Recent articles about China in Harper’s and N+1 remind me that there
will always be a need for print publications, as long as they can
deliver in-depth and trenchant analysis of the sort that is rarer on the
web. Before discussing the articles, it would be worth saying a word or
two about the two magazines.
Harper’s has been around since June 1850 and is the second-oldest
continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. after Scientific
American. I took out a subscription in the early 80s around the same
time I took out to the Nation. Eventually I grew tired of the tepid
liberalism of the Nation and did not renew my subscription. Harper’s can
best be described as close to Ralph Nader type politics with a strong
patrician streak that was most pronounced under the editorship of Lewis
Lapham who I adored. Roger Hodge, whose book on Obama, “The Mendacity of
Hope”, is a great read despite its odd affinity for Thomas Jefferson,
replaced Lapham in 2003. Hodge got on publisher John McArthur’s wrong
side and was fired in 2010. McArthur is heir to a family fortune and
apparently runs the magazine in a rather imperious fashion. Despite
that, I find it a great read and especially value the monthly
“difficult” crossword puzzles.
N+1 is published 3 times a year out of Brooklyn and has ‘tude to spare.
Benjamin Kunkel, who has written for The Nation and Dissent, two
mainstays of left-liberalism, was one of the founding editors. In an N+1
article commemorating Christopher Hitchens, Kunkel began:
In high school I was, like many incipient writers, too high-minded and
self-involved to take any serious notice of the world as described by
journalists. Wars, elections, and revolutions were trivial events beside
the development of literature and my part within it. Later, as a college
freshman, when I first discovered politics, it was on a summit of
vertiginous abstraction.
I suppose I never got a paying job as a journalist because putting
together a phrase like “a summit of vertiginous abstraction” is simply
beyond me. My goal in writing has always been to express myself in
exactly the same way that I speak to people. I suppose having read Ezra
Pound’s “ABC of Reading” back in 1961 also had something to do with it:
“Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost
possible degree.”
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/notes-on-chinas-new-left/
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