reviews

Review – Carter, “The Price of Peace”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Zachary Carter, “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” (2020) (read by Robert Petkoff) – I’ll admit: I’m behind on reviews. I listened to this a little while ago. And all I want to type is the name “KEYNES!” to the same cadence as the word “SHOTS!” in that one tens song where they just shout the word “SHOTS!” a lot. Admittedly, if one major economist of the twentieth century could be said to have engaged in “party rocking” it would probably be John Maynard Keynes. As journalist Zach Carter, author of this highly-regarded new book on the man and his ideas tells us, Keynes was a social butterfly who hung out with people thought of as cool, in his day, and got laid a lot with men and married one of the great ballerinas of his time. But, still, you all probably expect more content from me, and I hate to let people down.

Among other interesting innovations, Carter eschews the standard biography format. You don’t get a long section about Keynes’s childhood or education, or other bits of “setup” like you see in a lot of big, whang-dang-doodle biogs. Instead, we start with Keynes “folding his long legs” into a friend’s motorcycle’s sidecar and toodling off for London, leaving placid academic Cambridge for the hurly burly of WWI London. Someone needed to manage the empire’s economic situation in it’s time of need, and that would be a six foot seven queer math major, our Maynard. Also, the last third or so of the book takes place after Keynes died, in 1946 (at a relatively young 62). It discusses the future of Keynes’s ideas, their ascendancy, their modification — Carter would insist their corruption — their fall, their possible resurrection.

This is a rich and very well-written work aimed towards an educated general audience (I think of it as the NPR/Twitter demographic). We get into the ins and outs of Keynes’s career, which took him to the Versailles Conference, attempts to work at the Exchequer and manage the Depression, further work during the war, the Bretton Woods conference which laid the groundwork for the postwar global economic order, his personal life, encounters with figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill, on and on. Keynes had a really interesting life, on top of whatever else can be said about him. It’s hard to imagine contemporary big time academics matching it… if nothing else, they’re expected to work a lot harder at much dumber tasks than Keynes or academics of his generation (and Keynes was a hard worker) were…

Insofar as there’s a takeaway point beyond “this guy had a cool life,” it’s one I actually agree with, and which has been a minor hobby horse of mine for some time, even if I disagree with some of the valuations Carter has put on the point. Keynes, Carter argues, updated liberalism for the twentieth century. This is relevant in large part because Keynes’s opponents, led by Friedrich von Hayek (a contemporary of Keynes, whose attacks against his work Keynes treated with a patronizing — and often hilarious — encouragement, real “A for effort, Freddie” stuff), have tried to seize the mantle of “classical liberalism” against anything that smacked of Keynes. Anything that expands “government” can’t be liberalism because (insert what’s often a misreading of Mill, Locke, Adam Smith, whoever here), the “classical liberal” argument goes. This was always a stupid argument. In many respects, it reflects the Marx-envy of free market fanatics. They always wanted a Marx for their side, and have enlisted a roll call of figures, each less fitting or just more pathetic than the last — Smith, von Mises, von Hayek, Ayn Rand — to be that figure. But there just isn’t a prophet figure like that for them, and there isn’t a central set of canonical texts like there is in Marxism (you’d figure they’d appreciate that, “free thinkers” that they’re supposed to be!).

In fact, the closest to a Marx figure in liberalism is… John Maynard Keynes! This gets to the dumber, more relevant part of why the idea that “classical liberalism” really exists in a different ideological formation than postwar liberalism was always a sham. The point of liberalism was never small government or big government. It was always about eliding the basic, elemental conflict between redistributing power down the social scale towards the people who make society work, or keeping it where it is/retrenching it in the hands of ever smaller and more arbitrary elites. Law, markets, education, culture, numerous mixes and combinations of these and other things, liberals have proposed all of these as alternate axes and bases of politics than the basic struggle for power. Keynes, and his equivalents in liberal politics such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought that you could elide the power struggle through, basically, beating socialism at its own mass-appeal game. Keynes saw that the productive capacities of capitalism could make a decent life for everyone, and thought that fiscal policy could guarantee that life, thereby defusing social conflict and finally short-circuiting the struggle for power.

I’m a socialist and a Marxist. I believe that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle (some other stuff, too), and I want the working class to win, and I work towards that in my way. So it’s with that in mind when I say that the Keynesian vision is a tempting one… but maybe not as tempting as some would make out. Maybe it’s just the fighter in me, but I have noticed the political deactivation that the Keynesian future promises. We’ll all have so much leisure and time for art (Keynes was a great art lover, and envisioned everyone doing community theater, which is cute) we’ll just let the experts carry on with things! I don’t like that. Carter makes clear that Keynes saw most form of political agitation — from the October Revolution to his friend, writer Lytton Strachey, handing him a letter protesting Keynes’s involvement in WWI and stalking out of a dinner date — as essentially tragic, to say nothing of low-class. I will never believe that political struggle will ever stop, as long as we’re recognizably human (zap me up into the post-human energy hive mind, if it comes to that!), and wouldn’t want it to. “It’s all in the game,” as a beloved figure of early twenty-first century fiction put it.

Carter also makes clear that Keynes’s ideas never had a golden age. There was never a point where governments used countercyclical fiscal policy via investment in public goods to create a stable economic system for the benefit of a broad public. There was never enough money put into the New Deal or the Great Society for it to do that. The massive amounts of money poured into WWII sparked the recovery from the Depression and proved Keynes’s point about deficit spending. But that out terrible ideas into the heads of the politicians around, and we can call that “military Keynesianism.” Pour money into the military and boost employment and public purchasing power that way! No empowering the working class (even by accident, by giving them more leisure time by, say, cutting work time), less vulnerable to red-baiting (the American Keynesians were mercilessly hounded by McCarthyites until nerds like Paul Samuelson promised they’d be apolitical good boys), lots of shiny guns. This was a parody of what Keynes, a man who hated war, had in mind. But with its cowed working class, crucial role for (similarly cowed, but in a different way) experts, and attempt to evade, rather than crush, entrenched powers of wealth and bigotry, it was a parody as faithful to the spirit of the original as anything Weird Al ever produced.

Keynes supposedly “came back” in 2008 after the financial crisis but we all, Carter included, knew what that meant in that soppy cardboard political context- giveaways for the rich. The world might have, sort of, gotten one of Keynes’s basic points — “the market isn’t self-regulating any more than ‘nature’ is, stupid!” — but the political power to do something useful about that observation wasn’t there. It’s not just a matter of Keynes’s old enemies, the Austrian school types who insist on the self-regulation of markets, having seized much of the intellectual high ground. It’s that Keynesianism was always ambivalent about the forces — including a real, fighting left — that made it possible to even get a sham version of it like military Keynesianism going in the first place.

