Keith Gessen Blog

calling all Russians

Hi, are you Russian? It’s not easy, right? I know. But once in a while, something comes along, and it makes it all worthwhile. To wit: The great Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is coming to town in connection with Penguin’s publication of her new book, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. (*The* literary event of Halloween, incidentally.) But, rather than killing your neighbor’s baby, she’ll be performing a cabaret at the Russian Samovar on 52nd Street at 8 pm next Friday, November 6. I’ve seen her do this in Moscow and it’s amazing—she “translates” cabaret classics from German and French and Polish into what she thinks they ought to mean, in Russian. It’s really something. There’s also a reading at McNally Jackson on the 9th, but if you’re Russian you should really try to make this. No cover charge. Press contact Bela Shayevich (office: 718 210 3639, cell: 847 494 9011, bshayevich@gmail.com)—but otherwise just come.

experiment

Like everyone else, we at n+1 have been trying to figure out how to keep a print publication viable without becoming a ward of the state or spending all our time trying to sell ads to BMW. So here’s an experiment. We’ve posted three of the eighteen pieces from Issue 8 online; the others are available for download in their handsome original format for between $1 and $3 at Scribd.com. Like iTunes. Full list below and also here.

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no obsolescence

Sometimes writers worry that invoking any kind of technology in their work is like inserting a ticking time bomb of obsolescence. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) opens with the adulterous bond trader Sherman McCoy accidentally dialing his wife from a pay phone when he meant to dial his mistress. Having given himself away, he hangs up in a panic.

Sherman stood by the telephone, breathing rapidly, almost panting. What was he to do now? He felt so defeated…

He dug out another quarter and summoned up Maria’s number into his brain. He concentrated on it. He nailed it down. Then he dialed with a plodding deliberation, as if he were using this particular invention, the telephone, for the first time.

Ha ha, Tom Wolfe you retrograde sucker! Your book is barely twenty years old and most kids these days don’t even know what a pay phone is!

And yet it’s interesting… what he describes, misdialing from a pay phone, it’s actually a little hard to believe. Seven digits, dialed separately, is a lot of digits—about halfway through you’d probably sense that something was wrong. You’d sense you’d made a mistake and retrieve your quarter and start again. Whereas with a text message—that’s just one button. And no stopping it.

The technology is almost gone but the technology that’s replaced it has actually *increased the danger*. Amazing. Wolfe wins again.

foucault caption competition winners

We have our winners for the Foucault caption competition. This year in fact there are two:

Sangwon Yoon informs us that the caption under Foucault in TimeOut Tel Aviv reads: “Not the world, radical/extremist criticism of the world.”

This makes sense—in the pamphlet one of the participants says he was unable to read Foucault in college because he was still trying to figure out the world as it was, and wasn’t yet ready to read a wholesale radical critique of it.

Winner #2, SRolph, recalling Foucault’s reflections on the death of the human subject, argues that the caption actually reads: “When I become the subject of a caption competition, then you will know the end of man is at hand.”

That too makes sense. We congratulate the winners of this year’s competition!

neuronovel

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

interesting, though

That he should mention boot-licking. We have a whole essay on boot-licking in issue 8. (In our ongoing attempt to break even, most of it’s behind a paywall, here. For $2? Recommended.)

mario the epicurean

Calls for “field of power” map of Park Slope, posts interesting response to Mark’s essay.

Now then, sex. Whatever else sex is, it’s more complicated than Greif thinks. In fact, it’s hard not to read his anti-domination discourse as this proclaimed sex-radical’s inadvertent confession of vanillahood. Does Greif not know that some unknowable number of people, perhaps a majority, gets some sexual charge from the image of domination itself? Has he no idea how many people, men and women, want to be whipped, spanked, cuffed, pretend-raped, pissed on, shit on, kicked in the balls, trampled, made to lick boots, tickled unto torture? Has he no idea how many people want to do these things to others? Again, it’s impossible to say how prevalent this is, but there’s a lot of it out there. All sex, as Freud taught, is fetish, and all fetish is a swerve from nature. I well know the rejoinder to this: fetish is all false consciousness, it’s the distortion of the healthy sexual impulse that comes with a culture of domination. But read Dialectic of Enlightenment again: culture is domination, and not avoidably either.

from Caleb's letter

Your claim in the sentence quoted above, which is a sort of joke, has two lemmas. First, you imply that marriage is a surrender of sexual liberty. I don’t think that’s accurate. Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity when handcuffed to each other as when not handcuffed. Marriage is indifference to handcuffs. There are always opportunities to escape. The strange discovery that makes marriage possible is that one has the liberty not to—the liberty to make the same choice, day after day—and that one happens to want to make a consistent choice. It is a paradox, at least. Will one happen to want to make the same choice forever? Maybe not. Separation and divorce are always possible, in our world, and maybe they give marriage its poignancy. The possibility of separation proves that no two people stay chained to each other unless they want to. It even seems to be the case that people who want to stay chained to each other sometimes can’t manage to. It is at any rate an error to think that marriage is a surrender of liberty. It is an exercise of it.

The second lemma of your joke is less seemly. It is mockery of anyone—in this case, gays—who wants the general social approbation implied by marriage. I suspect that you yourself will find this indigestible if you stop and think about it. Do you really intend to mock homosexuals, who have long been considered and in some circles still are considered pariahs, for wishing to have proof that they are no longer so thought of, at least as a matter of law? Your joke will only seem funny to readers who have taken social approbation for granted for so long that they now see only its conformist aspect and no longer its psychological and social benefits. Yes, yes, society bestows its approval conservatively; do you really think that people who have gone without it for most of their adult lives are unaware of that?

four letters

In response to Mark Greif’s “On Repressive Sentimentalism.”

Caleb Crain

Matthew Gallaway

Marco Roth

Sadie Stein

On the same page

Also, Keith Gessen?

pilgrimsoul:

Not a public intellectual!  This is a dude who seriously entitled his novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men.”

Ha ha, it’s true. I’m more of an internet theorist than a public intellectual. But what’s intriguing about this is that “x is not a public intellectual” is being used to mean “x is an idiot.” (x being me, in this case.) It’s like the early 90s discourse of the death of the public intellectual colliding with the late 00s discourse of internet insult. X is honored to have been a part of this moment.

also

While all this was going on, the mobster Yaponchik died of his gunshot wounds. Police predicted that the gangster’s death could lead to an all-out war between Moscow’s major criminal groups. Keeping in mind that he was a very bad man who probably killed many people, does Yapnochik’s death make the video I posted of him getting shot funnier or less funny?