But imagine living your life under an Internet microscope, where total strangers are invited to criticize your life, your work, your romantic choices, and your psychology in front of a jeering audience of commenters. Gessen-bashing briefly replaced alcohol abuse as the favorite sport of NYC blog commenters, and in his zeal to respond, Keith did everything wrong...

The smarter you are, the less likely you are to respond appropriately when you are attacked on the Internet... Writers, academics, executives— successful people are more likely to handle this wrong because they have been trained, more or less, to expect rational behavior from their peers. [Lubbock Online]

Even though it's hard—so hard—and we don't always follow our own advice, the only way to deal with a blog-avalanche is to ignore blog commenters, bloggers, and blogs in general. Try avoiding the entire Internet if you have a book coming out, actually—the last thing you need to be wasting your time with is obsessively checking your Amazon rankings. Work on your next book, but don't be tempted for one second to make it include more than a cursory reference to Internet culture, Candace Bushnell.

Look, at some point I actually scanned in the good parts.


Anyway, I think we can all agree that Yang is no "Morlock." Here is his blog, it needs more comments. Oh, and the girl is managing editor Kate Perkins. One day maybe she will write something about her comically bad self-esteem and I'll post about that.

*Seriously, you are a girl and you go to their parties and think, "Whoa, I am never going to get laid, I give up," but you quickly learn this is wrong, you will totally get laid, and you'll make some of the most pretty friends you ever had bonding with the literary scene girls over what a unique experience it was!

Now, it must be said that we met Roy at a party before she escaped New York, and found her perfectly pleasant. But HuffPosts like this aren't helping your cause, Jess! If New York City is not a "place for serious people," as previously alleged, then Paris is a hellhole where you can't get a decent vegetarian meal:

As a vegetarian and someone allergic to most dairy, eating food other than carbs was almost certainly out of the question. So baguettes and Nutella and lettuce heads it was. A few days in I started crying in the dairy aisle of my local grocery store when I realized I didn't know the words for "soy milk" and was too embarrassed to ask.

Fine, fine. But this line... this line should have been excised during the HuffPo's editing process (assuming they have one):

"I've found that the most difficult part of being here is the nagging inability to communicate my feelings to others in a sophisticated manner."

Us too. Unfortunately, it takes years.

Dear chums,
There's drinks tomorrow at seven at the Scratcher, 5th Street and Bowery, these, because sometimes its fun to honor something inhuman, will be in honor of giant rock formations, such as you see girding the highways of New England, granite in and around the Granite State, and here I am gripped by the urge to plagiarize something about a different sort of mineral, but looking at Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" see no lines ripe for insertion, though there are a few good ones, like, "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; / That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad." But Xian, "That's such a downer," you, the list, say. "Do you really expect us to show up at this bar for the umpteenth time after spout some bullshit about rocks quote some depressingly pious mid-period Auden lines? What happened to the days when our inboxes would fill up with eighty emails about Norman Mailer making love to three-hundred-pound women? Where the fuck is Jon-Jon? He was fun." Right, I say. The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it. Not to be born is the best for man. The second best is the bailiff's order: "Break your embraces. Dance while you can."

As ever,
Xian

Dear everyone,
There's drinks tomorrow at nine at Scratcher, 5th and Bowery, these for this one who is certainly expressing something, who a few think is expressing something wrong, who is not certain that he is not expressing something wrong, who is telling something about suffering that is not a saddening thing to anyone hearing and not a dreary thing, and who very many are certainly wanting to be doing what this one is doing, wanting to be ones clearly expressing something, and who a few are very certain this one is someone great.

As ever,

Xian

At least, in these, he puts the time/place first so you can skip the rest of the email. Still!

[New York]

I had always imagined the commenters as a pack of wolves… and if they smelled blood, my blood, because there I was with them, they would pounce. And then we could have it out.

Instead, the commenters wanted me to leave. It was as if I’d misunderstood. Dude, said the commenters, in effect: We weren’t talking about you. We were talking about “Keith Gessen.” You’re just a name to us. Kind of a funny name, actually. And an author photo. Kind of an obnoxious author photo. But we don’t mean you, personally. We’re bored at work. Come on.

And that was really strange. I have a friend who occasionally makes the argument: You’ve put yourself out there, now people can take their shots. I have another friend who puts it a little differently: You manifest yourself in public, and then people will make of it what they will. But this didn’t feel like either of those things. It was more as if I’d given up my name and photograph as an offering, for people to take shots and interpret those things—not me. That was the deal.

And, if you look at it that way, it’s kind of hard to argue. I have no interest in ruining other people’s fun. I like fun.

So, it’s cool.



... Enough! Ultimately the battle for the internet will have to take place somewhere OUTSIDE the internet, that is to say in the world of flesh and blood, and toward that end, readers of this Tumblr, I announce a TAKE BACK THE INTERNET PARTY.

