Cubs into lions

The New York Times has an article about writers:

Rebecca Chapman, who has a master of arts in English and comparative literature from Columbia University, hit bottom professionally last summer when she could not even get a job that did not pay. Vying for an internship at a boutique literary agency in Manhattan, Chapman, 25, had gone on three separate interviews with three people on three different days. “They couldn’t even send me an email telling me I didn’t get it,” she said.
It’s a story familiar to anyone seeking to break into the New York publishing world. Willie Osterweil, 25, an aspiring novelist who graduated magna cum laude from Cornell in 2009, found himself sweeping Brooklyn movie theaters for $7.25 an hour. And the closest that Helena Fitzgerald, a recent Columbia graduate, got was an interview at a top magazine, during which the editor dismissed her literary career dreams, telling her: “C’mon, that’s not realistic.” Which explains, in a way, how they all ended up on a crisp November night, huddled together at an invitation-only party at a cramped, bookshelved apartment on the Upper East Side.
It was the weekly meeting of The New Inquiry, a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment. Fueled by BYOB bourbon, impressive degrees, and the angst that comes with being young and unmoored, members spend their hours filling the air with talk of Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.
Lately, they have been catching the eye of the literary elite, earning praise that sounds as extravagantly brainy as the thesis-like articles that The New Inquiry uploads every few days. “They’re the precursor of this kind of synthesis of extrainstitutional intellectualism, native to the Internet, native to the city dweller,” said the novelist Jonathan Lethem, an early champion. “They’re not trapped within an old paradigm,” he added. “They’re just making it their own.”
The New Inquiry is edited by Rachel Rosenfelt, 26, who graduated from Barnard in 2009. Though she had some luck finding work, her exposure to the literary establishment left her unimpressed. “It killed my interest in publishing,” she said of her internship at The New Yorker during her freshman year. “It just felt like they had all ‘arrived.’ It was boring. No one talked. The only real rule was, ‘Don’t mess this up.’”
Young, web-savvy and idealistic, she and two friends— Jennifer Bernstein and Mary Borkowski— wanted to create their generation’s version of cultural criticism, equally versed in Theodor Adorno and Britney Spears. Finding contributors was easy: their social circle was filled with overeducated, underemployed postgrads willing to work free to be heard on subjects like Kanye West’s effect on the proletarian meta-narrative of hip-hop.
After earning a master’s and writing on a farm in upstate New York, Chapman returned to the city uncertain about what to do next. “I met Rachel on one of my first days back,” she said, “and she was like: ‘Be our new literary editor.’”
There was no thought of turning a profit. But who cared? No one was making any money on the traditional path, anyway. “There’s something incredibly liberating,” Rosenfelt said, “when you realize that climbing that ladder is a ladder to nowhere.”
Chapman added: “My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”
Rosenfelt and her collaborators envisioned a kind of literary salon reminiscent of the Lost Generation of the 1920s. So, once a week, about twenty of The New Inquirer’s contributors and guests gather at an unmarked clandestine bookstore, a sort of literary speakeasy, in a second-floor, three-room apartment on the Upper East Side.
At 9 p.m. on a recent Thursday, Rosenfelt, wearing a black sweater, miniskirt, and combat boots, appeared behind a blue door in the unimposing prewar apartment building. The door creaked open to reveal a disheveled space that looked like a used-book store in any college town, with shelves of yellowing volumes of Dostoyevsky and Camus reaching to the ceiling and air thick with the musty smell of stale tobacco and old paperbacks.
This space belongs to a bookseller in his fifties, the godfather for The New Inquiry, a man with bushy brows and the affably abstruse mien of a coffeehouse intellectual. (He asked that his name and identifying details not be published because his building prohibits a shop in the space.) He opens only by invitation, when he feels like it. Rosenfelt described meeting there as a form of “urban hacking.” For the first hour, attendees, most in their mid-twenties and many dressed in untucked oxford shirts and off-brand jeans, mingled around a rickety table packed with half-empty Jim Beam bottles.
Despite the fact that everyone was young and attractive, no one seemed to flirt or network. Instead, they traded heady banter about the Situationists and reveled in an atmosphere of warmhearted mutual support; it felt like an oral dissertation mixed with a 1970s encounter group.