Basically, if you want to get what Keynes promised, you need to fight for what Marx wanted, and if you’re doing that, why not just take the whole fucking pie? Especially when you know, now, given the history (they should have known in the twentieth century, too- they were powerful but often foolish, where we’re all too wise and weak), that the right will wait as long as they have to to take the power back if you don’t break the base of their power, no matter what concessions you make to their little fee-fees? I think Carter would answer “so you don’t get mass atrocities ala Stalin,” more or less, and also a more robust idea of freedom and possibility than obtained in places like the USSR, even post-Stalin. I hear that, though it’s not like followers of Keynes-era liberalism, like LBJ or Richard “we are all Keynesians now” Nixon were strangers to mass death… well, that’s not the “real” Keynesianism, but the military mutation, Carter might say in an unguarded moment (he strikes me as much too slick to write something so gormless if he had time to think)… but then what’s the “real” socialism, etc etc.

Anyway! This was a pretty good book. Sometimes it rubbed me the wrong way in terms of petting expertise-driven liberalism and pooh-poohing radical politics, but I guess I’m sensitive. “The price of peace” is an interesting title, especially given how so many, especially but not exclusively on the right, think “paying for peace” equals appeasement equals Nazis equals bad. It could very well be even if leftists wanted to pay “the price of peace” (and it looks like we are more willing to play these games, and basically have been since the seventies or earlier), the right may very well not let us. Who’s to say? Along with whatever else it is, this book, like the tv show “Mad Men,” is also an elegy for a lost moment of mid-century ambition and cool, warts and all (Keynes had plenty, including that non-obsessive, partial, but nasty strain of upper class British antisemitism). Just how lost is it? I tend to think deeply lost, but who does that stop? *

Review – Carter, “The Price of Peace”

Review – Carter, “The Price of Peace”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Zachary Carter, “The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes” (2020) (read by Robert Petkoff) – I’ll admit: I’m behind on reviews. I listened to this a little while ago. And all I want to type is the name “KEYNES!” to the same cadence as the word “SHOTS!” in that one tens song where they just shout the word “SHOTS!” a lot. Admittedly, if one major economist of the twentieth century could be said to have engaged in “party rocking” it would probably be John Maynard Keynes. As journalist Zach Carter, author of this highly-regarded new book on the man and his ideas tells us, Keynes was a social butterfly who hung out with people thought of as cool, in his day, and got laid a lot with men and married one of the great ballerinas of his time. But, still, you all probably expect more content from me, and I hate to let people down.

Among other interesting innovations, Carter eschews the standard biography format. You don’t get a long section about Keynes’s childhood or education, or other bits of “setup” like you see in a lot of big, whang-dang-doodle biogs. Instead, we start with Keynes “folding his long legs” into a friend’s motorcycle’s sidecar and toodling off for London, leaving placid academic Cambridge for the hurly burly of WWI London. Someone needed to manage the empire’s economic situation in it’s time of need, and that would be a six foot seven queer math major, our Maynard. Also, the last third or so of the book takes place after Keynes died, in 1946 (at a relatively young 62). It discusses the future of Keynes’s ideas, their ascendancy, their modification — Carter would insist their corruption — their fall, their possible resurrection.

This is a rich and very well-written work aimed towards an educated general audience (I think of it as the NPR/Twitter demographic). We get into the ins and outs of Keynes’s career, which took him to the Versailles Conference, attempts to work at the Exchequer and manage the Depression, further work during the war, the Bretton Woods conference which laid the groundwork for the postwar global economic order, his personal life, encounters with figures as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Winston Churchill, on and on. Keynes had a really interesting life, on top of whatever else can be said about him. It’s hard to imagine contemporary big time academics matching it… if nothing else, they’re expected to work a lot harder at much dumber tasks than Keynes or academics of his generation (and Keynes was a hard worker) were…

Insofar as there’s a takeaway point beyond “this guy had a cool life,” it’s one I actually agree with, and which has been a minor hobby horse of mine for some time, even if I disagree with some of the valuations Carter has put on the point. Keynes, Carter argues, updated liberalism for the twentieth century. This is relevant in large part because Keynes’s opponents, led by Friedrich von Hayek (a contemporary of Keynes, whose attacks against his work Keynes treated with a patronizing — and often hilarious — encouragement, real “A for effort, Freddie” stuff), have tried to seize the mantle of “classical liberalism” against anything that smacked of Keynes. Anything that expands “government” can’t be liberalism because (insert what’s often a misreading of Mill, Locke, Adam Smith, whoever here), the “classical liberal” argument goes. This was always a stupid argument. In many respects, it reflects the Marx-envy of free market fanatics. They always wanted a Marx for their side, and have enlisted a roll call of figures, each less fitting or just more pathetic than the last — Smith, von Mises, von Hayek, Ayn Rand — to be that figure. But there just isn’t a prophet figure like that for them, and there isn’t a central set of canonical texts like there is in Marxism (you’d figure they’d appreciate that, “free thinkers” that they’re supposed to be!).

In fact, the closest to a Marx figure in liberalism is… John Maynard Keynes! This gets to the dumber, more relevant part of why the idea that “classical liberalism” really exists in a different ideological formation than postwar liberalism was always a sham. The point of liberalism was never small government or big government. It was always about eliding the basic, elemental conflict between redistributing power down the social scale towards the people who make society work, or keeping it where it is/retrenching it in the hands of ever smaller and more arbitrary elites. Law, markets, education, culture, numerous mixes and combinations of these and other things, liberals have proposed all of these as alternate axes and bases of politics than the basic struggle for power. Keynes, and his equivalents in liberal politics such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson, thought that you could elide the power struggle through, basically, beating socialism at its own mass-appeal game. Keynes saw that the productive capacities of capitalism could make a decent life for everyone, and thought that fiscal policy could guarantee that life, thereby defusing social conflict and finally short-circuiting the struggle for power.

I’m a socialist and a Marxist. I believe that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle (some other stuff, too), and I want the working class to win, and I work towards that in my way. So it’s with that in mind when I say that the Keynesian vision is a tempting one… but maybe not as tempting as some would make out. Maybe it’s just the fighter in me, but I have noticed the political deactivation that the Keynesian future promises. We’ll all have so much leisure and time for art (Keynes was a great art lover, and envisioned everyone doing community theater, which is cute) we’ll just let the experts carry on with things! I don’t like that. Carter makes clear that Keynes saw most form of political agitation — from the October Revolution to his friend, writer Lytton Strachey, handing him a letter protesting Keynes’s involvement in WWI and stalking out of a dinner date — as essentially tragic, to say nothing of low-class. I will never believe that political struggle will ever stop, as long as we’re recognizably human (zap me up into the post-human energy hive mind, if it comes to that!), and wouldn’t want it to. “It’s all in the game,” as a beloved figure of early twenty-first century fiction put it.

