, reader, both Anolik and her interview subjects talk a lot, a LOT, about Babitz’s breasts and their magnetic quality in particular — and bookish, witty and knowing from an improbably young age, she involved herself in a who’s who of Los Angeles cultural figures between the sixties and the eighties. Artists and rock stars (she was a lover of Jim Morrison’s), movie people and writers (Joan Didion acted as a mentor and eventual enemy), and more than anything just people on the scene — behind the scenes people, hangers-on, dealers, gurus, randos — she knew them all, and they all knew Eve. 

She made art, posed for photos (including a famous one of her playing chess naked with Marcel Duchamp, who was dressed), designed album covers, but her longest-lasting cultural contribution was her writings, short story collections and novels that were more or less “gonzo” or “new journalism” about the scenes she was on but with a shellack of fictional deniability on them. They’ve been getting attention again, with books like “Eve’s Hollywood” and “Slow Days and Fast Company” (the latter is supposedly the best – with my luck, I picked up a remainder of the former before listening to this book), long out of print, getting re-released as NYRB Classics. The imprint is a little ironic- Babitz was always a defender of LA against New York, and New York-based critics often weren’t kind to her. But so it goes! Anolik did a lot to help restore Babitz to the public eye, too, with a big story in Vanity Fair a few years back. 

Part of the story Anolik tells here is about how she tracked Babitz down for her profile. It wasn’t easy. Babitz’s fortunes began a long decline starting in the mid-seventies. She had always used drugs, but lost control over habits. Money troubles mounted and her books both got worse, and less popular. With help from her impressive cast of friends, she was able to keep more or less afloat, until sometime in her fifties she suffered a horrible burn accident, which she miraculously survived but suffered from for the rest of her life. Between this, and the fading of her world, she had become a recluse by the time Anolik found her. Anolik had to bribe Babitz, in her seventies by then, with meals, like a feral animal, to get her to open up, to eventually tell her side of the various stories and sit for the Vanity Fair photographer. Babitz died in 2021. 

Here’s the deal: I like Anolik’s writing. I know she’s capable of telling stories that engage me. But this did not quite click. And I’m aware of the many obvious reasons why it would not. I’m a man, who tends to conceive of his world in political and historical terms, a New Englander, a guy very content to let the culture pass him by and I have been that way the whole time. Eve Babitz was more or less the opposite of that- a woman and one known for her feminine wiles, an aesthete and socialite with almost no interest in politics (apparently she became quite the Fox News junkie in her old age but that’s neither here nor there), Anolik describes her as a true Southern California girl, and someone with her finger on the pulse during a very interesting time. 

Well, I won’t deny that there are aspects of Babitz’s whole thing that strike me as a little trite. But I don’t want everyone to be like me. I like that there’s aesthetically-minded people in the world, people not fretting about power and time, non-depressives! I’m glad not everywhere is New England, and I actually like Los Angeles, for a fairly simple reason: put me anywhere physically safe and with enough resources, and I will find things to do. I’ll find routes to walk (not as impossible in LA as they say- just unpopular), books to read, places to eat and have a beer (I like the food in LA, the burritos, sushi, Korean places). I might even find friends, because, again, I don’t want a whole world of me. I do prefer New England, but that’s mostly because the mental transaction costs are lower. Things make sense here, due to habituation of nothing else. Everywhere, New England very much included, sucks at least a little. 

What it actually is with me and this book, I think, is the point I began with. We actually don’t get a secret history of LA- we don’t get much analysis beyond the idea that Babitz prefigured writers like Bret Easton Ellis (not my favorite), was just as good as Joan Didion (believable, even without having read any extended work of hers yet), and deserves more recognition. To me, the book is strongest when Anolik discusses Babitz’s literary accomplishments (and later, failures). She has a good critical eye, even where I disagree (profoundly, in some cases, like her love for Ellis and disdain for Hunter S. Thompson- more on the latter anon). But she really doesn’t connect it to much other than to Babitz’s personal journey, and to a sort of vague defensiveness — the seemingly inevitable defensiveness in vernacular or simply unusual intellectual or cultural history — that Babitz and her interest in stars, aesthetics, gossip, etc. is just as good as anything else in the sphere of literature, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just a lame snob, and likely, a New Yorker. 

It’s less that I disagree with this opinion — I have read no Babitz and cannot say how good she is — but I will say that the conflict Anolik conjures doesn’t interest me much either way. But that would constitute taking a side, I think, as far as the Anolik of this book is concerned, and not the right one. I —should— be interested in Babitz’s personal life, her lovers and friends, her lifestyle, the small LA moments she records etc etc because to do otherwise is to not understand that this is actually the content of literature, and not to face the extinction of various (East Coast-associated) literary verities. Pointlessness is the new having a point. 

