Issue #28/83, February 10 - 17, 2000 
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THE BARRY MANILOW FAN CLUB TOURS MOSCOW
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Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society Since Gorbachev |
A friend of mine once told me about a secret world inhabited by her hopelessly ugly cousins on Long Island. Their lives, she said, centered around the local chapter of the Barry Manilow Fan Club. I thought she was making it up, but she insisted this was a real, self-sufficient social world occupied by dozens of people who had no notion that they were pariahs. And in their little world, she told me, these people have their passionate love affairs, their dynastic struggles, their triumphs and defeats, happily unaware that theirs is a Lilliputian parody of the larger world outside.
Slogging through this collection of articles on contemporary Russian culture by American academics was like reading the Barry Manilow Fan Club’s account of its Russian tour. With a few honorable exceptions, these articles are formulaic, CV-filling cant designed to repeat certain key jargon terms often enough to please an audience that fears the great world outside the seminar-room and believes that tagging it with academic spray-pisses will render it familiar and safe.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t think they were poets. Looking back, that’s the worst effect of the ‘80s theory-orgy: convincing a lot of teacher’s pets with good work habits and no spark of courage or style that they were no mere pedants but wild, daring, creative writers. The magical syllogism which worked this mass delusion was simple:
Benjamin was a critic and a poet.
I’ve read Benjamin, so...
I’m a critic and a poet!
The teachers’ pets were encouraged to repeat this incantation as needed, substituting different eminences for the grease they produced:
Barthes makes up witty titles;
I’ve read Barthes;
I can make up witty titles!
And unfortunately, they have. What constitutes a witty title in the mind of an American academic drudge? Very simple: a three-word alliterated list. It’s astounding, the utter sameness of imagination, the stunning conformity, these people so unselfconsciously reveal. Here are some of the titles these budding Benjamins and burgeoning Bartheses have given their masterpieces:
"Public Offerings: MMM and the Marketing of Melodrama"
"Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv "
"From the Toilet to the Museum: Memory and Metamorphosis of Soviet Trash"
Was there a three-for-one special on "M"s when these articles were written?
Take that first title: it starts with "MMM" and then adds "Marketing" and "Melodrama." That’s five "M"s in one title--a new Duke University Press record! It’s a close race, though; next we have "Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem"--three m-words in a single phrase! And a post-colon subtitle naming an author, "Marinina"--another "M," free of charge! The third title is clearly the work of a mere novice; it manages only three "M"s: "Museums," "Memory," and "Metamorphosis." No doubt its author will mature, with much mudraya mentoring, into a four- or even five-M scholar who will look back with a wry chuckle on a time when s/he could muster no more than three pitiful Ms.
But why "M"? Does the humming sound comfort frightened amateur writers, remind them of the wommmmmmmmmmb? Or does it echo the drone of agreement, the "Mmmmmmm!" that reverberates from nodding heads when one makes a clever point at seminar? No, nothing so subtle. These writers simply borrow the first phoneme of their topic-noun and extend it to the rest of their title. "MMM" is the company name; coming up with two alliterative nouns to fill out the title is as easy for these identikit writers as filling in a paint-by-numbers beachscape. If you’re writing about Putin, then you go for Ps, not Ms, and call your essay "Pondering Putin." Bring in a cowriter and soon you could be "Pondering Putin with Professor Plum." Or "Porky Pig," if you want to do the hip low-culture thing. Who knew great writing was so easy?
The only other trope aspiring culture-studies essayists need to learn is that staple of Modernist poetics, the disjunctive list. Like alliteration, this is a very simple, venerable trope, suitable for use by amateurs. In fact, it’s been a bit passe with real writers for the last few decades; Howl took it about as far as it could be stretched almost fifty years back ("backyard green tree cemetery dawns," "angry fix" and so on); real writers moved on to new tricks long ago.
But for the contributors to this volume, ignorance of literature really is bliss. As far as they know, disjunctive lists are still kool, kuspy, and kutting edge. So they write titles in which the alliteration links carefully mismatched nouns (usually abstract vs. concrete or high-culture vs. low). Take "Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem": three disjunctive nouns, with the third, "Mayhem," serving as punchline. (Not a good punchline; like real poetry, real stand-up comedy is way out of these people’s league.) Sometimes the disjunction can’t be fitted into an alliterative list, in which case the nouns must clash in a louder, more obvious way; this yields oxymoronic pairs like "From the Toilet to the Museum."
