N+1 magazine: C/D (in which we also discuss this week's NYTimes magazine article on the attempted ESCAPE FROM IRONY!)

Well, yes, of course. Mark Greif's essay on Radiohead in the new issue - subtitled "The Philosophy of Pop" - certainly proves as much.

Certainly.

(sorry programmer nerd humor)

As an Unstoppable Fighting Technique. The master of this art is as immune to direct challenge as the the oh-but-you-see-it-was-all-a-performance ironist.

But the ironist strikes me as less morally offensive. Irony effectively calls attention to What Must Not Be Exposed. Sincerity (which I'm distinguishing here from honesty) rolls over, shows its soft belly, and positions challenge as tasteless at best, cruel and bullying at worst.

There's something childish to it, a desire to know less than we do, to stay in Eden after eating the fruit, to retreat into a world where none of the kids are mean, and this may have something to do with why it offends me on a moral level. (Ironically) irony strikes me as more honest. Those who consider scrutiny of biographies a valid component of criticism may note that D. Eggers would be primed for this sort of regressive impulse.

There may be a generational element at play as well. GenY is the generation that came up more or less in prosperity, gets along really well with its parents, and had it so good under Clinton that they figured a "statement" vote for Nader couldn't make anything any worse. Can't be blamed 'for looking noseways at those sneering GenXers. Similarly, can't be surprised at GenX's contempt and envy at the soft, naive kids who had it so much easier and now want to take away the irony that protected them from the short, sharp shocks of Reagan/Bush and recession.

Emo fux0rz.

Curiously, the neo-sincerists (neo-sins?) bother me much less in film (the Andersons, David O. Russell, Charlie Kaufman, etc.) than in literature and essays.

And of course these distinctions are a little hazy, because Eggers et al are very much influenced by the snarkiness they purport to oppose. In some ways I think they're trying to beat those tendencies out of themselves more than anything else. (As I've said elsewhere, I think David Foster Wallace is the most interesting case of this, forever trying to get out of the box of his awareness of himself and his need to acknowledge that awareness.)

Interesting: http://nplusonemag.com/Why-Cahiers

Great piece. That terrible-sounding book has produced a few interesting reviews.

The film supplement is a mixed-bag, but all worth it for Chris Fujiwara.

Didn't know about that this practice of saying there is culturally nothing in the UK was called the "absence thesis". I've def heard it in connection with classical (contemporary and not) music as well as contemporary lit.

Anyone seen the new issue? Includes some (very selective) quotes from ILM in the course of a lame critique of Pitchfork.

<3 n+1

i am reading an old n+1 piece on claire denis right now that's excellent, excellent, excellent

http://i.imgur.com/CZLGf.gif

i was thinking about buying a back issue or something

All for 'em.

kinda hate this magazine, but they also publish a lot of good stuff, so i guess i'll call it a draw.

the only times i've seen it it looked like failed pitches to npr blogs from various hermenaut castoffs. plus post-orchiectomy nick sylvester (i guess he's the plus one).

I liked this article that talks about fast fashion stores like zara and self-commodification on social networks http://nplusonemag.com/the-accidental-bricoleurs

After the pitchfork thing and now this (http://nplusonemag.com/so-many-feelings) I'm really starting to feel an active distaste for n+1. Oh, and the "provocative" approach to the war on drugs in the "raise the crime rate" piece, which feels more like it's secretly extremely conservative/libertarian masquerading as somehow a radical proposal.

I mean when I first started looking at n+1 I was in some sense really into the idea of a magazine like it coming along, and there seemed like there was at least some weight and sophistication to its analyses. But increasingly the subjects and ideas about them are starting to feel sort of trivial and slipshod and so I'm feeling especially harsh because its like I'm feeling that tug from high-minded aspirations into blogoland that happens over and over playing out with nplusone too. I also think its really hard to write about the shortcomings of other online pubs without also effectively calling your own purpose/mission into question.

I dunno. Maybe this is just a particularly bad run for them.

