n+1 Issue 39: Take Care by n+1

n+1 Issue 39: Take Care Reviews

• 
  Laura

  Been reading this over the course of several months whenever I am in between books or only have a small amount of time. I liked it so much that I decided to get a subscription, but luckily the day I made that choice my roommate Andy informed me they had made the exact same decision!
  
  I won’t go into detail on every single piece, but here is some thoughts on the ones that stayed with me
  
  Baby Yeah by Anthony Veasna So
  I read the long Vulture piece about So a while back. I had never heard of him before that. I was excited to read some of his actual writing since I knew about the man but nothing of his work. This essay made me cry! And not only because I know the author died tragically, I think it would have made me cry no matter what. The essay is about his friendship with someone who had recently died by suicide. It tells the story of their relationship through the use of a song, which I have never heard, and discusses the value of repetition. I’ve never heard the song, I have never read Difference & Repetition even tho it’s been sitting on my shelf for a while to make me feel smart, but this still rlly got to me. The part that got me was
  
  “Repetition allows for reinvention. I am reading deleuze’s words as I parse the enigmatic purpose of my obsessive listening. I wonder if the repetition of “Baby Yeah”, and the retelling of the tender history it evokes, and the echoing of each baby and each yelled yeah- if all this enables fresh understandings, radical feelings never before experienced that can dismantle the blockage, or at least replace it with something else.
  [ok now heres the part where the waterworks went off]
  Perhaps this is Friedich Nietzche’s notion fo the eternal return, which Deleuze describes as the “power of beginning and beginning again” and I’m confirming for myself that regardless of the infinite suicides I might witness, regardless of how doomed and nauseating modern civilization might be (at least according to Nietzche), I would always choose to relive those awesome, brutal years with my friend”
  
  The thing that is crazy is I re read it again the next day, so I knew this passage was coming, and I cried even MORE than I had on first impact! I wish I read the book so I could understand what was happening in that instance of repetition lol. Usually an emotional impact hits hardest the first time idk what was going on here.
  
  Question Mark by Jenny Zhang
  Man I did not like this story lol , I really didn’t like her buzzfeed poem but I didn’t even realize this was the same author until after I finished reading so I can’t even blame bias! Jenny Zhang is just not my jam apparently
  
  Knowledge will Not Save Us by Joshua Craze
  
  I know next to nothing about South Sudan. I did have my own personal “what could my life have been” if I went down an alternative path that I feel I was really likely to have done as a teen. Like i applied for that YES abroad program but did AFS instead, I really wanted to be a diplomat or something, I had plucky humanitarian goals, I remember going to the general assembly of the UN in high school and being like this is so awesome, and I was taking arabic lessons (which for me was mostly due to my interest in writing systems and calligraphy, but still these are all the signs of a future spook). I seriously shudder to think of my alternate future if I did what my high school self thought I would do like go to Georgetown and major in IR and become a peace corps volunteer etc etc thank the fucking gods I am a humble bookseller!!! This isn’t really about the article but I did think about it alot while thinking of the kind of person who goes to work for the UN or state department with “good intentions”. I also was wondering about the responsibility of the international community in intervening and if there is ever such a thing as intervening without being imperialist like what is the answer here? I live with PHd students who study IR so maybe I should ask them bc I obviously have a blanket Imperialism = Bad and the United States/the West has never done anything benevolent without an ulterior motive stance but I realize there’s much I never even consider.
  
  American Accomplice by Matthew Shen Goodman
  OK THIS WAS THE MOST VALIDATING THING EVER!!!!!!!! I LOVED THIS ONE SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This article was about reading Minor Feelings during the Pandemic. I also read minor feelings at around the exact same time, and I felt (sorry to use this word) gaslit by the fact that everyone I knew loved this book. These were all smart ppl whose opinion I valued and I felt like I was going crazy for how tepid I felt about it. I loved that Goodman did the exact same thing as I did in looking up her husband. I fretted I was being a huge weirdo for doing that and for feeling some type of way about it (like I said in my review, it isn’t that she married a white guy that is a problem, it’s the fact that she spends so much of the book railing against white man performance artists, and then married one, and then afaik did not reveal that info to the reader!). I too wondered about her mixed child. I also had similarly complex feelings about the stop asian hate fervor that was going on even though my own asian father had explicitly faced violence due to the pandemic (was accosted and told to take the fucking virus back to where you came from etc etc by a complete stranger). Most of my own opinions on that book I covered in my review of it tho that was written on the day I got my vaccine and was wiped out. I really mainly just have to say I AGREE, I want ppl who read Minor Feelings to read this. I was mostly just like omg I am also a wasian who didn’t like the book who cant see what my friends see and I wrote my review while vaccine sick and he wrote this while covid sick and wow so many parallels etc etc. I just felt very reflected here!
  