This Friday night. 8 pm until midnight.
n+1 office in DUMBO
68 Jay St. #405
York St. F stop closest stop
Entrance on Jay St. a little past the intersection with Front

All Tumblr readers welcome! And others. Even if you’ve said terrible things about me on the internet, I forgive you. I know you didn’t really mean me. Even if you did.

[Keith Gessen]

(Image via Titlepage)

n+1 editor and novelist Keith Gessen started off by pointing out the shame involved in talking about the internet, possibly it's because it's something we confront by ourselves—we do it alone.

"Is it more stigmatized to masturbate to internet porn or to be so vain as to Google your own name?" he asked, adding that he hadn't done either in the last couple of days.

Commentary from the four panelists ranged from the pedantic ("many web sites today seem to use the concept of the 'page,'" according to Greif, although he did make other, funnier points) to, well, the pedantic: "How is the internet changing literary style?" asked writer Caleb Crain. Answer: The internet is always "welcoming us to the party, saying 'wanna hear something funny?' and 'Know who else is here?'"

Indecision author Benjamin Kunkel elucidated on porn versus politics on the internet—they are the opposite, as it turns out! Politicians fear exposure, while porn stars welcome it. Moe from Jezebel took a swig of Colt 45 when she stepped on the podium, which she had thoughtfully concealed in a brown paper bag.

During the Q&A session, Gessen said that it was common in the literary world to "pretend no one saw the last post about you on Gawker," adding that of course everybody read it anyway. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, being the one responsible.

As for why the internet makes us all such bad people, I would say that it's gone Warholian on us: in the future, everybody will be called an assclown on their own blog. As much as this hurts, we have no choice but to welcome it. Or drop out—delete your Facebook and nobody will remember you ever again.

I'll say straight off that three weeks is too long for a book tour... Meanwhile, God knows what has happened back home in New York. Spring came and went. People threw parties, went to dinner, published magazines (I still get some of the invitations). From a Polish bar in Chicago, I watched the Rangers get knocked out of the play-offs. In Los Angeles, I lost my credit card; in Portland, my phone charger. I haven't missed a round of drinks since Boston. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend and I have broken up, though I can't seem to get her on the phone to confirm this.

Whenever I’m in Los Angeles, I experience this unease. I don’t have a name for it. I go out to lunch and worry Sinbad’s going to be sitting across from me. I wait in line at a hot dog stand and hope I don’t spot Carmen Electra.

A celebrity sighting can really ruin your day. At night it’s even worse. Not too long ago I was eating in a favourite restaurant when Mike Myers walked in with a large group I hesitate to call an entourage. As the loveable star of the Austin Powers movies sat down with his people, you could see on the faces of the other diners that their wine had just turned to vinegar. What’s he doing here, their expressions said. What’s he doing in this part of town? Why isn’t he in his own area?

Increasingly, that’s where we want them: away from us. The Bible suggests that the poor will always be with us. Today it’s the rich who will always be with us. If they’re famous on top of it, that makes their presence all the more galling, not to mention disruptive.

Whole neighbourhoods of our cities have turned into ghettos of the celebrated, and there’s nowhere we can go to escape. They will always be with us. Who wants to live across the hall from the breakout star of Survivor: Guatemala? Riding the bus is bad enough without Ashton Kutcher taking the last seat. [TheNational]

First of all, Krotov lets us know that what goes on in Columbia's student paper is important, if only because "the Spectator's circulation rate is greater than that of many 'influential' publications."

Furthermore, the original Spectator review of Gessen's book was "instructive in its failures," and he takes issue with this part:

[Gessen's] "inclusion of highbrow intellectualism perfectly characterizes [his] tendency to name-drop literary or philosophical figures ... Gessen is so earnestly immersed in this intellectual façade that it is easy to imagine him referencing Heidegger in everyday banter."

Or maybe Gessen includes all of that "highbrow intellectualism" to illustrate the divide between his characters' realities and their profound political ambitions, and the "intellectual façade" might have more to do with their own failures of political disengagement than their writer's Heidegger-referencing yuppie elitism.

Anyway, the reviews are in. And boy are there reviews! Joyce Carol Oates, a terrifying critic if any are, weighs in for the New York Review of Books ("Gessen's humor is persistently Seinfeldian"). The Observer had a delightfully freewheeling, bitchy opinion. The NY Times appears slightly befuddled, and as Gessen himself said, even that fabulous literary heavyweight NYLON has given their opinion—negatively.

Because the media moves as a herd, one is basically required, at this point, to have an opinion or angle on this book. Why? Is it because n+1 is the most important literary journal of our time? (It isn't.) Is it because a novel bold enough to reference Fitzgerald in the title automatically merits discussion? Is it because this could actually be a new flagstone in the Way We Live Now—that is, if we're twentysomethings who went to Ivy League universities, saw that fact as an important pinnacle, and found themselves unenlightened and stuck years later, none the wiser?

