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From Stephen Elliott
Nebraska: golden Midwestern land of corn, cows, and…call centers?
Kathleen Massara writes for n+1 about growing up in Omaha.
Massara’s Nebraska has a lot more frustrating cubicle jobs than, say, Willa Cather’s, but then again, maybe they aren’t so different after all:
...moren+1 shares Marco Roth’s “On Torture and Parenting,” an essay originally published in 2006, in light of the release of Roth’s recent memoir, The Scientists: A Family Romance.
Roth, one of the founding editors of n+1, explores the parallels between parenting and torture, eventually leading to an exploration of the torture perpetrated by the then-current Bush Administration.
...moreToday in a Russian court, three members (Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alekhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30) of the all-female Russian punk band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in prison for “hooliganism.”
(For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a round-up of links that we published last week.)
The trio had been facing up to seven years, but, after much deliberation, was sentenced to two years in prison for an anti-Putin song they performed in a church.
...moreWhy review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question.
Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing “death” of the book review is perhaps a more nuanced process than it first appears:
“Perhaps a large problem in the decline of good criticism is that readers no longer know how, or where, to find critics, and, more importantly, how to define what makes it Good.”
Hu’s essay is in some aspects a continuation of the narrative established in Elizabeth Gumport’s 2011 essay “Against Reviews” for N+1, an impassioned argument for a complete rethinking of the form and its uses.
...moreAt n+1, Rafael Gumucio writes from within the Chilean student protests, recalling the rebellions of his generation–which grew up under the military regime–as he details the “hunger for equality” that characterizes current movements in Chile and beyond.
“Over the six long months of school sit-ins, marches, unavailing efforts at dialogue, barricades, and gunshots, everything shifted and is still shifting, an unending moral earthquake in a country that seemed to have turned away from great moral questionings, the pain of the dictatorship, the urgency of reconciliation.”
...moreWRITE YOUR STORY reads the advertising placard for corporate octopus Citibank on display in the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. The campaign’s thrust appears to be this: by spending money, being a consumer, one, in fact, indites a story on the face of the everyday.
...moreThis n+1 piece tracks the history of conversation, in different mediums. The vastly diverging worlds of talking vs. conversation vs. chatting online have all experienced their own evolution. Even just focusing on chat itself reveals a trajectory perpetually informed by the ways in which we chat online.
...moreTom Lutz at the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Elizabeth Gumport’s essay in n+1 called “Against Reviews.”
Lutz writes “Taste cultures do have something to do with circles of intimates, and the explosion of book clubs in recent years is testimony to a general desire for, if not an orgy, at least something more personal and embodied than a Sunday book supplement.
...moreLet’s collectively remember John Ross, a “relentless political and literary experimenter” with revolutionary tendencies.
Best known for his book Murdered by Capitalism and his coverage of the Zapatistas movement in Mexico, where he spent a significant portion of his life, Ross wandered the globe from San Francisco to Peru to Iraq, documenting his insurrectionist journeys. One of his last requests? To have his family mix his ashes “with marijuana and have them rolled into a spliff to be smoked at his funeral.”
(via Arts & Letters Daily)
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A hedge-fund manager predicts the 2008 financial meltdown, but adds little to our understanding—or our sympathy.“I was being paid minimum wage by an important publisher to sit very still and, occasionally, walk across the floor.”
Writing on the subject of the publishing industry, especially if it is lyrical and done well, will never fail to interest me.
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Thanks to Bloomberg.com, we now know how much Chad Harbach, the “Unemployed Harvard Man,” made on the sale of his novel, and how many copies of The Art of Fielding he’ll have to sell to outsell his co-editors at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel and Keith Gessen.
Leave it to literary magazine n+1 to get interesting people together to talk about interesting things that are of interest right now. For example, in December they had Malcolm Gladwell and Christine Smallwood discussing Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual. A discussion on gentrification was held in January at the radical bookstore Bluestockings.
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This week in New York Malcolm Gladwell and James Wood talk about Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual, members of the Velvet Underground reunite at the New York Public Library, 60 Writers/60 Places screens, Anne Carson performs, Andy Warhol films get shown at Anthology Film Archives, Mark Doty and Marie Howe read, and Voice 4 Vision Puppet Festival presents odes to Salvador Dalí and Fernando Pessoa.
This week in New York Cate Blanchett acts in A Streetcar Named Desire, John Ashbery and Paul Auster read, Mike Daisey monologizes, an n+1 panel discusses feminism and love, Sherman Alexie talks with Rick Moody, Samuel Beckett’s Letters get talked about, and Charles Burns and Adrian Tomine stand around, talk and sign books at The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival.
This week in New York Ben Marcus and Rivka Galchen at Harper’s Magazine’s The Family Table, Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach talk, Mary Gaitskill, John Turturro, and Eric Bogosian at PEN benefit, Frederick Wiseman’s documentary La Danse, Jeff Lewis and the Wowz!
PPOW Gallery in Chelsea has been lending its space for a variety of interesting literary arts events through its Hostess Project. A few weeks ago it hosted a screening of a film by writers Michael Kimball and Luca Dipierro, I WILL SMASH YOU.
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This week, Chinua Achebe speaks, n+1 in conversation with Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat, Jonathan Lethem reads, composer/drummer Bobby Previte with Psychedelic Furs’ Knox Chandler, photographer Jeff Wall presents more urban decay, “junkyard bohos” Huggabroomstik play, CMJ Music Marathon begins and Renée Fleming sings at the Met.
MONDAY, October 5, 2009 – SUNDAY October 11, 2009
This week in New York, Stephen Elliott reads from his memoir The Adderall Diaries, which has its East Coast Launch with n+1, Spike Jonze week in New York, Sufjan Stevens performs, Arthur Jones hosts The Post-It Note Reading Series, Opium Magazine hosts Live Relaunch, Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime screens at the NYFF.
...moreIn 1996, Phillip Connors’ brother unexpectedly committed suicide. Now, over a decade later, Connors is getting closure through the completion of a 22,000 word account of his family’s experiences called “So Little to Remember”.
The piece, which tackles more than his family’s reactions to the suicide, began as a “thought experiment” put together by Connors to identify patterns in his brother’s life leading up to his unexpected death. “So Little to Remember” also reminds us of the important differences between life and writing about life, as the author explains in his note to Maud Newton. Ultimately, Connors feels his piece is independent from the events it is based on; a method of “letting go by making stories.”
“So Little to Remember” will be out in the latest issue of n+1 magazine. To tide you over, an excerpt is available on Maud Newton’s blog.
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At a recent