Well… let’s put it this way. I’ve been thinking about literary minimalism recently. I don’t know if Babitz counts, but the writers around her whose work I do know, Didion and Ellis, both have substantial minimalist works. As you can tell, I am not a minimalist. I like adjectives, adverbs, asides. I’m fine with long sentences and paragraphs as long as they’re interesting, and to me, insight into a dynamic, preferably one involving power in some way, is more interesting than, I don’t know, what sort of outfits are popular at which Hollywood bar during which summer long before I was born. That being said, I think there’s a time and a place for minimalism. And I think that time and place maps onto when minimalism is important in material objects- to accomplish a purpose, to achieve efficiency and to do so under a variety of circumstances. The smartphone, the katana, the submarine… the literary equivalent of that. Something sufficiently interesting or pointed where you want or need the prose to be completely out of the way. Minimalism is one strategy, I think, to get at things hard to express. Of course, it is also a shortcut for those simply unable to express things to the extent you’d think a professional writer should. I think this is why so often minimalist stories are often about, to borrow a phrase, less than zero. It’s lack of talent, and/or a slothful and vain disdain for an interesting world, masquerading as a considered aesthetic choice. 

It could very well be that Babitz either isn’t a minimalist or is a good one, expressing something ineffable about the lived experience of a place. But the idea that this is what literature should be, and the highest, maybe only thing it can be… that’s a wrong idea, and frankly an ugly one, and I think the ramifications of the idea helped make this book not just “wrong” — that’d be more or less fine — but less engaging than it might otherwise be (it’s still reasonably engaging, for what it’s worth, it’s just that explaining why it fails at times is complicated). Anolik roundly denounces most of Babitz’s peers in the “new journalism” movement. Didion and Capote deserve it, Wolfe deserves more than Anolik dishes out. Hunter Thompson doesn’t, not on literary grounds, and the specific way Anolik denounces Thompson, as someone whose work will prove ephemeral because it concerns the actual history of the period in which he lived, as opposed to, I don’t know, vibes or some shit… that made it very hard to read the rest of this in a generous spirit. 

Anyway, I’m probably making this sound worse than it is. Much of the book is a reasonably engaging narrative about a lady who lived an interesting life that reflected some major social and cultural changes in her time and place. But it is, in its way, representative of some of the challenges of doing the sort of work I do, with the motivations I have. ***’

Review – Carter, “The Politics of Rage”

Dan Carter, “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics” (1995) – Split the difference: I still think Lynyrd Skynyrd is a good band, but I change the channel for “Sweet Home Alabama.” For one, it’s massively overplayed, for another, Watergate wouldn’t bother my conscience, not because I voted for their fucking fascist governor but because I’m the son of McGovern voters, McGovern activists, thank you very much.

There’s a story of how George Wallace was a racial liberal before losing an election to someone who just screamed the notable anti-black slur (I’m fine not using it, but I hate using the “letter-word” formation like a child), and then vowed to never be out-slurred again. This is about half-true. He did lose his first election for Governor to a candidate with Klan support. And, more importantly, Wallace’s central drive always was power for its own sake, and, if historian Dan Carter is correct, power for the sake of gaining more power, always moving, always forging ahead, seldom even seeming to enjoy it. 

Wallace was born into circumstances that were lower-middle-class by early 20th century Alabama standards and poor by most American ones, in the Alabama black belt. “Child makes the man” is always a risk in these big biographies, but Carter clearly did the legwork and everyone agrees: little George was a dynamo of energy and ambition, and did not have a lot of shame or honesty hedging him in, more or less from the beginning. Another way the old story is half-right: Wallace’s first real political mentor was “Big Jim” Folsom. Folsom was a back-slapping, mildly corrupt progressive in a certain Southern mold: he wasn’t going to seriously shake up the racial order, but he was going to try to materially improve things for the citizenry as a whole, including the black citizenry, and he condemned the more violent aspects of racism as a way of keeping Alabama poor and subject to the whim of landowners and big business interests. He made wry jokes about how there was plenty of integrating going on in Alabama, after dark. He was quite popular. 