Who knows. One of the passages Gessen chose to read was one that is oft-quoted in reviews, about the character Sam. (There's also a character named Keith, written in the first person.) It reminded me of the sad young literary men I have personally known, and exactly why I found them so insufferable:

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed... it was cruel. It wasn't nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he knew people with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even knew people like Mark, Mark Grossman, who had never published, who had kept silent, whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed ten-kilometer runs.

"But the sad trick of this snark/wonder binary is its shared terror of the serious. The former cannot show weakness for fear of being eaten by its children, the mocking commentariat; the latter, though able to take its own nostalgia seriously, does not want to grow up and deal with grown-up issues, as grown-ups do."

Us poor, poor kids. The fact that we deliver literary opinions as snappy one-liners that insult twee optimistic vegans in a small New York neighborhood on an interactive website is conclusive evidence that the rest of our everyday lives are just as silly.

Also, later is the review, Diamond might be straight-up calling Gessen a douchebag for his belief that he and his friends can save literature—or even write fiction, for that matter—but Diamond screwed up his quotation marks so I can't be sure if he called Gessen a douchebag or if Gessen called himself one. Read the review and let me know.

One of Gessen's protagonists in All the Sad Young Literary Men, studying for a doctorate in Russian history, discovers that erudition counts for little in his erotic life. But the author himself, with the soulful looks of a Greenwich Village bohemian and the oh-so-erotic arrogance of a Russian-Jewish intellectual, has had greater romantic success. Says one peripheral observer: "I don't really get it, honestly, the Gessen mystique; why these n+1 groupie girls love him so much." Nevertheless, they do; currently, one in particular, a former blogger with this site. Emily Gould, who used to date Neyfakh until a few weeks ago, has transferred her affection to Gessen.

It's been a long seduction. Emily wrote many of the items on n+1 in Gawker, last year, and even quit her blogging gig in a post about the literary magazine. After a party for the Winter 2008 issue, at which contributors and other guests were expected to offload copies from the back of a truck, Emily read Carla Blumenkranz's anemic review, 'In Search of Gawker'. "The status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully," wrote Blumenkranz—and Emily agreed. The post (A long dark early evening of the soul with Keith Gessen) began as a report on the n+1 party; it ended as a public resignation.

After quitting Gawker, and breaking up with Josh Stein, one of the site's crowd-pleasing bloggers, Emily Gould sought increasingly refined company. Leon Neyfakh's Observer may have a circulation of just 50,000, but it retains some of the patina from when it was a must-read weekly for Manhattan's business and cultural elites. In Gessen, she has found a boyfriend so high-minded that his publication has no measured readership whatsoever. "We think of ourselves as a research institute that has taken on the form of a literary magazine," Gessen once told an interviewer.

To be sure, Gessen's magazine adheres to the model of the Russian intelligentsia: women, as a friend of Choire Sicha's once said, are "mere accessories" in the world of n+1. But even the most feminist of writers can be drawn to the myth of the literary salon, however faded, in which the muse calls forth the genius in her lover, and shines in his reflected brilliance. Says a former friend: "Emily wants everyone—or at least a small sliver of New York's male media world—to think she's smart. And they want to fuck her. Both sides, thus far and pretty much, have gotten what they want." And Gessen, who now has a book to sell, will get so much more than merely private adoration.

The n+1 editor used to disdain the marketing machinery of the literary world. In his novel, the self-identifying immigrant rails against the nepotistic New York establishment in which, if a surname sounds familiar, that's because the person is a relation. And he used to have nothing but contempt for bloggers. "Wait 'til Gawker gets its filthy mitts on you," he said in a round table for the Harvard Crimson. "It's just strange, you know we live in a time when people can say whatever they want about you on the Internet and take no responsibility for it."

Of course, he didn't complain when n+1 began to receive blog attention, last year. I count 25 mentions on Gawker alone, last year, most of them gently mocking, but each reinforcing the semi-ironic message: "n+1 is the most important literary magazine of our time." One of the first reviews of his book is on one of Emily Gould's blogs. And now he's abandoned all pretense of detachment from irresponsible blogdom. Gawker has indeed gotten its filthy mitts on Gessen: he's dating one of the most untrammeled writers the site has ever had.

Emily rather famously rubbished her former boyfriend, Josh Stein, as "emotionally manipulative" though the assumption that she also dismissed him as a premature ejaculator is apparently a misunderstanding. The slanging match continues, months later. After a warning by her ex in the New York Post's Page Six Magazine against dating a blogger, she responded: "Josh is busy altering his odd sweaters with the $2K he got for his article and probably doesn’t give a shit about anything but that money, and the fact that the whole little scandal gave Gawker commenters another opportunity to marvel at the musculature of his torso."