At one point, a few debated, only half-ironically, whether a new bank in a former Dunkin Donuts nearby was philosophically akin to the French reactionaries’ construction of the Sacré Coeur basilica on the site of the Paris Commune’s insurrection in 1870.
Then, around 10 p.m., Rosenfelt called everyone into the main room. The highlight of each salon is a group reading in which each person selects a three-minute reading on the predetermined topic. “We’re reading about ‘failed revolutions’ tonight,” Rosenfelt reminded the crowd. She started with a passage from To the Finland Station, “in which Edmund Wilson couches the inevitable failure of Marxism in Edmund Wilson’s idea of the national and ethnic identity of Marx.” The room exploded in vaudeville-style hoots.
Continuing around the circle, Fitzgerald, the would-be magazine writer, read from The Cantos by Ezra Pound. Osterweil, the frustrated novelist, read from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, awkwardly admitted that he, too, had chosen a reading from Debord. (What are the odds?)
One young attendee offered a reading from Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.
“A lot of this book takes place during the revolutions of 1848,” he explained. “The part that I think has a good point for revolutionaries is how quickly a failed revolution can descend into careerism.” The word hung in the air, as noxious as cigarette smoke.
Despite its slacker-revolutionary spirit, The New Inquiry is starting to tiptoe toward the publishing mainstream. With an audience that understands references to consumerism as “a hedonic treadmill”, many articles in The New Inquiry make The Paris Review look like a beach read. Arch and often aggressively leftist, the articles dance effortlessly from Jacques Derrida to Lady Gaga.
Recent pieces include a review of Ben Jeffery’s Anti-Matter; a critical survey of the novels of the French provocateur Michel Houellebecq; an essay on the class struggle portrayed in Rise of the Planet of the Apes; and a personal piece by Malcolm Harris, a young writer who recalled growing up in the suburbs and finding sanctuary in Borders.
The journal counts cultural savants like Todd Gitlin, Douglas Rushkoff, and Mark Greif, a founder of N + 1, as early champions, and articles have been linked on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Beast blog and the National Public Radio website. Even barbs by the establishment elicit pride, like when James Wolcott of Vanity Fair called Osterweil’s film criticism “Maoist” on Twitter.
On Sunday, the journal is to make a social debut of sorts among the city’s literary A-list, organizing— in partnership with the publisher New Directions, Google, and others— a marathon reading of Frederic Tuten’s novel The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, featuring sixty readers, including writers like A. M. Homes, Kurt Andersen, and Oscar Hijuelos, at the Jane hotel in the West Village.
Even though staff members routinely serve up gloomy eulogies over the “death of print”, the publication plans to roll out a quarterly print edition next year, along with an iPad magazine, for $2 a month. Its breakout stars are even starting to climb publishing’s “ladder to nowhere”: Atossa Abrahamian, 25, an editor, has written for New York Magazine. Sarah Leonard, 23, is an associate editor at Dissent. Harris, 22, who was sifting through grad-school rejection notices a year ago, has written for N + 1 and Utne Reader and has been called out by Glenn Beck on television.
This is not to say that the generational angst fueling The New Inquiry is likely to vanish soon. At the most recent salon two weeks ago, Will Canine, the operations director, showed up with 5 o’clock shadow after spending 35 hours in jail following his arrest at the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Tim Barker, a junior at Columbia, said he was drawn to the salons for the chance to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities”. He added, though, that while he aspires to be a history professor, he was “extremely conscious of the contraction of job opportunities” in publishing and academia.
Inside the bookstore, however, the turmoil of the outside world seemed far away. The lights were low, the conversation crackling. “This is my fantasy: a room full of books, people talking about books— it smells like books,” explained Chapman, the journal’s literary editor. “It’s the literary community that I had read about when I was younger. It’s Moveable Feast-type stuff.”
Despite her upbeat take on the proceedings, Chapman admitted she wasn’t feeling chipper. It was her birthday. A happy occasion? For most, maybe, but not, she explained, when you are turning 25, having graduated summa from Cornell, with a master’s from Columbia, only to find yourself unemployed and back living at home with your parents.

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