Bay Area readings with n+1
The week of 11/26, I will be joining n+1 magazine for the Bay Area segment of their West Coast tour:
- Tuesday 11/27, 3-5pm, University of San Francisco, Kendrick Hall (Law School), Room 102.
- Wednesday 11/28, 4-5:30pm, Stanford University, Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460), Terrace Room.
- Thursday 11/29, 6-8pm, Berkeley University, 141 McCone Hall (near North Gate).
n+1 co-founder Mark Greif will be reading from “The Intellectual Situation.” So will some other n+1 editors/ affiliates also be reading from “The Intellectual Situation.” Somebody might read an “Intellectual Situation” contribution by n+1 co-founder Benjamin Kunkel. I know this because I was cc’ed on an email in which Benjamin Kunkel gives his permission for others to read from this piece, and then says he is going to the Alberta tar sands.
I also received a really circumspect and polite email from n+1 asking whether, for my part of the reading, “there was an ‘Intellectual Situation’ piece [I would] want to deliver with gusto.” I was like: “No.” It’s not that I don’t like “The Intellectual Situation,” but it tends towards strong statements about subjects I know very little about. So I immediately had a picture of myself at the USF Law School, delivering with great gusto some piece about how internet porn has transformed masturbation into office work—or how future presidencies will be even crazier than the Bush administration, because global warming will have made the weather less predictable—and then some super-smart Jesuit law student would ask me some super-smart question—and there I would be, completely sober, like, “Uh, eh, that reminds me of something Tolstoy once said.”
Well, I’m going to read from something I wrote myself, so bring on the tricky questions. The readings will be followed by a discussion about “the function of the small magazine at the present time.”
You know who should absolutely not miss these events, is fans of My Life on the D-List, because it just doesn’t get more endearingly “D-List” than n+1. They have a letter to the editors from Don DeLillo himself, taped to the wall of their office; this office is also equipped with a freight elevator, and staffed entirely by charming unpaid interns. During a fundraising party, hosted by the parents of one of these altruistic young people, somebody stole the $3,000 that n+1 had made by selling some kind of tote bags. They were actually planning to use the $3,000 to offset the unexpectedly high production cost of said tote bags.
The reason the Bay Area tour doesn’t include any bookstores is that no bookstore in the entire Bay Area wanted n+1 there. Even though n+1 has been “profiled in publications from the New York Times Sunday Magazine to the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung“! At one point, my friend’s friend Rick Abruzzo,roommate of the unsuccessful San Francisco mayoral candidate Chicken John Rinaldi, was going to help us organize an n+1-themed spelling bee at the House of Shields; the plan fell through when it turned out that nobody else wanted to do any of the organizing, including me, because I found out I have jury duty that week. In spite of these things—”in spite of or because of,” as Proust says—the university readings are going to be great. Prove your booksellers wrong, Bay Area!