Caleb Crain. The Wreck of the Henry Clay. Self-published. May 2009.

On December 7th, 2006, in a blog entry on "Offprints in the Digital Age," honestly reprinted in its entirety, n+1 friend and frequent contributor Caleb Crain assured his readers, "not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed." But he has now gone and done just that! Not just his essays but the blog itself, "Steamboats Are Ruining Everything." By doing so, he offers a Quixotic and dandified challenge, a well-mannered provocation to a legion of conventional wisdoms about what I now sadly must call something like "word culture." Why turn your blog back into a printed book when the whole point of blogging and reading blogs was thought to lead to an inexorable emancipation from the bindings of the page, the severe duties of print?

Although that question is never addressed directly, an answer of sorts emerges over 400 pages, spanning six years of blog posts. Hardly a member of the dreaded MSM when he began blogging, Crain was nonetheless an established and highly-regarded freelance journalist for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Nation, a former editor of Lingua Franca, the review of academic life that ceased publication in 2001, and a scholar of 19th century American history and literature. Crain tells us that he started the blog after being offered free software and web-hosting in a trial for Harvard alumni. (It's worth noting how "new media" forms were deliberately marketed via such perks to those positioned to drive change from the top. As we've seen with the Kindle. More recently, Jeff Bezos gifted the device to book publishers and literary agents, thereby enlisting them as footsoldiers in the liquidation—er, future—of their own trade.) In his introduction, Crain admits to diverse motives, some vaguely professional—posting corrections and addenda to published pieces, trying to identify an audience or community of readers who might like his work but not have time to track him through all the various publications he writes for. He is forthright about the fact that he had no need to "break in" to the old media establishment, nor did he imagine he was breaking it down. Read More

Matthew Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft. Penguin Press. May 2009.

Near the beginning of A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley reflects upon why, with his life at loose ends around him, he feels organized only as a fan of the New York Giants: "Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it…. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge."

What succor Exley found in football—age, tradition, directness, honest brutality, and the men who embody these virtues—Matthew Crawford finds in what he calls "the trades." Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor; it is an attempt to restore dignity to, and propose renewed pedagogical emphasis on, such work in the softer, more circumspect era of the "knowledge economy." Crawford has worked as an electrician intermittently throughout his life, and now owns a motorcycle-repair shop. His reflections on the pleasures and demands of manual labor are thoughtful and, frequently, inspiring. But where the Exley of A Fan's Notes was an alcoholic washup, Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, was a postdoctoral fellow on Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His book is not only an encomium to manual work but a "cultural polemic" in the tradition of Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic, and Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Crawford's suggestion is that our growing preference for the legerdemain of knowledge work over what he is tempted to call "real" work might help us understand what is amiss in the culture. Read More

Dear Friends,

For years we've puzzled over how to get the stories and essays in each issue of the magazine to people who couldn't quite get them on paper—because they were in another country, or far away from any known bookstores, or because, let's face it, they just didn't have $11.95 (now $13.95) lying around. But we couldn't figure it out. Now, with the help of our new friends at Scribd.com, we have. The contents of issue 8 are hereby available in their original format for between $1 and $3, depending on length. Click on the following links to preview and buy—and thank you, as always, for reading.

THE CENTRE DAILY TIMES – State College, PA

I lied about my age to get my first job. I guess I figured 12 years old wasn't a strict cutoff for work as a paperboy, just an indicator, and other, stronger indicators told me I was ready. I doubt the delivery driver I met on a Sunday before dawn to show me the route cared much for such details either. I was committed, competent, lived nearby, hit puberty early, and had a father who would do my route when I was sick—what more could he ask for from an 11-year-old paperboy?

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

March

We, The Blue Mist, the devoted fans of Kentucky basketball, have been watching The Door for twenty-four hours. A Memphis TV station has trained a web-cam on The Door, which leads to the University of Memphis athletic department. The video stream currently registers 12,611 views. There's also sound, and so The Mist can hear cars passing, the camera operators tittering. They must find it funny that we want to watch The Door.

Our hope is that John Calipari, Memphis's basketball coach, will walk through The Door and tell the camera he's leaving Memphis to coach at the University of Kentucky. Really, even to catch a glimpse of Coach Cal, as we've already come to call him, would be enough. In seventeen seasons at Memphis and U Mass, Coach Cal has amassed the second-best winning percentage of any active college coach. He's been named the Naismith Coach of the Year twice, one of only two repeat winners of the award. Read More

Dear Editors:

Dear Mark,

When you and I read Kierkegaard's Either/Or this spring, in a group that met every morning for a week in the second-floor cafeteria of the Houston Street Whole Foods, we had many arguments about the nature of marriage. Now I seem to be joining you in another, though our private conversation has become, in something like the ambiguous transformation wrought by marriage itself, public. Either/Or, as you know, is divided into two parts, the first written by a Seducer, who approaches the problem of human relations aesthetically, and the second by a Judge, who approaches it ethically. Neither approach proves satisfactory; a better title for the book would be "Neither/Nor." To the surprise of those of us who know you personally, your essay has caused some in the blogosphere to mistake you for a figure like Kierkegaard's Seducer. In disagreeing with you, I suppose I run the parallel risk of  sounding like the Judge, who is, I believe, in somewhat greater danger of losing his soul, because in order to preserve decorum, he seems willing to smother the spark that makes human relations possible at all. Keeping the danger in mind, I will risk answering you. Read More

Dear Editors,

Let me begin by saying that I’m an openly non-straight guy (in a long-term relationship of 10+ years) who is very much in favor of gay-marriage rights, not because I have ever favored the institution of marriage as a bourgeois construct to limit sexual freedom or otherwise constrain people from being happy, but because I think that any two people (regardless of sexual orientation) should be able to avail themselves of the same rights as any other two people; this is a fundamental inequality that frankly harms gays as much as straights.

Dear fellow editors,

When I first read "On Repressive Sentimentalism" during production of issue 8, I felt that it made at least one of the classic rhetorical errors attributed to Utopian writers: a tendency to insist on the wished for "ought" at the expense of acknowledging the actual "is." This struck me, in particular, in Greif's account of abortion, when he claims that "the idea that [abortions] are inevitably tragic is just false."