youth in revolt
Reader mail bonanza.
I read your book for a few reasons, which include, in no particular order: … 3) I had a crush on Emily Gould when she worked at Gawker. And if I had the book here with me, which I don’t, I would reread the speech on page 73 you mentioned today on your tumblr. Because here’s the thing: though I’m not sure what exactly you’re responding to with that post, I wonder what, exactly, is so wrong with us hoping we won’t waste our twenties?
Look. I’m not saying I have life all figured out. (I don’t.) In fact, I fear, constantly, that I am achieving a special brand of anti-potential. But would pessimism (maybe you’d call it realism?) serve my purposes in any way?
No, no, of course not. I meant the opposite, really: there’s a period in your twenties when no one cares what you think and no one (besides you) will publish you—and that’s the time to figure out what you want and what you do think—and, more to the point, you will never get that time back. It’s the most valuable time of your life. Once you’re “out there,” it’s too late. You can still develop, but not as rapidly, and also you have various obligations, alliances, etc. It’s the prerogative of youth to think you’re not going to make the same mistakes we made, and I have no wish to dissuade anyone of that. But I’m trying to tell you there are impediments and pitfalls. My book is a whole long litany of them. I mentioned that passage because it’s in a story where the young narrator is observing an older literary critic and seeing very clearly what’s wrong with him, and the older literary critic tells him, essentially, “Look, I know. I used to look around me and see everything that was wrong, and now I see I’m part of what’s wrong, and there’s nothing I can do.” Which, I don’t accept the view that n+1 is part of “what’s wrong”—but we’re certainly now part of what is.
Another writes:
As a twenty-something, I can personally say that I worry about the wasting of my third decade constantly. Furthermore, the only way of coping with this worry is to affirm it by actively, self-hatingly wasting my time. I went to grad school (waste). I consider dropping out of school daily (waste). I write essays I don’t show anyone (waste). I don’t write the papers I’m assigned at school (waste). I drink too much (waste). I smoke (waste, and worse, hastening the time I waste).
Me, I’m desperate to get out of these twenties. They’re baggy and snug in all the wrong places.
And then one of my fellow bloggers writes—hold your ears!
Listen dickface, and listen good: the internet is sick of your shit. The “youth,” however precocious and angry, are also, rightfully, sick of your shit. You want to know why your schtick doesn’t take?… Because it’s bullshit. It’s outdated, or at the very least, antiquated…. Because as anybody who already went through his 20s should know, nobody in their 20s will sincerely listen to someone telling them they will waste their 20s, right or wrong. Maybe it’ll happen; maybe it won’t. Chances are we’ll all be 32 before we knew what happened, and we’ll probably be just as closeted and ambivalent about our long-lasting, now very deeply-seated insecurities as you and your brethren are, finally. Hopefully not, but it’s entirely probable. You think we don’t know this?
[Some of these sentences don’t quite scan—is “outdated” really a stronger word than “antiquated”? (I’ll answer that: No, it’s not)—but I hear you. It does speak to a certain lack of self-awareness, don’t you think, that you would respond to a post suggesting that young people not be such punks by being more of a punk than anyone yet? Eh? Punk?]
Well, Keith, I do. Because I see a smug hornswoggler like you who, after going through your misguided, wandering 20s, thinking you’re so enlightened to have learned the same things as everyone else (including our parents) that you can help others with, decides to hand us a fucking pamphlet to tell us how to not make the same medicore fuckups he did.
Step 1 should be this: don’t turn out to be the guy who hands out pamphlets on how to handle their 20s… We have no need for your supposedly un-cautionary tale. We have no need for your guides…
You want guff? There. Now get the fuck off the internet. Your blog sucks. Your parties suck. And your advice especially sucks.
Easy, chief. Our parties don’t suck. And everyone should read the pamphlet. Decide for yourselves whether it’s bullshit. (It’s not.)
Look. n+1 is not “bullshit”; the pamphlet is not “bullshit.” To call them bullshit is, frankly, utter bullshit—and it destroys the ability to see what actually is bullshit, what actually is a con. We created n+1 out of nothing four years ago. It’s published a lot of good work in that time; it’s also made serious mistakes. It’s published two short inexpensive pamphlets, one of which we handed out for free to college students. “Don’t be the guy who”—don’t be the guy who tells other guys, anonymously, what not to do. And here, let me be a little less charming for a second: If you—all of you—get out of your 20s having done half of what we’ve done at one half the level of quality, I’ll buy you a beer.
While we’re at it, I’m going to reproduce the email I got last week from a young man who has actually thought about this stuff.
I wonder also what it is you think I expected from you. Frankly I don’t know what you mean when you say you have let me down. What do you think I wanted? More help? More advice? The answer is: neither, man. I just realized at some point that I don’t want to be on your team – that n+1 is a project motivated not by curiosity or some urgent new ideas about the world, but a reverence for “seriousness” and a longing for power…. You are mainly worried, it seems, about how people are not behaving themselves. A whole fucking world of wonders is unfolding before us and all you guys can talk about is how some people use blogs to say mean things about each other.