Carter also makes clear that Keynes’s ideas never had a golden age. There was never a point where governments used countercyclical fiscal policy via investment in public goods to create a stable economic system for the benefit of a broad public. There was never enough money put into the New Deal or the Great Society for it to do that. The massive amounts of money poured into WWII sparked the recovery from the Depression and proved Keynes’s point about deficit spending. But that out terrible ideas into the heads of the politicians around, and we can call that “military Keynesianism.” Pour money into the military and boost employment and public purchasing power that way! No empowering the working class (even by accident, by giving them more leisure time by, say, cutting work time), less vulnerable to red-baiting (the American Keynesians were mercilessly hounded by McCarthyites until nerds like Paul Samuelson promised they’d be apolitical good boys), lots of shiny guns. This was a parody of what Keynes, a man who hated war, had in mind. But with its cowed working class, crucial role for (similarly cowed, but in a different way) experts, and attempt to evade, rather than crush, entrenched powers of wealth and bigotry, it was a parody as faithful to the spirit of the original as anything Weird Al ever produced.

Keynes supposedly “came back” in 2008 after the financial crisis but we all, Carter included, knew what that meant in that soppy cardboard political context- giveaways for the rich. The world might have, sort of, gotten one of Keynes’s basic points — “the market isn’t self-regulating any more than ‘nature’ is, stupid!” — but the political power to do something useful about that observation wasn’t there. It’s not just a matter of Keynes’s old enemies, the Austrian school types who insist on the self-regulation of markets, having seized much of the intellectual high ground. It’s that Keynesianism was always ambivalent about the forces — including a real, fighting left — that made it possible to even get a sham version of it like military Keynesianism going in the first place.

Basically, if you want to get what Keynes promised, you need to fight for what Marx wanted, and if you’re doing that, why not just take the whole fucking pie? Especially when you know, now, given the history (they should have known in the twentieth century, too- they were powerful but often foolish, where we’re all too wise and weak), that the right will wait as long as they have to to take the power back if you don’t break the base of their power, no matter what concessions you make to their little fee-fees? I think Carter would answer “so you don’t get mass atrocities ala Stalin,” more or less, and also a more robust idea of freedom and possibility than obtained in places like the USSR, even post-Stalin. I hear that, though it’s not like followers of Keynes-era liberalism, like LBJ or Richard “we are all Keynesians now” Nixon were strangers to mass death… well, that’s not the “real” Keynesianism, but the military mutation, Carter might say in an unguarded moment (he strikes me as much too slick to write something so gormless if he had time to think)… but then what’s the “real” socialism, etc etc.

Anyway! This was a pretty good book. Sometimes it rubbed me the wrong way in terms of petting expertise-driven liberalism and pooh-poohing radical politics, but I guess I’m sensitive. “The price of peace” is an interesting title, especially given how so many, especially but not exclusively on the right, think “paying for peace” equals appeasement equals Nazis equals bad. It could very well be even if leftists wanted to pay “the price of peace” (and it looks like we are more willing to play these games, and basically have been since the seventies or earlier), the right may very well not let us. Who’s to say? Along with whatever else it is, this book, like the tv show “Mad Men,” is also an elegy for a lost moment of mid-century ambition and cool, warts and all (Keynes had plenty, including that non-obsessive, partial, but nasty strain of upper class British antisemitism). Just how lost is it? I tend to think deeply lost, but who does that stop? *

Review – Carter, “The Price of Peace”

Review – Wolfe, “The Urth of the New Sun”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Gene Wolfe, “The Urth of the New Sun” (1987) – Gene Wolfe wrote “The Book of the New Sun,” a quartet of novels (that can — I would say should — be read as one) that ranks among my favorite works, and probably the hardest to describe among literary favorites of mine. It is the story of Severian, an orphan raised by a guild of torturers and executioners in some far future Urth (the spelling turns out to have more meaning than flavor- maybe? See below) where the sun is guttering out. Severian has a perfect memory, clinical depression, a way with the ladies, a destiny, and arguably the greatest prose stylist in scifi/fantasy history behind him. The story is told in past tense- Severian is using his perfect memory to recall his youth, his adventures, and his ascension to the role of “Autarch,” emperor/representative of Urth, and due to scifi shenanigans he has more than one consciousness in him. The story goes back and forth across space and time, and if you get lost, it’s in the best possible way.

Wolfe — an unassuming man, for all of his talents, who died a few years back, not a strutting fool and/or a gormless nerd like so many big name scifi/fantasy writers — decided his follow-up would be… a follow-up. “The Urth of the New Sun” follows Severian in his ascendance past the Earth (or Urth?). This is an interesting decision for Wolfe to make. We leave the New Sun books as Severian the Autarch learns that being Autarch is basically about answering for Urth at some sort of divine/alien space/time tribunal. He gets on a spaceship and goes, the end, more or less. Do we really need a tale of Severian on the spaceship?

Well, having read it, I’d now say “no,” we don’t need as, it turns out, the world needed (but probably doesn’t deserve) The Book of the New Sun. Among other things, Wolfe can’t quite manage the creative farrago he did in the original series, strategically revealing what was going on behind all the weirdness, keeping other things concealed, switching out truths for lies and vice-versa until you barely cared anymore and just went with the story. This one does something like that but less so- the flipped cards stay flipped (“floop the pig!” as they’d say on a show that I think might have drawn some inspiration from Wolfe), confusing aspects stay confused, it is less elegant.

But it’s still pretty good. Wolfe’s prose style — dense and allusive but always flowing and alluring, not unlike a lava flow, how beautiful and crushing it is — carries the reader along. It might have helped had I read this closer to when I read the New Sun books, as there’s a lot of call-backs, but it’s hard to forget Thecla, Jonah, the Green Man, and the rest (some of Severian’s lovers — Severian being a lady’s man on top of everything else isn’t as cheesy as it sounds but is the closest to cheesy Wolfe gets here — are a bit interchangeable, tragic women of power usually)… Just sometimes hard to forget where Wolfe left off with them.

Especially because his spaceship, in keeping with relativity (or some other science stuff, who’s to say really), is also a timeship! And kind of a… temporal realm ship? There’s some Kabalistic metaphors here, where Severian and company, after some spaceship stuff, wind up higher up the Sepiroth, the Tree of Existence, snd then have to go back home. Among other things, this probably confirms what some of the old Wolfe-heads say- Urth ain’t Earth, but it’s close (and possibly upside-down- there’s reasonably good hints that the city where Severian is born is meant to be alternate dimension far future Buenos Aires, but the Plata/Gyoll flows the wrong ways, the jungles and mountains are on the “wrong” direction, etc).

