The novelist, recently based in New York, has been filing dispatches from Russia for the New Yorker, and may have been working on a story at the time.

Reports Russia!:

Gessen was researching a claim by one of the candidates of tempering with the voting ballots.

Gazeta.ru reports that the officials in charge of the election refused to take the reporter's questions and called the police instead.

Gessen is Russian by birth, but the "OMON" special forces unit confirmed he had an American passport before taking him away. One hopes this offers the writer a measure of protection against the brutal treatment Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin's authoritarian regime has accorded Russian journalists.

[Russia!]

UPDATE: Gessen has been released. Russia! quotes his friend: ""I just talked to him and he's fine. He was like "yeah I got arrested no big deal.'"

No big deal, Russian special forces squad, whatever. Pass the vodka.

So nonchalant/seen-it-all/I-eat-Spetsnaz-for-breakfast, these Russian literary types. (No doubt, we're glad to be able to say so. Godspeed, Keith.)

New Yorkers, your #2 bachelor: Steven Rubenstein, the New York Post's own flack. Huh. We'll leave all the commentary here implied.


Former MSNBC dude Dan is already going out with Renee Zellweger. More importantly he's already engaged...in a perversion of journalism. Pervert!


"Ron needs a woman who can be 'uptown' at galas and 'downtown' in the bedroom." Good god. Should not be allowed.


There's no denying that Keith, the most important writer of our time, possesses a sufficient amount of literary fameballdom to make the list. But he lives in Russia now. Sorry ladies.


The wealthy young Facebook founder is the perfect catch? But he lives in California. As does his girlfriend. Sorry ladies, pt. 2.


[They also referred to HOT BACHELOR painter Jules de Balincourt as "Jules Bettencourt"]

The guys I play hockey with, a number of whom are bankers, know about the crisis. ‘We could start farming,’ one of them suggested a while ago as we sat in the locker room after another loss to our rivals.

‘I have a balcony. We can raise a goat.’

‘Or mushrooms. We could grow psychedelic mushrooms.’

‘No, the FSB controls that market. The minute you came out with your mushrooms they’d be visiting you.’

‘Gentlemen!’ Our captain wanted us to get back to business. ‘There is a financial crisis. But we are also in a hockey crisis.’

‘We’re better off with a goat,’ the first banker continued. ‘It will give you milk – and progeny!’

Anyway that's pretty much the most interesting part, although we have to say that the rest is a good way of understanding how the global panicmeltdown is affecting Russia. Damn, never thought a Gessen item would end up filed under "things we actually like"!

Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again.

(The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.)

The End.

But imagine living your life under an Internet microscope, where total strangers are invited to criticize your life, your work, your romantic choices, and your psychology in front of a jeering audience of commenters. Gessen-bashing briefly replaced alcohol abuse as the favorite sport of NYC blog commenters, and in his zeal to respond, Keith did everything wrong...

The smarter you are, the less likely you are to respond appropriately when you are attacked on the Internet... Writers, academics, executives— successful people are more likely to handle this wrong because they have been trained, more or less, to expect rational behavior from their peers. [Lubbock Online]

Even though it's hard—so hard—and we don't always follow our own advice, the only way to deal with a blog-avalanche is to ignore blog commenters, bloggers, and blogs in general. Try avoiding the entire Internet if you have a book coming out, actually—the last thing you need to be wasting your time with is obsessively checking your Amazon rankings. Work on your next book, but don't be tempted for one second to make it include more than a cursory reference to Internet culture, Candace Bushnell.

Look, at some point I actually scanned in the good parts.


Anyway, I think we can all agree that Yang is no "Morlock." Here is his blog, it needs more comments. Oh, and the girl is managing editor Kate Perkins. One day maybe she will write something about her comically bad self-esteem and I'll post about that.

*Seriously, you are a girl and you go to their parties and think, "Whoa, I am never going to get laid, I give up," but you quickly learn this is wrong, you will totally get laid, and you'll make some of the most pretty friends you ever had bonding with the literary scene girls over what a unique experience it was!

(Warning: I would say this story signifies Nothing, but it probably signifies Nothing-1!)

