+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal. n+1 posts new, web-only material once or twice a week.
+ + + + + + + + + + + + +
Number One, Fall 2004
Annotated Table of Contents
THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION
Somehow the New Republic got the best people and encouraged their worst instincts. Academic experts in their own fields were invited in to garrote colleagues they didn't understand. It was called being a "public intellectual."
The paratextual games that McSweeney's revived had a long tradition behind them. They bore the finger-smudges of Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism—but most of all of MAD magazine.
PoMo NeoCons
If the Weekly Standard wants to do for Mickey Mouse what Marxism did for tractors, who are we to deny them their fun? But when they try out Foucault…
Forget the fact that the basket is too low, no longer commensurate with our capacity for jumping; there's not even space on the court to accommodate all the bodies.
POLITICS
Really to offer statehood is the least we can do. This would be a lot more polite than the Israeli occupation, or our invasion of Iraq.
Some on the left compare W. to Hitler. Nothing could be more wrong. It is our embarrassing distinction in the United States to have acquired a follower as our leader. You don't picture him on the podium at Nuremberg. No, you see him in the third row of the crowd on the rally floor. Look for his face, there, among the other sons!
A Bunch of Nobodies
Extraordinary that people can discuss war without saying to themselves, over and over: "we will kill people, we will maim, we will destroy flesh, we will burn and harm. That is what we are planning to do."
FICTION
Horse Mountain—Benjamin Kunkel
His vices had never had to do with the famously intense pleasures of sex or drink, though he'd liked both well enough. He was a true voluptuary only when it came to the feeling of which for some reason the taste of vanilla, or lemon cucumbers or coconut meat, reminded him: the pleasure of being subject to no one but yourself.
Fontana—Sam Lipsyte
"That's the thing," said Principal Fontana. "I want to be involved in your lives. Or I think I do. But then, really, when I look into my heart, I'd rather be on the driving range, or getting drunk, or getting my wick dipped. Is this shocking you?"
"Some nights," I said, "I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it's not napalm. It's apple butter. And it's not a street. It's my mother."
"Right," said Fontana. "I knew I could talk to you."
INSIDE THE WHALE
Eggers, Teen Idol—Keith Gessen
Throughout the Log, Gary was wry and skeptical—of Eggers (a sellout?), of Eggers's fans (mere hipsters!), and even of himself (a shameless publicity-seeker?). But he was also adoring, silly, and naive. Reading the Log you could watch Gary grow wise in the ways of the world without, somehow, growing cynical; you could see his increasing confidence and erudition, as well as his continuing troubles—thirty editions after his Kakutani gaffe, Gary referred to the Philadelphia Inquirer's main book man, Carlin Romano, as "she." In Log #9 he decided that the correct possessive for a noun like "Eggers" is "Eggers's," but warned, "in the interest of continuity, I will continue to use abominable punctuation."
Against Exercise—Mark Greif
Exercise is no choice. It comes to us as an emissary from the realm of biological processes. It falls under the jurisdiction of the obligations of life itself, which only the self-destructive neglect. Our controversial future is supposed to depend on engineered genes, brain scans, neuroscience, laser beams. About those things, we have loud, public, sterile debates—while the real historic changes are accomplished on a gym's vinyl mats, to the sound of a flywheel and a ratcheted inclined plane.
Art Chronicle—Dushko Petrovich
El Greco is like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing triangles. Guston is staying up and seeing french fries. It was a punchy gray dream to see them together.
The Black Iron Prison—Joshua Glenn
Baudelaire racked up lifelong debts with tailors and bootmakers in order to transform himself into the ultimate antibohemian. Why did he take such absurd pains with his appearance? Perhaps it was for the same reason that those who ended up surviving Stalin's gulags and Hitler's concentration camps are said to have carefully combed their hair and tied their shoes every day—because that's what it takes.
TRANSLATION
The Norm—Vladimir Sorokin
"You guys have to take it too?"
"Yeah. 150 each. You didn't know?"
"No," Slavka drank from the bottle. "Ekh. Why'd you decide to start?"
"Just decided is all." Vitya broke the norm in half and began eating it, biting from each of the halves in turn. "You'll decide too, one of these days."
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Why Reading Only Matters When It's Somewhere Else—Marco Roth
Nafisi's choice of James and Nabokov over the Western feminist canon becomes clearer in this light. In the stories she chooses, the reader does not get the passive pleasure of identifying with a striving, female subject, whether authorial voice or character, but she must read against the grain of the narrative in order to counter the ways that the women are judged or appropriated by other characters. This is not reading as a form of identity politics or "empowerment." It is a survival strategy.
Go ahead. Call me paranoid. I challenge you to explain why one of the candidates in the March presidential election, a faceless bureaucrat named Ivan Rybkin, suddenly disappeared in February, only to show up four days later, babbling incoherently about being drugged and dragged off to Kiev.
Mogadishu, Baghdad, Troy—Mark Greif
In contemporary US warfare, the hero returns, in the manner of the Iliad, and "hero" has here a purely technical definition. He is the lone fighter, who takes the stage amidst a sea of mere mortal beings—one of only a few heroes who are comparable in abilities and significance. The hero may kill or be killed but he is always absolutely visible and valuable; owner of a social status, among the princes, aristoi, and in the front lines, promachoi, he is one of the select warriors who are by their method of life hērōes.
REVIEWS
On Jean-Christophe Rufin—Marco Roth
Did I mention the savages are noble, naked, and muscular (though not tall)? They are free in their way, but like to submit to the authority of bold, kind, culturally sensitive Europeans who happen to be French.
On David Foster Wallace—Chad Harbach
For Wallace, plot is paradox—the given information can be parsed in various and often contradictory ways. The successful Wallace plot resonates without being resolved; in fact, it resonates even as it deteriorates, and the desire to know what happened races neck and neck with the growing suspicion that one can never really know what happened.
On James McCourt—Patrick Giles
Gay life defies standard memoir protocol: fear of detection and punishment created this life of abbreviated, shrouded relationships with people we cherished even if they were only a face on the opera standing-room line, or a voice (or body) in the dark.