You know what Pitchfork has always most reminded me of? Ain’t It Cool News.

Yet even the most explicitly political acts of data gathering and collecting, like WikiLeaks, can succumb to a contemporary ideology of the self-sufficiency of information.

n+1 on information and art, then information and anger.

Shit, guys. Apparently n+1 died this week, too. They wrote that thing about learning and college or whatever, right?

(Frankly, those guys were kind of douchey and we’d forgotten to check in on them. Dropped the ball. Yeah, so.)

I don’t know. Maybe send a card to Ben Kunkel’s step-uncle.

UPDATE:

I know I’m supposed to find out when they first published and all that, but seriously. Who gives a shit.

James Yeh interviews Diane Williams at The Faster Times.

At The Rumpus, Elissa Bassist wonders, have I earned these cliches?

In a belated look at the NYTBR, the great Harold Bloom reviews a book about the history of anti-Semitism in English literature, Adam Kirsch looks at two books about Heidegger, and Rebecca  Newberger Goldstein writes a satire on Theory, in the style of Borges.

io9 rounds up 35 titles for “The Essential Posthuman Science Fiction Reading List.”

The Nation has a new website! Learn about what’s different here, and about their decision to open source here. Kudos and congrats, guys!

Speaking of new websites, n+1 has one, too. The present feature is new fiction by Dy Tran “about” donuts.

A new issue of the Home Video Review of Books!

And last but absolutely not least, the new issue of Propeller features an interview with Kevin Sampsell, one with yours truly, a review of the latest Nicholson Baker, and a whole bunch of other treats besides. Check it out.

Thou Shalt Read

Last week while I was visiting family in Mississippi, I spent more time in church than I have in the past two years. This reminded me that from the age of 4 and 14, I spent roughly 490 Sundays in church excluding occasional sick days. That’s 1,225 hours when you include Sunday school and “fellowship” time. In addition to regular Sundays there were Wednesday night dinners, youth group meetings, confirmation classes, summer Bible school, youth choir practice, choir tours and weekend retreats. I’m estimating that about 3,500-4,000 hours. Yikes!

But what effect does all this Jesus have on one’s writing? I can’t speak for everyone who has had this kind of upbringing, but for me, church-going led me directly into writing. Prayer led to journaling; journaling led to disgraceful poetry; disgraceful poetry led to disgraceful fiction, then to essays and memoir and more fiction. But church also instilled a reverence for narrative and the inclination to analyze and obsess over stories and books (first books in the bible, of course, but then others.)

Just in time for Christmas, N+1 posted this video of their panel discussion titled Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual and it’s pretty interesting, though the title is slightly misleading. (It’s not just about Evangelicalism, which is a very particular corner of Protestantism, but about growing up in the church in general.)

The panelists are James Wood, Malcolm Gladwell and Christine Smallwood. The moderator is Caleb Crain. I like what Christine Smallwood says the best. It earned sporadic applause.

(Skip to 5:35 if you want to hear Caleb Crain’s introduction. Skip to 7:25 for Caleb Crain’s short history of evangelicalism. Skip to 11:00 for Malcolm Gladwell’s story, Skip to 20:00 for Christine Smallwood, and 29:00 or so for James Wood.)

Discussed:

New Yorkers will laugh at children who are addicted to the ecstatic experience of “being saved.”

Writing is often a replacement for church.

Malcolm Gladwell used to sneak into revival meetings that were held in a vacant lot near his house.

Church teaches one to “reconcile the irreconcilable.”

Christianity teaches adherents to feel outside of the mainstream.

English churches place more of an emphasis on the literalism of the spirit, and American churches place an emphasis on literalism of the word (the Bible.)

Hipster Tilley by Johnny Zito

I’m tired of hipsters saying they hate hipsters. Every time I read some rant on how hipsters suck I realize I’m reading it in a journal or website written by and for hipsters. Self-hating narcissistic hipsters somehow think they are immune to the vague and broad fallacies of hipsterdom. What deepens this ingrown pathology and paranoia is that self-denying hipsters often subconsciously enjoy being called hipsters, because in some weird way it’s a compliment. This is not a defense of hipsterdom, but an afriendly suggestion that maybe we’re all in the same goddamn pond.

