Chekhov’s Mistess

This Year Negation, Next Year Happiness, with Reading in Between

I attended the n+1 reading last Monday at Labyrinth Books. I don’t go to many these days, but this seemed worth it. I like the magazine after reading the first issue, Negation, and I like to support people who are doing difficult things.

I wrote about n+1 recently in an entry I titled In Praise of the Sublimely Unhip. I don’t know if you would call these guys unhip exactly, but I can’t imagine the truly hip (imagine black-clad Soho-ites on the couch at an unmarked private club at 3 a.m.) sitting down in front of thirty or so people telling stories about Jacques Derrida with any depth. This setting was a university-type bookstore under fluorescent lights, cheap wine in plastic cups and folding metal chairs. However, Marco Roth, one of the n+1 editors, did tell stories about Derrida, and compellingly so.

The highlight of the night was hearing an excerpt from Mark Grief’s piece on the meaning of life (yes, the meaning of life). That piece, promisingly, will be in the next issue, called happiness, due out next Valentine’s Day. He’s clearly a talented writer, and if my sources are correct, he’s enough of a smartie [you’re using this word too much, Bud. ed.] to be a doctoral candidate in literature at Yale. So if someone who is practically a colleague of the venerable Bloom wants to tell you about the meaning of life, you should listen. Right?

The funniest moment for me was approaching Greif after the reading to see if he was familiar with Walker Percy’s essay, “Loss of Creature.” The funny part was that no sooner had I satisfied my urge to claim that I’m smart enough to have read Percy, or I suppose identify with what he was saying, someone walked up to Greif and exclaimed, “Emerson!” carrying on the same exercise.

The most embarrassing moment(s) for me was being introduced around after the reading as “Bud Parr, Chekhov’s Mistress.” Having written about these guys before, they had in turn read my site, so that’s how I came to be introduced by the moniker of my blog. I guess that’s a new concept to me, and being a blogger has such uncertain and ill-defined connotations that it was an oddly uncomfortable form of identity.

Nonetheless, I met three out of the four editors (and a youthfully hickeyed intern) and now have more of a sense about what these guys are about. Keith Gesson spoke about why they started the journal, mentioning among other things, that they were trying to fill the gap left by the demise of the Partisan Review. That’s not the first time I’ve heard that, but these guys are pretty convincing. Even though I imagine they are facing quite an uphill struggle, particularly since their potentially alienating web-piece of a few weeks ago, I get the feeling that this could be the beginning of something significant.

Read widely, think well, and write often.

comments

I actually hope they become something other than the Partisan Review. Their minds seem wasted on the Weekly Standard, the New Republic, and McSweeney’s; they seem at their best diving into uncharted realms far afield from the moribund literary culture of the US.

Why stay in this world when there are better, more exciting ones to pursue? I’m sorry to have missed the event; at their best they seem a damn sight better than most of what’s out there.

    – Mr. Waggish (12/01  at  11:33 PM)

Page 1 of 1 pages of comments

Next entry: Reading The Recognitions 2
Previous entry: Surgery, No Anesthesia

« Back to main

About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: November 17, 2004
• Filed Under:
  Literary Journals

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

Recommended Links

- top -