Once upon the early aughts I lived in Philadelphia with two other soon to-to-be bloggers and a sad young literary journal editor.* When we lived in Philadelphia we were gainfully employed but also bored, so we — well, chiefly Pressler, who had a "gossip" column in the local alternative newsweekly, but also the other three of us, who committed various acts of "journalism" — unconsciously went to work constructing our own memory palace of microcelebrities, proving that a microcelebrity economy can exist even in a city with a crippling five percent wage tax and a severe (SEVEEERE) case of "brain drain"! The key was simply to 1. Zero in on someone trying to get attention and 2. Write about them in such a way that captures/wryly acknowledges/satirizes the absurdity of their endeavor to get your attention. Among them were:

1. A party promoter who was sort of like our Julia Allison named Rachel Furman. Pressler liked to call her "Hotel heiress Rachel Furman" but she eventually started a business not promoting parties but just showing up to them and the business, and eventually she, were called "Rachel Inc."
2. Restaurateur Stephen Starr, who owned all the restaurants in town and dated a much younger woman named January, and another restaurateur Neil Stein, who was a huge cokehead and pillhead and owned nothing but he used to write Pressler from prison, where he had to go on charges of tax evasion and being a big pillhead I think. I believe we pretended they had a "feud" although Neil Stein was too much of a drug addict to really feud with people and Stephen Starr's actual feud was with Jeffrey Chodorow, but Chodorow did not live in Philadelphia so we acted like he did not exist, even though he was actually important.
3. A crew of ambitious publicists who traveled in packs, stole one anothers' clients and marketed themselves by dressing like Julia Allison and sending out Christmas cards with pictures of themselves in Sex & The City poses. At the time we thought they were kind of pathetically trashy but at that time The Hills did not exist, much less The Real Housewives of New York. They all feuded all the time! Then we found out one of them was bisexual and had an "open relationship" with her husband and that was fun too.
4. And speaking of Christmas cards: a prodigiously obnoxious "blueberry heir" named Anthony DiMeo who became a sort of John Fitzgerald Page-cum-Tucker Max sort of character for us. Girls in his apartment building emailed us constantly to attest to his terrible woeful obnoxiousness. Pressler scanned his Christmas card for one of her columns, and DiMeo sued her. Fun times!
5. Gervase. Of Survivor I fame. (Obviously!)
6. A state senator named Vince Fumo who supposedly bought fake tits for his bartender girlfriend and had really amazing hair transplants.
7. An assortment of deejays, because hipsters were very important back then, the most — oh who am I kidding with the "most" -0 notable of whom was Diplo.*

See, it was not too unlike Gawker! Except we sort of hated Gawker in those days, because we read it and assumed the people it covered were somehow less pathetic and more special than the people we covered, which was actually not true. (Also this guy named A.J. who was from Philly but living the awesome New York used to try and get us to move because Philly was so pathetic.) But somehow Jessica convinced everyone that Philadelphia was the "Sixth Borough" and around that time Gawker even noticed us! Then somehow Doree and I ended up working here and Jessica meanwhile got a job working with former Gawker editor Jessica Coen at New York's Daily Intel. And A.J. — following a stint back in Philadelphia! — is also working for Gawker Media. And last I heard:

1. Rachel Furman had some sort of existential crisis wherein she went off the internet and drove cross country to get a nose job.
2. Stephen Starr owns a bunch of restaurants in New York now and he no longer returns our flirtatious text messages.
3. One of those publicist girls told everyone she was a millionaire.
4. Some guys made the TV show we always wished we had made about the whole scene but, who are we kidding, we don't know how to do that.
5. Diplo stopped dating M.I.A. and is still nowhere near as annoying as any of the Misshapes!
6. Vince Fumo was charged in a 139-count, 267-page corruption indictment. (I guess we could have paid attention to that!)
7. Anthony DiMeo sued Tucker Max.***

Anyway, today the same shit keeps happening with a whole new cast of new people! Every time we sit down to devote ourselves to trying to write something a little more pointful, it's…Mary Rambin! Raffaelo Follieri! Tao Lin! Jared Paul St…ill?! See, but it never lets up! Eventually "our Gessen" — he lives here now too! — wrote a highly thoughtful think piece on the subject for the Times Magazine. Perhaps we might direct you to the line:

This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.