There’s a lot of back and forth about populism these days. It doesn’t help that some academic and political elites have chosen to make it the go-to term for everything they don’t like, from Corbyn to the alt-right, and it further doesn’t help that their critics have since insisted that whatever they think ur-populism is is never wrong and the elite critics only lump in “the bad kind” to discredit a threat to their regime. More heat than light! Let’s put it this way: Folsom can be seen to represent both the strengths and the limitations of a populist approach, defined broadly and generously as “advocating for the material interests and attempting to uphold and represent the cultural values of the common people in a given constituency.” Folsom did do some good things for the people of Alabama, building roads, schools, hospitals, etc. He also was crushed after the Brown v Board of Education decision came down, and “massive resistance” to school desegregation became the order of the day throughout the South. The last straw was a picture of him having a drink with black congressman Adam Clayton Powell. He was out, and that whole generation of Southern populists, an under-appreciated support for the whole New Deal order (the literature shows a lot of how Southern racist bourbons supported the New Deal, and they did, with conditions, but so too did Southern populists), was out too. To me, that sums up much of the problem of populism: if it were that easy, it would have already happened. It isn’t, alas.

Whether or not he actually breathed the promise not to get “out-(slur)’ed” into the open air, Wallace from then on made his career in opposition to the black freedom struggle, and anything he could memetically link to it. We don’t need to rehearse how things went in Alabama, except to note that whatever has gone down into conventional history, things were likely worse. Birmingham was, for a while, the bombing capital of the world- an industrial town, there were many men there who knew how to handle explosives. Carter uncovers very, very short links between murderous klansmen and Wallace, including at least one meeting Wallace directly took with the National State’s Rights Party, an openly fascist goon squad that sought to prevent even notionally-integrated Alabama schools from opening up by having adult thugs attack the schools directly. 

With all this massive resistance stuff, I always wonder… what did they think they were going to accomplish? Integrated schooling is now the law of the land in Alabama just as it is Minnesota, and so is one-man, one-vote without poll taxes and so on. Except… well, you have to figure what at least some of this did was provide delay and cover. On the other side of the coin, Malcolm X used to say people would talk to King because they didn’t want to talk to them. There was a dynamic where figures like Nixon, and eventually Reagan, seemed like more palatable versions of Wallace, better attuned to national audiences, knowing when to say the quiet part quiet… and in war, you can never underestimate the element of time. The period of chaos that came with massive resistance and all that came with it in the South gave southern white supremacists time to adjust, to figure out workarounds to maintain their power, so there was still a deeply unequal society with whites on top in the end. Would it have worked that way if the southern “moderates,” the deal-makers, had been in charge from the beginning, without the terror? I’m not sure it would. 

There were points where it was easy to write Wallace off as an atavism, a figure of the old south risen to scare the country again (1995 would be one of those times, so credit to Carter he doesn’t take that tack). It’s a lot harder, post-Trump, but that was well down the line. The sense that the future was 180 degrees away from everything Wallace represented was a major factor in his ability to succeed, when he left Alabama to run in Democratic primaries for president, and then as an independent candidate in 1968. Wallace found that his message resonated in the north, especially when he broadened it to include attacks on bussing for integration, welfare programs, student protestors, anyone opposed to the Vietnam war. King discovered something similar, in the negative, when he went to Chicago and encountered hate as fervent or more as he did in Selma. This not only shows that Wallace’s politics, the politics of white resentment, had a future, but that its past wasn’t so remote as all that, either. Wallace was always a thoroughly modern figure.

Who knows how far Wallace could have gotten — probably not the presidency, but he could perhaps have thrown an election into the House of Representatives and make some kind of grubby 1876-style deal — if not for two things. The first was nominating Curtis LeMay, founder of the Strategic Air Command, as his VP candidate. LeMay talked about using nukes, which scared people, he talked about abortion being ok as population control (he was a population control/ecofascist psycho on top of it all), which offended people, and he was just generally weird and off-putting. This restricted Wallace’s ability to throw the 1968 election. The other was a would-be assassin, the guy Robert DeNiro’s character in “Taxi Driver” was based on, shot and paralyzed him during the 1972 campaign. That dude was an avant-la-lettre incel and had all the ideology of a magic 8-ball, but hey… 

Wallace tried to clean up his act and repent some, towards the nineties, apparently. A hustle, or sincere? Who knows, and really, who cares? Carter doesn’t fall in love with his subject like a lot of biographers do. Wallace was an asshole who made his wife run for governor so he could be her puppet master (all she wanted to do was fish) and then abandon her for the presidential trail when she had the cancer that would kill her. He had admirable qualities, but not the redeemable kind- his humor and indefatigable work ethic mostly went towards advancing his own power and aggravating white supremacist violence. All around, a grim story, one that only gets grimmer reading it post-1995. ****’

Review – Lahiri, “The Namesake”

Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Namesake” (2003) (read aloud by Sarita Choudhury) – I cheated a little; usually, for my contemporary literary fiction audiobooks, I only go back as far as 20008-2010 or so. I let this one in on the idea that Jhumpa Lahiri and her stories of upper-middle-class immigrant angst do play an important role in our contemporary literary landscape.