For the moment, Emily is still revealing only with a six-month lag: she has been commissioned to write her own personal account of her experience as a blogger for the New York Times Magazine—where Gessen, despite his image as an outsider, has several connections. (I assume it will focus on manipulative capitalists rather than manipulative boyfriends.) But eventually she'll move on to the literary milieu. I can't wait for the too-much-information blog posts. Word is she's already honing a pitch for New York Magazine on her new area of expertise, the most important writer of his generation, Keith Gessen. That's synergy!

There's nothing that scandalous about any of this. Bed-hopping is an honored literary tradition. The only victims in this story are the more naive among the dreamy writer's groupies, who may have believed that he was a pure soul, or at least a potential soulmate. Oh, and the Observer's poor Leon Neyfakh—though he had plenty of evidence that Emily Gould's a heartbreaker. Both Gessen and Gould are, despite their self-involvement, talented writers: maybe the self-involvement is an integral part of the talent. Hypocrisy? Well, duh! Radical writers have always tilted against the publishing establishment—until the moment the doors open a little. Today's penniless bomb-throwers are tomorrow's self-satisfied rulers: that holds as much for New York's literary scene as for the Russian revolution with which one of Gessen's characters is so obsessed.

And that brings us to the closing anecdote, which is slightly unfair, because the author may have simply been looking after his father's dog. In Emily's account of the arrival of n+1's winter issue, Gessen in the style of a literary revolutionary drove the delivery truck himself from the Ingram warehouse in Pennsylvania. Now he leaves such menial work to the foot soldiers. n+1's great leader spent last weekend in Cape Cod, with his new muse, leaving one of his unfortunate underlings to make the following plea, complete with compromisingly bloglike links at the end, to their groupies.

Dear Stalwarts,

I received an urgent text message tonight from Delmore Gessen ordering me to organize a crack posse to converge at 11 am upon 195 Chrystie St. (Manhattan) to move the offices of n+1 magazine back to their rightful native home in DUMBO.

This effort commences from 11am-1pm, Saturday.

People, if you are reading this email (pimped out from the scratcher list), YOU ARE THE FORCE.

There is no other way but to show up.

Now to make this mass email more palatable, I throw in some video links to commemorate the death of the eminent reactionary Bill Buckley:

FULL BUCKLEY V. CHOMSKY:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1214894113898255184

BUCKLEY TO VIDAL: "NOW LISTEN YOU QUEER":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

BLOATED BUCKLEY SWAN SONG ON CHARLIE ROSE:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2955116813086874076

Bonus video:

Answers: Movie, Movie, Movie, N+1, Movie, N+1, Movie. BUT all apply to each equally! Right?

Keith handled himself remarkably well in this crisis, though he did later blame the accident on me: "You make me nervous," he said, his voice getting high-pitched and muppety for a second.

At the time of the accident we'd been talking about Keith's book "All The Sad Young Literary Men," which Viking will publish in April. Jonathan Franzen had said that reading Keith's book made him wish to be a young man again. And last night, Choire quoted a friend of his who's reading a galley of the book as saying that the book was a cautionary tale. [The friend had written: "I just started reading Keith Gessen's novel — irritating of course, it's the n+1 world, where women are mere accessories, but not bad! But SUCH a cautionary tale.... To me it's screaming *Get out of NY before it's too late*!!! Or, shrink your life in NY... stop going to all those lame competitive parties. Look, I always liked Sloane Crosley too, but when the fact that she is *nice* is the subject of an Observer article, that is a culture in deep, deep decline."]

Keith didn't understand how the book could be a cautionary tale.

Not having read the book, it's impossible to say with any certainty whether it would make me want to be a young man or whether it would make me want to leave New York.

While Keith was writing a note for the minivan's owner, I had time to flip through n+1 issue 8. In it, Wesley Yang writes about Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, and of other "essentially unlovable" people, including himself:

Jasper once told me that I was "essentially unloveable." I've always held that observation close to my heart, turning to it often. It's true of some people—that there's no reason anyone should love or care about them, because they aren't appealing on the outside, and that once you dig into the real person beneath the shell (if, for some obscure if not actively perverse reason, you bother), you find the real inner ugliness.

In the Budget truck, I also had time to read most of Carla Blumenkranz's review, 'In Search of Gawker.' Carla went back into the Gawker archives to trace the site's evolution from Elizabeth Spiers' first post in 2002 to the decadent Gawker of today. "Reading through the early Gawker archives means watching Spiers receive and record her New York education," Carla writes, also observing that "her persona was part of her appeal," while the site's next editor Choire Sicha's appeal was that he was "almost impersonally sharp and cruel and correct."