Hipsterdom’s got something do to with an impenetrable irony which results in shallowness, affectedness, smugness, etc. — but aren’t those just judgment calls, like things people have been calling other people forever? Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh’s been calling out people like that for ages. Hipsterdom may be a new word, but pettiness is timeless.

Case in point with the now infamous article from Adbusters, the quasi-subversive academic yet highly stylized magazine which I can’t help but flip through for the shocking photos. Douglas Haddow, author of said article’s personal flickr is littered with hipster paraphernalia: Pabst beer, Japanese culture, messy studio flats, chicks with weird hair cuts, cheap sunglasses, chronic loitering, etc. He also writes for Vice and a bunch of design blogs. Totally cool, really — seems like a nice life, good for you Doug, seriously, but hey, I don’t quite understand the angst towards your own peoples.

Christian Lorentzen’s article in Time Out New York rings of a sort of exclusionary “jock mentality,” wherein he calls out “fake” hipsters for not being an artist or musician, but some broker or lawyer (here he is [right] in a tux with a scotch rocks at a New York Times award ceremony). I love it when the incumbent gentry cry about gentrification. The Class issue gets all murky, as the nobility of being broke — whether it be artist/writer [sans] salary incurred, or hipster ‘ironic’ blue-collar — is posited by both sides; all the while one’s class is assessed by materialism, inextricably tying this discourse to capitalism, which both parties somehow consider themselves immune to.

n+1‘s “What Was the Hipster” panel symposium earlier this year claimed in their press memo they were “[...] free enough of the hipster taint to write the hipster’s history without contempt or nostalgia [...]” They qualify hipster with ‘taint,’ then immediately say ‘without contempt.’ I couldn’t make it, but I have a good feeling they ripped hipsters apart, with legs crossed, pensive and dour, on a stage somewhere while iPhones vibrated perkier news. Again, nothing against being solemn n’ awesome, but dang bros you guys are hipsters (maybe not the “kitschy 80′s” hipster, but mos def the Brooklyn smarty-pants type).

Best Foreign Film

Google “self hating” and the suggested appendages are ‘jew,’ ‘black,’ ‘asian,’ and ‘white.’ Autophobia is nothing new. Pigs bite the tails of pigs in front of them; vicinity is the greatest recipe for derision. Sorry for the Orwellian allusion, I’m just having such a swine time. I guess the implicit question here is what about HTMLGIANT? Is it not hypocritical to call others hypocritical about calling others hipsters when we in fact may be accused of either said hypocrisy or hipsterdom? I’ve spent way too much time perusing the blogs of our commenters and yah, many of you lovely people are hipsters. That’s okay, really. Nice tattoo. Nice subscription to that obscure journal nobody reads. Nice fucked up mattress not parallel to any walls. It’s a nice life, and “nice life” is the key phrase here — because the other name for hipster is bourgeois. Forget about your music taste, or how much your t-shirts costs, we are bourgeois through and through. The middle-class work, the lower-class die, and the upper-class scrutinize other people’s culture, like we are doing here. Just to clarify, I’m not above any of my indictments.

I hate Pabst Blue Ribbon’s simplistic and indulgent economic symbolism. Political, generational, and cultural disfranchisement is a nice PR campaign, but just get a job and you can afford the nice beer. Stop talking about class. The self-hating hipster is still in the making, though I suspect a wiki entry very soon (this is what happens when friends edit friends). And say hi to everyone at the next party you go to, before that awful band starts screaming.

The question, then, is why novelists have ceded their ground to science. And from the writer’s perspective, if not from the reader’s, an allegorical interpretation of the neuronovel does seem possible. Is the interest in neurological anomaly not symptomatic of an anxiety about the role of novelists in this new medical-materialist world, which happens also to be a world of giant publishing conglomerates and falling reading rates? Are novelists now, in their own eyes and others’, only special cases, without specialized and credentialed knowledge, who may at best dispense accurate if secondhand medical (or historical or sociological) information in the form of an entertaining fictional narrative? And is the impulse to write not an inexplicable compulsion, a category of disorder outside the range of normal?

-from The Rise of the Neuronovel / n+1

Britney Spears’ “… Baby One More Time” reached #1 on the charts on January 30, 1999 – ten years ago this week. [NOTE: NOW A WEEK AGO; OH WELL  -JT] After her came the deluge: the end of the record industry as we know it, yes, but also the end of America as it used to conceive of itself. Five writers mark the decennial of this debatably historic occasion.