This is the story of the Gangulis, a Bengali Indian-American family. Ashoke and Ashima leave Calcutta for Cambridge when Ashoke goes to MIT for grad school in the late sixties, then moves to the Massachusetts burbs when he gets a job as an engineering professor. They have a son. They tried to follow a Bengali naming tradition where an elder relative names the child, but due to slow mail speed between the US and India and some health crises, they do not get a name from the intended grandma. Pressed by the bureaucratic imperatives of American life, they have to improvise a name, and the little shaver winds up with the handle Gogol Ganguli. The Russian satirist is Ashoke’s favorite writer and he was reading him during a traumatic moment in his life, so. 

A fair amount of young Gogol’s first-generation-cum-Gen X angst gets channeled towards annoyance with his weird name. He’s a brown kid in a white town. He’s far from poor and has a stable and loving family, but has to deal with a certain amount of racism and also back and forth between his parents insistence on preserving at least a little of his Bengali cultural heritage and fully embracing Americanism, and the fact that even if he commits to either option, he doesn’t quite fit in with either culture. He does ok, though, becomes an architect and all, and finds something resembling balance towards the end, but has to go through some difficulties to get there. 

I will say… as someone who grew up in Massachusetts in the late twentieth century, and had South Asian classmates whose first names did strike us white kids as odd and amusing, we wouldn’t get or care that “Gogol” was any different from any other “weird-sounding” name. I guess the Gogol thing maybe more gets something else across. If the MIT career path didn’t let you know, these are smart, cultured people. America is impressive to them for its material wealth (though they’re a little miffed by how uncommon domestic help is, compared to West Bengal where they never had to sweep their own floors!), not for its cultural accomplishment. It’s not just sentimental attachments that lead the Ganguli parents to cling to Bengali ways- American ways seem cheap, rootless, no weight of past or custom behind them. It’s not just supposedly timeliness customs, either- it’s also things like the expectation that educated people will develop degrees of culture that even rich, educated Americans mostly don’t bother with. I’ve run into this with similarly-situated immigrants or first-generation Americans in my life, not just from South Asia but from all over. 

So, there’s stuff to say and to think about, here. “The Namesake” says some of it, in inoffensive prose. The book isn’t great but it’s not terrible. It’s a little boring, but, I try to project myself to what a thirty year old in 2003, when it was written, might think. Depending on where this literate Gen Xer lived and what they did, they might, or might not, already be used to families like the Gangulis, to the existence of third-culture kids, to the idea that immigrating to the US isn’t always a picnic even if it isn’t always a nightmare compelled by desperation, either. But any educated American twenty years later is already profoundly accustomed to these elements of twenty-first century life, through knowing neighbors, classmates, coworkers, through numerous Netflix shows and comedy specials, just the general back and forth of life… or else, they don’t want to be used to it, likely out of bigotry (that’s not to say a Hari Kondabalu fan can’t also be bigoted, but you get what I mean). That’s not to say that the lives of professionally comfortable but existentially somewhat fraught immigrants and their kids isn’t worth examining. And there’s surely worse examinations- among other things, you can now find numerous YA-type novels to instruct you on the realities of people not dissimilar to the Gangulis, the appropriate subject positions that their mostly-white readerships can take towards people like their characters and authors, on and on. It’s just not a revelation, now, to me anyway. 

I will say that reading this did seem to give me a better idea of what is going on in contemporary literary fiction. To the best of my knowledge, Lahiri isn’t a big target of critical-social-media bile. But reading this helped me get the idea that, in the background of what a lot of contemporary literary people are trying to rebel against, stands the sort of big, bourgeois novel of diversity, ala Lahiri, Zadie Smith, and whoever else that became such a big thing in the 2000s. I’ve had some peeks at Gen Z literary culture — if a middle-aged nerd like me knows much about it, it can’t be that cutting edge, but I see a little — and as far as I can tell, their big models are the closest you’d have to an alternative from this same period (or maybe a little later- five years is a long time, for non-historians). They seem to idolize “alt-lit,” spare, divorced (supposedly) from politics (especially cursed “identity politics”) and moralizing, notionally avant garde but also, you know, easy to read, and easier to posture around. Bret Easton Ellis’s idea of literature, as opposed to Lahiri’s. They see a few things — long novels, moralizing, progressive politics, sentimentality, cuteness — as tics of the millennial literati they despise (despite the fact that alt-lit was a millennial thing, too, really- historical facticity isn’t their strong suit… anybody’s strong suit, seemingly). 