In the end, Severian does the thing. You kind of know he will. The suspense of that was never the point, though seeing what Wolfe could yank out of his bag of tricks to complicate matters is part of what you’re plonking down time and money to see. There’s some time travel (including retconning/retroactively-establishing stuff in the prior books), some Christian symbolism (Wolfe was a devout Catholic, but I question how the claims made that his works are directly devotional), and then Severian finally gets to get a rest. Wolfe wrote two more series, the Book of the Long Sun and the Book of the Short Sun, in the same, err, multiverse? I’ll get to those, at some point, but I think this is a good, if perhaps more protracted than necessary, stopping point for Severian’s story. ****

Review – Wolfe, “The Urth of the New Sun”

Review – Thelwell, “The Harder They Come”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Michael Thelwell, “The Harder They Come” (1980) – A movie novelization praised by Chinua Achebe and Harold Bloom! Well, it makes sense. “The Harder They Come” is an awesome movie (watch it with subtitles), a classic tale of overcoming odds and dying to become a legend, and which helped introduce reggae to global audiences. Michael Thelwell is one of the original Black Studies guys, a civil rights movement veteran, and a friend/editor of Achebe. And as Thelwell points out in his introduction, he does not slavishly follow the plot of the film- among other things, the film runs at a brisk 109 minutes so it’d probably make for a short novel.

Thelwell starts us out in rural Jamaica in the mid-twentieth century. Ivanhoe Martin is a young boy who acquires the nickname “Rhygin” for his “raging” lust for life. He’s always willing to go farther than the other kids- work harder, swim further, jump off higher cliffs into deeper water. His grandmother wants him to follow in her footsteps, farming the green hillside land in a community descended from Maroon slave rebels. But you can’t keep them down on the farm once they’ve heard rocksteady, one of reggae’s progenitors. As a teenager, Ivan moved to Kingston, the big city, and encounters many classic “country bumpkin” pitfalls before starting to lead a dual life- good churchgoing boy, helping repair things around a Baptist compound by day, and “rude boy” by night, running the streets with a gang and watching endless westerns in the movie houses.

Ivan is what I’d (modestly) call “Berard-complete” – a fleshed out character (it was a real risk, too, to turn him into a kind of black Horatio Alger character, but Thelwell knew better) who also isn’t tediously psychologized. His knocks don’t all go into making him a better, stronger person. In particular, Thelwell presents the brutalities of all levels of Jamaican poverty — from wandering the streets of the rich neighborhoods begging for work only to be treated like pests, to the numerous ways the poor rip each other off just to survive, to Ivan getting ripped off by record producers after almost reaching his music stardom dreams recording the titular song — utterly unromantically. It doesn’t make you better. It just sucks.

Eventually, Ivan is hit hard enough he snaps. He cuts up a cruel overseer, gets whipped (Jamaica still used caning as a punishment at the time), and becomes a weed dealer. He gets in with some Rastafarians. The Rastas are a sort of otherworldly presence in the book. Ivan and his friends witness an attempt by Rastas to “take over” Kingston (this happened in real life). Rastas show up at odd points to show a way that black men can be true to themselves in the world. Ivan never becomes one — he loves the flash of the world too much — but they’re an important presence in the book. Eventually, the big fish Ivan works for betrays him and tries to have him killed. This allows Ivan to fully become Rhygin, as he goes on a massive crime spree that makes him a folk hero (and launches his record to the top of the charts). In the end, he’s gunned down by the cops on a beach, calling on them to “send out one man who can draw” so he can fight and die like his cowboy heroes.

It’s an interesting book, written partially in Jamaican patois (with helpful glossary). Thelwell makes good use of the contrasts of types of life- the simple rural life in the villages (which Ivan can’t return to, due to devastating changes while he’s away), life among the “sufferers” of Kingston, glimpses at the nice life lived by exploiters, the mystic experience of the Rastas. One thing I found interesting was the way in which Ivan, in the end, overcame by turning away from his humanity, in large part symbolized by women, especially his girlfriend Elsa who escaped the Baptist compound to be with him. It’s ambiguous whether Elsa betrays him to the police or not- it was either her, or the Rasta partner last seen being tortured by the cops. In any event, turning away from womanhood, with its softness and potential treachery, to finally become the “star-bwai” gunslinger… that seems to be a theme in a fair amount of lore, not unique to Jamaica but pretty common, in my experience, in Jamaican narratives, including reggae lyrics. In Rasta myth (and to a degree, practice) you don’t usually become a gunslinger star, but women very much belong in a separate, subordinate place while men take the “chalice” (weed pipe) and “reason” with each other. Remnant of colonialism, maybe, I’m no expert. Either way, an interesting book. ****’

Review – Thelwell, “The Harder They Come”

Review – Shivji, “Class Struggle in Tanzania”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Issa Shivji, “Class Struggle in Tanzania” (1976) – I picked this one up at a sale at the Brookline Public Library. Who was reading Marxist analyses of Tanzania from the seventies in Brookline, I wonder?

In any event, I have it, and read it. 1976 was an interesting moment in Tanzania. By then, it was almost ten years past the Arusha Declaration, where charismatic leader Julius Nyerere declared that Tanzania was going to build “African Socialism,” based on village cooperation, nationalizing foreign-owned business (much of which dated to the colonial era), and forging the country’s own path in the Cold War. Probably the best known artifact of this era were the “ujamaa villages,” planned cooperative villages where socialism, African style, would supposedly be grown from the ground up.

What did Marxist Issa Shivji think of all this? Not necessarily what one would think, in a number of directions. Shivji taught in Tanzanian universities, and belonged to the prominent Asian minority you see in much of coastal East Africa. He writes in the classic inter-Marxist mode- this is when Marxist and Marx-influenced thinkers were taking the “international development” world by storm, in that brief period between America’s defeat in Vietnam and when neoliberalism really started to hit in the eighties. He understands the books — Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao — and how they apply to the ground better than his interlocutors and he wants to prove it.

Socialism can work in Tanzania, will come to Tanzania, Shivji argues, but it isn’t there as a result of Arusha. Ujamaa is ultimately a conceit of the “bureaucratic bourgeoisie” based in Nyerere’s regime, who defeated the old commercial bourgeoisie (basically, the guys selling sisal and cotton abroad) for power with the help of the emerging working class and the peasants. It’s not an adaptation of socialism- there doesn’t need to be “African socialism” because as far as Shivji is concerned, that’s a patronizing workaround; Africans, like everyone else, can have, will have, deserve to have, socialism, no modifiers necessary. Things don’t look exactly like Russia in 1917, China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, Shivji grants, and we shouldn’t expect it to, but a working class is emerging into class consciousness and will soon get what it is due.

