#nplusonemag

[ghelgheli]

The Stuff I Read in August 2023

Stuff I Extra Liked Is Bold

Books

Raven Stratagem, Yoon Ha Lee (2017)

Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (2022)

The Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women, trans. Dick Davis (2019)

The Origins of Unfairness, Cailin O'Connor (2019)

Short Fiction

the prisoner, ignatz

The Unwanted Guest, Tamsyn Muir

She Loves to Cook, and She Loves to Eat, Sakaomi Yuzaki

Still Sick, Akashi

Born Again Bunny, ignatz

A Museum of Dubious Splendors, Studio Oleomingus

In the Pause Between the Ringing, Studio Oleomingus

The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place, Studio Oleomingus

Game Theory

The Bargaining Problem, John Nash (1950)

Two Person Cooperative Games, John Nash (1953)

Perfect Equilibrium in a Bargaining Model, Ariel Rubinstein (1982)

Marriage and household decision making: A bargaining analysis, Marilyn Manser and Murray Brown (1980)

Evolutionary Game Theory

The theory of games and the evolution of animal conflicts, John Maynard Smith (1974)

The Logic of Animal Conflict, John Maynard Smith and George R. Price (1973)

Why imitate, and if so, how? A boundedly rational approach to multi-armed bandits, Karl Schlag (1996)

On the Stability of Racial Capitalism, Liam Kofi Bright, Nathan Gabriel, Cailin O'Connor, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Fairness and Signaling in Bargaining Games, Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Roland Mühlenbernd Jeremy L. Wyatt

Inequality and Inequity in the Emergence of Conventions, Calvin Cochran and Cailin O'Connor (2019)

Power by Association, Travis LaCrois and Cailin O'Connor (2020)

Why Natural Social Contracts are not Fair, Cailin O'Connor (2022)

How to Put the Cart Behind the Horse in the Cultural Evolution of Gender, Daniel Saunders (2022)

Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification, Joseph Heinrich and Robert Boyd (2008)

On the emergence of minority disadvantage: testing the cultural Red King hypothesis, Aydin Mohseni, Cailin O'Connor, and Hannah Rubin (2021)

Philosophy (broadly construed)

"But What Are You, Really?" The Metaphysics of Race, Charles W. Mills (1998)

Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System, Maria Lugones

Extracted Speech, Rachel Ann McKinney (2016)

Nozick's Entitlement Theory of Justice, Kenneth J. Arrow (1978)

Nietzsche, the Chinese Worker's Friend, Ishay Landa (1999)

Measuring Conventionality, Cailin O'Connor (2020)

Other

Who Was Barbie? various @ nplusonemag

Lockhart's Lament, Paul Lockhart

Female Hunters of the Early Americas, Randall Haas et al.

We Have No Moat, and Neither Does OpenAI, anonymous

The Bitter Lesson, Rich Sutton

The Evolution of Individual and Cultural Variation in Social Learning, Alex Mesoudi et al.

Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-Like Women, Sahar Amer (2009)

"My son was castrated as a result of a medical error. Is it OK to raise him as a eunuch?" Thomas W. Johnson and Richard J. Wassersug (2021)

[interpol-nyc-documents-blog]

I wasn’t the only monster, of course: our singer, whose lyrics and vocal timbre give that first record of ours a special place in the indie-rock pantheon, was so prone to his vodka cocktails that you can hear the tinkle of ice cubes leaking into the mic during one of our song openings. He and I, although not the best of friends, made for a compelling tag team of depravity during the band’s early days.

- Carlos Dengler in nplusonemag

[kenyatta]

A LOT OF UGLINESS accretes privately, in the form of household goods, which can make it hard to see — except on the first of the month. Today’s perma-class of renters moves more frequently than ever before (inevitably to smaller apartments), and on moving day the sidewalks are transformed into a rich bazaar of objects significant for ugliness studies. We stroll past discarded pottery from wild sip ’n’ spin nights; heaps of shrunken fast fashion from Shein; dead Strategist-approved houseplants; broken Wirecutter-approved humidifiers; an ergonomic gaming chair; endless Ikea BILLYs, MALMs, LACKs, SKUBBs, BARENs, SLOGGs, JUNQQs, and FGHSKISs. Perhaps this shelf is salvageable — ? No, just another mass of peeling veneer and squishy particleboard. On one stoop sits a package from a direct-to-consumer eyewear company, and we briefly fantasize about a pair of glasses that would illuminate, They Live–style, the precise number of children involved in manufacturing each of these trashed items, or maybe the acreage of Eastern European old-growth trees.