Presumably, people on both sides of this half-unconscious generational literary squabble would be confused, if they bothered to listen to a clout-less middle aged man like me, when I denounce glazed-over “alt” “lit” types such as Ellis and Tao Lin in the same breath as moralizing bourgeois chonk-writers like Franzen or whatever is left of the new-sincerity McSweeney’s types, because an opposition between these camps seems to structure their idea of what literature is… Lahiri’s work doesn’t quite fit, but, it’s earnest, literally about multicultural life as practiced, and over three hundred pages long, so, would presumably be in that millennial camp. Man! Imagine if you thought those were the options! Then consider that that’s how some of the people who are supposed to be the voices of an upcoming generation see the matter! ***

Review – Parish, “Love and Theft”

Stan Parish, “Love and Theft” (2020) (read aloud by Angelo DiLoreto) – Fun fact: I found this book while searching to see if there was an audiobook version of the classic history of blackface minstrelsy of the same title! There isn’t, for now, but there is this. This was a pretty fun heist novel! Alex is a classic “dadcore” heist dude, a smooth consummate professional who keeps it tight and keeps it cool- no random violence (not that he can’t get down if he needs to!), no unplanned jobs, no big talk. After a bold, motorcycle-based Las Vegas jewelry heist, Alex goes to suburban New Jersey to lay low for a while and attend some ketamine parties (??). At one, he meets Diane, a pretty lady, and they get into each other real fast.

Also, it turns out they knew each other during dirtbag eighties days in Atlantic City! This was the beginning of Alex’s career in high end crime, and Alex got out of town fast after his best friend (and Diane’s babydaddy!) got killed. Alex, guided by some Mexican smuggler friends, got into heists, Diane got into catering and raising her kid, who turned out to be an ok young man by the time Alex shows back up.

It’s a whirlwind romance, of the type pursued by people who get bored of their adopted upper middle class circumstances! They go to Tulum, on the Mexican coast, for vacation. Alex wants to give up the life, especially because Diane, you know, she’s cool but not that kind of cool. His friends, mostly gay ex-cop fixer Ben, are cool with that, more or less. But another Alex — well, Alejandro — has other plans. Alejandro runs the coast for one of the cartels. His bosses need Alex to do a boss, taking down a Chinese fentanyl manufacturer as he meets with some Russian exporters in a Spanish beach town (got all that?). You can probably figure out what Alejandro uses to force Alex into the job! 

Parish is a good action writer. That’s not as easy as it sounds. He has a lot of moving parts in some of these sequences, and I’m not going to say it’s always possible to keep track of who is doing what, where, but it’s still fun. The twist end was… decent. Well-done, but you knew it was either DEFINITELY going to be it or definitely NOT, if that makes sense… 

It’s a fun, though often odd, book. Like Michael Mann — there’s a lot of Michael Mann here — Stan Parish likes to linger in the worlds of the contemporary globalized rich, these nether-spaces devoted to commodity fetishism. Parish (and Mann, and a lot of thriller writers/filmmakers)treats this as almost the only world, even as their character despise most of its habitues- the rich are the geeks, gawking at the show and stuffing their faces, Mann and Parish’s criminals and cops are the ones running behind the scene and occasionally causing bloody disruption to it all. Let’s be honest- who’s ever been anywhere even as fancy as the Natick Collection and —hasn’t— wanted to see some chaos break out?

There is a part of me that rather wishes that Parish (Neal Stephenson, now that his characters and one suspects he himself hangs out in the anodyne world of the crazy rich, too- Mann’s another story because of his visual chops) would get a bit weirder with it. Let’s put it this way- Alejandro is the most interesting character, because he’s both out of fits into the story, and he hints at a world outside of it: he’s a former yoga instructor and a Mayan, his people having lived on that coast from time immemorial, who got involved with the cartel to keep the riff raff off the land, and who accepted everything that came with that deal. Things don’t need to utterly abandon verisimilitude for random bullshit (like, it seems, some online critical subcultures suggest) to let in some of the world outside of what you’d see at a high end airport lounge. The world is big! If nothing else, as someone who moves in this world, among others who move and occasionally do a thing, for reasons other than money or sociopathy, it’d be nice to see that reflected… but I can’t complain if thriller writers don’t anticipate my self/friend-insert desires. ****