"Sicha's persona did not change much during his time at Gawker, but he did reveal himself to be invested, in a strange way, in the integrity of Gawker as an institution," Carla goes on to say. It's hard not to be invested in the integrity of an institution that you are, to some extent, the public face of. Yes, also it's just a job, it's just a business. Right now, it's a business that is fairly hell-bent on increasing pageviews in light of the allegedly coming internet advertising downturn—whether that means that content is a tertiary concern after pageview-boosting commenter-friending features and sponsored contests. And still when you work here, Gawker is, to some extent, you. Carla also wrote:

No one ever said Nick Denton was an altruist. But it's important to note that Gawker Media was designed to compete with the corporations that Gawker abused from the sidelines, because this is what created the dissonance of the site's later years....It was the writers, from Elizabeth Spiers to Emily Gould, who sold Denton's cynical project to his cynical audience, on the strength of their authentic interest in the material....

"The status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully," she wrote.

And finally:

In early 2007, Choire Sicha—the outsider, the non-careerist, the one who had known restraint, whose parody of journalism had retained some memory of journalism's ethics—returned from the Observer to save Gawker. But it was too late.

Keith finished his note to the minivan-owner and, with Choire behind the truck waving his arms in an impersonation of usefulness, backed the truck out of the too-narrow street.

Later Keith asked me what I thought about Carla's essay and I said that I didn't really think she was wrong about anything, except that Jessica Coen had not "grown up in Los Angeles." By then we were standing high on the F train elevated platform at Smith and 9th Streets. The Statue of Liberty looked like a little dashboard adornment beyond the B.Q.E.

I took a phone call and when I got back, Choire had told Keith he was quitting Gawker.

"Yup, we're quitting!" I said.

"Because of this?" Keith asked.

"Sort of. Well, not because it was written. But because it's not untrue."

n+1 editor Keith Gessen held court behind a makeshift bar strewn with beer bottles and pizza boxes, tufts of black chest hair peeking from the unbuttoned collar of his American Apparel polo, making sure the undergraduate-looking girls got as many beers as they needed. He was also quick to point guests to the box of copies of "What We Should Have Known," which is being distributed free to college freshmen and 18-year-olds with proof of ID.

In this pamplet, Keith himself expresses regret that he ever attended college, a sentiment later echoed by Siddharta Deb, Rebecca Curtis, and Ben Kunkel. Ben also dismissively calls college "summer camp." These people's other regrets include having read Paul de Man before Wordsworth and Deleuze before Proust and having read Frederic Jameson instead of Perry Anderson. The pamphlet is 126 pages long. However, it only takes 5 minutes and 52 seconds to listen to the song "Common People" by Pulp in its entirety.

"So you're the bartender?" I asked Keith. I wanted a beer. "So you're a yoga teacher?" he countered. This neg immediately attracted me to Keith. Mystery knows what he's talking about with that shit. For a moment, I was charmed by Keith's big, wide-eyed face, his lips perpetually curled in a smirk of what is either amusement or disdain. But then he tried to explain to me why "Indecision," his pal Kunkel's debut novel, is a good book—apparently, I had missed the point and failed to see that Ben was satirizing 28-year-old navel-gazing boys who've read too much literary theory.

It is always so helpful when friends of authors whose books you didn't like explain why said books are good!

In a corner, debut novelist Porochista Khakpour huddled with novelist Alexander Chee, whose second book is nearly finished. They were talking about how some of their students are so dumb it's sad (they both teach writing). An Observer intern wandered around, asking people, "Will you give me a quote?"

Who is that pale woman who keeps giving me the hairy eyeball? I wondered aloud to a friend. It turned out to be Carla Blumenkranz, the n+1 editorial assistant who's best known for her in-depth takedown of American Book Publishing, based on her experience as an intern at Plume. At that commercial publisher, she discovered a stunning truth: Editors try to find marketable authors, because they would like to publish books that people will actually purchase! For shame.

She has just completed an essay about this website for n+1's next issue, so I suppose it isn't surprising that she didn't want to talk to me. Sometimes it's so much easier to perceive things from a distance.

*Keith Gessen, 'What We Should Have Known: Two Discussions,' 2007, n+1 Research. p. 118.

Hilarious:

In the messianic first issue, which shipped to bookstores last week with an initial print run of 2,500 copies, the editors resolved to put forth something more than a buyer's guide for the very rich—to offer, instead, a form of art criticism that rejects the language of publicity and avoids fossilized jargon pilfered carelessly from the academy. "There are enemies out there," is the magazine's alluring central conceit, "but we are stronger than them and we have some thoughts."

But, says the Observer: "[T]here's a problem, which becomes clearer in the issue's two other 'polemics'—the first an angry rant titled 'New York Must End,' in which D.C.-based Christopher Hsu comes out against 'ethnic' restaurants; the second a sharp denunciation of rock music in which John Daniels declares that 'if your favorite band exists, it is already part of the problem.'"