Notice how familiar "Toilet [to] Museum" sounds? Didn’t that Duchamp guy put a urinal in an art gallery oh, about a hundred years ago? Didn’t that shock people sometime before the First World War? And didn’t it stop shocking people sometime around 1921? Of course! After all, these are only pseudo-shocks: safe, belated reenactments of old explosions, a Westworld gunfight for flabby tourists. That’s why the use of words like "subversive" and "undercutting" is so laughable in the context of academic articles by culture-studies drudges: these are the least daring people in the world. They want safety, even if they have to mime daring to gain it.
And safe they are, convinced that their Manilow-writing is the real thing. To break up their mutual-vanity publishing business by saying to the contributors to this anthology, "But you people can’t write! You’d be laughed out of a Chico State poetry workshop! What makes you think you can play around with Wallace Stevens’s toolkit without any talent or study?" would be genuinely subversive of important things (academic careers, CVs); therefore, of course, such questions are not allowed.
What makes the gauche poetics of these articles so striking is that their topic is often the role of "Kitsch," as in Theresa Sabonis-Chafee’s "Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet Society." How’s that for Kitschy alliteration? Not just those two Ks in Kommie and Kitsch, but six sibilantss (or as Daffy would put it, "thithk thibilantth") after the colon! Sssssssssmooth, kkkkkkkomrade! Ssssssmooth as a Ssssssseal in an oilsssssssslickkkk! To describe such articles accurately, we must qualify "Kitsch" with one of these people’s favorite prefixes, "meta-". This gives us the term "meta-kitsch, " "kitsch about kitsch"; grotesquely bad writers presuming to analyze what they consider bad culture.
The article which offers the funniest example of meta-kitsch in action is Laurie Essig’s "Publicly Queer: Representations of Queer Subjects and Subjectivities in the Absence of Identity." The title uses a currently popular verbal trick even simpler than alliteration: outright repetition of a positive term, in this case the term "queer." Like much of the vocabulary in this anthology, "queer" represents fossilized courage. Once it took courage to call yourself "queer" under any circumstances; in many places--say a bar in Laramie, Wyoming--it still does. Do it there, and you may be beaten to death and hung on a fence. But the word "queer" in a volume of cultural studies articles from Duke University has another function: it works a kind of blessing on the entire text. It helps Laurie Essig fill out her CV; it helps the press with their grooming rites. Thus the actual purpose of Essig’s article is to repeat the word "queer" as many times as possible. And she does; the article reads like that Far Side cartoon in which the dog hears its master’s scolding as "Bla bla bla GINGER! Bla bla GINGER bla bla!"--except here the word is not "GINGER" but "queer."
To the extent that Essig has a point beyond waving the semantic flag, it is the usual one made by American academics: that Russia is lamentably unlike America. In this case her objection is that Russian homosexual practice is far too male-oriented. She asserts that in Russian culture, "Lesboerotic acts were...seen as an illness to be ‘cured’"--completely missing the fact, familiar to everyone in Russia, that lesbianism is a very common and accepted practice among whose greatest proponents are Russian men; they like to watch.
But it is Essig’s dramatization of herself as the Great White Explorer of Russian male homosexuals’ public-toilet and club scene that is most entertaining. She ventured into the very depths of the clubs, and is no less proud of her rigor as participant-observer than her courage: "...counting dancing and mingling bodies is always an imprecise science." Indeed! Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just trying to mess up my data?
As a trophy of her Moscow safari, Essig produces a photo of herself in what she apparently takes to be drag, posing as a gay Russian man cruising the pleshka. The photo (see above) shows a squat American woman (quite obviously a woman and an American), all in black, glaring off to the side as if worried someone might speak to her. She appears to be costumed as a gaucho, with a wide-brimmed black hat, black jacket, huge belt buckle and black pants. She’s standing beside a fountain, every muscle tense, as if she were waiting to meet 007 in downtown Pyongyang. It’s a wonderful picture. I wouldn’t advise anyone to buy this book, but if you can find it in a bookstore, rip out Essig’s photo (on page 286) and hang it on your wall.
God, how these jumped-up civics teachers love to imagine themselves as secret agents! Back in the high-theory years, the coolest texts (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault) were published by an outfit that called itself "Foreign Agents." Its logo was a faceless spy-figure in wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat, looking sinister and cool. Essig has assumed in this photo exactly the pose of the figure in that logo. Of course she isn’t really a secret agent, and her men’s-toilet visits posed no risk other than reducing the guys really cruising the park to hysterical laughter--but that’s the sort of safe, stylized bravery these people love. The rise of academic publication in the United States has offered a host of Walter Mitty secret agents the chance to play squirt-gun war on paper barricades, mimic courage in any realm but the one that matters: the academic hallways in which they live.