If I’ve understood your email correctly, you think I should be writing things myself about stuff I *am* excited about instead of talking my shit about how you’re doing it all wrong. If that’s it, you’re absolutely right — and you should know that, insofar as this has ever been personal, it is only because I recognize so many of my own worst instincts and inclinations in what you do and say, and fear constantly that the things I wish you were paying attention to are beyond me just as they are beyond you.
One day I’ll get past that, maybe. Or else I will come to terms with my limitations and that’ll be that. For now, I feel unready and unequipped to do what you’re suggesting, but finally hopeful, and focused.
Anyway: obviously you know this, but part of the responsibility that comes with putting oneself “out there” the way you and the other editors have done is to accept and engage with criticism both of content and omission. If that criticism happens to come from a bunch of kids like me and my friends, deal with it – you certainly don’t seem bothered when those same kids offer you their devotion and faith.
Now, see, that hurt. Or, in the words of one of my fellow bloggers: “I may be a millionaire, but this stuff still hurts.” And you know what this young man did after writing this email? He signed his name to it.
I disagree with a lot of what’s in that email, but for the moment my answer is this: Are there things wrong with n+1? Yes. Were there things wrong with my book? God yes. (Something about which I was very clear to any interviewer who asked.) Were all these things done as best and as honestly as we could do them? Also yes. Were they done more honestly and more conscientiously than anyone is now doing them? Decide for yourselves. And while it’s too late for my book, n+1 we’re still working on.
Part of what I’m talking about here is what happens—and it happens so quickly—when you move from a position of being the youngest and angriest person in any room, to being the not-youngest, and if you’re still angry the things that you’re angry about are no longer in the same room with you. One of the attractions of n+1 was always its negativity. We began by writing about the people just above the ladder from us—and we had read them, and thought about them, and what we said was impersonal and harsh. See here:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=node/25
And here:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=regressive-avant-garde
And here:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=burying-hatchet-man
Now, we still do this to some extent, in dealing with other media—
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=oscar-preview
—but it’s not the same as beating up on the literary world. In truth we’re tired of beating up on the literary world, and even if we weren’t there’d be the problem that we’re inside the literary world. These days I think, of the New Republic, Gosh, what a well-edited book section! And gosh, that’s not easy. I even think of McSweeney’s: For all they’ve done wrong, what an impressive catalog of books they’re putting out, all told. Is there an independent publisher in America with half the energy, half the werewithal? There isn’t.
Orwell spent the 1930s calling everyone a “fascist” and a “pansy,” and then found that when he actually met these people he ended up wanting to apologize. He lost some of what he called his “intellectual brutality.” I would say he lost some of his intramural intellectual brutality. So, in short, someone else is probably going to have to beat up on the literary world for a while. Just do it with a modicum of intelligence. Do it by knowing what you’re talking about and thinking about it a little instead of flying off the handle in the middle of the night. And sign your name.
One final bit of reader mail from a twentysomething, partly in response to the post, partly in response to the pamphlet. (Again, recommended for readers of all ages, here.)
I’m from Miami, FL, and did my undergrad at The University of Florida,
where apparently we had much more similar undergraduate experiences (at least as far as *in* the classroom goes) than I would have imagined. As an undergraduate, I was heavily into lit-crit and postmodern theory, but also thought of myself as a committed radical and activist. I tried to forge a link between those halves of my experience, and when that failed, tried instead to simply believe as an article of faith that there was one. Looking back, I’m not sure there was even a tenuous connection. Deleuze and Baudrillard helped me develop as a thinker (and perhaps in some sidelong way—as a writer) but they didn’t make me a better activist—neither did Jameson. Foucault? Maybe. Likewise, hanging out with homeless punx and letting Food Not Bombs cook at my house and going to lots of protests was fun and worthwhile, but it didn’t help write my papers on Modernist literature. Indeed, cramming a hardline syndicalist perspective into an essay on Joyce is a fairly difficult and not especially useful thing to do.
Interestingly enough—or maybe not surprising at all—only a few
people I knew in college are still actively engaged with the political. One was a history/english double major who worked as a union organizer for a couple years and now works for some city bureau that fights for tenants’ rights in San Francisco. The other is a nurse who moved to New Orleans as soon after Katrina as she could get there, and helped found a medical collective and worked for no money for the better part of a year. She ended up moving into the same decimated neighborhood where her clinic was, and stuck around long enough to go back to school there and get her nursing masters. Everyone else either went back for more school, got an office job, or else is still waiting tables. Except me, I guess— who moved here and became a writer, which as I’m sure you know has its more and less politically engaged moments, but on the whole isn’t exactly social work or a picket line.
Against Chad Harbach’s advice [in the pamphlet] I did pay for an MFA (well, I haven’t paid for it yet—but payment is owed) but for me it was about buying more than a degree. I bought an excuse to move here, attempt to become part of the literary world, and basically just see if I could hack it. If I had had a better understanding of how NYC and said literary world worked, I probably would have held out for funding from someplace or maybe gone to Columbia, so at least I could work for those Ivy League Tutoring companies. But that’s the whole point—coming where I was coming from, I had no sense of how NYC or the literary world worked, and I really only had one idea about how to find out, so that’s what I did.
Yeah, OK. The kids are alright.