  The Speculator Vanessa A Bee
  I’m reading 10:04 by Ben Lerner which I will finish today but I thought about the art gallery scene from that book. Well the whole book tbh. About how something can be exactly the same but if the context shifts everything is different, particularly when it comes to value. Your house can be identical to how it looked the year before, no new countertops no new flooring but can skyrocket or drop in value due to forces outside of your control. This essay ponders some of the same things my friends and I talk about wrt participating in gentrification.
  
  Rumble in the Jungle by Christian Jungersen
  I loved this! It’s a short fiction piece about a man dropping his son off at college. He and the Son end up going to his childhood friend’s new apt o help his roommate hang some cabinets. The roommate in question is Ralf, a hypermasculine gym rat who has no legs. They end up playing a rigorous game of ping pong which involves tying the legless man to the ceiling. This sounds absurd and it is. I felt out of breath and ran ragged just from reading it. It’s about masculinity, fathers and sons, and also the rarity of these exhilarating experiences. I thought about this constantly in 2021. After a year in 2020 of having the same sensory experiences every day, I was yearning for that feeling you have as a child when you jump in a bouncy castle or run really fast down a hotel hallway with no shoes on. This story was about that type of novel physical experience that gets fewer and far between as you age.
  
  
  Salt, Fat, Acid, Defeat by Aaron Timms
  Despite how bad the forecast looked at this time last year, restaurants seem to be pulling through in a way that I did not think possible at the beginning of the pandemic. This article was written when things looked a bit more dire, but I still found the history of restaurants fascinating. I, like many people, used the pandemic as my chance to escape the restaurant industry after having worked in it since I was 17. I have read and thought about how nostalgia is all we have since our culture is folding in on itself with regards to movies and barcades, but I did not think about how that applies to food and food concepts. So bleak. We’ve had a steady erosion of Third Spaces since we don’t have town squares/plazas, we don’t have walkable cities we don’t shop in person, The Restaurant has to do a lot of heavy lifting these days as a social space that could’ve been dispersed across other locales in an ideal society. But it’s also an industry rife with labor issues, sexual harassment, racial issues, health and safety problems, the list goes on.
  
  My Octopus Girlfriend by Sophie Lewis
  I still haven’t seen the netflix movie, but I clearly remember the day this happened on twitter. I remember I was dismayed for OP. There is a difference, but also a big venn diagram overlap, between Queer as in Gay and Queer as in Grad Student. You know what I mean. Like queer as in queer theory. Just as there is a difference, but big overlap, between the Erotic and something that pertains to Sex. The longest most important paper I ever had to write for school was on how the queer subjectivity of the Eva from Evangelion provides an opportunity for us to rethink our world and we can rise from capitalism ashes etc etc etc I barely remember. I could easily imagine that essay falling into the wrong hands and my argument getting over simplified and getting dunked into oblivion for saying Neon Genesis Evangelion will see us through climate change and help us build a communist utopia in the new world. When I read Lewis’s original thread, I was going through a bit of a ~Phase~ shall we say of thinking that all that sort of stuff is a load of phooey and the only things that should be focused on is material stuff like making sure people have food and housing. But I sympathized with Lewis because I know I have had the same sort of thoughts about stuff esp when I was reading Keeping Up with the Cthuluscene (which is mentioned here) and I think we need both this kind of lofty imaginationing and real world practicality in order to build a better world!!!! It’s like the dialectic of enlightenment you need science and mythology!! we need both for truly understanding our world!!! It’s not a zero sum game!!! So anyway all this is to say I loved this essay and I completely agree! We have an oversexed pornified culture but people are having less sex than ever. There’s a ton of in-your-face Sex but everyone is terrified of the Erotic. Plus the fact that she was tripping on acid while watching the movie and making the twitter thread… Jesus! That is literally one of my nightmares come to life, that something I say online leaks past the intended audience who will Get where I’m Coming From and turns into a hullabaloo. This is part of why I don’t have twitter and just say stuff on Goodreads where no one will read it. I can’t wait to watch the movie and have lengthy discussions that are Not indicative of the downfall of society @liz bruenig!
  
• 
  Allison

  I’m a freak for Popo nostalgia
• 
  Bridget Bonaparte

  This issue was great! I found it to be well balanced and well edited. My favourite article was probably “the speculator” but I’ve been thinking the most about Matthew Shen Goodman’s essay “American accomplice” the most. Shen hates white people so much he claims he doesn’t speak to his father anymore solely because he’s white and urges, multiple times, for POCs to not fuck, marry, or birth any whiteness. Any association, he feels, is a contaminate. The self-hate for his own half-whiteness is visceral. Way before this comes up, the tone of the essay is very entitled-male-jerk which is pretty funny in this day and age. Anyways, I have to respect such solipsism.