It’s interesting what’s not in this book. I don’t mean this as a dig, really, but you can see it as an artifact of the era just before concern for “human rights” took over the thinking-about-developing-countries realm. Nyerere was far from the worst violator of human rights around, but he did force people off the land into his Ujamaa villages. He controlled the press tightly, and waged periodic campaigns against such “non-Tanzanian” cultural practices as soul music and homosexuality. He also had almost nothing to say about periodic attacks on the Asian community he comes from. You could see this as being beyond Shivji’s strict brief (and this is a short book), but you’d figure the forced migrations would enter into the status of the working class and peasantry… in any event, Shivji’s tradition as he understood it took other stuff more into account. In ten years time, Nyerere (who probably comes up more in this review than he does in the book- it is centered on the reality of class, not the actions of important individuals) would be gone, the dream of Ujamaa and numerous other decolonization-era visions for what Africa could be would fade, replaced by a terrible cycle of exploitation and war. If Marxism provides the blocks with which to rebuild, one has to assume people will have to reach for more elementary ones still than the ones Shivji presents, given the stark realities. We’ll see, I guess. ****

Review – Shivji, “Class Struggle in Tanzania”

Review – Yu, “Interior Chinatown”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Charles Yu, “Interior Chinatown” (2020) (read by Joel De La Fuente) – Another way in which white Americans have been absurdly lucky: many of the “white ethnic” groups came to social acceptance at a time when literature was taken halfway seriously. The most dramatic case in point is the rise of Jewish talent in American literature after World War II (by this time most white American Catholic ethnic communities, after flirting with social realism when that was cool in the thirties ala James Farrell, deracinated all their writers when they produced them at all). Guys like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow came to prominence in an era when you could become famous by writing serious, ambitious literature, and I say this as a guy who doesn’t like Bellow and runs hot and cold on Roth. They could say what they had to say about being an American Jew — it was a lot — and say a lot of other stuff in many different ways, to say nothing of saying it all in a context of broad-based economic prosperity.

None of that holds anymore, and it sucks pretty hard, I’d imagine, for people from ethnic communities that produce a lot of people in a class position to break into literary fame, and for readers more generally. There’s a Tantalus element to the situation. Everyone, notionally, who reads anything other than what Fox News shills at them to fill out cheap ad time, wants to hear about difference from diverse voices. Our universities duly stamp out many many ambitious young scribblers from more and more communities, mostly communities of color (you could argue recent immigrants from Eastern Europe count too, and there are weird quasi-ethnic elements of how literature receives poor whites from some parts of the country). Like Roth’s New York area Jews before them, these writers and their communities have had to make difficult adjustments to American life and constantly second-guess what their (valid, impressive) success means in the face of both racism and life’s general absurdity. All the tools are there in abundance like never before, from word processors and the Internet to every kind of inspiration, every source of color, available at the touch of a button.

All this has been a decent spur to the creation of books- but not, necessarily, to the creation of quality literature, of an exploration of contemporary life and its contexts or of artfulness or experiment in literature, and certainly not the two combined. Newly intellectually prominent ethnic communities are faced with a situation that does not reward literary quality or risk-taking. Publishers are cautious in a way they weren’t during an era of cheap paperbacks and a public that saw the consumption of difficult and/or daring artistic production as a marker of class status. Neither of those were necessarily noble (well, cheap paperbacks are, in my opinion), and the stuff that came out of it wasn’t always great. But it was different. It’s ironic that writers today can now be lumped into the category of “content providers” when, in fact, the actual content of their works is of decreasing relevance. What matters is what boxes they can tick off for the company producing them and the readers consuming them. This does not for quality literature make- you get a lot of secular sermons, a lot of try-hard bullshit, and a lot of not-try-hard-enough bullshit, too. A lot of the better fiction writing that pertains to ethnicity comes from writers immersed in genre, like Carmen Maria Machado and Stephen Graham Jones.

Maybe it’s the Marxist in me, but I have to think the class positions involved have something to do with it, too. Roth, Bellow, Vonnegut (not a Jew, but with German roots when that meant something), none of them were exactly poor or working class. But class divisions, especially within expanding postwar universities, were less salient (especially among white people- more of their/our infernal luck) than they are today. Look up the biographies of contemporary literary lions who write about their ethnic experiences and they’re pretty impressive- fancy schools, often fancy jobs they did before writing, prizes of all kinds. That these are in no way representative of their communities as a whole — couldn’t possibly be, Harvard doesn’t have enough dorm space for it — is part of the problem. That being a winner from a marginalized (but, key, internally stratified) group now means something different than it did in the mid-twentieth century seems to be part of the problem.

All of which is a very long way of getting to a profoundly mediocre — I’d go ahead and say bad — book that has gotten a lot of good press, Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown.” How much of this is marketing, how much any of it will last beyond a season, it’s hard to say, but this has been hailed as a definitive statement in the literature of one of the largest (and most diverse- more on that anon) groups I’m talking about, Asian-Americans. Yu is very much in the category of ultra-impressive resumes you get on writers these days, and worked in a white-shoe law firm before deciding to write full time (he’s not a bad looking guy, either, another recent development in authors- they tend to have it going on, physically, these days). Big, or anyway highly credentialed and talked up, talent, community that wants to be heard, surely he has something to say?

Well… yes and no. Let’s get a description out of the way first, which among other things gets into Yu’s forms, which to the extent there’s a selling point here beyond “big Asian-American literary statement,” is it. This is the story of a guy who goes through most of the book being called Generic Asian Man. He’s called this because the novel takes the form of a screenplay! All the world’s a stage, or anyway, a production set for a hacky police procedural. The main character is forced to play Generic Asian Man over and over again in role after role. Yu is not shy about making this the central problem of Asian-Americans, especially Asian-American men (women are “The Girl With the Almond Eyes” until they become “Old Asian Woman”). He does that thing you get in metafictions where the whole thing is an obvious metaphor, but the author escapes from the obloquy assigned to allegory (never got why allegory gets such a bad wrap, and from Tolkien too!) by keeping it vague as to whether the action in the novel is meant to be taken at all literally. But in any event, we see some of his life as he gets the chance to play an important side-character in a hacky cop show called “Black and White” (can you guess the races of the protagonists?), marries and screws up his marriage, but also has various surreal encounters culminating in being arrested for some sort of Generic crime and having to defend his Asian-Americanness in court, or something.

If there is a central problem in contemporary anglophone literature (and peeking over the Anglo fence to figures like Michel Houellebecq and Karl Ove Knausgaard, I’m not sure it’s much better in other languages), it’s an utter inability to commit to anything worth committing to- and this includes committing to the bit. It’s funny- comedians can do it, in some cases to the point of monstrosity. But with all the political and social change we’ve seen since the return of history circa 2001-2008, and with seemingly good intentions on the part of so many expensively educated people, literature can’t seem to nail commitment.

So, “Interior Chinatown” does not commit to the “all the world’s a stage” bit. It is, in fact, highly self-serious (for all of its jokes, few of which land) and ends in a long long sermon (there’s a kung fu fight after the sermon, which is both Yu’s best joke and a transparent toss to whoever has to make a movie out of this lame book). Some of the better sections of the book, in fact, describe Generic Asian Man’s parents’ lives, back in that generally-more-literary midcentury period. Yu unrepentantly milks the experience of midcentury Asians for pathos in what is, let’s recall, the story of a contemporary Generic man (who… may or may not work fairly successfully in show business? I guess Yu was trying to say he does, this might not have been the best choice for audiobook), despite the profound differences in situation between him and them.

