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CONTENTSPrefaceIAgainst ExerciseAfternoon of the Sex ChildrenOn FoodOctomom and the Market in BabiesIIThe Concept of Experience(The Meaning of Life, Part I)IIIRadiohead, or the Philosophy of PopPunk: The Right Kind of PainLearning to RapIVGut- Level Legislation, or Redistribution(The Meaning of Life, Part II)VThe Reality of Reality TelevisionWeTubeWhat Was the Hipster?VIAnaesthetic Ideology(The Meaning of Life, Part III)VIIMogadishu, Baghdad, Troy, or Heroes Without WarSeeing Through PoliceVIIIThoreau Trailer Park(The Meaning of Life, Part IV)
A brilliant collection of essays from one of the most highly acclaimed young writers in the US
Mark Greif is a founder and editor of the journal n+1. He lives and works in New York, where he is Associate Professor of literary studies at the New School. His criticism and journalism have appeared in publications including the London Review of Books, Guardian, TLS, and New Statesman. He is the author of the hugely acclaimed The Age of the Crisis of Man.
Greif's book proposes the impossible thing, a phenomenology of the
present-at a moment in which the present is slipping by so fast
that anything we dare call that is already signed, sealed and
delivered to the past. Hip hop, food shows, current events like war
and the police, hipsters, exercises, the youth culture-this list
omits the deliberate and attractive heterogeneity of Greif's notes
on the everyday, his attempt to capture its random contents before
they are incorporated into some official academic field or
trivialized into familiar themes and slogans by an omnivorous
public sphere. It isn't a novel, it isn't a journal either (which
you could 'dip into'), it's probably not a blog, it is deliberately
unfinished (in the sense of 'to be continued,' but maybe by all or
each of us); but it is certainly wonderful reading which cuts into
the present before the latter disappears.
*Fredric Jameson*
Mark Greif is the best essayist of my generation. No one is more
modern or more classical - or more stylish. This has its alarming
effects. When you read Against Everything, you will vow to change
your life.
*Adam Thirlwell*
Like James Wood or Susan Sontag, George Orwell or Randall Jarrell,
Greif defines our age yet writes with such wit and grace, he'll
last forever. A must-read collection by one of our preeminent
thinkers.
*Mary Karr*
I love Mark Greif. No living essayist effects the destruction of
everything other people hold dear with a lighter or more elegant
touch. An unmitigated delight.
*Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed*
Mark Greif writes a contrarian, skeptical prose that is at the same
time never cynical: it opens out on to beauty and the possibility
of change.
*Zadie Smith*
The ideas and images I discover in Mark Greif's essays stay with me
for years, and become part of the way I experience and understand
the world. I couldn't be happier that this book is being published
so I can read them all over again.
*Sheila Heti*
In Against Everything, Mark Greif makes a case for so much: for
curiosity and precision, for second glances, for reconsidering, for
paying attention to the world and not being satisfied by what it's
become, or ever been. Greif is interested in blame and desire and
how we coax and wrench meaning from our lives. He's interested in
how we might remain alive to what matters while staying
attuned-also-to the truth of mattering itself as something fluid,
its contours up for grabs. His unexpected turns of thought come
with such persuasive acuity they sound like common sense. I found
the crackle of rigor in these essays, but also so much tenderness
and awe.
*Leslie Jamison*
Embodies a return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its
most cerebral and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of
critics from William Hazlitt to Lionel Trillling, but most of all
he suggests it is possible to write about culture with a reverence
for language and a passion for what has come before. I would read
anything he writes, anywhere.
*New York Times Book Review*
Greif's essays aren't really "against" and oppositional. Instead,
they work through the experience of doing to find something more
complex and luminous.
*Times Higher Education*
His generation's finest essayist...a powerful injunction to look,
listen and reflect, our surest means of defiance against the
encroaching dimness.
*Evening Standard*
Greif is a critic of the modern American condition...a dazzling
intellectual, and like all the best philosophers, he thinks we all
can and should live our lives like philosophers. To read Against
Everything is a good start on that path.
*NY1*
[A] prodigy in that class of gifted and talented writers
responsible for bringing us n+1, the magazine that effectively
remade the intellectual scene in New York City[,]. Greif showed
everyone how it could and should be done ... Against Everything, a
collection that features many of Greif's best essays, offers a good
occasion to consider what it was that made his early work so
singularly powerful.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
The title Against Everything announces a revision of Susan Sontag's
project, or a completion of it. Sontag's "Against Interpretation"
concluded, in 1966, that we ought to replace our hermeneutic drive
with an erotics of art. Greif sees eros, however, as just one of
the instinctive drives whose possibilities for pleasure and
rebellion have been captured by the powerful, packaged by the
inventive, and sold back to us not only with our consent but with
our gratitude. Greif's sentences themselves can sound, at times,
like Sontag's, especially in his admonitory mode, but they can also
echo with the placid alienation of Joan Didion, or the
commonsensical modesty of Richard Rorty.
*Bookforum*
Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his
hand...There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn't
have a kernel of interest at its core...intriguing...embodies a
return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral
and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William
Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is
possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language
and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he
writes, anywhere.
*The New York Times Book Review*
The truth is that Greif, as we come to know him in these essays, is
a deeply hopeful thinker, full of visions of a better, even
perfect, world. His disciplined, thoughtful critiques of all manner
of cultural phenomena-from YouTube videos to the mania for
exercise-rest on an intuition that the world we have been given is
not good enough...To argue this point with Against Everything is
not to dismiss Greif's achievement, but the reverse. An
intellectual's job is to provoke thought and argument, and this
Greif does as well as anyone writing today.
