The New Criterion

I’ve been meaning for some time to report on the cornucopia of thoughtful and rewarding feedback generated by my thoughtful and rewarding piece on N+1. My negligence occurred to me yesterday when James (whose bright idea it was, I should note, for me to investigate these upstarts in the first place) forwarded me the following from N+1’s subscription renewal appeal:

We hope you�ve enjoyed the essays, reportage, fiction, poetry, and art so far. In just two years, n+1 has managed to make a unique home for new writing in America: most recently hailed in the Times Literary Supplement (UK) and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), excerpted in Etiqueta Negra (Peru), and denounced in The New Criterion (neoconservative New York).

There, there, children. If I had a nickel for every time The New Criterion was denounced, I could buy this 75 dollar copy of N+1 Number One. I used to have my own, given me by the editors themselves, but after my piece came out, a very unhappy fellow who will remain nameless called and asked for it back.

And Keith Gessen wasn’t the only one who took exception to my take on the magazine. On a blog called Chekhov’s Mistress, a certain Bud Parr wrote:

Obviously, since Beck’s article is just more ideologically driven bias rather than thoughtful argument, it’s not worth commenting on further. I have to ask: can’t you do any better, Mr. Beck? It’s one thing for your beliefs to form a basis for your argument, but it’s tiresome when you let your ideology do your thinking for you.

On AndrewSullivan.com, Ross Douthat opines that "the gang at N+1 . . . are neither as great as they’ve been made out to be, nor as bad as Stefan Beck suggests." Surely they’re much worse, Mr. Douthat!

An amusing post at Alicublog had this to say:

I credit folks like Beck for taking art more seriously than the usual Zhdanovite clowns, but Jesus Christ, guy, if you feel that way about things, why bother writing about such ephemera, unsuited as both the object and the analysis are to the New Sparta our times demand? Why not go make munitions, or hang yourself?

For our old chum Karl Wenclas, it’s all about Karl Wenclas:

n+1 is right when it publishes essays outlining the stratified class nature of the American educational system. Stefan Beck is correct to suggest that n+1’s editors themselves are part of the intellectual aristocracy. Neither takes their thinking to the next step.

After all, there’s a group of writers in this land who are authentically "from the wild"; many who’ve known exile and live in it every moment. I’m the ULA’s most visible personality, yet who is more in exile than myself?!

MediaBistro gets right to the bottom of things:

It’s also worth noting that Beck himself only graduated from Dartmouth in 2004, meaning he’s around 24, meaning he might be just a little upset that the ’smart set’ thinks publications like N+1 speak for him. (Though he is editing a smartypants anthology coming out this spring, working title The Dartmouth Review Pleads Innocent: Twenty Five Years of Being Threatened, Impugned, Vandalized, Sued, Suspended, and Bitten at the Ivy League’s Most Controversial Conservative Newspaper. We’re trying to get our heads around that one, and no, we didn’t make that up.)

Good sleuthing, Nancy Drew--it’s the gospel truth!

Jossip says: "Stefan Beck brought the pain on N+1, and Benjamin Kunkel. Please tell us they are going to war it out in a tri-game-a-thon of of Dungeons & Dragons, Magic, and Backgammon." (Make it Scrabble and it’s a deal.)

Notes on Non-Camp offers this whimpering non-response:

The most vitriolic of these attacks is Stefan Beck�s piece in The New Criterion, an interesting choice of forum to mount an assault on a rather small stateside journal that comes out twice a year. There�s an excessive amount of ressentiment at work in this piece, but I won�t excerpt too much, since most of it cut from the same drippingly vituperative cloth and not worth repeating.

Ditto this blog.

And just when I was about to take that advice from Chekhov’s Mistress and put the noose around my neck, the fellows at Snarksmith came through for me.

The editors of N+1 will get the last (or second to last?) word on the Letters page of an upcoming issue of TNC. April? May? The suspense . . . and then, we hope, the great "Was-Stefan-too-mean?" debate will be settled at last. In the meantime, here’s the latest rubbish from N+1:

A Donald Duck head. A miniature windmill. Some patterned cloth. Three rats sniff around the cage. I can�t tell if the Environmentally Complex cage affects their mood. I laugh. There is no illustration for Isolated Cage. I don�t need one. EC rats have heavier brains than IC rats. EC rats have higher dendritic fields than IC rats. Living in Environmental Complexity seems to make a rat smarter.

I wonder if there exists a complexity threshold, a point after which the accumulation and compounding of visual stimuli overburden the visual cortex. The brain cries uncle.

Uncle! Uncle! It is Friday; it is 5:45--gentle reader, I take my leave.