It occurs to us, strolling past a pair of broken BuzzFeed Shopping–approved AirPods, that the new ugliness has beset us from both above and below. Many of the aesthetic qualities pioneered by low-interest-rate-era construction — genericism, non-ornamentation, shoddy reproducibility — have trickled down into other realms, even as other principles, unleashed concurrently by Apple’s slick industrial-design hegemon, have trickled up. In the middle, all that is solid melts into sameness, such that smart home devices resemble the buildings they surveil, which in turn look like the computers on which they were algorithmically engineered, which resemble the desks on which they sit, which, like the sofas at the coworking space around the corner, put the mid in fake midcentury modern. And all of it is bound by the commandment of planned obsolescence, which decays buildings even as it turns phones into bricks.

from Why Is Everything So Ugly? nplusonemag

[ryankraklau]

[fursasaida]

Unfree Associations | Issue 42 | n+1 | Hannah Zeavin

Hard to describe but very worth reading. Here's how the author shared it: "For @nplusonemag, I wrote that time my step dad was the main character of the internet, Tucker Carlson, whiteness and psychoanalysis, & why neutrality is a fantasy." I would add there is some interesting stuff sort of triangulating among Jewishness, whiteness, and specifically postwar psychoanalysis in the US.

@glintglimmergleam

[roamanov]

Class 1: The social aesthetics of confession.

Required reading 

Confessions by St Augustine (extract): Found here:  (Book 4 - http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug04.htm)

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (extract)

Reality Hunger by David Shields (extract)

Recommended reading

Shannon Keating, “Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out?” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/personal-writing-social-media-influencers-caroline-calloway

Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion – introduction’: available in PDF on Blackboard and online via Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QT8YAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Marshall Berman, ‘Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development’ and ‘First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer’ from All that is Solid Melts into Air (on Blackboard)

‘But Enough About Me’ : what does the popularity of memoir tell us about ourselves?’ by Daniel Mendelsohn, New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enough-about-me-2

Class 2: The stylised self in the world. Aesthetics of the insertion of the self in the story. Style and world view

Required reading 

The White Album by Joan Didion (PDF provided)

Extract from The Birth of New Journalism by Tom Wolfe (PDF provided).

Recommended reading

'Gonzos for the 21st Century', http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/the-new-new-journalism-gonzos-for-the-21st-century.html

Tom Wolfe, The Birth of New Journalism: An EyeWitness Report: http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/index6.html

Martin Amis on Joan Didion’s style: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/martin-amis/joan-didions-style

Class 3: The writer’s subjectivity and physical space. Melding Interior/Exterior worlds.

Required reading

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Recommended reading

Anne Carson – Plainwater (extract provided)

Anne Carson – The Autobiography of Red

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (extract provided)

Ian Sinclair – Lights Out For the Territory (extract – chapter 8 Word doc provided)

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

Olivia Laing – The Lonely City – extract on blackboard

Review of Lights Out for the Territory: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/29/reviews/990829.29hoffmat.html

Class 4: Writing Nature/Nature of Writing.

Required reading

'In History' by Jamaica Kincaid - PDF supplied

'Findings' by Kathleen Jamie - extract provided

'Landmarks' by Robert Macfarlane - extract provided

'A Claxton Diary' by Mark Cocker - extracts provided

Recommended reading

'The Kusi' by Jean McNeil

'Soil Turned to Song and Dance' - the TLS on Mark Cocker's nature writing: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/mark-cocker-naturalism/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1574952085

'The Thoreau of the Suburbs' - feature article on Annie Dillard

'The New Nature Writing' by Jos Smith - extract provided

'The Anthropocene Lyric: an affective geography of poetry, person, place' by Tom Bristow (book)

Class 5: The self, anxiety and history – the non-novels of Sebald.

