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n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal. n+1 posts new, web-only material once or twice a week.
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Number Three, Fall 2005
Annotated Table of Contents
THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION
A Boom Deferred
The economy was very busy on the surface with its creative destruction, but that didn't conceal a basic stasis. It seemed the important things would never change, and maybe we'd grown up into a stilled world.
Dating presents itself as an education in human relationships. In fact it's an anti-education. You could invent no worse preparation for love, for marriage, than the tireless pursuit of the perfect partner.
Ballad of the Stockholder Intellectual
As I streaked across the podium, landing a cream pie on a CEO's chubby face, not so unlike my own, I thought: What will they do with me now?
Under conditions of the reading crisis, everything a writer does, no matter how self-serving and reprehensible, becomes a blow in the service of literature. If "books" are "good," as the mantra goes, you don't have to face how good or bad your book actually is.
POLITICS
On Torture and Parenting
---
Marco Roth
If parenting, even responsible parenting, made me feel like a torturer, it wasn't exactly because I'm melodramatic or overwrought, but because the official torturers now conceive of themselves in the same terms as the parenting manuals. They, too, are technicians of the naked human personality.
More Blood, Less Oil
---
Michael T. Klare
Life during the Twilight Era will be unpleasant and occasionally painful, but not unbearable: rising gasoline prices, periodic energy shortages, and local oil wars. The Nightfall Era will be another story.
The Chatroom Society
---
Francois Cusset
"Dialogue" is now the ultimate existential commodity: entering into it offers one's only chance to have sex.
EROS
Radiohead, or the Philosophy of Pop
---
Mark Greif
And all of us lovers of music, with ears tuned precisely to a certain kind of sublimity in pop, are quick to detect pretension, overstatement, and cant about pop-in any attempt at a wider criticism-precisely because we feel the gap between the effectiveness of the music and the impotence and superfluity of analysis. This means we don't know about our major art form what we ought to know.
Two Fairy Tales
---
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Once there lived a father who couldn't find his children. He went everywhere, asked everyone - had his little children come running in here? But whenever people responded with the simplest of questions - "What do they look like, what are their names, are they boys or girls?" - he didn't know how to answer. He simply knew that his children were somewhere, and he kept looking.
First Love
---
Pankaj Mishra
It is hard now, in these days of visual excess, to recall the sensuous poverty of the towns I lived in: the white light falling all day from the sky upon a flat land only slightly relieved by bare rock and the occasional tree, and houses of mud and grimy brick, among which any trace of color could provoke a sense of wonder. It explains the eagerness with which I awaited Soviet Life.
TWO VIEWS ON CLASS
The Neoliberal Imagination
---
Walter Benn Michaels
The function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard.
John Thomas and Lady Jane
---
J. D. Daniels
You want to wear a trucker hat? Go on and wear it. Relax. Wear it right. Don't be shy. Downward mobility - unlike access to higher education or to white-collar wages - is free of charge. Call it gravity. All that keeps you afloat in the guilt-ridden middle class is the force of your will.
THANATOS
A Violent Season
---
Emily Votruba
The lady boxers are eating clean, going to the gym several hours every day, rubbing Albolene all over before mounting the elliptical machine to sweat; sweating, spitting, popping diuretics and laxatives, neglecting their boyfriends and girlfriends.
Or Things I Did Not Do or Say
---
Benjamin Kunkel
To postpone the flushing of the toilet until the bender wore off! That was just too much. And yet in fairness, why should he suspect that another man had snuck in and used the broken toilet in his tiny cabin on the south face of Horse Mountain, and now stood in the bathtub waiting to kill him?
What Independent Film?
---
Andrew Bujalski
Some folks compromise their work to get it to a wider audience. Other folks keep the work pure but compromise instead their sanity, or their health, in promoting it. Others still compromise nothing at all and leave their films on a shelf to maybe be uncovered by future archaeologists.
APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA
A Reply to the Editors
---
James Wood
Jose Saramago, Saul Bellow, Graham Swift, Jeffrey Eugenides, Philip Roth, Victor Pelevin, Allan Hollinghurst, Amit Chadhuri, Monica Ali, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Kazuo Ishiguro, Muriel Spark, J. F. Powers, V. S. Pritchett, W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Vikram Seth, Anne Enright, David Means, Geoff Dyer, David Bezmozgis, James Kelman, Marilynne Robinson, Richard Yates, Francisco Goldman, V. S. Naipaul, and indeed Christina Stead.
REVIEWS
On Franco Moretti
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Elif Batuman
It is rumored that, in a talk on novels "from the periphery" of world literature, Moretti claimed to have read "only the introductions" - and then, during the Q&A session, a professor from the Spanish department tricked him into betraying such details from an obscure Argentinean novel as could only have been known by someone who had actually read the whole thing. Moretti was allegedly flustered, and said something like: "Well, I don't really remember, maybe I read it in the airplane."
Homo Freakonomicus
---
Meghan Falvey
Levitt's imaginary calculating individual is the ideal subject of neoliberal economic reform, the expansion of the market into all areas of life.
On Salman Rushdie
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Siddhartha Deb
I had read and admired Rushdie's earlier novels and possessed a certain understanding of literature, of its work of resistance against tyranny and dogma. In those days, Rushdie's books appeared to be books, not events, and appeared to stand at an angle to the history they were narrating.
On Reality TV
---
Mark Greif
The "friends" on Friends were an ideological group, propagandists for a bland class of the rich in a sibling-incest sitcom. If only Judge Judy could sit in judgment on them, once! If only Cops would break down their door and throw them against the wall!