What would a story of Generic Asian Man trying to become his beau ideal — Kung Fu Guy! the best Hollywood offers Asians! — look like if it committed to the bit? What would it be without the descent into family story, the stuff about divorce, and the speechifying about why Asians aren’t considered real Americans in the end? Well, it would be… a light novel! Perhaps not unlike that other Asian publishing phenomenon, “Crazy Rich Asians,” in that regard- self-aware, more formally experimental (though not in a way a sitcom couldn’t reproduce, and has), but mostly farcical. Yu isn’t quite funny enough to pull that sort of thing off, but light novels are quite honorable- arguably, that’s what P.G. Wodehouse, one of the all time greats of English language literature, produced.

The problem here isn’t Yu’s descents into pathos on their own, or even the ineptitude with which he shifts into these descents (though the latter is a problem). There’s some serious, serious lumping involved, on axes of class — Yu the white shoe lawyer/bestselling author speaking for a community whose working class majority faces much bigger problems than getting cast in cool roles — and origin — something tells me him claiming to speak for literally every American with roots in Asia, including casually throwing in South Asians and Middle Easterners into the malaise he fights, flies more with white readers than anyone else — but you could still make a decent novel with ideological holes. Hell, a lot of great novels are, like, eighty percent ideological holes!

I guess what makes this novel lousy is a gestalt of all of these problems and a general lack of funniness in the supposedly funny bits or interest in the bits that aren’t supposed to be funny. Maybe it’s also disappointment. There was a point, a sort of first draft of multiculturalism, where it seemed like diversity might actually improve American literature on some axis other than bare representation (which is an improvement! If dull writing is going to be a thing, people of color deserve the same chance to be rewarded for being dull as us whites!). Ishmael Reed, for instance, went out of his way to promote writing from outside establishment circles on every ethnic and class basis he could. He did this because he thought it would transform American literature in terms of form and content beyond the representational benefits- he could be cruelly cutting towards writers of color who he thought carried establishment writers, and he made a lot of enemies that way. Enemies or no, he was pretty successful, helping launch the careers of writers who did pretty well… for a while. But you can’t waltz into Harvard Books and grab a copy of a Shawn Wong novel (I’m sure the employees would order you one that’d be there in a week or two, but you know what I mean). Reed won in that he survives at all- he lost, in that the culture went in an altogether different direction. “The armies of this age are weak,” to quote another guy who literature also didn’t follow, but could have, to our benefit.

We’ve lost so much in the last few decades that we’ve lost the dream that we can get something other than sitcom material or rich kid masturbation in serious literature. That one of the central dreams we lost is also the name of a godawful sitcom that people pat on the head for formal experimentation that would have seemed crusty in Reed’s heyday — “Community” — is just an ironic insult to add to our injury. It’s pointless to pick on Yu in particular for these problems. “Chinatown Interior” is a symptom, not the disease itself, and there’s way worse out there. But I read it and it sucked and here I am. I’m not in charge of what any community, certainly not the Asian-American community, should like or want, but, from the cheap seats, it deserves better than this. **

Review – Yu, “Interior Chinatown”

Review – Caldwell, “The Age of Entitlement”

Peter BerardLeave a comment
Figured the real pig poop balls might get me in trouble with platforms and besides, this asshole deserves the real version of nothing except a boot in the ass

Christoper Caldwell, “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties” (2020) – It’s getting on towards the end of the year, and so I find myself thinking about the best and worst books I’ve read lately. Since I’ve instantiated “readings on the right” as a slot in my book rotation system, I can rely on it (and the random crap I read for birthday lectures) to fill up my “worst of” list. I don’t feel great about that, as it makes me look like I have an ideological litmus test for quality, which I don’t. It is what it is, as people now say, and I can console myself with the several literary libs who have also made this year’s shitlist so far.

But the bottom three — the ones that have earned my “half-star” rating, for those playing the home game — are all shining examples of contemporary right-wing brain rot, the sort of thing that really makes you (or, well, me) wish we could restrict their (ab)use of the English language for the aesthetic good of society. And they’re three quite different examples, which pleases me as much as I’m going to get pleasure from dogshit like this. Michael Mahoney, you may remember, is a boy nazi who has tried his hand at avant-garde literature and produced nothing but bloviation and commentary on lifestyle choices. I guess in this triptych he’d represent the contemporary right trying to be cool and cutting edge. Andy Ngo produced his pants-wetting “journalistic” account of the dangers of antifa, a laughably cack-handed and incompetent work. There’s the right as brave, honest truth-tellers, above ideology.

And then we come to Chris Caldwell, a journalist of sorts and a Claremont center hack (Claremont is a California school/tax-dodge whose lit review came to some prominence on the strength of having a sufficiently undiscriminating digestive tract to swallow Trumpism without the show of gagging other right wing rags made). Here we have the contemporary right trying to be intellectually relevant. One thing you can say for Caldwell is that he’s not trying to get intellectual relevance by aping anyone on the post-Buckley tree of conservative intellectuals. He’s too coy to come out and say “Trump is great” (his coyness is one of his nauseating qualities) – but he has to be able to express enthusiasm for Trump, his program, and what he represents. And he has to do so in a way that doesn’t come out of the box compromised by what a certain portion of Trump’s base — and something tells me this guy has browsed 4chan and congratulated himself for his edgy currentness in so doing — would call “countersignaling.”

And so, “Age of Entitlement.” I suppose I could, if I wanted to, applaud the ambition of this book, an attempt to read the whole period from the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 to the beginning of the Trump campaign in 2015 from a Trumpian (but coy and faux-reluctant) lens. But what distinguishes sweeping, ambitious historical readings from your uncle bitching on Facebook about kids these days? Well, a carefully constructed argument based in sources and a publisher’s imprimatur, generally. Caldwell has the latter, alas.

The thesis here is pretty simple: the Civil Rights movement, and it’s legal denouement in the Civil Rights Act and associated laws, upended the United States Constitution and ushered in a radical new understanding of governance in the US (file under “things conservatives believe that would rule if they were true”). Instead of a nation of laws and limited government, we became a nation of judicial fiat and big government. Rather than limiting behavior, civil rights laws made affirmative guarantees and empowered the federal government to make those guarantees real. It started with guarantees to black people but extended to women, other people of color, gay people, etc. This in turn can be understood as an instantiation of a class revolution- the dread Professional Managerial Class doing in their betters, lording it over the poor working stiffs and making them take sensitivity trainings in the bargain. By the end of the book he’s calling white men “second-class citizens.”