*Tablet*
I was impressed above all by the resourcefulness of his prose, the
concentrated intelligence of the exercise ... By being so alertly
of his time, Greif becomes the vehicle for demonstrating just how
out of joint the times really are.
*London Review of Books*
Smart, profound
*4Columns*
Engaging in its honesty and earnestness and his critical evaluation
of the social and cultural impact of consumer capitalism is clearly
worth welcoming.
*Morning Star*
It makes you think ... Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to
change before real choice is possible. Until then, it's not enough
to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the
best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against ...
everything.
*New Yorker*
It is difficult to do justice to the subtlety and wit of Greif's
arguments.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Matches brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays
risk embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life -
hipsters, foodies, gym-goers - so that we might see these
characters in ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness,
more interest.
*Spectator [Books of the Year]*
Mark Greif's essay on the Kafkaesque nature of the modern gym,
Against Exercise, is already a classic; and his new book, Against
Everything (Verso), tells us it's not just the gym, it's also our
music, our culture, our political life - everything about us, in
fact - that is right out of Kafka.
*Guardian [Books of the Year]*
Greif turns the quotidian world over like a miniature globe in his
hand ... There is, in truth, nothing that Greif writes that doesn't
have a kernel of interest at its core ... intriguing ... embodies a
return to the pleasures of critical discourse at its most cerebral
and personable. Greif brings to mind a host of critics from William
Hazlitt to Lionel Trilling, but most of all he suggests it is
possible to write about the culture with a reverence for language
and a passion for what has come before. I would read anything he
writes, anywhere.
*New York Times Book Review*
Isn't it elitist to talk about punk as if it were a text? To
juxtapose Rousseau with a dating show? To say an intense workout is
reminiscent of Kafka? ... Against Everything, a new essay
collection by Mark Greif ... approaches populist topics like
exercise, food, and pop culture from a decidedly not-populist
perspective in order to deconstruct them, see how they work, and
understand what they really mean to us. While the collection's
title is delightfully antagonistic ... the contents are not
necessarily so. Greif's point is not to tell you how to live, but
to encourage you to really think about how you're living.
*VICE*
Mark Greif's Against Everything-as its title suggests-matches
brilliant critique with improbable optimism. His essays risk
embarrassment to analyse the irritations of urban life-hipsters,
foodies, gym-goers-so that we might see these characters in
ourselves, and treat them with, if not more kindness, more
interest.
*The Spectator (UK) Best Books of the Year*
Susan Sontag was against interpretation. Laura Kipnis was against
love. Seven were against Thebes. Mark Greif is against everything
... Against Everything is really a book on a single subject:
contemporary life, more specifically, the kind of life that someone
who would buy such a book, or read a column about such a book-in
short, yourself-might right now be living. It's meant to be
consumed from beginning to end. It makes you think ... Greif's
argument-and this is what separates him from the usual solver of
the times-is that what's killing us is deeply embedded in our
social and economic system. It's not the gym that's the problem.
It's the way we live now, which is making the gym seem like a
solution to something. Greif thinks that a whole lot will have to
change before real choice is possible. Until then, it's not enough
to be against the box-office and the real-estate section and the
best-seller list. Until then, we have to be against ...
everything.
*New Yorker*
Against everything, if it was corrupt, dubious, enervating, untrue
to us, false to happiness," writes n+1 co-founder Mark
Greif...Greif isn't a doomsayer, but a smart man, soused in decency
and fellow feeling. He would like to know the meaning of
life...Civil disobedience is a lived way to counter plutocracy.
Consider Occupy Wall Street, an action in which Greif participated.
"Fight the Power." That's to live.
*San Francisco Chronicle*
Dark, wonderful essays on contemporary derangement ... academically
current but free of jargon; discontented but free of resignation;
gladiatorial but free of truculence; sincere but free of gentility
... [T]o a reader of my generation, [they] have taken on the finish
of classics.
*Bookforum*
These smart and bracingly negative essays will break you out of
your Facebook-induced stupor.
*Esquire*
[M]aybe you've missed cofounder Mark Greif's years of essayistic
genius for [n+1]. This book is a one stop shop to fix that. In
thoughtful, deeply informed, nuanced works of criticism, Greif
makes the case "Against Exercise," questions "What Was the
Hipster?" and delves into "Octomom and the Market in Babies." ...
[F]ans of in-depth cultural criticism will have the perfect
companion in this compendium.
*Huffington Post*
These essays carve out a space of silence ... a void levered open
for new knowledge to rush in and fill ... Against Everything is the
work of a gadfly essayist, not a windbag: in it, Greif is nasty and
fun and also takes us to new and spacious places.
*The Awl*
Greif has outdone himself (and this is saying something, because
his work has consistently blown us away) with this collection of
critical essays ... Everything is brilliantly disseminated, clearly
argued, and will leave you wanting to host (or at least attend)
dinner parties where you can show off your newfound knowledge.
*Nylon*
Mark Greif's essays can cut, they can connect, and they can soar.
Greif inhabits the center of all his subjects, from Nietzsche to
Nas, but there is no display or cynicism here, only a powerful mind
thinking hard about our culture and our politics. 'The instant for
philosophy is always now,' he writes, because it can take forever.
Now is Mark Greif's time.
*Sean Wilentz*
Mark Greif is one of the most consistently interesting American
writers of the last decade, and this book proves it. I read him for
the pleasure of never knowing where his brain's going next. Here's
the first sentence of his essay on cops: 'A surprise of being
around police is how much they touch you.' That's the kind of weird
and accurate observation I want from an essayist. Get down with a
writer who's dogged in his attempt to understand us better, and
wise in knowing it's hopeless.
*John Jeremiah Sullivan*
Politically engaged, coolly stylish and often drily funny
*Guardian*
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