Reading Matt Ross’ ‘In Defense of Hipster Literature’ in The Rake magazine, gave us a strange case of deja vu:
I like McSweeney’s.
This may come as a surprise, because I don’t wear tight jeans. And even though I have thick-framed glasses, it’s because I’m near-legally-blind, so if I had puny little wire-frames the lenses would stick out like half an inch, and I’d be all self-conscious about it. You can call my tortoiseshell frames trendy, even pretentious, but the fact is I need them, and that they look so good on me is purely incidental, a symptom of my otherwise-already-fantastic features. (I’ve been led to believe, maybe because of the movie Juno, that McSweeney’s readers are prone to tight denim and unnecessarily thick spectacle frames. Greasy hair and a moth-eaten scarf might round out the picture. A plaid wool skirt over the tight jeans, for the ladies. Hipsters, if you will. Dirty, dirty hipsters.)
I like McSweeney’s. More so than my sartorial infractions, this may surprise you because I also like n + 1.
For the uninitiated, n +1 is a powerful little literary/sociological journal printed twice yearly, updated online frequently. Occasionally its editors will get some attention for, among other things, doing a little bash work on McSwy’s.
The latest barb came in last Sunday’s New York Times, in an article about Keith Gessen, whose book All the Sad Young Literary Men just came out. It was a paraphrase, and only half a sentence long, but biting nonetheless:
“As a founding editor of n +1… Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence, or never merited it (McSweeney’s and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers).”
Here is a bit of extrapolation, taken from an interview Keith Gessen did with the New York Inquirer:
“When [n +1] launched, it seemed like [McSwy’s] were the ideal representatives of a certain kind of literary position, which states that 1) reading, in any form, is good, that writing is good, that literature is good; 2) all these things are imperiled, and therefore 3) that anything done in the service of these things is good. We disagree with all three parts of that, even #2. And we’ve said so a number of times.”
At root, it seems n + 1 is arguing that the McSwy’s crew is not serious enough about their writing, because they look to their childhoods for substance and content instead of culling meaning from the world we live in presently.
Gessen and others are assertive, and even persuasive. I, too, believe that the best literature out there is more expansive than a fictionalized memoir — the characters of Tolstoy and Fitzgerald and Flaubert are all products of the societies they inhabit; their novels aren’t about personal stories, but about whole cultures.
[..]
Am I missing something here? I must be missing something here. I’m not saying Eggers is on the level of Proust or Joyce, but if they’re allowed to examine their childhoods, why can’t Mr. Eggers? Is it a matter of intellectual analysis? Of storytelling?
If nothing else, Eggers and his pals are making literature enjoyable for the non-reader. One can pick up an issue of McSweeney’s and not have to have read hundreds of other books to catch the references therein. n + 1 has some ambitious goals for its fiction, but the fact is they need publications like McSwy’s just to establish some ground-level interest in reading, to make n + 1 accessible — possibly even relevant — at all.
Via Largehearted Boy // Further Chuck Klosterman on the difference between hipsters and retards / The Hipsters Handbook
First posted: Wednesday, May 7th, 2008.
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