And trust us, "out there" does not only mean New York. It is like Staphylococcus Aureus…it's actually everywhere, but it's not going to emerge as the bombastic plague of pointlessness until you start cultivating it in the ego-advancing agar of your wholly unwarranted attention!! (It's the microbiology of microcelebrity, doncha know!) (I know! It doesn't ever stop though.) And to that end I will leave you with two quotes from a seventeenth century philosopher I learned about from this N+1 guy:

If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.

It's universal! But… this

To establish oneself in the world, one has to do all one can to appear established.

So what are you waiting for? Go forth and establish! Perhaps I can interest you in Tumbling your endeavors? We'll be most gracious followers.

*One was former Gawker editor Doree Shafrir, another was New York magazine Daily Intel blogger Jessica Pressler, and the literary journal editor — "our Gessen," as Doree calls him fondly — was a guy named Matt "Mattathias" Schwartz. (Everyone was intimidated/repelled by Schwartz's highminded seriousness at first! But I ended up dating him and he turned out to be high-mindedly serious in a good way.
**Philadelphia deejays have a long history of local prominence: we often found ourselves writing about the antics of this one, who is now 67 years old.
***Though alas, Tucker Max won the great douche-off.

Bonfire of Inanities [Eye Weekly]

By reducing average class size! Now a full 3/4 of Harvard undergraduate classes have fewer than 20 students. And you know what that means: more classes taught in intimate settings by younger instructors no doubt hungrier for brain sex.

(I have anecdotal evidence of this, even. Earlier this year I met a young aspiring journalist from Harvard named Lena Chen, and she was traveling [to Julia Allison's house, in fact!] with an ex-teaching assistant in tow. I am pretty sure they were having traditional non-brain sex!)

Now that you know that here is some information: it is the 25th anniversary of the journalism world's most pointlessly controversial listicle and still I am pretty sure Gawker has done the only actually funny (and crowdsourced) alternative ranking. Internet people, please put rub your A+ school for B student educated brains together and think us up a new concept. Unsafest Safety Schools? Fairly ridiculous names?

*Ahem, Princeton would like you to know they still hold the top spot in several categories of the Princeton Review and also are beloved by Black Enterprise magazine despite that angry thesis penned by that alumni association Judas Michelle Obama.

Vote For America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College
College & University Rankings Library
Eating And Shopping In Cambridge [WWD]
Campus Squirrel Listings

Paraphrased: Everyone is wrong, nobody understands, especially in how they interpret his book, people like us misconstrue things, not that they've read it (even though I have, several times); but anyway, "I think I've said this before but it bears repeating, the book I wrote, and the work I do in general, it's meant for a large audience." Neg! (Even though only about 7,500 copies are distributed of each issue of n+1.)

And so given all that, given that my target audience was *everyone under 40*, when a site like Gawker—which, let's not exaggerate the size of Gawker, those 16 million pageviews are largely generated by about 100 people clicking on the comments over and over and over again

Hah, maybe! But! Keith still manages to mention this website one dozen times in the interview. Looks like somebody has a hate-crush!

[Young Manhattanite]

[Image is commenter Strikethrough's creation.]

TV PITCH ****AMERICAN PRETENSE*****

THE PREMISE: As the alarming, poignant Matter of Jessica Roy recently reminded the world, thousands of girls (or at least probably a thousand girls!) all across America dream of literary ingenueship in New York City. There's no money in it of course, but the romance! The richness. Pathos. And bathos! (Haha, Glamour…and Grammar!) Okay, so: It's an elimination-based competition show in which 10 photogenic 18-24-year-old females (yes, just females, blame affirmative action or something) cast as interns for N+1, the most important literary magazine of our time, compete for the chance to be…nominally paid interns? Token female contributing editors? Unclear. Wait, that's the gimmick! It's a SATIRE, of the conventional reality show PRETENSE that creative fields actually lead you to security/success/fulfillment!

