The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

Happy refresh week. New emoji, new category-award names, this time taken from the contributors’ list from the last issue of 1975, fifty years ago. No particular reason except ‘why not’. I’d especially suggest you use the link above to learn more about the gone-too-soon David C.K. McClelland, who unfortunately lacks a Wikipedia page but is still a very notable figure.

⏰ Fiction

“Risk, Discipline” by Andrew Martin. Two Ellises. kitchen, kindness, kink. A funny story about kink and companionship that has just enough resonance to linger, but not so much as to kill the joke. Your mileage may vary when it comes to the Joe Swanberg-esque zany banter; you can take these moments as either actual attempts at humor or a self-aware take on what an annoying millennial writer would find funny; it’s equally pretty-good either way. What makes the story special is the way Martin weaves the thread of queerness (whether you think it’s “just” sexual queerness and/or genderqueerness, there’s certainly room under the umbrella) gently beneath everything, unsaid but not really unsaid. The basic thematic point, regardless – that everyone involved knows the narrator better and more deeply than he thinks he’s being known – is a genuinely resonant portrayal of one of the central potholes of the depressive mind. Read a certain way, this is a story about Chelsea breaking the Egg Prime Directive and/or Doing Kink Wrong by involving alcohol and what seems to be a shit-ton of cocaine¹; still, despite there being an obvious annoyance level to her and her hubby’s shtick, I appreciate that Martin is ultimately not only forgiving of their foibles but actually has them prompt an emotional breakthrough for his protagonist. This is also an exceptionally elegant excerpt; I would never have pegged² this as taken from a novel. Take note, editors: Authors can be really well-behaved, they just need rules.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“The Edge of Adolescence” by Hua Hsu. No McClellands. lime, line, limitless. Really strange reading this tossed-off little piece, in which Hsu takes his son on a trip to an art show about teenagerdom and then to a theme park, and mostly looks at him, talks to him, and thinks about how much he loves him, in the context of Within the Context, reviewed immediately below, which takes forever-adolescence as its central point of attack. Hard not to think that the difference between Hsu, who loves gift shops and finds it “easy to understand the modern American dream of a perpetual childhood”, and Trow, who’d be red-faced at the briefest exposure, is largely one of affect and era. (Hsu, a Xennial, moved through a Berkeley snob phase that was largely culturally normalized, if still alienating, before eventually arriving somewhere warmer.) Hsu’s take on an art review doesn’t really work – he’s too caught up in figuring out what evidence fits his theme to focus enough on the stuff itself – and on the page, the subtle qualities of a nice day get lost among weepy commonplaces. (“…I felt a pang of nostalgia for those days when my son was very small, hand permanently in mine, and anything seemed possible.”) But it’s only a five-minute read; might be worth taking a flyer and seeing the sights.

⏰ Random Pick

“Within the Context of No-Context” by George W.S. Trow. (Nov 17, 1980.) One Whitaker. ad, ado, adolescent. I’m sorely tempted to do a lengthy stylistic parody, but I’ll spare you. A sprawling, intermittently brilliant but more frequently numbing indictment of, basically, The Culture Industry. It’s very hard to read this as anything other than “Adorno for the eighties”, a concept which is both pointless (Adorno is forever) and sort of brilliant, if only because Trow can use the language of endless, meaningless repetition; thus reproducing the gestalt of the very thing he’s mad about. Still, I pretty quickly grew weary of the affected-didacticism segments – while that mode is often how an intelligent person with a weak imagination works through their thoughts (I would know!), it’s hard to bear the affect of condescension when your interior self is not the one being condescended to. (In other words, I’m allowed to repeat my thoughts over and over as if I’m dumb, but if you repeat your thoughts over and over to me, I’ll know you think I’m dumb, and that’s irritating.³) There are three moments the essay decides to shake off this style: A look at the magazine People and the way it’s shaped by a cultural stagnation Trow attributes largely to television, a vibrant, funny essay-within-the-essay about Trow’s time working at the World’s Fair and how it replicated the aura of television without much of the fun, and, weirdest, a kind of poetic short story or imagined history about the Pointer Sisters seeing Josephine Baker and, later, being unable to tailor their act to a Harlem audience. Each of these moments is compelling, the first especially to periodical nerds (if you’re reading this…) to whom Trow grants an extended discourse as to the difference between the authoritative voice of earlier decades and the desperate popularity-chasing voice of the TV age. The last has troublesome or at least questionable politics⁴, as does much of this piece – Trow basically implies the world as a consequential place is over, that everything is now weightless, which isn’t actually that different from thinking things used to be better, whereas Adorno at least still thinks there’s value in critique, that there are still difficult things to be grasped, and thus that there is such a thing as insight, improvement, progress. (Even if that progress isn’t exactly in the room with us.)

It’s easy for a pessimist in the twenty-first century to look prescient, and Trow’s theories map somewhat neatly onto, you know, Marvel and TikTok and Trump, oh my… if you squint a bit. Popularity is less important and less popular than ever, and even Charlie D’Amelio would probably not sell newsstand copies of People anymore, but among the masses, the inauthentic⁵ cultivation of selfhood reigns supreme. Trow ends with a shout of embarrassment, and it’s suddenly hard not to think of the whole work as an avoidant response to rejection. Of course, we’re all rejected by capitalism – that’s the point, as Trow points out; that’s what makes us want to keep buying. The sane response is to stop and look around, but sanity is not the object here, and if you don’t keep moving, the tribe will scoff and shout insults as they leave you in the dust.

🥐 Something Extra

Initiative had such an annoyingly bad last twenty or so minutes that I’m tempted to discount the frequently gorgeous, often wrenching four and a half hours that preceded it. Can’t quite.

Sunday Song:

(from the Pitchfork year-end songs list)