Required reading

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

Recommended reading

Reviews/literary criticism of Sebald:

André Aciman: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/12/03/out-of-novemberland/

Cynthia Ozick – The Posthumous Sublime (on The Emigrants) on Blackboard

André Aciman: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/w-g-sebald-and-the-emigrants

Jonathan Coe: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n06/jonathan-coe/tact

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/30/reviews/970330.30wolfft.html

http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-the-emigrants-by-w-g-sebald/

Class 6: Politics, alienation and self-displacement in South African and South American writing

Required reading

Summertime by JM Coetzee

Resistance (extract provided) by Julián Fuks

Recommended reading

Roland Barthes – The Death of the Author (on Blackboard)

Donald Powers, ‘Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee’s Afterlives’, Life Writing, 2016. (on Blackboard)

Review: JM Coetzee, a Disembodied Man - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Dee-t.html?pagewanted=all

Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room - Galgut is a South African writer of the next generation. I've given an extract of this book, which is made up of three long novellas, here. 'The Lover' is the middle section in Galgut's trio of novellas.

Class 7: Walking and writing the city in fiction and non-fiction.

Required reading

Teju Cole – Open City

Recommended reading

Walter Benjamin – Berlin Chronicle (extract), One Way Street (extract) and Naples.

Joanna Walsh - Hotel (PDF provided)

Lauren Elkin – Flâneuse

Review of Open City: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/17/open-city-teju-cole-review

James Wood on Teju Cole: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/the-arrival-of-enigmas

Class 8: Irony - Unreliable and self-critique as narrative drama.

Required reading

10:04 by Ben Lerner.

Recommended reading

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Review of Leaving the Atocha Station https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n16/sheila-heti/i-hadnt-even-seen-the-alhambra

Jenny Offil - Dept of Speculation

Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?

Zadie Smith – Two Paths for the Novel (from Changing My Mind) on Blackboard

Zinzi Clemmons - What We Lose

Colebrook, Clare. Irony. New Critical Idiom.  Routledge, 2004

Alejandro Zambra – Multiple Choice (extract on Blackboard)

Class 9: Contemporary autofiction - two texts.

Required reading

Rachel Cusk – Outline

Amit Chaudhuri - Friend of My Youth

Recommended reading

Rachel Cusk  – Transit (extract on Blackboard)

Rachel Cusk, Kudos

Marcel Proust - A la recherche de temps perdu

VS Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Geoff Dyer – Out of Sheer Rage

‘Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel’ – profile in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel

Class 10. Shame and the self in auto-fiction. Domesticity. The Japanese I-novel.

Required reading

Karl Ove Knaussgard - My Struggle (in whole if you can buy the book, or in extract) provided here. My Struggle: book two, a man in love, introduced by James Wood: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-birthday-party

Recommended reading

Extract from Yuko Tsushima's Territory of Light (to be uploaded soon).

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, ‘The Careful Craft of Writing Female Subjectivity’ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/territory-light-yuko-tsushimas-vital-i-novel/585832/

Amit Chaudhuri ‘I am Ramu’: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/i-am-ramu/

Review of Final volume of Knausgaard: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/29/the-end-karl-ove-knausgaard

'How Writing My Struggle Undid Knausgaard': https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/knausgaard-devours-himself/570847/

'Each Cornflake' - Review of Knausgaard by Ben Lerner in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/ben-lerner/each-cornflake

Class 11: The aesthetics and politics of the sexual self

Required reading

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Recommended reading

Chris Kraus – I love Dick (extract on Blackboard)

Emilie Pine - Notes to Self

Catherine Millet – The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (extract on Blackboard)

Hélène Cixous – ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ http://lavachequilit.typepad.com/files/cixous-read.pdf

‘Virgins or Whores – Feminist Critiques of Sexuality’, in Veronique Mottier, A Short Introduction to Sexuality (on Blackboard)

Henry Miller – The Tropic of Cancer

Sarah Ahmed – ‘The Performativity of Disgust’ from The Cultural Politics of Emotion (PDF here)

Chris Kraus ‘The New Universal’ https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/new-universal/

Vivian Gornick http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/vivian-gornick-good-feminist-solnit-rhode-cobble-gordon-henry

Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School

Class 12:  Using 'real' people in fiction.

