What We Love | N+1, Baby! New Issue with Too Much Sociology, White Indians, Cultural Revolution and Sadomodernism

N+1 magazine_n_1spring13 II

 


 

THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION

Too Much Sociology
Think back to the first time you heard someone casually talk of “cultural capital” at a party, usually someone else’s inglorious pursuit or accrual of it. 

White Indians
No minority presence in the US is more reassuring, or less likely to get angry or acknowledge your antiblack racism. 

Cultural Revolution
Released, unprotected, into the dark fields of the republic, we would find new things to say and, with luck, new people to say them to. 

 

POLITICS

Rachel Basch
Sandy Hook
All network programming has been preempted for this story, and this frightens me almost as much as the continual buzz of helicopters over the house.

 

TRANSLATION

Francesco Pacifico
The Story of My Purity
I gave anyone who found fault with the opinions of Pope Ratzinger a mouthful, and turned up my nose if anyone made dirty jokes; in short I was totally committed, in my own way, to becoming a saint. 

David Dufresne
Tarnac, General Store

Bauer was at his office when one of his clerks showed him a suggestion from Amazon: “If you’ve enjoyed these other works, you would love The Coming Insurrection.”

 

ESSAYS

Emily Witt
What Do You Desire?

Penny was small, just over five feet tall, with full natural breasts, milky white skin, and a chin-length bob of cornsilk blond. Her eyes were the rich azure of a blue raspberry Blow Pop. 

Lizzie Feidelson
The Merce Cunningham Archives

Choreographers like Cunningham may want preservation to be impossible. They want to remember dances the way we remember people who have died—framed by loss and yet perfect, “as they were.”

John Colpitts
Heads Ain’t Ready

I had no plans, and my high school friend Rob told me that he was moving to New York with his friend Al “to rock.” That was enough for me—it gave me some purpose. 

Moira Weigel
Sadomodernism

Ascetic in its forms and rigorously unpleasant in its subject matter, the films this unacknowledged movement has produced suggest that the only honest and decent thing for art to do is inflict pain.

 

REVIEWS

Nell Freudenberger
On Alice Munro
The child who appears in the four stories of the “Finale” understands that she must be like her father in order to survive her childhood, and like her mother in order to transcend it. 

Bruce Robbins
On Étienne Balibar

Balibar was proposing in effect that Marx offered no providential assurance that things would work out in the end. This was Marxism without a Book of Revelation.

A. S. Hamrah
Film Chronicle 2012

Making a film featuring the music of Benjamin Britten and a biblical flood so you will get the chance to see a 12-year-old girl dancing in her underwear is a perfect example of going the long way around the barn. And the barn is the perfect color.

 


N+1 magazine_n_1spring13 II n+1 is a print magazine of politics, literature, and culture founded in 2004 and published three times yearly. Issue Sixteen, “Double Bind,” is now available by subscription.


 

The Editors