Comments on: True Believers

By: Matt

Matt — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 14:47:25 +0000

n+1 is neither McSweeney’s nor The Believer, nor the “unwitting product of Oprah culture” though the person who wrote that may be. Try reading it, really.

By: amnesiatica

amnesiatica — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 13:13:31 +0000

I thought it was an exceedingly dull article. I tried to read it all the way through but I kept skipping waiting for him to say something interesting and he never did. I tried to like The Believer also and frequented the damn McSweeney’s store in Brooklyn, but it never took. Something about all that earnestness and precocity stuck in my craw.

By: whicker

whicker — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 09:49:09 +0000

‘“to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.”’

There you have it: the equation of importance with ‘feeling it’ shows how these guys are the unwitting products of Oprah culture.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 09:20:40 +0000

Keith, Unfogged.

By: lemuel pitkin

lemuel pitkin — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 02:34:17 +0000

See, the real difference between n+1 and The Believer is that n+1 is a great magazine. Whereas The Believer is to good magazines as Ann Coulter is to attractive women: in the abstract, the component parts are there, but in reality…

(I was reading Babel in California from the current issue in the bathroom this morning: it made me laugh out loud, and want to seriously reread Babel.)

By: Henry

Henry — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 22:20:09 +0000

Don’t get me wrong – I think that the Believer has done some good stuff. But I also think it’s quite fair to say that its ethos is self-consciously less critical than n+1 – the two seem to me to be very different publications, not only in tone but in the substance of what they’re trying to do.

I’ll admit that my use of the Jarrell quote was a bit snarky (it is a wonderful aphorism, though, isn’t it). Haven’t read the Burt biography, though I want to – I’m working my way through Jarrell’s letters, which are wonderful.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 21:50:21 +0000

I would strongly disagree with Mark. There is nothing merely “easy” or patly diagnostic about “why you should hate this” in n+1. Quite the opposite.

By: J. Ellenberg

J. Ellenberg — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 21:38:07 +0000

The myth won’t die that the point of The Believer is to refrain from saying anything bad about books. As far as I can tell, this all comes from one article Heidi J. wrote in one issue—but I can attest that when I wrote for them, I had bad things to say about some of the books I wrote about, and no complaint was heard from the Believers-in-chief. I think it’s one of the few consistently interesting magazines going (along with Transition.) But I haven’t ever read N+1, and I think highly of Ben K., so probably that’s good too.

Also, I want to say that Heidi is not a spooky ghost in real life, despite the photo in the NYT.

And for more on Jarrell’s view of the proper role of literary criticism, see ch. 2 of Stephen Burt’s Randall Jarrell and His Age.

By: Keith

Keith — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 21:24:38 +0000

Why does literature need to be serious?

I’m going to start a literary mag where we tell fart jokes, make snarky comments and still have something interesting to say about the human condition that can be discussed critically without having to descend into snobbery and elitist fiddle faddle. Enough of this cliqueish nonsense.

By: Max

Max — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 20:10:24 +0000

I took out a subscription to The Believer. I’ve been more disappointed than satisfied or excited. Partly because it’s not what I thought it was going to be and partly because it’s just not that interesting.

I was thinking it would be something like The Baffler. But with loads of reviews of old books. Sadly, not.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:31:45 +0000

I admit that I have not yet read an issue of n+1, but I did read the article, and I find the expression “it is time to say what you mean” a little naive, as though irony is simply a tactic for shuffling off responsibility. Irony is, as n+1 suggests, not saying exactly what you mean, but it is also employed to serious effect, as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Thomas Mann, and hundreds of others, would attest.

By: yabonn

yabonn — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 19:27:00 +0000

No snark, no nothing : what’s seriousness in literary culture?

I realize i should be able to gather it from the post, but i can’t really wrap my mind around it.

Unless of course it’s just being serious while doing literature.

By: Mark

Mark — Sun, 11 Sep 2005 18:06:05 +0000

I feel the opposite way about the two magazines; I’m more annoyed by n+1’s dismissiveness as opposed to what I see as more constructive criticism in the Believer, which really can’t be called apolitical since they often publish pieces which make forthright political commentary (I seem to remember an issue with a large John Kerry drawing on the cover). I found that n+1 article “the Intellectual Situation” more annoying and unhelpful than anything because of it’s negativity—not in the sense that they should have found something to praise about the Believer, but that they offered no vision of an alternative that would be better, they were just dismissive. It’s easy to make yourself out to be critical of something (and therefore “better” than it) if you just dismiss & don’t offer anything specific (which I have usually found n+1 to do, more often than not)… it’s too easy. I’m just tired of relentlessly negative critiques by people who seem not able to imagine anything better than what they’re critiquing. In the articles I’ve read in the Believer I usually at least find something positive to think about adding to my life, rather than a rundown of “why I should hate this”, and I don’t find that that necessarily saps my ability to be politically critical.