Required reading

Megan Bradbury – Everyone is Watching

Zachary Lazar –  I Pity the Poor Immigrant 

Recommended reading

Zachary Lazar – Sway

James Wood in The New Yorker on Lazar – The Punished Land: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-punished-land

Miranda France in the Guardian on Everyone is Watching: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/22/everyone-is-watching-megan-bradbury-review-novel

[ruseg]

THE IDIOT is “an addictive, sprawling epic,” sez @Miranda_July. Get it 50% off with a year’s subscription to n+1. http://bit.ly/2pPRV4Y http://pic.twitter.com/TWq8VIpIxp

— n+1 (@nplusonemag) May 7, 2017

[burninginwaterart]

Valerie Hegarty created the installation work "George Washington with Branches" (2016) for the exhibition Interventions 3. Valerie Hegarty, George Washington with Branches (detail), wood, canvas, paper-mache and acrylic paint. #valeriehegarty #valeriehegartyart #georgewashinton #installation #nyc #gallery #americanberserk #burninginwater #intervention @nplusonemag @burning_in_water_art @valeriejhegarty

[stuartelden]

There Is No Outside: Covid-19 Dispatches -a FREE ebook collection from Verso and ⁦‪@nplusonemag‬⁩, edited by Jessie Kindig, Mark Krotov, and Marco Roth

There Is No Outside: Covid-19 Dispatches -a FREE ebook collection from Verso and ⁦‪@nplusonemag‬⁩, edited by Jessie Kindig, Mark Krotov, and Marco Roth

There Is No Outside: Covid-19 Dispatches -a FREE ebook collection from Verso and ⁦‪@nplusonemag‬⁩‬⁩, edited by Jessie Kindig, Mark Krotov, and Marco Roth.

An urgent collection of essays on the global pandemic, from n+1 and Verso Books

A collaboration between the renowned magazine of literature and politics, n+1, and Verso Books, this collection tracks the course of Covid-19 across the circuits…

[the-big-milk]

nplusonemag com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/

This is an interesting story, but I don't understand why it was sent. Thanks?

[espressonearme]

The latest The Coffeehouse Daily! https://t.co/wzt8yTexrB Thanks to @nplusonemag @ras527 #photography #travel

The latest The Coffeehouse Daily! https://t.co/wzt8yTexrB Thanks to @nplusonemag @ras527 #photography #travel

— Espresso Near Me (@espressonearme) April 13, 2019

[trantwitterfavs]

Favorite tweets

I’m back in New York and I have a story in @nplusonemag

— Natasha Stagg (@natasha_stagg) April 11, 2018

via http://twitter.com/natasha_stagg

[dimestorebookgirl-blog]

I’m loving these books so much. I just read “H” by Sarah Resnock in the Essay collection, about her uncle who battles heroin addiction, about the so-called heroin scourge, about harm reduction, about supervised injection sites, about Hep C and HIV, about why people with drug habits are still often worth knowing - even without abstinence. I though about my brother. I thought about how much easier it is to wind police tape around drug use and how uncomfortable I feel with both my closed mind and closed heart but also with the idea of anything but temperance. It’s really thoughtful. You should read it. You can find it here in the collection but also in @nplusonemag. It’s so good. . . . . . #sarahresnick #nplusone #bestamericanessays #2017 #colormeenglish #carylphillips #bookbooks #bookish #booklove #booklover #booknerd #bookworm #bibliophile #gradlife #gradschool #gradstudent #englishdegree #essays #essayist #essaycollection #read #reader #reading #instabook #bookstagrammer #readersofinstagram #bookstagram (at Oak Grove, Oregon)

[readingtext]

RT @nplusonemag: “The Republican authors of the Nunes Memo have the power to stamp TOP SECRET across the top of their misbegotten semi-factual slam book, as though it contained information that someone thought was worth protecting.” http://bit.ly/2EFQbRL

“The Republican authors of the Nunes Memo have the power to stamp TOP SECRET across the top of their misbegotten semi-factual slam book, as though it contained information that someone thought was worth protecting.”https://t.co/mnOMlAuFc6

— n+1 (@nplusonemag) February 5, 2018

from Twitter https://twitter.com/bjohnson February 05, 2018 at 04:59PM via IFTTT

[thomasbolt]

Read "Insurance" by Thomas Bolt at nplusonemag (Online Only!)