These vital young contrarians are fun!

n+1's latest e-blast (ha!) also plugs editor (and Dalton graduate!) Marco Roth's memoir in progress. Here's some out-of-order sentences from it: "[L]ight pouring from the East River through the bank of windows overlooking Central Park... I hate myself for writing a memoir and I hate most contemporary memoirs... [The living room was] large enough to seat 30 people for the chamber music concerts my parents hosted two or three times a year... a magnificent, pre-war, two-story temple to neo-classicism... the kitchen was about the size of the one-bedroom apartment where I'm writing now." There, done!

Finally, there's a genius plan to send out copies of their mag all over the world using traveling lawyers. That's just funny.

From: Editors of n+1 < subs@nplusonemag.com> Date: Aug 3, 2007 2:31 PM Subject: n+1 reading on the Hudson Pier To: subs@nplusonemag.com

Dear Beloved Subscribers,

Greetings from n+1 headquarters, where the air-conditioning is not what it is in your standard major New York publisher, to put it mildly. But we do have Microsoft Word, and email, and the hardiest
band of interns in n+1 history.

Some news:

READING NEXT WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 8. At the Hudson Pier, Manhattan, 7 pm. Rebecca Schiff, who appeared in the Issue 4 Fiction Chronicle, will read her dark, comic tales of post-industrial love-seeking in New York and Boston. We will also inaugurate, on the Hudson Pier, our first experiment in having a trained actor read a piece from n+1—in this case, Eli Evans's "TV Diaries," from Issue 5. We'll see what
happens. Please come if you can. Afterward we will go over to the [SITE OF PARTY REDACTED, TO AVOID ANNOYING EMAILS] which happens to serve an excellent burger, if you're hungry, plus beer.

*Note*: We don't yet have the exact pier assignment from the Parks Department. To avoid incessant emailing of everyone, we're going to post the location at the top of our website (www.nplusonemag.com) as soon as we have it, we hope by Monday at the very latest.

PAMPHLET #2: We are making another pamphlet—this one about what we wish we'd known when we were college freshman, and what books we wish we'd read. "What We Should Have Known." Is that too cumbersome? We'll be slipping it under the doors of incoming first-years at select universities this September. Really. It will also be on-sale to non-college students, just in case. But anyone who can prove college first-year status is entitled to a free copy.

RENEW: Please renew if you haven't! There will be many more n+1s, and renewals keep us alive.

www.nplusonemag.com/renewal.html

(Note: The pamphlet referred to on the renewal page is the PS1 pamphlet on the avant-garde. We'll make the second pamphlet available for purchase as soon as we send it to the printer.)

NPLUSONEMAG: Continues to produce high-quality internet-only web gems, recently featuring the work of the beloved crazy German-Swiss writer Robert Walser:

www.nplusonemag.com/newnovel.html

Also, Nikil Saval on Bobby Seale at BAM.

www.nplusonemag.com/seale.html

and Carlene Bauer on how Sassy didn't actually change her life:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/sassy.html

Elsewhere on the internet, we're proud to recommend Marco Roth's continuing series of memoirs at Nextbook.org. They're really quite remarkable:

http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=554
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=571
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=597
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=652

And a bonus treat:
http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=464

Finally, while we're at it, Rebecca Curtis's book of stories, Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money is now in bookstores. "The Near Son," which appeared in Issue 5, is in it; it's a very good book.

AND, our good friends at Paper Monument are now putting the final touches to their first issue, and threaten to throw a large party in September. Be sure to subscribe here:

www.papermonument.com.

NEW INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION SCHEME: Remember how we called on people to contact Greg Jackson, International Distribution Tsar, if they were going abroad? Well, that did sort of work—heroic
subscribers lugged issues with them on vacation to Beijing, Berlin, Barcelona, and Bogota (seriously). But now we've added a whole new dimension: lawyers. All across midtown New York, boxes of n+1s are now
sitting in prestigious law firms, ready to be toted by lawyers who need to fly to Europe or South America for two days in order to read through a single foreign document. But we need people to meet the
lawyers. So: The old offer—bring n+1 on vacation—still stands. The new offer: If you're already *in* a foreign city and think n+1 could sell three or four copies there, we'll send a corporate lawyer out
there as soon as—well, as soon a major corporation in your country gets sued. So let us know you're there.

WEST COAST TOUR: We're doing a West Coast tour in the late fall. The n+1 informational blackout on the West Coast must end. There are entire communities in California that have never even heard of the
magazine. And yet every day they die a little for lack of what they'd have found in Issue 5. "TV Diaries," for example. "The Blog Reflex." "The Meaning of Life, Part 2." More on this later. And if you happen
to be attached to a university in California, Washington, or Oregon, please consider inviting us to speak.

Speaking of Issue 5...

ISSUE 6: We've entered production on the issue. Poetry from an unknown poet, fiction from an admired literary critic, the definitive history of the cubicle, and also the first-ever world-wide appearance
of the new novel by the incomparable Helen Dewitt, author of the Last Samurai. Seriously. Estimated shipping date: October 1. If you plan on moving between now and then—please let us know your new address. Issue 6 is not to be missed.

