Where we learned about the other kind of shelf life.
The n+1 office paid a visit to our neighbors in the Brooklyn Navy Yard: the Kings County Distillery.
n+1 personals: THE END OF LOVE, OR WHATEVER
This past year, n+1 got in your space. We cried foul on prisons and banks and higher education. Hey, reader: Raise the crime rate! Occupy! Burn that degree! We yanked you out of your cubicle to socialize with Juggalos and J.H. Prynne fanatics and one very sweaty Gordon Lish. (Then we let you slink back, if only to Gchat.) A few readers even woke up to find us between the sheets, when the interns launched this classifieds site to close out one long, hot summer.
“Welcome to the golden age of internet dating!” the press release quipped, (darkly?) foreshadowing the histrionics to come. Strange bedfellows an n+1 readership does make. (Sample internal email during this time: I am ready to wield my digital pen like a mighty sword, castrating any and all weirdos that threaten to ruin our bastion of love!) But we came to forgive—or at least allowed ourselves to be entertained by—those whose psychic space our city feeds with an endless deluge of people to, well, fuck, marry, or kill.
At the best of times, an n+personals mixer was even entertained—dance me to the end of love, etc—but who are we to externalize our reader’s discontent. At this rate (responses average 5-6 a week; more than 50% of ads get one contact request), we could continue the personals into perpetuity. If, well, we had some perpetuity.
Instead, we’re opting to kill this site, and a little more than half of what it stands for. We’d like to thank n+1, the New York Review of Books, and all our readers. You have until August 31st to submit or respond to existing ads!
Readers are encouraged to get your daily dose of n+1 in a more n+1y format: the issue!
—Kaitlin
Meanwhile, the growing tactical and ideological solidarity between the Russian protesters and Occupy seems to be paralleled by a shared sense of hopelessness. Where does the protest movement go from here? Where is the chink in the armor of the regime? Occupy has struggled to answer these questions ever since its encampments began to be dismantled; with the once-unifying call for fair elections no longer a going concern, Russian activists are beginning to do the same.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. But something colorful, like a sticker, might.
But while few things are more titillating than a hollow shell, no one is actually a cipher. Celebrity may disfigure personality, but it doesn’t obliterate it; creative lives are not so different from other lives - they just command more attention.
—Christopher Glazek, Phoenixes
According to Greenblatt, the Renaissance humanists discovered a relentless curiosity about the building blocks of nature in Lucretius’s poem, which helped rekindle curiosity about the world at large. But if Epicureanism leads to a dispassionate attitude about our place in the world and a suppression of theoretical curiosity, as Blumenberg suggests, then Greenblatt is getting something very wrong.
—Morgan Meis, Swerving
Horror scholar and xenoarchaeologist Jason Colavito defines a monster as ‘a bizarre liminal creature poised somewhere on the continuum between man and beast.’ A monster then, in the classical sense, is an obsolete threat. We are now less afraid of devolving than we are of progressing too quickly. Our civilization is contaminated not by animalism but by technology; we risk becoming not werewolves but cyborgs.
—Alice Gregory, Horror’s Muse
It’s hard not to think ‘death drive’ every time I go on the internet. Opening Safari is an actively destructive decision. I am asking that consciousness be taken away from me. Like the lost time between leaving a party drunk and materializing somehow at your front door, the internet robs you of a day you can visit recursively or even remember. You really want to know what it is about 20-somethings? It’s this: we live longer now. But we also live less. It sounds hyperbolic, it sounds morbid, it sounds dramatic, but in choosing the internet I am choosing not to be a certain sort of alive. Days seem over before they even begin, and I have nothing to show for myself other than the anxious feeling that I now know just enough to engage in conversations I don’t care about.
The appeal of women’s magazines was that they could tell you how you ought to behave—how you should look and whom you should date and what you should buy. How to be a woman is a notoriously slippery, mysterious business, and the women’s magazines offered to pin it down, to make it manageable. All you had to do was buy a skirt, take a quiz, learn six confidence boosters and seventy-five sex tricks.
The Other Modernism making sense of the older Modernism.
Barcelona Pavilion study drawings by Paul Rudolph circa 1986.
Paul Rudolph’s architectural office in Manhattan circa 1965.
A man stepping across file cabinet tops among elevated drafting stations.
(via LoC)