I’m not sure if anyone’s irony-sensors have triggered alarm bells already, but if they are, you should manually disable the system and give this thing a fair shot. (Also, when you have a minute, do yourself a favor and look up the definition of the word irony.) Like everything n+1 produces, the Britney Symposium is erudite, funny, and concerned–for better or worse–with an absolutely earnest engagement with the world. 

Nick Sylvester’s “Faster, More Trumpet”: an anecdote about being the horn player in a local band, and playing the then-brand new hit by request at a Bar Mitzvah. >>Toward the end of what you believe to be a perfectly executed swing medley, two girls about your age approach the band leader, and kindly request that the band play “Baby One More Time.” It is a new pop song by the American recording artist Britney Spears, they explain.<<

Christine Smallwood’s “Britney Republic”: >>Britney and I were born the same year. She’s my starlet. And her singular achievement was that she, a child, managed to sell child porn to other children.<< (BTW, if you don’t know Smallwood or her work, you should. Among other things, she writes a Q&A column for The Nation online called Back Talk, which has featured Kelly Link, Billy Bragg, and Nicholson Baker, just to name three of my own favorites. She also co-edits/ed a rad little print journal called The Crier, which may or may not still exist.)

Emily Gould advances a thesis I find highly compelling, that Britney makes >>music that sounds like it was made by a person who has never heard any other music before.<< To help solve this now decade-old problem, she offers “After The Glitter Fades: A Mix-Tape” of  powerful songs by female artists such as “Anti-pleasure Dissertation” by Bikini Kill, “Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez, and “Violet” by Hole.  >>”I told you from the start just how this would end. They get what they want and they never want it again.” If only Courtney Love had actually told Britney that in 1998. It wouldn’t have made a difference, but can you imagine the conversation? <<

Wesley Yang’s “Inside the Box” is my favorite of the lot, in part because it comes the closest to describing my own experience of the Britney Decade, and reveals aspects of that experience to me in ways I don’t think I understood (or at least did not articulate) on my own. Also, the prose is incredible. >>I would drive down a peculiar strip of Route 18 that looked like one of those long tracking shots that filmmakers rely on to establish a mise-en-scene of anonymity and cheapness—those garish colors attenuated by years of grime, those ghostly commercial icons suspended on massive pedestals projecting into the sky, and all those tons of polished metal darting around the off-ramps bearing their vulnerable human cargo. You grew accustomed to risking death at the jug-handled turn ramps that were unique to New Jersey highways. It felt like the end of the world.<< 

Last but emphatically not least, Carlene Bauer’s “A Hot Dog Wearing Versace” offers the kind of take-no-prisoners, concede-no-ground, the-author-doesn’t-give-a-shit-if-you-think-she’s-hip-or-not cultural criticism that I’ve come to expect from n+1, and always treasure when they provide it.  >>I resist the interpretation of Britney as a Site of Resistance. I resist the interpretation of her as something worthwhile because she is something mass, or something female. I resist the interpretation of her as a guilty pleasure. There is no pleasure, and nothing playful here. Even as she relentlessly feels herself up, she is still an innocent, a deeply uninteresting innocent, because she has no real compelling idea about where to put herself or who to give herself to when she’s naked.<<

n+1 are pretty much the only publication I know of that makes space for this kind of writing in their pages with regularity–as a matter of policy, I don’t doubt, and probably as a fundamental part of their raison d’etre. It is this, more than any other single thing that n+1 does or publishes, that makes them vitally important and consistently worth paying attention to. Hell, let’s have another chunk of Bauer. Play us out, Carlene-

Why do critics claim to get pleasure from Britney, or even pay attention to her? It’s not like she needs their votes to win. Isn’t that whatTRL was for? It seems that in the ten years Britney’s been around much music writing has given up on being critical. It stalls at the level of knowing distinction. Writers may make it clear they know their buttons are being pushed, or that the next big thing is cleverly reclaiming what was once dismissed—but they hardly ever argue their subjects into a new key. Are they afraid of sounding like Greil Marcus? Or Alex Ross on Radiohead? By which I mean like someone from the sixties, bearing down on ephemera with a scholarly earnestness and devotion. Like someone who knows more than most people, or loves more than most people. Did her materialization, not too long after Nirvana, stun them into cynicism?