Christopher Caldwell’s Wikipedia entry refers to him as a “journalist.” Journalists can and have produced fine works of history. Journalists, the good ones anyway, have a respect for sources. But Caldwell does not. Most of his sources appear to be anecdotes from journalistic profile pieces. He repeats the kind of ludicrous claims that have become stock-in-trade for idiots, cutouts where knowledge would be, like that one that claims that every dollar any American governing body has spent on anything other than the military between (whichever year, usually sometime around when “those people” started “acting up” in a way the cracker in question started noticing) and (now) equals spending on “welfare” or “social justice,” therefore constituting “the most expensive failed social experiment in history” or whatever. Like the “100 million dead from communism” number, it’s a ridiculous claim, and unlike the communism one, doesn’t paper over anything real, just a category error. But who cares? It’s a meme. It’s all memes- one way in which Caldwell really has been “red-pilled” since his Weekly Standard days. That’s the quality of argument here.

I was curious what would happen when this ding dong got to Reagan and neoliberalism. How was he going to frame a story of expanding government power through decades of rule by politicians of both parties slashing the welfare state and denouncing “government as we know it?” Well, that was my turn for a category error. Because I have a class analysis, I understand what Reagan and Clinton did as part of a class war, a highly successful one- retrenching the scraps of power previous generations of workers wrested from the bourgeoisie. But this guy is actually dumb enough to be paid to write about politics and still think “government” exists in an existentially discrete category, subject to binary switches you can toggle- “small-good; big-bad.” And, of course, he’s both a right-winger and a member in good standing of the upper classes (even as he plays populist at times), so he doesn’t give a shit or notice what happens to poor or working people under these conditions. The government in some sense stayed the same size or got bigger (mostly due to police and military power but ok), gays got more accepted, immigration continued, the news was bad, Reagan or no Reagan. I shouldn’t have expected different.

Of course, if you think of “government” as a thing in and of itself, a building downtown sending out orders and goons according to its own logic, the “second class citizen” business as applied to privileged people the law attempts to blunt the privilege of — white men, usually — makes more sense. This is as good a reason as any to not make that category error, and one of the reasons why the Republican Party and the conservative movement could so easily get swallowed by someone who would say the quiet parts loud. The list of things you need to think in order to wedge such an understanding into the other accoutrements surrounding it — from the expansive power all of these people, libertarians included, want to give the cops, to the long long history of government action specifically propping up white supremacy up to and including literally conquering a continent and handing government land to white squatters and railroads, to a completely fictitious “freedom of association” Caldwell somehow finds in the Constitution — is… long. Arguably, that list is coextensive with white American culture (as opposed to other cultures to which white Americans can and sometimes do belong). Many of its greatest proponents think it’s not long for this earth. Let’s hope they’re right, for once. ‘

Review – Caldwell, “The Age of Entitlement”

Review – Ryan, “The Dynamite Freaks”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Donald Ryan, “The Dynamite Freaks” (1972) – I picked up this little pulp cheapie at a pretty great used bookstore in upstate New York. They had a lot of titles like these, what I think of as “exploitation paperbacks” – lurid titles and covers, stories ground out by the dozen by pseudonymous hacks. Now, people who collected those sort of books are dying or going to retirement homes, and their books — and the scifi and romance heads, and the collectors of dozens of cheap paperback editions of what were at the time deemed classics — are dumped on the used book market, to get scooped up by the likes of me. You see it more outside of higher-end used book markets like those in New York and Boston- upstate, Cincinnati, other places I’ve been.

Anyway! This exploitation novel exploits the New Left and the counterculture, especially the wave of bombing undertaken by groups like the Weather Underground. If you were expecting a sensitive sociological portrait of what would drive people to blow up banks, well, you’re not gonna get it here. You’re also not going to get much in the way of moralizing or a cop/right-wing protagonist bringing those dirty hippies to rough justice, either. Remember, these were contemporary exploitation novels, published by entrepreneurs trying to stay with a shifting audience and keep them buying.

There’s a lot more sex in “The Dynamite Freaks” than there is violence, though there’s a good amount of both. The main character, recent college graduate Carol Waring, and most other women in the book are described primarily via talking about their breasts (weirdly enough, this skeezy book very seldom talks about other sexualized parts of the body). Carol winds up in the clutches of a hippie communist terrorist gang basically because she was a grind in college and the first guy who paid attention to her (despite the author taking pains to convey that she is, in fact, very hot) was a hippie communist, so there you go. The closest thing to a “good guy” protagonist is a dude from her college who goes looking for Carol on behalf of her parents, and who muses that if only he had slept with her, she might be ok now. It’s that kind of book.

Selection pressures have drawn forth the best pulps of earlier eras, especially the thirties and forties, so when we think of pulp from that time, we think of tightly-crafted crime novels by the likes of Hammett and Chandler. To the best of my knowledge, no one’s done that for this era. The main blog dedicated to this stuff is “ain’t it cool” level criticism (run by a Trump chud to boot). So when you dip into this stuff like I do occasionally, you never know what you’re going to get, craft-wise. I do get the impression that latter-era pulp often disregarded plotting in favor of what could be called “sensation” (thanks, Spillane, thanks, Fleming), but that could be bias based on the aforementioned selection pressures.

In any event, there’s not much plot to “The Dynamite Freaks.” Carol starts out pretty in deep with dirty hippie Kurt and his band of miscreants, plotting to blow up a statue at her university graduation (and show off her body in a bikini under her robes- it is that kind of book), and only gets deeper until she meets a gruesome end borrowed from what happened to the Weatherman around the time they thought they were going to bomb a GI dance. The dude tracking her sucks at tracking and fighting (despite supposedly being a Green Beret?). The juice is all in the author (Donald Ryan is a pseudonym… or perhaps a “house name”) trying to twist the knife of transgression. For someone who grew up with the Internet, it’s quaint, almost touching, and at times disturbing by turns, what midcentury straight guy types do in art to shock. They seem to think that depictions of smoking doobies, of many different levels of violence, and of both consensual sex and of rape are more or less in the same category and will yield similar responses- shock and titillation. “Ryan” makes sure to throw in as many exacerbating details as possible- race stuff, family stuff. Violins for the poor little rich girl given everything by (a rather sexualized) daddy (with a heavy overtone of “watch this rich bitch get what she REALLY wants” as a sort of carnival barker come-on), etc.

I could appreciate the craft, such as it was. It also made me think about what “square” society thought was going on with the whole new left/counterculture thing. A lot changed, quickly- and even more seemed to be changing, superficially, while remaining fundamentally the same (different haircuts, same capitalism). There is a certain reciprocity between the sensationalism of the book and the motivations of the hippies in it. Spoilers- Kurt is taking money from a right-wing politician to do bombings that the politician can then use for political gain. In the end, Kurt declares he’ll take money from anyone to keep doing his thing- he’s only in it for power, more or less for its own sake.

