$20.00
MAINSTREAM, featuring Helen Dewitt's new novel, "Your Name Here"; Wesley Yang on the Virginia Tech shootings; Caleb Crain's "Sweet Grafton"; Mark Greif's "Only a Gore Can Save Us"; plus "The Birth of the Office" and "In Search of Gawker."
Temporarily out of stock. More to come soon!
Number 6, Winter 2008: Mainstream
THE INTELLECTUAL SITUATION
The Hype Cycle
The problem with hype is that it transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value. The important thing is no longer what a song, movie, or book does to you. The big question is its relationship to its reputation.
---
The Spirit of Revival
The spirit of revival may be the spirit of an age that believes it is at the end of something, and therefore looks around for eccentric practices and goes through its backfiles for someplace to start.
---
What Not to Read, and How
John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel enters the novel in an unwinnable race to the bottom. An 18th-century literary professor and sometime Booker Prize judge, Sutherland draws his examples of great literature almost entirely from scenes of rape, gang rape, homosexual rape, or heterosexual anal sex.
---
Book Review Nation
And so you begin to think that, like the gangs of L.A., the book review will never die. To comment, annotate, respond, and then give a rating based on a five-star rating system—this must be what separates us from the animals.
POLITICS
Lower the Voting Age
---
Marco Roth
Perhaps it's middle-aged adults who ought to be disenfranchised. Having become a government of spoiled children, with laws by spoiled children, for spoiled children, we still recognize, guiltily, that we've defrauded the real kids, out of ignorance or spite.
Forum: Politics of Fear
Alex Gourevitch: Environmentalism is a left-wing politics of fear because it rests on the deeply fearful idea that only an overweening threat to our physical and collective health can inspire us to "transcendence."
Benjamin Kunkel: In a strange way, the politics of ecological anxiety is probably the only version of a utopian politics we can have, the only open path, if one exists at all, to a flourishing public life. Today there is no good way to talk about the society we want except in terms of what we fear.
Chad Harbach: America does have a deeply ingrained, morally coercive politics of fear that must never be realized, and this is it: To fail to grow—to fail to grow ever faster—has become synonymous with utter collapse, both of our economy and our ideals.
Mark Greif: From 2001 forward, I cherished an absurd hope: that a fat, bearded, and depressed Gore, elected President, could give us our only way out of a destructive centrist or rightist spiral and save America and the world.
FICTION
Your Name Here
---
Helen Dewitt & Ilya Gridneff
People don't write to John Updike saying "You lazy talentless son of a bitch, what the fuck was that quarter-column pic of a Brooks Brothers shirt doing in your story, it was completely unmotivated, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the characters, and what about the bookrest and reading lamp, John, you're over the hill. Finding your inner Breton, John? I don't think so."
Sweet Grafton
---
Caleb Crain
The line was silent for a while; then it made a ticking sound, like a cat clicking its claws on linoleum as it stretches to wake itself up; and then the dial tone hummed in Jacob's ear. It was a prank, and another boy would have been able to laugh it off, or would have lost his temper and then forgotten about it, but with Jacob the caller had by chance hit the fault in the metal, and the bell of his self seemed to fracture instead of ringing with either anger or mirth.
TRANSLATION
Literature Will Be Tested
---
Kirill Medvedev
Entire literatures consisting of subtle turns of phrase
will be tested to prove
that where there was oppression,
there were also rebellions.
By the prayers of earthly creatures to heavenly beings
it will be shown that the early creatures trampled one another.
Their rarefied verbal music will testify
that many did not have enough to eat.
HISTORY
The Face of Seung-Hui Cho
---
Wesley Yang
It's not an ugly face, exactly; it's not a badly made face. It's just a face that has nothing to do with the desires of women in this country. It's a face belonging to a person who, if he were sending you instant messages, and you were a normal, happy, healthy American girl at an upper second-tier American university—and that's what Cho was doing in the fall of 2005, writing instant messages to girls—you would consider reporting it to campus security. Which is what they did, the girls who were contacted by Cho.
Birth of the Office
---
Nikil Saval
Now I'm frequenting the cafes of New York City, enjoying my post-office freedom. There are many like me—too many. I have to get up early in the morning to find a seat, which I claim with a valuable laptop. I'm afraid to get up to use the bathroom—the other freelancers might not steal my laptop, but they'll certainly steal my seat.
REVIEWS
Alexandra Heifetz
There was no place for me out there, I thought, on the lawns of the university, where for years I used to lie, thinking my back was touching the true earth of the world.
Pamuk: Bad for the Turks?
---
Gloria Fisk
So my students express regret that Armenians were killed in their country, along with regret that Turks were killed, too. They assert the unknowability of the past. Every time they voice these sentiments, I shudder at the thought that they will repeat them in London, Paris, and New York, where they hope to go and make friends.
In Search of Gawker
---
Carla Blumenkranz
Reading through the early Gawker archives means watching Spiers receive and record her New York education. As she began to notice, she could make herself a winning protagonist. Spiers worried theatrically that she had become too mean. She also started to write not only about what she saw but also what she wore, as though she were the heroine in the sitcom she and her readers could imagine of their upwardly mobile lives.
The End: On the Post-Catastrophe Novel
---
Chad Harbach
Why bother dreaming up a devastated world when you live in one?+