I really liked the line, "They bake pies with low-hanging fruit"

I mean what's striking about that article is that everything it discusses seems to take place in some sort of magical "provoking and serving and redefining women" vacuum absent the probably more real and pressing concerns of these pubs, like getting eyeballs, selling adspace, developing and keeping talent, finding ways into the public eye, etc. And ok there's something interesting about all the little blogs in the gawker-diaspora (was that another n+1 piece I forget!?) but because you have a spate of blogs that have being "for women" in common, do they really have enough in common to generalize the way this article does? There's also, e.g., another side to jezebel which is more about sort of more trad-feminist issues, so it's also extremely young I guess to class that as "safe" or "soft" compared to other blogs with a different, sort of maybe frothier outlook, or really to judge any of these sites by one another's standards, or maybe almost to expect that we should judge any of these sites against some set of expectations about how they can or should define women as such, or at least the women of their audience.

I mean part of this is you've got the bully-pulpit of a well respected intellectual-ish magazine and you're using it, in essence, to complain about the lack of cultural transformation issuing from sites which derive whatever profit they have from, generally, posts by youngish ill-paid writers, which are typically upscale versions of cats-with-captions. The fact that they can slip any more substantive stuff into the mix without alienating too many eyeballs is sorta miraculous to begin with.

my new favorite mag is Jacobin

but they don't have that many eyeballs to potentially alienate, and their overhead is way lower than that of a print publication.

sure

just saying its my new favorite, and i look forward to seeing where it goes

they are in print btw

oh you weren't talking to me were you

oh, that was an xp! There's actually a really interesting book about Sassy! that talks about its influences and behind-the-scenes stuff, and the problems it faced in terms of issues/content and revenue (namely advertising). Plus, it was primarily for pre-teen and teen girls, so it was limited in terms of what advertisers it could solicit.

Ok one more thought on this: n+1 is very much a magazine with a purpose and agenda, or at least pretensions to that (a pretenda?). So if another mag/blog/back of a cereal box doesn't have such a straightforward mission statement then n+1-type-writers will tend to project/attribute one to them anyway, all the better to then criticize them for failing to live up to it. So this feels like a ny-literary equiv of self-righteous-enviro-dude. "I spent last saturday trying to revive the principles of high-minded progressive political discourse in criticism. And how was your weekend?"

it just doesn't seem that prescriptivist to me. her thesis seems to be "what do these popular publications for girls/women tell us about how to be a woman"

"Neither Jezebel or the Hairpin concerns itself with the harder to articulate, more insidious expectations about women’s behavior. Neither knows how to write for and about women without almost embarrassing itself in its eagerness to please. Jezebel is too painstakingly inoffensive to hurt anyone’s feelings. The Hairpin is too charmingly self-effacing to take itself seriously, too tirelessly entertaining to ever bore a visitor.... Surely one can’t, and shouldn’t, strive to like and be liked all the time. But how else can one be? This is not a likable enough question for the ladyblogs to entertain. "

heh, maybe i just agree with her conclusions!

I guess they're not bad things to ask for from blogs -- it's more like I feel like they're bad things from an article in n+1 magazine (as I so imagine it) to ask for from blogs :-)

i did wish that in some ways it was fleshed out more, in terms of how these publications are "enjoyed" and "used" by women, perhaps in comparison to the print publications of the 20th Century. Charming and entertaining are positive qualities -- and you can enjoy reading one of these blogs, but also find them lacking in certain respects. It isn't complete enjoyment - part of the pleasure comes from criticizing the publication, discussing that with friends & others - though maybe i'm just projecting my personal relationship with n+1.

I think somewhere these guys went from 'let's do well-thought-out omnivorous pieces with an on-our-sleeve liberal/marxist bent' to 'let us tell you what is wrong with your contemptible cultural consumption' which god knows I get enough from from anything written by anyone under 40 now. It seems like the decline happened really quickly and might have had something to do with the adrenaline rush of Occupy.

