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N+1

woman-of-letters.com

67 pointsCaiero16 comments

I discovered I live in a parallel universe from the author, having heard nothing about anything this article references.

This happens to me every time I take a quick look at the “high culture” world, be it literature, art, music, or general intellectualism. I have a minor in philosophy and consider myself reasonably well-read, but today’s avantgarde is nothing like that of the past, and seems above all else designed to be exclusionary.

Exclusionary isn't the term. I'm not sure there is one specific term in English, but today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment, or pretending to have a deep understanding.

My wife's sister did an art degree, for example, and she and her friends wouldn't stop gushing about purposefully-inscrutable postmodern nonsense like Derrida, who was an absolute hack.

All that aside, N+1 sounds like it's the sort of thing I would enjoy read. I didn't get the sense that it was written to be exclusionary, but maybe I just didn't get the full picture from TFA.

> today's high culture all seems to be predicated upon feigning enlightenment

That must be the marker of "high" culture throughout history generally, right?

I like this quote from a funny video on ancient Greek philosophy (although I'd probably be less amused by the layers of nonsense if the people around me were deep into it):

> Philosophy is known for being equal-parts Pretentious and Needlessly Confusing, and that’s definitely true, especially after Descartes shows up, but there is one thing that Philosophy is not, and that is “Boring”, because it is WAY too stupid. Anybody who tells you that Philosophy is the unflinching pursuit of objective truth is lying to you and to themselves — Philosophy is a mess where everyone is competing for the most galaxy-brained take on the world, and that’s why I Love It, dammit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9ve3BARdFI

n+1 painted itself into a corner by escaping from this failure mode of philosophy.

That's why it's biggest discernible audience-class was lower-middle to "blue-collar" grad students in architecture or design. Who knew this was a great place to learn the form=function* of the writing that they need, but not feel so strongly about it that they'd push it on their colleagues.

I think the early editors should have marketed it to compiler engineers, like a reverse-Wired

@DuaneMclemore, help me out here

*Appeal to the most discerning of [ie old money] aristocrats while being painfully aware that the writing has to distance itself from "champagne socialists"

I should've been clear that I was responding more to the comment than the article or N+1. I skimmed it and agreed with the root comment "[I've] heard nothing about anything this article references".

High culture can feel obscurantist to me.

Writers like to impress that they and Derrida are in on a shared secret, but if this secret is not interesting then the reader must not be allowed to know it before doing some work. A barricade of allusions and references and filler is necessary to make readers feel like they really earned an insight.

Whereas if we took a step back and stripped off the allegories, we'd realise that Derrida's argument to Lacan about the nature of the phallus is not interesting and does not tell us much.

Your comment made me laugh but I had a similar experience. It felt almost voyeuristic with how far I am from whoever they’re trying to reach, like I’m reading someone’s private journal.

I almost mistook the article as a work of fiction

Isn't it good? On one hand, the world is more rich than you (and I) had thought. On the other hand, the people who would go for a Communist revolution do not surface near you as prominent media figures, at least, not yet.

Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.

A particular highlight of n+1 for me was issue 11, which contained a retrospective review of the site Pitchfork[1], an essay chronicling the author's experience at their first Gathering of the Juggalos[2], and an excerpt of Helen DeWitt's excellent novel Lightning Rods[3].

Issue 24's The Intellectual Situation[4] has a phrase I still think about frequently:

> "you have to choose your irrationality or it will choose you."

I have not been a consistent reader, but reading it is a constant delight.

[1] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-12/reviews/pitchfork/

[2] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-12/essays/american-juggalo...

[3] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-12/fiction-drama/lightning...

[4] https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-24/the-intellectual-situat...

> n+1 is a New York–based American literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, essays, art, poetry, book reviews, and short fiction. It is published in print three times annually with regular articles being published online. Each print issue averages around 200 pages in length.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%2B1

** unless you are into cycling/guitars/keyboards/hotrods/whatever then "N+1" is the ideal number of bikes/guitars/keyboards/cars/whatever to own where N is the number you currently have.

Issue 4 is incredible, I bought a damaged copy for a buck and it was the best literary dollar I have ever spent!

You can cultivate an aristocratic attitude even if you never had that much money by USian standards. I mean, as much as we complain about medicine as a kafkaesque nightmare and nexus of inequality [1] it is a miracle not least vaccines, antibiotics, statin drugs, dental implants were never available to the richest people in the Ancien Regime. A character in a 18th century novel might spirit his lover away to Paris from the backwaters of France, now for the rest of us there is Ryanair.

It's quite a healthy way to deal with elite overproduction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM5kKqUETbE&list=RDmM5kKqUET...

Placeholder

https://youtu.be/_Y8mpClnuAI

[Next Gen] Editors of n+1 on a Panel

I should also have put an upper bound on the votes!

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