Finally, a very short but militant story by the Russian poet Kirill Medvedev:

"In Praise of Evolution"
The owner of a factory—his underworld nickname was Toothache—sat in a cafe wondering how he was going to destroy the union. For a while this was the most important thing in his life. He was working up some ideas about it now, when all of a sudden a group of comrades walked by the cafe bearing a red flag. The factory owner decided that the revolution had come, and he began to repent, and shed tears, and share his profits with the workers. But it turned out this was just a slow evolution, and there was still plenty of time to exploit, crush, and kill.

As ever,

Keith Gessen (for n+1)

Carla Blumenkranz

Mark Greif

Chad Harbach

Ali Heifetz

Benjamin Kunkel

Allison Lorentzen

Marco Roth

Nikil Saval

For example, if it were up to us, we'd have deleted the part that makes Carlene look like a sad loser who can't get over her teenage successes.

But they don't mention that Seventeen also published Sylvia Plath, Lorrie Moore, and Edwidge Danticat—all winners of its fiction contest. (Full disclosure: I am one, too.)

How Sassy (Should Have) Changed My Life [n+1]

I have two year' worth of hoodies, wearing a different one every day. A lot of people in the hardcore scene used to wear them. It's also like a comfort blanket. Long after I started wearing them, my manager told me that Bob Dylan would wear hoodies on tour. And when the hoodie was up, you couldn't talk to him. I was like, "That's amazing!"

BONUS DIRECTOR'S CUT: Go behind the scenes and see how this post happened!

If you've read this site with any degree of frequency, for which we apologize, you'll have noticed that Thursdays seem to be the most difficult day for us to put together anything resembling a readable blog. We stretch more, we make items out of things that normally wouldn't merit a mention, we resort to weird, self-referential material that results in a fusillade of indignant e-mails from publisher Nick Denton, all of them simply reading "too inside." But, chatting with a colleague from popular new girly-site Jezebel this morning, we learned that we were not alone.

Jezebeller: Do you want to do something about a picture of Angelina Jolie?
BALK BTW: Hahahaha
Jezebeller: i dunno, just a thought. i have pic if u want it
BALK BTW: Sure, we'll give it a whirl.
BALK BTW: Fucking Thursdays.
Jezebeller: RIGHT?
BALK BTW: We're ALREADY at Julia Allison
Jezebeller: why the fuck are thursdays so awful?
BALK BTW: Nothing publishes at all.
Jezebeller: yeah but thurs. is bad for us too
Jezebeller: and we don't over-rely on that kind of stuff the way u do
BALK BTW: It's a weird, eventless day for whatever reason.
Jezebeller: at least it's one day till friday
BALK BTW: Maybe that's why.
BALK BTW: Can't you guys gin up another "I would totally blow him" IM? People seem to like those!
Jezebeller: what was a totally blow him?
BALK BTW: Oh, just a sort of "hot guys" conversation that you ladies do so well.
Jezebeller: haha
Jezebeller: we'll see
Jezebeller: we have to be "into" it
BALK BTW: I want to do an IM with Choire about why he's so obsessed with the Transformers movie.
BALK BTW: But I'm afraid I'd find out.
Jezebeller: HAHAHA
Jezebeller: PLEASE DO THAT
BALK BTW: I think we'd all be too frightened to learn the real reasons.

And also maybe a magazine with a little naked Ben Kunkel!

Previously: Our Dream Magazine

This class will deal with how to write about ideas and politics in a way that is personal without necessarily being confessional. Along the way, we'll explore themes and conflicts raised by the first six issues of n+1 and its reception, and how these play out as matters of literary style. Topics to be discussed will include: What is it like to write in an information-saturated climate? How do you incorporate contemporary political conditions and ideas into fiction and how use techniques of fiction writing to make political arguments? We'll also debate whether certain stylistic modes-satire, irony, etc.-can have political meaning and whether or how that meaning changes historically. Finally we'll explore the politics and sociology of current literary practices in publishing, the universities, and New York itself. Classes will be organized around intense close-reading of short assignments from the magazine and elsewhere.

From: Allison Lorentzen Date: May 15, 2007 3:33 PM Subject: n+1 Intern Goodbye Party, Friday 5/18 To: Chad Harbach

Friends,

Please join me, Chad Harbach, and the rest of n+1 in wishing a fond
farewell to our winter interns this Friday, May 18, at REDACTED.
If you are an intern or know of interns with a passion for
documentary films, you may be interested in our pre-party screening of
Paul and Dan Catagallo's[sic] "No Outlet," about disaffected young adults
living in suburbia—write to me for more details.

