Have a Look at The Point

I'm going to recommend everyone have a look at the first issue of the new journal The Point. Although it publishes in a regular, printed journal-format, everything is also free online (albeit in a unnecessarily difficult-to-navigate webpage).

I've read about half of the first issue, and The Point seems to aspire to be a sort of n + 1 for those of us who have grown impatient with Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel. That is to say it's a mixture of literary and cultural criticism, written in a learned but far from academic prose.

As to the good in this first issue, I though Jon Baskin's piece on David Foster Wallace was right on. Based on my reading Wallace, Baskin nails exactly what he was up to throughout his entire career:

The irony is that such a critical framework has been applied with special fervor to a succession of writers whose great theme has been the complicated problem of fraudulence and authenticity in modern secular life. On the back cover of Jest, Sven Birkerts invites readers to “Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis.” Birkerts does not elaborate on what these names should make us think about. Beckett, Gaddis, Pynchon and Wallace all wrote about the problem of self-consciousness, which is also the problem of how to have and express an authentic self. Beckett impressed on us the naked terror of self-consciousness stripped of ulterior justification. Gaddis, in The Recognitions, asked how we could know what was original and what forged—in art, but also in ourselves. Pynchon suggested that self-consciousness was nothing more than a cherished illusion (Tyrone Slothrop could have no self-consciousness, because he had no self). Wallace wanted to return to the subjective consideration of self-consciousness, repudiating what seemed to him a self-defeating trajectory. Yet Wallace’s characters, like his readers, were haunted by Pynchon’s denial. “The task of the modern artist,” as Cavell put it, is also the “task of the modern man … to find something he can be sincere and serious in; something he can mean. And he may not at all.”

On the bad side, some of these pieces could use a little tightening. I think the piece on "the female slacker" misunderstands some fundamental concepts, among them the flaneur. Likewise, Adam M. Bright's look at the New Age guru Eckhart Tolle comes off as far too credulous (even for a professed fan) and more than a little misinformed:

Five minutes later a panel in the wall opens and Eckhart Tolle—spine kyphotically buckled, eyes cast down at his feet, hands clasped at his navel—crosses the stage in shadow. He moves with a hyper mellow domesticity, like a Trappist Mr. Rogers. He’s wearing a white sweater-vest over a dress shirt, a pair of khaki pants and plain black shoes. (On the advice of a friend, I have been reading Max Weber while researching this article, and it strikes me that Tolle’s sweater-vest—which he is almost always photographed wearing—functions as what Weber would call a “talisman.” It’s something that no normal person would wear, and reaffirms Tolle’s special status as an oracular figure operating outside of social norms).

All in all, though, as first issues go I think this one is strong, and with a little development this could be a very impressive journal. It's especially nice to see a journal like this that's getting into the grey zone of cultural crit, since of the online venues I've seen come about recently have stuck to fiction and/or book reviews.