Tuesday, August 01, 2006
(5:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Way Things Are Today
Nowadays it's hard to walk down the street without tripping over a crazy-long block quote from n+1 -- those latter-day literary modernists at n+1 (to which I am a proud subscriber) are, after all, revolutionizing the world. And, improbably enough, in print. We here at The Weblog prefer to revolutionize the world, when we do -- and yes, we do -- in blog form. We are the best blog, because the purest blog, always and only blog, in and for itself: the blog.The Weblog. But anyway, nowadays to change the world in print takes considerable talent -- you know, given our contemporary situation. It's a slower format, and "some" have been known to read said publication (viz., n+1) on the toilet. It is truly the best of all possible toilet reading, than which no better toilet reading can be conceived -- better than Harper's and the Chicago Reader combined. Reading is important in these boring times. We're all bored, and yet ironically we don't have time to read, except for the most boring material possible (viz., blogs), which we read while we're supposed to be doing our boring office jobs.
We all follow these blogs around, on our computer screens, admiring the wit and certitude of our proud corps of pasty white guys, writing with that distinctive air of unearned, breezy authority that is the pride of the blogosphere. Whether it's Kevin Drum talking about some issue or other that he feels like he should talk about but his heart's not really in it, or Josh Marshall tracking down the latest minutae of what a congressional aide had for lunch last March, or Atrios interrupting an imposing wall of open threads to opine sarcastically using the nicknames that he tries to pin on people but which no one else actually uses, or Daily Kos blogging about how the media is out to get Daily Kos -- one thing's for certain, and that's that civilization is doomed. What we laughingly call "the left" -- mainly as a concession to those irrascible fascists who need there to be a "left" to scapegoat for their failures -- is both bored and boring; no one gives a fuck. Josh Marshall took down Trent Lott, single-handedly saved Social Security (and continues to save it!), and is now bored. They're all fucking bored. Meanwhile, the right is stupid -- just like "our" bloggers, they just say the same fucking things over and over again, but they seem to enjoy it. Whereas "we" on the "left" are bored with saying those self-same things: "Dude, I thought we were supposed to be the technocrats here, the competent ones! Why do we have to keep saying this shit? It was already inherently convincing and nuanced the first time!"
Into this context -- comes n+1. It is wonderful. It is important. As I said to Brad last night in a humble IM conversation (old is the new new, and so IM is old, but humble): "It's like the Bible and sex rolled into one massive joint, which you then shove up your ass." In other words, life-changingly good. It has revolutionized the way I defecate. And I'm apparently not the only one!
Let's be honest here: in our boring times, when we're so bored and boring, isn't there something to be said for the simple satisfaction of a shit well-shat? And let's take it a step further now: is there anything to be said for anything else? No. This is it: shitting out the butt-ends of our days and ways.
That was actually a quote from T. S. Eliot, edited to refer to crapping. Pretty erudite, maybe a little bit over your head -- anyway, I hope you have your notebook handy and are taking notes as you read this very important blog post, in which I'm doing very important theoretical labor, heroically. Ironically, however, blogs are now out of date: they've been superceded by n+1, which is actually [mirabile dictu!] what they used to call a "print publication."
I don't know what to think! Thank God, then, for n+1!
