26th
Last week the Nation published a heavy-handed attack piece on the literary critic and Hollywood actor James Wood by a former Yale literature professor. The piece included a reference to the “hipster literary journal n+1” and dishonestly suggested that Caleb Crain’s great short essay in Issue 4 on “Academic Criticism” was anti-intellectual and anti-literature. In fact it was just anti-literature professor, Professor.
Other than that, the piece made some very valid points about Wood, many of which had been made four years ago, in similar terms, by the hipster literary journal n+1. Toward the end it trotted out the beloved ghosts of my most beloved critics: “No one is doing what the New York critics once did. The real question is why. The first answer, it seems to me, has to do with a general loss of cultural ambition.” Ah, a fairy tale about cultural decline. Scratch a university Marxist and you find a… Cossack.
Anyway, why do I bring this all up? Because James Wood has issued a vigorous response! Via YouTube. It’s above. As for Caleb, he has launched a fierce, impassioned, witty, and eloquent attack on the Templeton Foundation—follow it here, here, here, and here. Highly recommended. And as for n+1, we held a big party, attended by a lot of hipsters, I guess confirming the initial charge.
UPDATE: I don’t want to become, like, the TMZ of American literary criticism, but it actually turns out there’s a lot of James Wood on YouTube. Here he is walking his dog; and here he is, well, getting arrested. Note the short pants.
