So! Last week we slogged our way through the table of contents of the new issue of n+1, noting the lads' penchant for double-entendres and intellectualizing pornography. Today we delve—deep breaths, all—into the actual contents of the most important literary magazine of our time. We don't want to overwhelm you, so we decided to focus on the first three pages.
In addition to over-intellectualizing porn, one hallmark of the current crop of Bright Young Things is a tendency to profess a kind of blustery technophobia—no BlackBerry Thumb here!—in contrast to the fast, superficial world around them. And thus, we have the first essay in n+1's Intellectual Situation (or is it Intellectual Scene? They have it both ways), "Against Email." Some selections:
As late as the early '90s and the early '00s, during the last days of dial-up [Is that like the last days of disco?—Ed.], it still felt nice to send and receive the occasional squib, to play an epistolary game of catch with some friends. Sometimes you would even forward a joke, a larky practice that nowadays seems an unconscionable crime.
Yes, everything these days moves so quickly, does it not? But this nostalgia for the not-so-long ago past—a more innocent time, a more authentic time—is rather reactionary, is it not? In any case, let us continue:
Over email, you can be in touch with so very many people—and make each one mad at you. And they are mad at you, your former friends, because no more efficient vehicle for the transmission of rashness and spleen has ever been devised than the email. Nettled by something—often something imaginary, since no one's tone comes across quite right, over email—you lash out instantaneously. You hit SEND and it's too late. It's too late because it's too soon.
One feels almost sorry for n+1! So many emails sent too soon—or is it too late? The boys go on to say that email is only good for one thing, flirtation, and one pictures hundreds of carefully, cleverly worded "squibs" sent back and forth, all in the service of getting in an adoring lass's corduroy pants:
The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness. But with email you can spend an hour refining a casual sally. You trade clever notes as weightless, pretty, and tickling as feathers. The email, like the Petrarchan sonnet, is properly a seduction device, and everyone knows that the SUBJECT line should really read PRETEXT.
How many of us have been on the receiving end of one of these "clever notes," these "casual sallys," only to discover that the Cyrano at the other computer was, in fact, not so clever and witty after all? In fact, he is kind of a dork, and can't have a normal conversation to save his life. Also, will later describe himself as "unable to love."
n+1 [nplusonemag.com]
Earlier: Knowing n+1 By Its Table of Contents