THE MARKET: American Pretense will be the most laserlike television target yet at the "Everyone I know in the New York Media seems to be watching this show nobody is actually watching which is why the media keeps laying people off so in five years if I have not been laid off from my media job and quit for the Peace Corps and/or pharma sales referencing this show will be one of those cultish rituals in which I engage so as to act as if New York Media cultural currency was not actually the worst investment since the Indonesian rupiah" psychographic that has made "Gossip Girl" such a valuable brand.

Liberal use of sponsors, online component and free labor solicited by various proprietary email lists to offset production costs. (Obvs.)

GESSEN: Gessen is this show's CHIEF JUDGER NURTURER DIPLOMAT. Like Tim Gunn/Ryan Seacrest with a dash of Trump. He will introduce the show, offer tips and critiques interspersed with pieces of wisdom he wished he had known when he occupied the 18-24 demographic.

PANEL OF JUDGES: JUDGES are the crucial element that makes a voyeuristic treatlet into a FRANCHISE. Important to cull panel from three universes: PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL WITH LITERARY MERIT (Hitchens as Simon Cowell figure)…Has-been female with drugs (Wurtzel) … and a few new unknown but Googlable bad cop/villain types. (Like I have seen this guy around!)

CHALLENGES:
This is still sketchy. Because you shouldn't really be able to read/pontificate/frantically Wikipedia literary references you missed, and act out the Hobbsean histrionics that make for good reality television, simultaneously, and yet I somehow have a feeling you can! Like that guy on Project Runway who got kicked off for hoarding pattern books…we could have something like that happen here, like an Orwellian "no books on penalty of excommunication" policy that no one can, by the other requirements of the show, actually follow, and on that note, maybe the consequence of breaking rules, or losing individual challenges should actually be the opposite of elimination. You have to stick around forever like in that play! Maybe the biggest losers will mobilize to start a class struggle? (No of course not duh! They will discover some obscure post-structuralist theorist who restores their self-esteem or go into private equity or something.)
Other ideas:
*Competition to get the words "Mark Sarvas sucks cock" somehow published on McSweeney's website.
*Competition to get semi-famous rapper to write (publishable!) letter to N+1 website.
*Competition to convince minor literary celebrities to attend an official N+1 pizza party in Brooklyn and/or Foreign Policy-ranked public intellectuals to attend a loft party in the West Village. (The WINNER, though, gets Steven Pinker to the pizza party and sneaks some into the fancy loft party, right?)

MAKEOVER ELEMENT:
Obviously a slight makeover ("makeunder"?) element is involved, but will have to tread lightly w/r/t corporate sponsors so as not to pollute the N+1 brand. Ideas?

The cheat sheet, via Sorgatz:

Personal faves include Krucoff stumbling across Emily's name, Julia musing about Google hits, Sklar standing in front of Balthazar, and Choire closing the house. But all of you! All of you have made America (and perhaps Russia) a better place!

Also, we are told that the book copy in this video, the FSU Middlebrow Remix of All The Sad Young Literary Men, has passed from Andrew Krucoff, who bought it from us at $890 (proceeds to the homeless), to the blogger 99, who bought it at $275 (discounted by the bundling of a date) from Krucoff (proceeds to a soup kitchen).

We are all witness to something very special! Don't you already feel more literarified and shit??

Excerpted from a triumphant email from Krucoff to Gessen:

Now, to be honest, my original plan for the book was to burn it upon pick-up at Gawker HQ (preferably right there in the office using Denton's evil eye laser), then stuff the ashes in an urn, mark it with "pussy" and mail it to you.

Dramatic, huh?

Two things dissuaded me from that: 1) I was reminded of the ugly history of book burning and how Jew-on-Jew desecration wouldn't serve anyone's cause. 2) More importantly, I remembered that *I* am the pussy. There's no way I would actually go through with that. After studied consultation, I concluded you were right on all points in our previous exchange. If we were Facebook friends, I would send you a "You Win!" sticker if such a thing were available in their virtual marketplace.

Instead, Krucoff's current plan is to offer the priceless ($890) book as a door prize at this soup kitchen benefit next Wednesday. And Gessen agreed to do his part, saying:

Sure, I'd be glad to come. We should consult the Talmud—or, failing that, Jewcy.com—as to whether a book can be offered to charity twice, but otherwise I'll be happy to explain how I replaced the Crimson Sports Grille with the 4th Quarter Bar.

