Apparently, there is another broadsheet publication on campus! It’s called the Nassau Weekly and is published roughly once a month. When I first discovered this, I was quite worried about the competition from this rival paper, but my concerns quickly dissipated once I realized that the “Nass,” as I have heard it called, is not really a newspaper. (And I mean that in a completely different way from how people mean it when they say the ‘Prince’ is not really a newspaper.) In actuality, it seems to be more of a magazine that specializes in lengthy intellectual diatribes and bizarrely esoteric features that make you think, “This might be supposed to be funny, but I would need to go get a dictionary to find out, and I’m not sure it’s worth it.”
One of its semi-recurring features, as I discovered in my thorough research, is a rigorous lampoon of this very publication. The column, titled “PrinceWatch,” seeks out slipups, retractions, blunders or just poor writing in general, and makes a mockery of them and of the ‘Prince’ as a whole. Though this feature is admittedly a refreshing oasis of accessibility within a wasteland of stultifying esoterica, I still feel a rebuttal is necessary. Plus, this will probably elicit much snark and derision from Nass staffers and devotees in the form of online comments, increasing my column’s ranking on the ‘Prince’ website’s “Most Commented” sidebar and thereby improving my self-esteem. And so, dear readers, I bring you the NassWatch.
I picked up a copy of the Nassau Weekly’s April 24 edition in the main entry of Terrace, where stacks upon stacks of the publication lie like back issues of “Highlights for Children” in the lobby of the hipster dentist’s office. Now, I’ll be honest: I might have made an increased commitment to thorough research, but I sure as hell didn’t read the whole thing. Have you looked at a copy? There are a lot of words. A LOT. Many words I have never seen in print before, including (but not limited to) “sabermetrician” and “autochthonous.” So I mostly just skimmed through it. But that was enough to know I hadn’t been missing anything.
There was the spread featuring two full-page pieces that, from all I can surmise, not only discussed precisely the same subject (the National Organization for Marriage and their not-so-secretly homophobic ad campaign) but also took precisely the same stance on it (it’s bad). There was the “From the Editors” message, written from the viewpoint of the lewdness suspect of Campus Safety Alert fame, which managed to be extremely inappropriate while still lamentably unfunny. And who could forget the mind-numbingly irrelevant advice column of self-proclaimed “Wise Wendy,” whose unfathomable nonsequiturs fail to be even remotely entertaining. Clearly she is far from wise: What’s worse, I’m not even sure she’s a Wendy.
But the trait that truly makes the Nass a difficult read isn’t its format, feature or subject matter. It’s style. They seem to gravitate toward a literary aesthetic that I think is best described as “what this column would be like if I didn’t have an editor or an eight-hundred-word limit and typed exactly what I was thinking without ever rereading it.”
One article, titled “The Future of Narrative,” begins with the author admitting that she’s not wearing any underwear and segues somehow into a description of some English lecture that manages to give me more unnecessary detail than I’m willing to wade through but not enough necessary detail to understand what the hell she’s talking about. Eventually, there is talk of “the narrative” and its place in modern society, but nowhere do we receive an explanation of why this young woman is going commando or why we needed to know that.
My favorite piece, a sprawling two-page masterpiece occupying center spread and making allusions to Martin Scorsese and Bela Bartok, is an in-depth discussion of how our lives have been affected by that cornerstone of the American literary canon, “Gossip Girl.” It provides us with such profound pockets of wisdom as “the artifacts of right now that will come to serve as such will turn out to be far more removed from these immediate ligaments binding our literal experience of this time to our aesthetic one — far less obvious.” Far less obvious, indeed.
I could go on, but thankfully, I’ve reached my word limit. I certainly wouldn’t discourage you from picking up this copy of the Nass if you’re looking for some mild amusement — but I’m warning you, “Verbatim” isn’t that good this time.
Brandon Lowden is an electrical engineering major from McKees Rocks, Pa. He can be reached at blowden@princeton.edu.
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