MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

Where did we leave off? Ah yes—with the direct empirical proof of the existence of McCone Hall, and the retreat of the bearded “doubter,” proclaiming, like the Apostle Thomas, the truth of the Word. At that point there were still 20 minutes before the reading. I had left home early, hoping to have time for coffee with the literary historian Luba Golburt.

Instead, what I had time for was hanging out alone in the basement of McCone Hall. Dear reader: if what you look for in a basement is spaciousness, solitude, and a faint buzzing sound, then you will love McCone Hall. I had a moderately good time observing some silicate boulders. I also read some faculty bios, posted in the same glass display case with the boulders. One professor had actually attended the University of Colorado, at Boulder.

The basement of McCone Hall also houses a computerized micromill used for high-resolution sampling across “fish otolith growth bands.” Fish otoliths are calcified stones that you can find in the inner ears of fish. A week ago, I didn’t even know that fish had ears, let alone earstones.

Otolith segment from a juvenile chinook salmon; image by Reg Reisenbichler, US Geological Survey.

Soon the n+1 contingent arrived. We spent some time moving around tables and lecterns. Overheard from an n+1 affiliate: “Berkeley is just how I expected it to be: a dump.” Our room was in the geography department. “Geography: it’s not just maps,” observed n+1 web editor, Nikil Saval: “…although there are maps.”

We agreed to start the reading 15 minutes late, in case anyone had accidentally gone to the UCB law school, our initially advertised venue. Signs had been posted at the law school, announcing the location change. Wandering back into the hallway, I was delighted to witness the approach of literary historian Luba Golburt. Golburt and I pleasantly whiled away the next 7 or 8 minutes by strolling up and down the corridor, where my eye was caught by another display case—this one containing an enormous pinecone. BATUMAN: “What an enormous pinecone! Now I feel I can see my tax dollars at work.” GOLBURT (unimpressed): “I’ve seen bigger.”

Golburt and Batuman, 141 McCone Hall

By 6:20, our audience numbered somewhere between 20–25 souls, including: my webmaster, Mathias; the literary historian Luba Golburt; a solitary attorney; some journalism students and their professor; and an extremely tall, gaunt man wearing a long-skirted black robe, with a silver cross on his chest.

The panel was then introduced by Mark Greif, who also read an excerpt from “Afternoon of the Sex Children,” which appeared in n+1 Issue 4 and was reprinted in Harpers. In this essay, Mark posits a link between (1) the supreme cultural value placed on youthful, barely-legal sexuality (represented by the “sex children” Lohan, Hilton, Spears, et al.); and (2) the modern-day identification of pedophilia as the touchstone of absolute evil (more reprehensible than murder, torture, or other forms of child abuse). “Our cultural preoccupation with pedophilia,” Greif writes, “is not really about valuing childhood but about overvaluing child sex. It is as if the culture understands it must be ruthless in preventing adults from tampering with real children, just because it is working so hard to promote the extreme commercial valuation of youth.”

The first time I tried to read this essay, I got so depressed by the beginning that I kind of rushed through the rest, and didn’t appreciate what a brilliant argument it is. So I was really glad to hear Mark read aloud from it, twice (and from the Harpers version, which is more compact). It actually solved a mystery which had been troubling me for some time: the popularity of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I love Law & Order, and could never understand the relative appeal of SVU, which typically involves 45 minutes of indignation and outrage directed at like some guy who plants a video camera in a high-school girls’ toilet. Now I understand that watching the “human scum” get busted could be soothing to viewers with a deep interest in how Paris Hilton doesn’t wear underwear.

Immediately after Mark’s reading, the tall mysterious man in the long black skirt stood up and left. It was clear that many audience members noticed this vaguely ominous departure. I was reminded of Chekhov’s “Black Monk,” in which a spectral black monk keeps turning up to haunt a young horticulturalist. This monk is actually a mirage cast by another mirage cast by another mirage cast by an actual monk walking around in some desert a thousand years ago.

Even before the silent exit of the fleshless figure in the black robe and silver cross, however, I was already thinking about “The Black Monk,” because I mention this story in “The Chekhov Museum,” which is what I read that night (in a twelve-minute version, reincorporating some slightly “off-color” material omitted from the ten-minute version that I read at the NYU reading). I also read an introduction about why I think n+1 is so great.

The other readers that evening were both former n+1 interns: Nikil Saval, a first-year grad student at Stanford English, read from his history of office cubicles; Ali Heifetz, a valiant young person who is now the n+1 business manager, and apparently had to organize this entire West Coast tour all by herself, read about the demise of Cody’s Books in Berkeley (which still exists, but is owned by a Japanese corporation).

During the Q/A period, we were joined by n+1 editor Chad Harbach. Chad Harbach, like his colleague Benjamin Kunkel, is really, really concerned about the energy crisis. I vividly remember attending an n+1 panel at Columbia, about the role of the small magazine today: the first two editors read papers about the role of the small magazine today, and then Kunkel read a paper about peak oil. As I remember, the idea was that once we exhaust the world’s petroleum, we will have to live in small agrarian communities, producing not only our own means of sustenance but also our own literature, which we will read to each other in the last remaining daylight hours before heading to an early bed. In Issue 4, the entire “Intellectual Situation” section was devoted to an essay by Chad Harbach about the energy crisis.

At the Q/A, I found myself wondering how and when Chad would turn the conversation to the energy crisis. As it happened, he got a relatively easy opening: an audience question about whether print media is “a twilight industry, like oil.” Chad elegantly replied that indeed, print media is a twilight industry like oil… because once there is no more oil, there won’t be any more trucks, so it will be impossible to send magazines anywhere! Nicely done!

Speaking of trucks: the Berkeley reading was n+1’s first official “bicoastal event,” because at the very moment that we were reading in Berkeley, the Chrystie St. office was hosting an Issue 6 “launch party”—one of those parties where guests spend the whole time unloading the new n+1 from the back of a rental truck. Keith Gessen, who continues to be the most frequently Googled person in my “professional” life, having brought to this blog a staggering 63 unique viewers (i.e., they can’t all be Keith Gessen), personally drove the Budget Rent-a-Truck to the Ingram warehouse in Pennsylvania to pick up the new issues. Gessen then returned the truck to the Budget lot in Brooklyn, accompanied, to posterity’s incalculable advantage, by Gawker editor Emily Gould, whose “Long, Dark Early Evening of the Soul with Keith Gessen” chronicles their discussion of Gessen’s much-anticipated first book, All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking, April 2008), as well as the abrupt termination of said discussion, when Gessen managed to smash the taillight of a minivan belonging to “an Orthodox Jewish lawyer.”

To be contiued…

Tags: d-list, events, Keith Gessen, Luba Golburt, n+1

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.