Although I think they should charge a lot more than $10 at the door.

Ha, YES WE DO TOO.

The outcome of our saga: An $890 donation to the New York Homeless Coaliton; The opportunity for even more charity, if Krucoff is able to convince the small, effete sliver of New York society that would actually desire to own this obscure volume to come out to a soup kitchen benefit next week; And, most importantly, an odd and short-lived sense of unity among fake enemies on the fake internet arguing about fake writing and stuff, which is how we sum up the culture war.

Never again say that Keith Gessen hasn't accomplished something good.

[Pictured, Krucoff enjoying his new prize on the Gawker office toilet. The backstory to all this is here. Andrew Krucoff's blog is here. Info on the soup kitchen even is here. The most important Tumblr of our time is here.]

• 1. MIB Vs. Tucker Max/ Sedaris: Yes, Michael Ian Black is a funny and tolerable guy. But variety is the spice of life, man. How about an online encouragement of somebody?
• 2. Jakob Lodwick Quits The Internet: This one is lame because it will not stick, we guarantee. For one, he runs an internet company. Yea.
• 3. Julia Allison Quits Blogging: *Scoff*. Also: other things.
• 4. Patrick Moberg And His Subway Dream Girl: A guy sees a cute girl on the subway, draws a picture of her, puts it on a website, and gets famous. The two finally meet! They go on national TV! Everybody writes about them! Then they end up not really liking each other that much, proving that love is a dirty sham and we live in a cold and heartless world. Thanks for nothing.
• 5. The Keith Gessen Middlebrow Remix Book: We muddy the clearcut sides of this tedious feud by having Gessen remove the objectionable references to Harvard in his objectionable book and replace them with references to Florida State. Btw, bidding on this for-charity item ends tomorrow so bid bid bid!

I am the least literary of all Gawker writers, and therefore the least qualified to comment on the contents of Gessen's book (which I haven't read). So I just complained that he talks about Harvard way too much (which he does). But Gessen responded!

Hamilton: I do say Harvard a lot, don't I? It's impolite, right? You know who doesn't ever mention where they went to school? People whose parents went there before them, or paid for a lot of tutoring. In my book I was writing about a certain subset of guys and I didn't think it served any purpose to be coy about where they went to school. But how's this—if you send me your copy I'll cross out all the references to Harvard and replace them with the college of your choice.

So I did. Sheila donated her copy of his book, and I took it and gave it to him at his party. I considered having him replace all Harvard references with Oral Roberts University, but eventually settled on Florida State University, on the theory that middlebrow is even funnier than lowbrow.

Do you agree? Disagree? Either way, you fall on one side or the other in the culture war!

Gessen lost Sheila's book, but, to his credit, replaced it with a brand new copy, and kept his word by replacing every reference to Harvard, by hand. And there are a lot. In the front of the book, he wrote (as best as I can make out):

At the request of Hamilton Nolan, all references to Harvard in this copy of All the Sad Young Literary Men have been replaced with "Florida State" or "FSU." I've also replaced dorm names and bar names, where necessary.

The "Sam" character still moves to Boston after college—I don't see why he wouldn't be able to do that just as well from FSU. Of course he would find the weather more depressing. Otherwise the tone of the force(sp?) of the book and its complaint(sp?) remain intact.

Keith Gessen
New York
6/30/08

Please: take a moment to reflect on all of the various threads of the literary, social, cultural, urban, educational, academic, media, and Gawkerist zeitgeist that are summed up in this single item. It is truly staggering. Do you want to keep it under glass? Burn it? Either way, it has a power over you that you cannot deny.

We are auctioning off this totemic volume for charity. All proceeds will be donated to the New York Coalition For the Homeless—the organization that will be responsible for sheltering all of us once this writing hustle plays itself out.

The link to the eBay auction is here. We listed the book last night at $10; bidding currently stands at $105. But it should rightly go much higher. It's for a good cause.

What price is too great to pay in order to own this, the new version of the "Morris" character's speech on p. 72?:

"There's this thing about guys from FSU. They think everything's fine, just because they went to FSU. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Florida State fucking University."

[Bid for it here.]