n+1

I was a bit worried a year ago, when n 1 started to get repetitive. Too many translations of that same handful of authors, I guess.

Anyways, issues 18 and 19 are back to form.

Some surprising stuff in this one: an article on reverse engineering, and another on linguistics, were unexpected and made for a nice change. The Intellectual Situation and Politics sections were decent, with the former being about Putin and the latter being about neo-sincerity (shouldn't the contents have been swapped?).

I quite enjoyed Two Scenes by Nell Zink, and the Reviews on Office Furniture and Net Neutrality. An enjoyable trend in the past few issues: Reviews are no longer limited to the work of a single artist or even to a collection of related works, and now can be a summary-and-response of ideas, trends, or even locations (in this issue, Morningside Park).

I admit I skipped over rest of The Help Desk once I encountered the first Infinite Jest reference.… (mer)

Obviously, living abroad long-term, you may expect to miss some developments at home. Returning on annually short holidays each year, it was apparent that there were some developments that I had missed. I had no idea what was meant by tiles in the pavement depicting a ladybird (indication of location of unprovoked molestation), and my unfamiliarity with the many small euro coins causes some awkward pauses at cash registers (people think I am dumb). However, these are localized phenomena. I would vain have expected to miss out on an international sociological phenomenon, but there it is.

Living in China means not only detachment from the physical environment of the home country, but also, especially electronic isolation. China very sparsely reports on foreign countries. The first five years, Internet access was very limited, and as Internet access widened, China started blocking websites or overall hampering Internet access. Thus, with limited access for foreign news, foreign printed news media and increasingly difficult Internet access, I missed out on the hipster.

I have hear the term, but never gave it much thought, and had no picture in my mind of a classifyable person. In the introduction, the editors of What was the hipster. A sociological investigation state that the hey days of the hipster as a phenomenon are between 1999 and 2010. (I moved to China in 1999 and been here ever since.)

As a graduate in social sciences, I naturally have an interest in this topic, but must say the type of publication does not seem very solid. Below the names of the three editors, it says "Transcribed by Avner Davis". What or how much is transcribed and from what source is not very clear. Page 185 gives a list on contributors, most of whom are designated as writers or critics, but none specifically as sociologists of academics attached to research institutes.

The very small book consists of four sections: Symposium, Dossier, Responses and Essays. Half of the first part consists of a (transcribed) discussion of about 25 pages. The Dossier consists of just two very short articles (indeed they were previously published elsewhere) but together just 10 pages. The Responses (to what?) are also just two pieces, altogether barely 20 pages.

The tone of all parts of the book is "chatty", "dropping names". Surely, 40 years ago these people would style themselves as Marxists. I must say, I also only just recently, as in less than one month, learnt the meaning of "woke". Maybe I should hide out a little longer in China.… (mer)