Culture, Digested: Fck You, Pay Me
The literary magazine n+1 posted a job listing for a full time managing editor. Maybe you heard. For some reason, a lot of people were upset about this.
They said it was about the salary being offered — around $60k plus benefits for a full time in person New York City gig. A lot of professional media types scoffed at the low pay and accused n+1, a literary magazine, of perpetuating the system of exploitation throughout the culture industries that keeps them full of nepo babies and trust fund kids.
Others were offended by the rank snobbery shown by the fully employed, those who have compromised their dignity, their integrity, their artistic ambitions to work full time at a publication run by a former member of the IDF yet still somehow think themselves superior because they make more money. They think that because they still believe that the only thing keeping them from being an artistic genius is the low pay. That if the material conditions were better, they could definitely be the contemporary Susan Sontag.
So look, everyone is wrong here. The professionals are wrong for thinking everyone is just like them, primarily motivated by money and status yet desperate to think of themselves as morally superior, which is why they are in media and not in finance. They watched All the President’s Men and completely misunderstood it, it’s only like 85% their fault.
But the people who are defending n+1 are also wrong, because if the magazine offered that much money in almost any other city in America — Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland — they could attract someone with experience and standards and skills. But as it is, they are very likely to hire, maybe they already have, some 26 year old who is going to publish all their friends who already think the same way they do about all the same issues. The only reason they don’t is because of a nostalgic belief that New York City is the cultural center of the world, which hasn’t been true since 1998. Every cultural product that has come out of New York since then has been nostalgic rip-offs of other, better times. New York lacks a great writer, a great publication, a great band, a great scene, a great thinker, a great institution. But it is obsessed with celebrating itself, so it hasn’t noticed this yet.
The only reason n+1 is even considered “a thing” is based in this New York obsession — only a highly professionalized and moribund culture would have seen the emergence of a literary magazine that was run by a bunch of dudes who went to Yale and thought, oh my god, revolutionary!
I find the appeal for more money in the arts a little distasteful, because the discourse doesn’t distinguish between different kinds of operations. My general rule is, if someone has money then the contributors should make money. But there’s a big difference between a self-funded project that took more than it gave, financially speaking (like Bookslut), and a magazine owned by someone who made their fortune on the suffering and exploitation of workers overseas.
My only real complaint about the MFA system in the American arts is that it acts as a gatekeeper that makes sure the underclasses and those without formal education will never access traditional publishing. But I do notice a kind of whining that emerges from a group of people who treat their MFAs like law degrees. Like, I’m credentialled, where is my corner suite? There’s something about that whole process that turns the minds of its participants into professionalized subjects, and they struggle to see the arts as something other than a career. They are constantly disappointed by their increasing irrelevance in the culture, they are Marxists only because capitalism has failed to celebrate them, and they would not only take CIA money if another Cold War emerged they are furious that the CIA is no longer subsidizing the intellectual lifestyle.
None of this will matter soon. I went to a book festival in Nashville this week, and every writer I met was a fantasy writer. There was a wide variety! Of different subsections of fantasy. Every time I saw someone reading a book, it was a fantasy book. One had a sexy fairy on the cover. But the literary realm’s continued irrelevance is beginning to feel willful. Like a choice everyone is making. Easier to fight over the buffet options in the ivory tower than step out into the world that is indifferent to them.
Recommendations:
I kind of like the new Vanity Fair, under new leadership.
Once again, I am asking you to read Richard Sennett’s book The Corrosion of Character.
I spent the last several days in Nashville, reading The Revolutionists in hotel rooms and airport bars, and I have decided it is really good. It’s not revelatory, but Jason Burke is an excellent journalist, so he makes very detailed connections between different revolutionary groups, how money flowed into these groups, and how ideologies shifted over the years. Rather than looking at one organization, like the Red Army Faction or Black September, he shows how they are interconnected, which I like. It makes me really want to watch Carlos for the fifth time, though, now that it is back on Criterion.
I recommend that you write for us.
I still (somewhat begrudgingly) subscribe to n+1 on the basis that it does occasionally roll out a genuinely interesting essay or article here and there, but I've long noticed its same-y tendency with respect to content. In fact, I first noticed this most jarringly during the 2016 election almost 10 years ago. There was a really long extended personal essay in their politics column about the specific and personal disappointment that the Bernie campaign had failed to overcome Hillary's in the Democrat primary. I will never, ever be interested in discussing the how or why with that incident ever again, ever, in my life, for as long as I live, but I remember thinking: "Oh, wow. These people were genuinely surprised that happened?" They seemed to think the entire reason Hillary "won" the Democrat nomination was because of a small subsect of wealthy liberal white voters in Park Slope who were not entirely receptive to Bernie canvassers in North Brooklyn. It was the sort of thing that I would have expected to read in a Verso Books memoir but not a literary magazine that ostensibly publishes not just for a national audience but aspires to publish for an international anglophone one - like, "I'm sorry - have you heard of this other city, called Atlanta? It's not in Brooklyn but maybe you should know about it." The "vibe" has long been MFAs from the New School who get their own literary magazine, not so much dishing or bitching as much as intellectualizing all their internecine left wing media scene conflicts in millennial Brooklyn and Manhattan.
Which sort of reminds me of another magazine drama: The Current Affairs one from years ago. I'm not going to go into that one too deeply because some of my friends worked there and were frankly kind of screwed by what happened with it and (I thought, unfairly) lambasted by people who decided Nathan J. Robinson was suddenly sympathetic after making fun of his Little Lord Fauntleroy affectations for years, but it was amusing to me to see people remarking on the fact that everyone there had earned $45k a year. $45k a year is what I'd consider a humble-to-moderate salary in New Orleans, and almost everyone there had other side gigs or income to augment that, but its not the level of poverty wage people imagined it was simply because you can't rent your own place for that in the Bay Area or Brooklyn or Highland Park in Los Angeles. And some of the drama with how that magazine's staff all quit WAS exacerbated by the simple fact that most people working there lived in New Orleans, but some chose to live in more expensive locales.
ETA: I just remembered the other, maybe even more obnoxious, article that struck me about n+1's professional echo chamber for its writers: A personal essay from one of its writers, also a Yale graduate, about how profoundly put off he was to attend an old friend's wedding in Charleston. The wedding wasn't at a plantation or even a truly offensive place, he was just mad it was ... in the south, because the south is where slavery was invented? I kept thinking, "Surely he knows the elite university he went to was, rather famously, built by slaves, and that a number of extant Yale institutions were not and still are not on the side of history he presumes he is, right?" I also kept imagining how mortifying the now-spouse of his old friend must have been to read that essay, and to hear that your personal wedding was being used as an example of insidious Lost Cause or confederate apologia by some asshole who went to Yale because it happened in Charleston. You had to publish this in a national magazine, man? You couldn't just end that friendship by not RSVPing?
"My only real complaint about the MFA system in the American arts is that it acts as a gatekeeper that makes sure the underclasses and those without formal education will never access traditional publishing." Can you elaborate on this in a forthcoming post? How does the gatekeeping around MFA holders work? I used to read the commentary of a writer called Anis Shivani on the MFA system, until he went silent or only began to publish about US politics and Sanders after 2016.