New Reading

N+1nce in a While Something Important Happens

BY ADAM DELEHANTY

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Illustration by Hilary Falb
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Soon enough, when I die cold and alone but reasonably well informed, the last thing they'll find in cleaning out my apartment are those magazine re-subscription slips I toss behind the bed. Periodicals! Better than friends, they're institutions—they are books that do not end. Reliable affection, information, and art—all you need is a Mastercard. And if we find the right one, a magazine can become a serious means of self-identification: we fall in line with its voice, using it to diagnose society and ourselves. Which is to sometimes say that a person is only as charming, astute, or obnoxious as the periodical company he keeps. In that case, then, I like to skim the College Hill Independent; but recently, and much more enthusiastically, I've been reading n+1.

Most independently funded semiannual literary magazines do not make it. Especially, perhaps, with a table of contents like n+1's: women's boxing, Salman Rushdie, the "Concept of Experience," Reality TV, "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation," the state of independent filmmaking, cigarettes, exercise, dating, and why living in Russia right now is to live in paranoia. And this is to put aside short stories, fairy tales, poetry, and photography. N+1 printed only 2,000 copies of its inaugural issue in the fall of 2004, but, nurtured by the blogosphere and some great critical reception, they'll print 7,000 copies of issue four next spring. It is big enough to get a picture in New York Times Magazine, but still small enough that I was able to personally correspond by email with one of its editors, and everyone at n+1 writes and edits for free. Which is to say nothing about why I enjoy it. Here:

Why Do You Pretend, So?

Let the "n" in "n+1" stand for the way most other magazines, if not most people, think about class. Where last Spring's widely read New York Times series "Class Matters" meekly wondered "What is the state of class in America?" the following two pieces, in the third and most recent issue of n+1, ask a very different question. And, I might add, it is one unmistakably directed toward a very specific group of people: namely, us.

Walter Benn Michaels' "The Neoliberal Imagination" describes a shift in the last half-century from a "liberal imagination" which was reluctant to look closely at economic inequalities, to a "neoliberal" ethos which acts to maintain these inequalities. This second ideology fights against classism, as opposed to the class differences themselves. The neoliberal, he claims, goes out of his way to make sure that poor people are not made to feel inferior. Many élite universities, for example, abide by this philosophy when they try to instill an on-campus spirit of egalitarianism—'it doesn't matter where you're from,' so the mantra might go, 'you're at Brown now.' Also, at the 146 institutions characterized as "selective", where 3 percent of the students come from the lowest economic quartile and 74 percent come from the highest, this "neoliberal imagination" is apt to pretend that class differences exist—even though they really don't. Michaels cites an article in the Harvard Crimson which, in opposition to an $85 student-dorm-room cleaning service, contends that keeping the maid service away would eliminate "unneeded distinctions between the rich and the poor." Michaels puts it differently: "The function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard."

In the very next article, "John Thomas and Lady Jane," J.D. Daniels takes on, well, the hipster aesthetic—wallet chains, wifebeaters, trucker hats—with anecdotes from his lower-middle class life, where such clothing isn't considered fashion. When Daniels thinks of the word "wifebeater," he remembers his one-room apartment in Louisville and the screams of an abused wife next door, and what the cops told him when he called 911: "If he's not still whipping her when we get there, we can't just take him in." He describes how the actual truckers who wear trucker hats are "consigned to invisibility," as those who sport the fakes from Urban Outfitters rest confidently on the assumption that they won't be confused for the source material. In the end, he draws a critical distinction. A certain kind of intellectual wants to be a champion of the working class: another kind, however, wants to be working class—"there is a clothing store in Harvard Square called Proletariat." Daniels has blunt advice for the tired, blasé hipster: "Try asking it [the working class person] what it thinks when it looks at you."

Let's Push Things Forward

Like a number of the pieces found in n+1, these two seem most applicable to well-read, well-off young Americans. This shouldn't come as a surprise: the four editors are all 30(or a few years older), and attended Ivy League universities. The magazine's Brooklyn "office"—if it can be called that—doubles as one of the editor's apartments. But what sets this publication apart from others with a similar demographic is the way n+1 considers its own kind—this newest, educated generation to which we all belong: seriously.

