“To start a little magazine, then—to commit yourself to making an immutable, finite set of perfect-bound pages that will appear, typos and all, every month or two, or six, or whenever, even if you are also, and of necessity, maintaining an affiliated Web site, to say nothing of holding down a day job or sweating over a dissertation—is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age—and also, of course, against other magazines.”
—from “Among the Believers,” by A. O. Scott
“In the so-called cultural sphere, things have been changing quite radically if not dramatically, but it is difficult to write about this, perhaps because the change has been creeping up on us for years.”
—William Phillips, co-founder of Partisan Review
1. Hype and Hyperlinks
Clik here to view.
n+1 issue 6, Mainstream
My first introduction to n+1 was not, as might be expected, through an issue of their magazine, but instead through a series of hyperlinks and Google searches about the magazine (which, sadly, is how I receive all too much of my information these days). Though I am somewhat embarrassed by my first opinions about n+1—or, more specifically, embarrassed about the origins of those opinions—I nonetheless relate them below, as they seem a good example of what n+1 was established as a reaction against.
My n+1 web surfing began, if I remember correctly, with a 2005 article about current trends in literary magazines by A. O. Scott on The New York Times website. Googling the magazine’s editors I had read about in Scott’s article—Keith Gessen, Marco Roth, Benjamin Kunkel, and Mark Greif—led me to some much more spirited (and critical) discussions about the magazine on the literary blogs The Millions, The Elegant Variation, and Wet Asphalt. To counteract these blogs’ largely hostile opinions of n+1, I found some interviews with Gessen at The New York Inquirer and Emerging Writers. Eventually, drawn on by the easy clickability of internet research, I ended up locating the largest repository of secondary information (if it could be called that) about the magazine on the internet—the sensationalist (and humorous) postings about n+1 editors on the New York tabloid blog Gawker. At some later point I read reviews of Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision (and, more recently, reviews of Gessen’s 2008 novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men). I heard rumors about the elitist, arrogant nature of the magazine and its editors. Somewhere in all of this, I actually glanced at the magazine’s own website, but not long enough to finish any of the articles there (articles quite long in comparison to similar pieces on other literary websites). Instead I continued my glance, click, glance, click click, glance, etc.
Without yet cracking the spine of a single issue of n+1, I eventually joined the chorus, spreading rumors about the arrogance and elitist attitudes of the magazine. I did this at parties, in conversations with writers, and at home with my wife. Why? How did I come to have an opinion about a magazine without ever actually reading the magazine? I do not know for sure. It was easy, actually, came naturally even, like bad-mouthing James Frey or criticizing of the bigotry of Martin Amis. Everyone talks about books they haven’t read.
*
A review copy of n+1 number 6 arrived in the Luna Park mailbox last February, sent along by one of their interns who in January had expressed an interest to write about Luna Park’s New York launch party. Said intern never made it to the party—most likely due to our own delay in responding to his request—but thanks to him I was reminded of the dangers of becoming a mouthpiece for what a recent article in n+1 succinctly refers to as “the hype cycle.”
Not that I ever meant harm to anyone at n+1 by the occasionally tossed off “I read that the editors of n+1 are kind of elitist” or “The magazine is supposedly full of snarky reviews” in conversation. I did not portray these observations as my own, and, in my view, I was only repeating what I had read. But such repeating dulls reason, both individually and on a larger, societal level. And after reading an issue myself—checking the evidence against the observations of others—I saw the much greater complexity that criticism of the magazine must deal with, because what n+1 is most criticized for—its stubborn, polemical positioning on literary issues—is actually one of its greatest strengths.
2. Pharmakos
“One of the things you learn, if you write for enough different magazines, is that each has its own culture, and that culture is very powerful and affects the way you write for the magazine, even unconsciously.”
