MY LIFE AND THOUGHTS

The first work I ever published was in the second issue of n+1.  It was a long, generically ambiguous piece called “Babel in California,” centering around a conference on the work of the Russian short-story writer Isaac Babel, which took place at Stanford University in 2004.  Nobody besides n+1 would ever have published this piece, which is around 20,000 words long, and combines elements such as: my thoughts and feelings about Isaac Babel’s work; my experiences picking up Isaac Babel’s last surviving family members from SFO; and my interactions with a pair of Chinese filmmakers who were trying to make a Chinese adaptation of Babel’s “Red Cavalry “stories (in China).  

Almost immediately after this piece was published, I was asked to write for the New Yorker.  This was an unimaginably lucky break for me.  I thought: “Wow, it’ll be just like writing for n+1, only I’ll get paid.”  In fact I did get paid, and I don’t want to underrate that.  On the other hand, it really wasn’t like working with Mark or Keith at all.  My editor at the New Yorker, who was really smart, a really talented editor, nonetheless ended up cutting many of the things that I thought made my piece interesting.  [E.g. a passage that included one of my favorite sentences: “‘||| || |||||,’ Bunkerd said darkly.”]  Because, as she pointed out, correctly, these passages didn’t “sound like the New Yorker.” We would have these long phone conversations, and she would tell me things like: “Let’s try to minimize the eccentric parts, so that people who would get it, will get it—and people who wouldn’t get it, won’t notice it.”

The reason I go into this is that for me, as a writer who doesn’t necessarily work from any strong political or philosophical consciousness of the state of liberal capitalism, what makes n+1 really special is their editing.  [In his introduction, Mark talked about how n+1 was started in 2004, one year into the Iraq War, in response to predictions of the end of history, the end of intellectual progress, and the world domination of liberal capitalism.]  It’s already remarkable that they do edit; this makes them unlike student publications, or some web publications, where the editors are basically selectors: they just select pieces and then fix the punctuation and run them.  By contrast, anything you read in n+1 has been through several rounds of genuine, old-school editing, which gives it this polished, thoughtful feeling.  The material feels edited, and even somehow unified—and yet it doesn’t feel processed. 

Basically n+1 is a magazine edited like a book: the authors are given the kind of freedom that is normally reserved for book authors—but with an added immediacy, because it comes out twice a year.  Furthermore, many of the contributors are young writers who haven’t quit their day jobs yet, or they’re in graduate school or whatever, so they aren’t writing books yet; normally, they wouldn’t be getting this kind of freedom at all.  There would be no venue for their thoughts that are “too eccentric” for more commercial publications.

Trying to decide what to read today, I looked over some past issues of n+1 and I came across a terrific piece by Mark Greif, in Issue 2, about literary readings.  It’s called: “Cancel Them.”  In the normal reading process, Mark writes, writer and reader are “two sovereigns… meet[ing] in a nowhere place, proud, independent, and… completely undeceitful”; what the institution of the literary reading does is then to totally compromise this dignified relationship. After all, isn’t the reason the writer became a writer in the first place, largely so that his body wouldn’t have to be attached to his words?  A literary reading is this kind of monstrous habeas corpus, when the public demands that the writer’s body be produced, so they can nod at it.

Mark then observes this phenomenon, that at a literary reading, the audience tends to laugh knowingly at lines that aren’t really funny—lines that clearly weren’t even meant to be funny—and the reason they are doing this, is to be charitable, because laughter is the only communicative sign available to them in the artificial environment of the reading.  For the same reason—because it’s the only sign available—the writer is actually reduced to soliciting this laughter, even for lines that he didn’t intend to be funny. 

I read this piece the night before the first of these readings, and got really depressed. But I’m going to try to get around the problem it describes, in two ways.

First, I’m going to read an entire short piece, rather than an excerpt from a longer piece—because that’s just an even wider disjuncture, the gap between the experience of reading a whole work at home in the bath, and the experience of listening to an anxiously “contextualized” fragment, in some university somewhere. 

Second, the story is actually supposed to be funny.  Please feel free to laugh.