Argonaut Folly revealed!

Back in November, I mentioned in a Brainiac post that I'd written an essay titled "The Argonaut Folly" for the forthcoming issue of the journal n+1. Despite Chris Shea's cajoling, I coyly refused to reveal what the title meant. Well, the new n+1 is finally in the mailboxes of subscribers, and will soon be in bookstores everywhere, so the secret is out.

My essay is a galloping history of a particular fantasy, more common than you might imagine, that gripped many of my favorite writers, thinkers, and artists -- from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the Beatles. It's a fantasy about not just working, but living in close company with one's most talented peers. Nietzsche wanted to do so; so did D.H. Lawrence and Andre Breton. I call it the Argonaut Folly because the Argonauts were the original band of talented individuals who together were able to accomplish great things, but whose very superiority (in my reading) rendered them misfits and losers among ordinary mortals.

Oh yeah, there are other fine essays in the new n+1, too. So far, I've enjoyed Gemma Sieff's gloomy report on post-apartheid South Africa; Imraan Coovadia's short story about a Pakistani nuclear engineer's surprisingly sentimental business trip to Pyongyang; and a terrific essay -- penned by Nancy Bauer, a feminist philosopher at Tufts -- which insists that "no philosophical analysis of pornographic objectification will enlighten us unless it proceeds not from the outside, from the external standpoint of academic moralism, but from the inside, from a description of pornography's powers to arouse." On deck: Keith Gessen's analysis of "Torture and the Known Unknowns" and Mark Greif's treatise on "Anaesthetic Ideology."

Other posts about n+1 and "The Argonaut Folly": 1 | 2 |