It's a damn shame because I really didn't need or want another Atlantic ('let us BLOW YOUR MINDS by telling you HOW EVERYONE'S GOT IT ALL WRONG with something Gladwell could have dashed off on the back of a napkin while having lunch with his editor'). I'm bitter, because for a while there I was thrilled the mag existed (except for the fiction which is not really my thing).

trying to think of a way to say 'you have disappointed me and now suck' without becoming representative of the problem

n+1 is coming from a way different place than Gladwell

I mean these are also pieces by different writers -- I don't follow n+1 closely + it's still only put out under 15 issues, so I don't have a sense if they have a coterie of regulars, or maybe did for the first few issues, then those went onto newer bigger things (or just other things) and soforth so you very quickly get 2nd and 3rd generation imitations of house style and themes, and magnifications of the more distinct qualities, etc.

(the only folks I know of that read n+1 are here on ilx, btw, so maybe I'm missing some essential part of this experience)

the writers all seem pretty young - at least the woman who wrote the ladyblog article and the guy who wrote the pitchfork one - like they're of a younger generation than i am.

i'm currently working my way through the n+1 hipster symposium book.

the essay on 'cavell as educator' in the last (not new) issue was truly outstanding.

but the 'your cultural consumption sucks' part has become so tired so quickly. i think the earlier writers had higher hopes for extricating themselves from the morass of the past 50 years of academic-cultural-critical writing and it kind of seems like they realized it was harder than they thought? but it seems to be highly dependent on the particular writer. i kind of suspect their earlier-issue talent that was holding things down have been spread out a bit more as they've picked up prestige and been doing lots more things since the magazine took off? but that's just an idle thought, i don't really know.

Was using Gladwell as shorthand for the myth-debunking article that 'disproves' some commonly-held trope or received idea. I think of the Atlantic as reinventing themselves around that one concept, since it gets you great headlines and people talk about the piece ...

Writing about pop culture critically is like shooting fish in a barrel - it's a little like writing about politicians or policy simply by dissecting their rhetoric, or trying to dispute things logically with people of faith. There's a level of incoherence built in, simply pointing out that incoherence doesn't really work for me.

Given their usual subjects, isn't it funny that it took an article on Pitchfork for these guys to get on the radar of so many smart folks?

I remember subscribing to N+1 when it first came out ... not sure what the motivation was, think it was the literature and nerdy take on pop culture aspect of it. Honestly, looking through some of their back issues, the Pitchfork article isn't that surprising.

I think of N+1 as focusing on so many thinks that make Pitchfork frivolous--more the political/social/anthropological side of contemporary culture. Maybe this comes from reading Keith Gessen's first novel.

http://nplusonemag.com/authors/hfm

These interviews, and the book that came out of them, are excellent in my opinion.

n+1 is still p fantastic publication imo. if all youre getting from them is articles on p4k and 'ladyblogs' thats p much on you

for example: http://nplusonemag.com/raise-the-crime-rate is p excellent imo

i think i had a dream last night that involved part of the plot of the mouse story from vol. 12 (which i liked) and John Maus.

Lamp: i mentioned that one. It started strong (though I think with others' material) and then got real weird. It seemed sort of contrarian-for-its-own-sake by a certain point.

while i dont think the essay is correct in terms of either its idea of policy tradeoffs or 'how crime works' i think its a good essay on an important topic and its dumb to call passionate advocacy 'contrarian'

I mean these are also pieces by different writers -- I don't follow n+1 closely + it's still only put out under 15 issues, so I don't have a sense if they have a coterie of regulars, or maybe did for the first few issues, then those went onto newer bigger things (or just other things) and soforth so you very quickly get 2nd and 3rd generation imitations of house style and themes, and magnifications of the more distinct qualities, etc.