Daniels and Michaels, for their part, expose one of our very particular tendencies: idealizing class—whether a specific one (that of trucker hats), or the structure itself (where inequality persists). Many college students willingly buy into their school's pretense of class solidarity, but while dressing up like you're poor might alleviate some privileged insecurity, and nourish for visiting parents the myth of upward mobility, it doesn't change anything. It's a costume. In the last paragraph of the last page of the magazine's inaugural issue, editor Keith Gessen sets n+1 in contrast to models he sees on an Abercrombie and Fitch poster: "Someday, perhaps, we too will run topless into that Western wind, heedless of consequence, celebrating the good life. But as a child's personality begins to form when it can say, you are not me, so we've begun by saying, No. Enough."

I Really Only Ever Have One Question: "Tomorrow?"

At the beginning of each issue, there are short, anonymous pieces by the editors in a section (probably half-sarcastically) entitled "The Intellectual Scene—A Diary." These diaries have a very specific voice: juvenile but literary, analytical but personal, erudite, facetious and modest—or endearingly self-righteous? Sometimes I can't tell. It kneels in reverence before 60s poststructuralists but spits in the face of NAFTA, The Weekly Standard, and McSweeney's—which they call a "Regressive Avant-Garde," because Dave Eggers and co. "return to the claims of childhood," and put enthusiasm before intellect. N+1 is as comfortable alluding to the wonders of recreational drugs as it is formulating a brief history of 20th century French fiction: "in the twenties it was the Unconscious and Communism," for instance, while "in the seventies it was sex, sex, sex, and feminine writing."

In another "diary" entry, the editors express nostalgia for life during the dot-com boom, when conditions allowed them to feel wonderfully "superfluous." But it's a guilty nostalgia, as "the older generation that sometimes paid for our health care is also the generation overseeing the wreck of our economy, democracy, and climate. This society that cosseted [in the 90's], and now permits us to try a new restaurant once a month, bribes our poorer contemporaries off to Iraq." Elsewhere, they bemoan contemporary literature from every conceivable angle, and convincingly, but end with great insights on how and why the novel can persist.

These editorials are candidly and thoroughly against the status quo, but they are simultaneously committed to ideas I would've found ridiculous before reading n+1: that even amidst hundreds of thousands of stimuli, sleep-deprived, supposedly-jaded post-millennial pre-adults with big ideas can actually write, and create a literature, and that that writing might be able to change stuff. "The idea of progress is not uncomfortable to us," they announce in the "preamble" to the first issue. "[Progress] is wanted in a time of repetition. It is needed whenever authorities declare an end to history. It is desperate when the future we are offered is the outcome of technology."

How To Be Better

In a way, it's especially refreshing to read n+1 as a college student, because its writers and editors—though mostly young enough to be our older siblings—possess the shrewdness, nerve, and rhetorical chops to so irrefutably reconcile some of the strange dialectics that emerge on a campus like ours. "I want to be able to breathe and sit cross-legged but I feel like an automaton at the gym; I want to explain to you why I think Radiohead's music is the essential incarnation of my late-capitalism adolescence, but I don't want to come off like a chump; I am fed up with our culture of sexual promiscuity and short-term romance, but because I'm its product, how will I ever stay in a relationship?" And, in a much more serious way: "I want to be able to believe in something—but will I ever have enough information?"

But reducing n+1 to this kind of applicability is a disservice. I only do so because this magazine challenges me: its scope is so wide, and its arguments so nuanced—I happily take from it what I can. The questions above allude to articles in n+1 that are 30 times better than an answer. This is partly because of format. An article in the magazine might touch on pop culture, economics, continental philosophy, and literary theory, take on a specifically 21st century phenomenon, and lambaste everything in its way, but it will read like a personal narrative, and an academic paper, even though it's a book review. I cannot follow every anecdote or reference, but the point is that I want to, and if a few of my peers agree, n+1 won't just be sold at Symposium. It'll be in the supermarket—bless the day—next to the fava beans, in the "Think, for once! We'll all be better off" aisle. Go on and get a copy.

Adam Delehanty B'07.5 runs a burgeoning periodical out of his Brooklyn apartment.

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