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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 Two, Spring 2005
Annotated Table of Contents
Underlined titles are links to pieces available online.
THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION
Happiness: An Introduction
The novel didn't make any promises. Quite the opposite: it could have scared you off of life. But somehow its congenital unhappiness actually made you want to live.
Who will insult these people now, expose their life as self-deception, their media as obstacles to truth, their conventional wisdom as ideology? It will be unbearable to live with such people if they aren't regularly insulted.
Literary Readings: Cancel Them
A reading is like a bedside visit. The audience extends a giant moist hand and strokes the poor reader's hair.
It would be tragic to think of inwardness as an artifact of modernism, a trip that started in Flaubert's Yonville, passed through Musil's Kakania and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, and came to an end in Beckett's glass jar.
Foreign Report: French Sex Novel
The French are classicizers and everything they touch becomes classicism, even pornography.
POLITICS
Among the Believers
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Pankaj Mishra
The Hindu nationalists used the folksy symbols of Hinduism even as they struck deals with big businessmen and multinational corporations. They pointed to various terrorist and Islamic fundamentalist threats to India, and promised to restore the national virility that a "liberal and secular elite" had apparently sapped.
Shhh...Swing Voters Are Listening
---
Benjamin Kunkel
In a time of total victories by slender margins, anything at all comes to seem red or blue, including what we eat, by what means we travel, how we speak, whom take to bed.
BAD EDUCATION
Babel in California
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Elif Batuman
Tolstoy observed, "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family's unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Indeed," I finally said, "as a six foot tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation
---
Daniel Smith
In this way and others I was assured again and again: no Delgado by way of TMS. No mind control. No social danger. Pascual-Leone had been brainstorming aloud; or he had been attempting innocently to pique the curiosity of a visiting journalist. And yet Delgado's bull stuck with me. Because if for most ordinary people, with their ordinary conceptions of human will and human personality, the bull is terrifying - indicative of an incursion upon human dignity - for me he was indicative of hope. What I couldn't tell anybody is that I wanted to be zapped because I wanted to be the bull.
Last Cigarettes
---
Marco Roth
In this gentle and permissive way we were enjoined to get high on pot and take up oral sex, but not do any favors for Philip Morris. Now I know that when shaggy, Dionysian Allen Ginsberg takes on the role of forbidding father, and you still take up smoking, you must really be on the wrong side of history.
Trends in Network Television Comedy
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Peter Frankel
Then there's the comedy of Dennis Miller, who strings together cultural references into rambling sentences that have the rhythm of jokes but are not, frequently, jokes. He'll say things like, "I haven't seen a tax plan this poorly constructed since Tony Orlando did J"ger shots with Buzz Aldrin," and the crowd will, inexplicably, bust its gut.
FICTION
The Reaper
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Rachel Sherman
Dear Beth-
I liked your last letter. You are funny. Really.
I'll tell you, mostly there is just a lot of sitting around here doing nothing. I play cards and THIS IS THE REAPER! WHEN I AM BORED I MASTURBATE AND THINK ABOUT YOU. I'm so sorry. Oh my god. I can't believe that just happened again.
The Vice President's Daughter
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Keith Gessen
I did not come to Harvard so that my roommate could sleep with, or almost-sleep-with, the Vice President's daughter. In my secret dreams, or even from past experience, I would have thought that it would be I who slept with, or almost-slept-with, the Veep's handsome daughter. But to have a roommate who did, that is also something. And to realize this, that it is something, may just be the beginning of wisdom - or almost-wisdom, as the case may have been.
DESPERATE LIVING
The Concept of Experience
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Mark Greif
You could also easily say, how pointless - how uncomfortable I was, how much I disliked that person, how rotten I felt; how disappointed I was by what I learned in sex and intoxication, how ashamed of what I revealed. You can suffer hangovers in more shades of misery than the merely physical, and vow never to touch the stuff, or person, again. But somehow the experience seems definitive, for better and for worse. What was learned is not unlearned.
Three Poems
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Peter Gizzi
I lost my way.
Can I say that
and still be trusted?
Diana Abbott: A Lesson
---
Benjamin Kunkel
Why, after all, must Coetzee be such a gloom-monger? For if he desires to draw attention to suffering, doesn't the apprehension of such become the more acute when full allowance is made for the possibility of happiness? Or might it be that John Maxwell Coetzee, like so many men, is simply afraid of life?
TRANSLATION
At the 2003 International Security Conference
---
Alexander Kluge
—Well, what would you suggest?
—Write an article.
—That wouldn't help anything.
—What you're doing here won't help anything either.
—But at least I'm doing something. It's not useless to be here, just 50cm from all these decision makers. I've gotten as close as 20, or even 10cm away when the decision makers take sugar.
REVIEWS
On Christopher Hitchens
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George Scialabba
Really, one could almost get the idea that Hitchens thinks the antiwar left doesn't care every goddamned bit as much as he and the neocons about the suffering of Iraqis.
On Naomi Klein
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Kim Phillips-Fein
By now, everyone has noticed the connection between Bremer's disbanding of the Iraqi army and the rise of the insurgency. Klein alone has seemed to recognize a similar link between mass privatizing layoffs and a bottomless supply of desperate young men.
On Philip Roth
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Elaine Blair
It's true that Roth hasn't been funny lately. The humor largely went out of his work after Sabbath's Theater, when he turned to writing historical tragedies. But never has the humor been so sorely needed.
On Graphic Novels
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Dushko Petrovich
The rationale somewhere in here is that if you could only recover the long waves of American history, 1901 and 2001 would be the same. It's a form of cyclical time - rather than end-time or Armageddon - that furnishes Spiegelman's only comfort.
On Giorgio Agamben
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Mark Greif
Even a year or two ago, as Agamben's more far-out warnings began to seem plausible, it did look like we were heading for the apocalypse. But, of course, just when it looked as if the Bush Administration was leading us into never-ending worldwide war and internal repression, some curious things happened.