—Keith Gessen, in an interview with The New York Inquirer
Let me go on record to say that n+1 is currently one of the most interesting literary magazines being published. It is Lewis Lapham‘s Harper’s editorials transformed into a literary magazine—with the fiction of Fiction magazine and the criticism of Dissent tacked on. It is The Paris Review crossed with New Left Review. It is what New England Review might be if it were edited by Arianna Huffington and Jonathan Franzen after drinking three pots of coffee. It is the literary world’s first response to the gaping whole left by the passing of Partisan Review, no doubt the most effective politically engaged literary magazine of the twentieth century (sorry Masses, Salmagundi, and others). It is a movement literary magazine in the tradition of Blast, The Masses, Poetry, Hound and Horn, Big Table, Fuck You, and The Outsider, because, like these magazines, it is not merely a venue but a voice as well.
Or maybe this is true of all magazines—that they serve as both venue and voice. The quote by Gessen above from an interview with The New York Inquirer argues just this, that each magazine “has its own culture.” One supposes this would be true then for every context one writes within—writing programs, etc—and not just periodical cultures. Either way, what is particular about movement literary magazines (a phrase I am borrowing from a recent interview I did with n+1 editor Marco Roth) is that they are blatant about their positioning, about what culture/community they want to foster. For n+1 this is one in which, as Greif says, “arguing about things could be impersonal, because it advances thought.”
Information about the beginning of n+1 is widely available (see hyperlinks above), so I won’t get into it in detail here. To sum up: n+1 was started in 2004 by four men with graduate degrees as an intellectual magazine meant to shake up the literary world—a world which in their view had become too reliant on unearned praise and lazy criticism. True to this editorial vision, n+1 leapt right away into the fray, criticizing literary elites such as James Wood and McSweeney’s. They moved on to criticize the literary blogosphere and the reputations of established authors, such as Kevin Brockmeier, whose writing is archly described on the n+1 website as “magical feelism.”
It is this sort of criticism (most famously, I think, of the aforementioned literary bloggers) that makes people frustrated with n+1. And they have a point. The editors of n+1 often come across as youthfully idealistic in their declarations and maxims (e.g. “It’s time to say what you mean”), but, as I mentioned above, these declarations are much of the attraction of the magazine. Like the Derridean pharmakos, the controversy n+1 creates in the literary establishment is both the magazine’s poison and cure. It is what joins them to their famous antithesis McSweeney’s: both ventures take risks, are willing to possibly makes fools of themselves, and in the end often achieve impressive results.
Like great actors, great literary magazines—if we use magazines like the original and revived Salmagundi, the German language Athenaeum, Eliot’s Criterion, Poetry, The Masses, the New Directions anthologies, The Paris Review, kayak, and Story as examples—seem clearly to be the ones which, like n+1, are willing to take risks. Just take a look at some pieces from n+1 number six alone: a criticism of “the hype cycle,” a questioning of the position of such ‘classics’ publishing series as NYRB’s, a take-down of proto-literary “how to read” books, a call to lower the voting age, a wildly experimental story by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff, a heart wrenching and unexpected reading of the Virginia Tech shooting, a novella-length story by Caleb Crain, a look into the effect of Orham Pamuk’s fiction in Turkey, an elegy for independent bookstores, a history of tabloid blog Gawker, and etc. Not only are these not the sort of pieces one is used to seeing in literary magazines with more conservative editorial visions, but the range of subjects is more diverse than other literary-minded periodicals.
It is most often not until a person sees the new thing (or, more likely, the rebirth of the old thing) that they realize something is missing. Controversy, such as that elicited by Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” from Partisan Review, is much of what n+1 has brought to the literary world. Such controversy, which is, at least for n+1, the offspring of passion, is a welcome addition. What’s more, like Sontag’s essay, the pieces in n+1 are written with intellectual rigor and a love of language. Though it is often critical, n+1 is serious—or “responsible” as they see it—in its estimations of the literary world. On occasion, they even publish laudatory pieces, such as on the work of David Foster Wallace. Whether or not one agrees with the work published in n+1, it is hard not to appreciate that literary and social matters are being looked at with such passion and consideration in some corners.