At n+1 Benjamin Kunkel examines the insidious pull of networked living.

My hope is that these reminders will keep me from succumbing any further to a pastime that has already cut deeper into my more serious reading and writing than I’d like, and that has led me to partcipate in the great ongoing suicide (by freeloading content) of the intellectual class. Thinking of the internet, I remember the reflections of Proust’s Swann on his mistress Odette: To think I spent years of my life on a woman who did not appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type! Of course—one recalls that word domestication—he married her all the same.

In n+1’s new book review supplement, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington describes judging Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest.

Recommended with reservations.

Back in 2002 I had a running debate with a friend of mine on the subject of “dignity.” She claimed that this was something I was excessively concerned about. She didn’t think it was possible for people like us to be really dignified in the old (and possibly imaginary) way of prior generations and characters in classic novels.

In writing about David Foster Wallace at n+1, Benjamin Kunkel writes about art and criticism in general.

At n+1 Mark Greif writes of the political theology of the GOP.

If I had to play for one side or the other, and I had no other thoughts or feelings but the will to side with genius, I’d play for the Republicans. The GOP convention trumped the Democratic—because some intelligence there is, in their control room, who can conceive of mastery on the grandest scale; a moral monster, to be sure; a jinni of evil; a trafficker in political eschatology, unafraid to trespass on myths of the gravest consequence. Someone behind the scenes held the key and boldly turned it: someone foresaw that the means of hatching a McCain triumphant was to make of him a risen God. This was the burden of the Vice Presidential and Presidential addresses, and the galvanism of the last few days.

In “What Would Allende Say?” at n + 1, Luke Epplin examines the lasting influence of a political project that never came to completion.

Recommended.

n + 1 has a piece on Slavoj Zizek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

I now realize that my earlier perception of circumscribed causal reach was a consequence of my attachment to a mechanical model of reality, whereas the world under that glass sheet obeys only organic laws, by which everything is interconnected in ways that cannot be reduced to the mere collisions and repulsions of metal balls and plastic knobs.

Read more pinball philosophy on the home page of n + 1.

n+1 has a piece on the worth of e-mail.

Email is good for one thing only: flirtation. The problem with flirtation has always been that the nervousness you feel in front of the object of your infatuation deprives you of your wittiness. But with email you can spend an hour refining a casual sally. You trade clever notes as weightless, pretty, and tickling as feathers.

The New York Inquirer has an interview with Keith Gessen of n+1. On the topic of his magazine’s rivalry with McSweeney’s he says:

This is where McSweeney’s and the Believer come in. When we launched, it seemed like they were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we’ve said so a number of times.

The latest issue of n + 1 carries a bold essay by Elif Batuman.

“New American fiction” is, to my mind, immediately and unhappily equivalent to new American short fiction. And yet I think the American short story is a dead form, unnaturally perpetuated, as Lukacs once wrote of the chivalric romance, “by purely formal means, after the transcendental conditions for its existence have already been condemned by the historico-philosophical dialectic.”

The contemporary American novel actually fares just as poorly in the essay, and, while my assessment of the literary landscape is slightly more optimistic in its own grim way, I enjoy reading something with bite. The establishment needs a shot fired across its bow now and again.

Read the rest of the essay at n + 1.