(the only folks I know of that read n+1 are here on ilx, btw, so maybe I'm missing some essential part of this experience)

― s.clover, Monday, February 13, 2012 12:09 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

I know some of the people who work at n+1 and it's pretty much a 'network of people who are friends with each other', I regret to inform you

The crypto-conservative but obviously contrarian bit is right in the headline -- "raise the crime rate." I mean, you can in fact more easily argue "prisons are terrible and conditions are terrible and the war on drugs is stupid and terrible" without also throwing in "btw, people in prisons are also terrible and if they weren't in prison they would be robbing some of us right now!" which is sort of a rotten thing to say, and really an excuse to then say "but we should care about people more than petty crime!" as though its some sort of moral-philosophical masterstroke. It feels v. undergraduate clever-clever to me.

idk, "they would be robbing some of us right now" is a widely held belief that is probably one of the main reasons the prison system has been able to get as awful as it is, so I think it's kind of necessary to address.

Especially given that it's not 100% false, I mean some portion of the people in prison actually would be robbing people right now if they weren't in prison.

yeah i also dont think the point is 'undergraduate' is kinda vital to the whole argument i.e. by allowing the state to incarcerate so many people we are trading our own safety for theirs. not on an equal basis but thats the crux of the matter its morally wrong for us to make this exchange, even if its understandable to desire it

i mean i lean closer to the view put fwd in adam gopnik's essay on this in last week's new yorker, that mass incarceration isnt the primary reason for the fall in crime (outside prisons) but its not negligible either

I thought the prison essay was good at pointing out the incredible scale of suffering caused by our current prison system. I wish the writer had focused more on incremental steps that could improve the system rather than jumping to the more dramatic but less practical extreme of abolishing prison.

http://nplusonemag.com/listening-to-books

It's like walter benjamin on an incredibly boring coke binge.

^^^

New board tagline.

So deep. Or rather, piled high.

http://nplusonemag.com/please-rt

"Favorite that, followers."

Tweet this, sheeple!

lets be concerned with everything these people say

I just want their money, I am simple.

NYT review of the n+1 founder's memoir:

I was impressed by how unlikable — how needy and ineffectual, how effete and whiny — Mr. Roth was willing to seem. He emerges in “The Scientists” as one very coddled egghead.

He is so precious and literary he almost squeaks. He is so self-absorbed that, like the vacuum cleaner beast in the Beatles’ movie “Yellow Submarine,” he nearly suctions himself and everything else off the face of the planet, leaving only reverberating white space behind.

And yet there is praise.

Marco Roth is the drummer for Vampire Weekend

The dilemma I always feel when I read reviews like that is that, on one hand, it seems like it shouldn't count against an individual writer that he comes from a certain Literary Class of New York -- after all, it's a class from which you'd expect some good writers to emerge, since it's full of families who love and study literature. And yet there just seems to be this parade of almost obligatory reviews in the Times of books like these where "he's Anne Roiphe's nephew and otherwise well-connected" is not-so-subtly sprinkeled in to the point that you wonder if the reviewer is hinting an apology, like "I have to earn a living too."

On the one hand, this sort of stuff does seem overrepresented in the Times, but on the other hand, they're just giving people what they want. I'll admit to a certain fascination with that milieu - the storied New Yorker intellectual class - and a memoir from that milieu has a certain immediate appeal that say a memoir about growing up in the suburbs to normal middle-class parents wouldn't have.

I like the way the review is basically "I hate this obnoxious little shit but there are some good parts."

and a memoir from that milieu has a certain immediate appeal that say a memoir about growing up in the suburbs to normal middle-class parents wouldn't have.

― o. nate, Tuesday, September 18, 2012 1:38 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, in part because the milieu tends to be full of witty, articulate, quotable people like Roth's father.

so is this: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-21/essays/the-next-next-level/

the this: http://www.suck.com/daily/98/03/27/index.html

of the mid-2010s?

also i guess cf juiceboxxx: you gotta feel the kid

man how is the suck website still up

how come suck.com still works but not empty.org

they renewed their domain :-(

was gifted a subscription for christmas. is anyone else a subscriber? I’m enjoying what I’ve started so far of the most recent issue

i have a subscription too! i kinda have a love/hate relationship with this magazine the way various ilxors do with ptichfork

I wouldn't have guessed that n+1 would outlive the Believer magazine.