A lot of people did a lot of shit in the sixties for a lot of reasons, and we look at them in various ways for various reasons of our own. We way overstate the importance of collegiate radicals like SDS/Weather Underground, for instance, and almost completely ignore waves of working class radicalism at the same time. Weather Underground might be the militant group in the world with the highest books-written-about (or by! lots of memoirs) to effective actions ratio… and hell, here they are, more or less, in pulp novel form. Maybe we keep thinking about the white collegiate radicals because they’re hard to figure- they could have been anything, they became… that, not just revolutionaries, but mostly shitty, vain revolutionaries who then all got book deals (the ones who actually seemed to mean it didn’t get rich and often wound up in prison for decades). Maybe they thought like Kurt did, that they could somehow ride their youthful bravado and a changing society to ultimate power, severely misunderstood the situation, and used their privilege to come back in… or maybe I’m just reading into a cheap, sleazy, diverting airplane read. ***

Review – Ryan, “The Dynamite Freaks”

Review – Macdonald, “Based on a True Story”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Norm Macdonald, “Based On a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016) (read by the author) – Norm Macdonald was probably the funniest motherfucker I have shared this planet with thus far. My roommate and I had tickets to see him perform in Boston when we learned about his death. Like everyone else, we had no idea that he was sick. From the cheap seats, Macdonald was what I think of as “pure comedian.” He wasn’t notably charming, or handsome or compellingly ugly, he didn’t push envelopes in terms of hot button content or naughty words, wasn’t from a fresh identity category (don’t think Canadian counts), didn’t have an angle to him other than being just extraordinarily funny and utterly committed to the bit, to making people laugh. I’ve known of a few people a bit like that, not as successful as Macdonald, naturally, and they can make the lives of the people around them hell, but it really is it’s own kind of art.

I don’t know whether the story that someone asked Macdonald for a celebrity memoir and he handed in this comic novel is true, but it would make sense that Macdonald would seize the opportunity such an opening would give him. Your pure comic, more even than most comics, relies on the absurdity of life in general for material. What’s a more compound absurdity than the celebrity tell-all memoir and the life it kinda-sorta depicts?

So, Macdonald tells “his” story, using one of his go-to joke modes, old-timey phrasing and anecdotes summoning up hardscrabble pseudo-wisdom, as a tone and even plot structure for the whole book. This version of Macdonald is both a wholesome son of the rural great white north and a deviant of the first order. He regales us with cliches of rural life at least as funny as Stella Gibbons’ in “Cold Comfort Farm” before bringing us to Star Search and Saturday Night Live, where he makes his way via threats of violence, strategic illegal morphine sales, and sheer delusional self-belief. There’s a brief stint in prison for stalking Sarah Silverman, then he gets caught up in gambling.

This is where “Based on a True Story” comes relatively close to living up to its name- Macdonald was a problem gambler. He talks about it as hinging on that one moment, after you’ve thrown the dice but before they land- the moment of hope. I’m not a gambler, but that made me relate. Macdonald decides to throw away the credit he had built in Las Vegas in one last gambling spree, either making millions of dollars and buying a ranch in Montana, or losing it all and killing himself with dilaudid. He forces his (irl friend and cohost) Adam Eget, depicted as a manchild gambling prodigy along for the ride, winds up in hock to a mysterious figure in the Salton Sea, meets God but doesn’t pay much attention to Him, and tries to kidnap his ghostwriter, a fallen intellectual who occasionally bursts in to tell his version of the story.

Macdonald read the story himself (except for ghost writer parts- I thought they were Judah Friedlander, but were not) and so nails the delivery on every line. Not everything is a laugh line, of course, but he masterfully builds the tension and plays bait and switch with expectations to lead to gut busting laughs throughout. Things never go to the place, emotionally, you’ll think they’ll go. He’s never sentimental — part of his genius was the way he played with sentimentality but never gave in to it — so it meant that when I felt nice hearing his voice after his death, there was no bullshit heartstring tug to cheapen it. It was just a hilarious, well-written comic novel that played with memoir, celebrity culture, and crime fiction. It was funny, the one thing Macdonald wanted to be, and the one thing he was more than anyone. *****

Review – Macdonald, “Based on a True Story”

Review – Cook, “Charcoal”

Peter BerardLeave a comment

Garrett Cook, “Charcoal” (2021) – I got this book as a special preorder from Clash Books, which puts the “lit” back in literary, as they say! It’ll be out for the rest of you hoi polloi next year. I knew to order it because I’ve been following Garrett Cook’s career since our days at the dear departed Marlboro College. Lit and Garrett promised a literary horror experience, and delivered.

We begin in the scariest place of all- art school! Shannon Rodriguez is a student MassArt who has talent and drive but also substantial self-doubt. This is made worse by the fact she’s a Dominicana in a largely white male dominated space and someone with a lot of childhood trauma. Professors skeeve on her, “that guy” that’s in every class doesn’t take her seriously. Art is hard.

What for it but to become part of a Faustian lineage? Thomas Kemp, a nihilistic artist in Victorian London dedicates himself to wickedness and sadism, making art out of other’s pain, eventually going so far as to inflict as much as he can himself in order to depict it. He has his ashes, when he dies, made into drawing charcoals. A skeevy professor suggests Shannon use them (for a consideration, of course) to really bring out the artist in her. She does, and it does, but it threatens to bring her down. Kemp himself was part of a chain of artists sponsored by a shadowy supernatural force, one interested in pushing art and evil to its extremes. The opportunities and costs are high, as is usually the deal with your Faust situations.

One good thing Cook does is vary up prose style considerably between works. There is none of the flippancy found in his earlier “bizarro” (roughly, surrealist horror) work. That’s not to say everything is self-serious, and the close attention to interpersonal detail in one or two relationships that you can see in other works comes out here- dorm room romances amidst communal couches and cheap weed. But Kemp and the charcoals bring Shannon to another world, as manifested by the murders of crows that follow Shannon around — in reality? In imagination? — consuming her traumas, past and present, making her…

Well, here, Cook presents few easy answers. Just what is the relationship between monstrosity and art? Is Shannon producing better work under Kemp’s influence, or is that just something her douchebag professors and peers say? What exactly is the potential cost to Shannon (note, it involves murder, but mostly of people who suck)? “Charcoal” was written and published in the midst of numerous debates about the relationship between art and artist. It also comes from a scene, horror fiction, that has not altogether handled these questions well (on any “side”) and depicts an art world that’s pretty bad with reconciling morality (or just functional, non-harmful behavior) with its ideas of genius. At some points in the book, Cook seems to come down on the side of the idea that artists of sufficient evil do deserve to be cast aside, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the point, or the only perspective taken.

I don’t want to spoil the ending, but in the end, Shannon has to reckon with her own power and agency, and when she does, this opens doors. It’s not a direct splitting off with the evil engine behind her artistic rise- it is not a “cancellation.” I’m not entirely sure what it is. A reconciliation, perhaps? In any event, this was a thought-provoking and well-written work, and you all should buy it when the publisher starts putting it out for more wide release, especially all you horror heads. ****’

Review – Cook, “Charcoal”