It may surprise some readers to learn that I have a subscription to n+1, a young publication which I’ve had occasion to criticize. (I’m fond of several of its writers, and friendly with one of its editors, who will remain nameless lest he be keel-hauled by the others. Hint: It’s not Keith Gessen.) I think the following “correction,” included in the magazine’s opening section (“The Intellectual Situation,” analogous to The New Criterion’s “Notes & Comments”), is a good example of the wisdom that vigilant readers can find in the pages of n+1:
In Issue Three, we voiced skepticism toward the rhetoric of the “reading crisis” that uses the grim statistics—the declining numbers of serious readers—to cover up shoddy literature and literary practices. We deplored the protective argument that anything that encourages reading is good, and that all writing encourages reading, especially writing that’s not hard to read, even when it’s written by people who themselves don’t read.
We were right about the bogus crisis but we missed the real story. We have a writing crisis on ours hands. Everybody in the country is writing books but only a fraction of that number is interested in reading them; while the Chinese work, we workshop. There’s no bigger folly than writing instruction displacing “literature” in college English, though this seems to be what’s happening—not because you can’t teach writing, but because there’s no point in teaching writing when you haven’t reproduced the art of reading. The best you can hope to do is create an artificial market of people who will have to purchase the current round of books, whatever they may be, because they weren’t given the skills to read the books that came before. It’s like those Hollywood remakes that trade on the fact that modern viewers can’t watch black and white, or Technicolor, or even actors with bygone accents and uptight hairdos.
Who can argue with that? It never hurts to quote Amis: “If there’s one word that sums up everything that’s gone wrong since the War, it’s Workshop.” While you ponder that, think about giving a subscription to the magazine to the undergraduate in your life. It leaves much to be desired, but I can’t deny that it’s showing definite signs of improvement.
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