Details for the party:
Friday, May 18
ADDRESS REDACTED
2/3 to Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
10:30 PM till late

See you there!
Allison

How can one statement be such a fantastic pineapple upside-down cake of fallacies? It's like some crazy mash-up of an appeal to pity and spite, capped with the world's most anti-democratic and most anti-intellectual irrelevant conclusion. People can say whatever they want about you on the Internet—but it doesn't mean anything, because speech so free is apparently reckless. It's irresponsible to print whatever one believes! Oh, I get it! He means it's not true, somehow, because he deems it irresponsible.

Oh, by the way—you know what my favorite part of n+1 is? The unsigned front-of-book items! Where an anonymous editor, or friend of editor, or someone, can weigh in on whomever and whatever however he wishes. Those are great.

Keith Gessen has a friend in David Blum, our favorite former Village Voice editor, writing in today's NY Sun about the horrors of the internet. (He saved himself some money, by the way, and attended the University of Chicago!)

Eventually, someone's career will be ruined, needlessly and unfairly, by a reckless Web site. Who arbitrates the limits of Internet exposure, or the level of celebrity required to justify it? As it gets easier for Web sites and reporters to pick apart the private behavior of our public figures, what greater public good is being served by these floggings? Meanwhile, we could all probably benefit from ratcheting up our fear of exposure, too—even the best behaved among us. The Internet is out there, and it's an equal-opportunity destroyer.

FM Roundtable: Writing to Live [Crimson mag]
Baldwin Gets Caught In An Odd Parent Trap [NY Sun]

Grads Reveal Secrets From Within The N+1 Offices [Crimson]

[Photo via]

Keepers of the Flame: A Reply to n+1 [The Millions]

The details:

Dear Honored Subscribers,

A month ago we sent out a save-the-date for February 24th. Then our space fell through, and all the other spaces we found were way too expensive, and in short the wholesale re-zoning of the entire metropolitan area into one enormous BANK threatened to keep us from ever having a party again.

But not so fast.

New York subscribers, and all those visiting from out of town, please join us this Saturday night, March 3, at the TANK (not the bank), at 279 Church St. in Manhtattan between Franklin and White to celebrate the launch of Issue 5 and the first n+1 pamphlet: "A Practical Avant-Garde."

Because Manhattan is a crowded place, the party will take place in two segments.

The first, from 9 pm until midnight, in honor of the avant-garde pamphlet, will be conducted in the downstairs space at the Tank while a play goes on upstairs at Collective Unconscious. This segment of the party will be for our more respectable subscribers; wine and beer will be served. Issues and pamphletsand totebags will be on sale.

The second half, from midnight until 4 am, in honor of Issue 5: Decivilizing Process, will be for our less respectable subscribers. Kid Millions of Oneida will DJ. We will have both floors of the space. If we run out of room we will commandeer the palatial offices of the Paris Review, down the street.

Price policies! As always, subscribers get in for a nominal fee ($2); non-subscribers, as always, pay through the nose ($12) until they subscribe ($20). We are raising the price of wine and Brooklyn beers to $1.50, to reflect a price increase from our wholesaler. Sorry. And for the absurdly late notice, sorry. But please come! Who knows when they'll let us do this again.

Love,
n+1

PS for non-New York subscribers: We are going on tour in mid-April! We will visit New Haven, Providence, Boston, Amherst, Philadelphia—and then we hope to press on to Baltimore, Washington DC, Richmond, and Charlottesville. In the future we will head west. We will keep you posted, and for the moment the latest tour info is on our News page — The Tour Committee

Earlier: Reading Letters From Famous People In The New 'n+1'

Lethem is concerned about a story that (apparently! How would we know?) takes to task his stance on Ratnerville. (Weirdly enough, the story was (again, apparently!) written by Gawker Weekend contributor Jon Liu. Huh. Small world.)

Dear Editors,
A glance in the mirror Jonathan Liu offers me in "A Sporting Chance" shows a creature of straw, wearing my name. Liu indulges the same caricature of an anti-Ratner position as Charles "There's this small culture of inertia" Schumer and Frank "They should have been picketing Henry Ford" Gehry—i.e., that to stand against this particular development is to stand, somehow, against progress—and the contemporary city—itself. Hooey. Balderdash. Flapdoodle.

Let's make it simple. A thousand different futures could be projected for that zone (and if you chose from a thousand at random you could hardly do worse than Ratner's top-heavy, over-dense, privatized, underplanned, compromised-yet-railroaded vision). Who ever claimed the only choice was between this and 'stasis'? (If you're not for wiretapping, you must be in favor of terrorists.) I like sports too, but when did basketball come to mean towers? Why not ask for better, instead of consoling ourselves in advance for acquiescence to yet another triumph of capital's brain-dead imperatives? "Growth for growth's sake is the logic of the cancer cell." Edward Abbey said that. I don't find anything more persuasive than cancer logic in Liu's elaborate rationalizations.
—Jonathan Lethem

Earlier: We've Been Giving That Issue a Nice, Close Read

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.

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.

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.

n+1 [nplusonemag.com]
Earlier: Knowing n+1 By Its Table of Contents