March 19, 2007

n+1 AND THE SCOWCROFT DOCTRINE or THE LAST WORD

(Note:  Garth Hallberg at the Millions beat me to the punch on some of what follows and some have advised to simply let the whole affair die and move on but I'd already begun this when his post went up and I wanted to see it through.  Those who have had their fill of this discussion should avoid the temptation to click through and read today's literary posts instead, as it's otherwise business as usual around here.  For those who have had their fill of this discussion, I've hidden the post after the jump. n+1's input was solicited and appears at the end.  Haters, beware.)

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Posted at 12:01 AM in The n+1 Letters | | Comments (15)

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March 15, 2007

THE N+1 LETTERS #2

From Keith Gessen, August 26, 2004 (Still not hating blogs.)

Hey, Mark.

Fair enough--please take your time with it.

The Intellectual Situation was written collectively. Especially the more offensive parts. We'd have done the whole magazine unsigned, but I think people might have found that weird. We really wanted to have a section in there that was from all of us, saying things we all believed to be true.

Which goes some way, maybe, toward answering the question of us writing so much of the thing. It's just a different model of magazine. As you say, Eliot's Criterion, where he published The Waste Land, or something like Partisan Review (those guys published their own poetry!), are places where the editors had things they wanted to say that they believed no one else was saying. Irving Howe's Dissent. Herzen's Bell. Dwight Macdonald's Politics. Sartre's Les Temps Modernes. The other model is curatorial: you're throwing a creative writing contest and whoever wins the contest gets published. That's the New American Review or the Paris Review--or the thousand magazines associated with MFA programs. They're both valid models, but obviously we're working in the first one.

On the other hand, once we've made it clear what we're doing and how we want it done, we'd like for other people to show up and do it for us so that we can lie back and watch the money roll in. That hasn't happened yet, though.

Keith

(For the most part, these letters will stand without comment but it's worth comparing the editors' lofty aspirations to the sometimes embarrassing reality ...  )

Posted at 12:30 AM in The n+1 Letters | | Comments (52)

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March 14, 2007

THE n+1 LETTERS # 1A

In our comments box, Keith Gessen has chided us for having had the temerity to ask to see a copy of the debut of n+1.  He's right, we did and we neglected to run this response to the request.  (Our inbox is a bit disorganized.)  So we include it here for posterity and resume the series tomorrow:

From Editor Keith Gessen, July 27, 2004

Dear Mark,

Thanks for the note and the interest. The blog looks good. We'll get that n+1 to you this week.

Best,
Keith

Posted at 04:51 PM in The n+1 Letters | | Comments (0)

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THE n+1 LETTERS: #1*

From Editor Keith Gessen, August 25, 2004 (They apparently didn't hate blogs then.)

Dear Mark,

We sent you an n+1 about a month ago, and I just wanted to make sure you received it. You're not under any obligation to write about us, of course, except... well, except that you are. Of course. No such thing as a free n+1. I look forward to it.

Best,
Keith

* The first of an irregular featurette, charting the evolution of n+1's stance toward litblogs.

Posted at 10:55 AM in The n+1 Letters | | Comments (8)

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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