To be fair, the wannabe-coolsters wrote only about half the dreck in this anthology. For every Laurie Essig playing out spy fantasies, there’s an old-school Slavic-Studies twit mumbling through his tweeds. The tweedy, conservative, Russophile faction is represented in articles like "Between A Rock and A Hard Place: Holy Rus’ and Its Alternatives in Russian Rock Music." The authors, Julia P. Friedman and Adam Weiner, clearly know nothing about either rock music or literary criticism. You might think this would handicap them in writing about Russian rock, but using a few familiar tricks and a massive, unquestioned belief in the superiority of the Russian Soul, they muddle through. And I do mean "muddle."
All they really want to do in their article is quote some poetic lyrics by their favorite Russian songsters like Bashlachev and Grebenshchikov. But they have to pretend to provide an up-to-date critical context. So, hopelessly lost, they begin by citing Eliot’s hoary claim that the artist can only be original within a tradition to prove that the really good, valuable sort of Russian rock stars have nothing to do with "models they perceive as foreign and inorganic"--i.e., Western rock. In other words, they cite Eliot on the importance of tradition in art to prove that the best Russian rockers have all ignored Western rock, the indisputable and direct ancestor of Russian rock! If that doesn’t seem to make sense, that’s because it doesn’t. It makes you long for the theory people; at least when they make no sense, they have the courtesy to kick dirt over it, like a polite dog. This, by contrast, is proud, brazen idiocy.
Well, maybe they know the Russian stuff a bit better...but no! Not a hope! In an article supposedly devoted to Russian nationalism in pop music, the authors don’t mention Letov or Grazhdanskaya Oborona. Weiner and Friedman are simply old-school Slavic Department dweebs, and their article is a lame excuse for a lengthy tour of pop lyrics expressing "the Russian soul."
Friedman and Weiner actually believe in The Russian Soul. No, seriously--they do! They describe singers’ minds wafting "Eastward, homeward" and "artists whose music most vividly depicts their native land," informing the reader that Bashlachev "...followed Dostoevsky’s axiom by turning his art to the mysteries of the national character." After a page of this blather, you know it won’t be long before that sloppy drunk The Russian Soul shows up. Bashlachev and Shevchuk "are [both] remarkable for a Russianness of form and content." This, you understand, is taken to be a good thing. Indeed, "Shevchuk’s demeanor is so intrinsically Russian..." that his songs are "...a convincing expression of Russian national sentiment."
Since Russian pop wells up from The Russian Soul, a spontaneous product of pure national consciousness, the authors don’t feel any need to consider any possible foreign sources. Apparently Russians just got specific instructions from the R.S. to get electric guitars. Then, decades later, derivative figures like Chuck Berry and Little Richard stole what the Russian Soul had created. Or it could just be that the authors of this article are so totally ignorant of Western pop that they couldn’t even fake it. I’m sure I’m wrong about that--but just in the interests of science, I invite Friedman and Weiner to take a two-hour closed-book exam on the history of rock music. It’d be fun. You know where to contact me, folks.
Well, that about wraps it--no, no, wait! Like the good fairy popping up after the witch has ruined the Princess’s christening, a few good writers grace this volume. Some can even write clearly about interesting topics. Heading this group is E. K. Zelensky. Her article on children’s culture in contemporary Russia was actually fun to read. Nancy Condee’s discussion of tattooing was a good, informative, cant-free survey of a really wild, interesting field.
But they are the few; for every one who finds a way to speak honestly in a human voice, the universities turn out a hundred Essigs, doing parodies of courage, or Friedman/Weiners, coughing more bookdust into the already choking air. There are so many of them, and they speak only to each other, a huge Barry Manilow Fan Club in which every ugly wretch continually reassures every other that they are looking particularly fine, especially dazzling...ah, you were never lovelier! Ah, the wit, the originality, the dazzle! Sheer delight! Winner of the Wheelchair Races! Star Sprinters of the Special Olympics! Tallest Dwarves in the World!
Check out Dr. Dolan’s new book, "Poetic Occasion From Milton To Wordsworth" published by St. Martin’s Press, or order it on amazon.com .
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