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.]

Know the Sharing/Oversharing Divide. A bit of personal info—we have a kitty!—makes you a friend. Too much personal info—check out my facial!—makes you a target. This is not even a fine line. It is a very obvious line. It is the line that drove Julia Allison off the net before. Since her return, she, surprisingly, has not really crossed it!

Don't Write Like An Asshole. Kinda hard to quantify this one, right? Especially because some of us make our livings acting like pricks all day. But writing assholish things and writing like an asshole are different! Keith Gessen often Tumblrs like an asshole. Yes, you have a fine little magazine, but the I'll buy you a beer if you are half as impressive as me when you're my age thing is one of the douchiest things we've ever read, especially because dude is not actually Norman Mailer yet. Ditto for Lodwick's contention that his pretty websites "change the world." No, they don't! Maybe "asshole" just means "solipsist?" It does seem to, doesn't it. Which brings us to:

Manage Your Narcissism. Please. And:

Have a Sense of Humor Please.

STOP DIGGING. You're mocked or attacked. Respond with a cutting counter-attack, a reasonable and self-reflective defense, or DON'T RESPOND AT ALL. Or email the author and make friendly! This secret tactic usually works wonders. DON'T flail about helplessly in the comments section, where you'll be piled on. Don't post something hurt and whiny that reinforces whatever real or imagined fault you were attacked for. Bite back and enjoy the game or ignore it and move on with your life. Mr. Keith Gessen sort of did this, which is why we'll link to his cute puppy pictures.

Man Up. This advice is very sexist but also sadly useful.

Own Your Terrible Gimmick This is basically summed up as "fuck the haters." It means that when we (or anyone else!) do things like this to you, you do this.

Read This. Will Leitch is leaving the internet, but he imparted wisdom on his way to print.

Be Like Doree Everyone likes Doree. Everyone! Look at how she deflects criticism!

Don't Storm Off the Internet In a Huff. It's embarrassing. Also it makes the entire internet indistinguishable from LiveJournal, which is depressing.

We hope this helps all you Tumblrs and Tweeters out there! You whiny idiots!

[Big Think]

Lest you get your hopes up—honestly, no battle was fought that night, unless one counts the collective, epic consumption of Brooklyn Lagers. Cruelly, the task of dispensing the beer had been assigned to n+1’s young, nubile interns (both men and women.) Apparently this is a time-honored tradition. A plastic cup pleaded for a $1 donation per beer for these poor foot-soldiers of culture.

N+1's office was fairly small, sweltering, and full of people who kept inadvertently poking each other—much like the Internet itself. Who was crammed inside? We saw journalist Wesley Yang, Brian Stelter (formerly of TVNewser, currently of the NYT), and Harper's/n+1 contributor Christian Lorentzen (who we hear is dating an intern) and Harper's Miriam Markowitz. The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell was there, and someone showed him a cell-phone photo of themselves dressed up as him for Halloween, complete with an oversized curly wig. Luckily, Gladwell was amused.

The party was something of a minefield: people who live in glass Internets will eventually have a beery, slightly awkward conversation with somebody they threw an e-brick at. For example, I met Keith, who had not forgotten my declaring n+1 as not, in fact, the most important literary magazine of our time.

“Got any other suggestions?” he asked shortly after shaking my hand. (Meanwhile, I silently pondered his online remark referring to us as “card-carrying enemies of culture.” Should I update my business card?)

Jessica Wakeman, formerly of the HuffPo and now stringing for the Observer, wandered the crowd looking for Pareene. “He wrote about me!” she said. She was no doubt referring to his “earnest feminism” remark. An introduction was made.

Near the end of the evening—I am told—Gessen made a speech. Ever single person from Gawker was drunk (except for Hamilton) in the hallway at the time and missed it. However, eyewitness reports describe the novelist standing on a piece of furniture, waving his arms around in a mostly-futile call for silence:

He had spent the last two weeks on the Internet! he shouted over the din of the crowd. And during that time, he learned that the Internet was a place where people expressed their pain! (“Isn’t that what literature is?” somebody shouted back.) He would continue to express his pain via the Internet, he declared! Eventually, he got off the table.

A commenter for this website admitted to Gessen afterwards that he had been the one who had told him, online, to “suck his balls.” They embraced.

Meanwhile, there was no more beer. And so, the card-carrying enemies of culture headed down the rainy street to an empty bar, unsure of whether or not the battle had been won—or even fought. No matter. We continued to drink, expressing our pain long into the night.

[Photo: Joe's NYC]

• The Web is dead. Churchill once described a pudding as having no theme. The same is broadly true of today’s Internet; Web 2.0 has descended into bathos, which really ought to have its own 'sphere named after it. Facebook’s great advertising revenue model went bust a year ago and everyone’s already stalked everyone else on MySpace. Most user-generated content reads like a stale algorithm of pettiness, paranoia and semi-literacy. Time formerly proclaimed “us” the “Person of the Year,” and it proved too burdensome a responsibility. We renounce the title.

• The television season is over. What is there to watch now except the Real World set where it always belonged – on a Hollywood soundstage – and with revolving cast members that don’t hang around long enough to come out of the closet, smack each other in the face, or forget to load the dishwasher? Bring back House with its acerbic Bertie Wooster.

• The economy is in limbo. It’s bad, sure, but it’s not quite so bad as to precipitate a new artistic or literary movement. No one's ready to move into lean-tos on the B.Q.E., become a Trotsykist, and found Partisan Review. Speaking of which –

• There are no new magazines. What’s to overhype and then hound to an early grave? Radar’s doing fine in that unremarkable way of its. And n+1 will either lurch into neoconservatism or get bought out by Dave Eggers and turned into Zimbabwean refugee’s emo fanzine.

• There are no parties, except the one being thrown tonight by Keith Gessen, the Julia Allison of public intellectuals, who wants to take back the Internet the way Irving Howe wanted to make socialism relevant.

• We live in atomized and fragmented times. Like academia, the culture is over-specialized and only caters to microscopic – mostly web-based – niches. My Buddhist Scandinavian black metal band can beat up your vomit porn-themed ballet troupe. It’s impossible to congregate under a mass banner of anything anymore. Is this why Barack Obama is deified? Is he the closest thing we have to a popular icon? (Michael Chabon thinks so, and he’s the dean of Superman studies.) But there are no other imagos to make our hearts beat as one and give us a shared cultural experience. What’s the last stadium-venue concert you attended? (I'm seeing Mos Def with a Big Band this month and I can't even get worked up about it.) Who’s the Seinfeld of the humorless aughts, the Geldof of this age of waste?

• Politics has sucked the oxygen out of media. Fortunately, like the TV drought, this may just be seasonal and subject to change once November comes and goes and Obama Girl is cast in the next Tom Stoppard play as Béla Kun's wry housekeeper.

• It’s been an uneventful summer thus far. Might we look forward to a rolling blackout in August that will allow us all to mate in darkened stairwells and wash with tonic water for a glorious twelve hours again?

I had always imagined the commenters as a pack of wolves… and if they smelled blood, my blood, because there I was with them, they would pounce. And then we could have it out.

Instead, the commenters wanted me to leave. It was as if I’d misunderstood. Dude, said the commenters, in effect: We weren’t talking about you. We were talking about “Keith Gessen.” You’re just a name to us. Kind of a funny name, actually. And an author photo. Kind of an obnoxious author photo. But we don’t mean you, personally. We’re bored at work. Come on.

And that was really strange. I have a friend who occasionally makes the argument: You’ve put yourself out there, now people can take their shots. I have another friend who puts it a little differently: You manifest yourself in public, and then people will make of it what they will. But this didn’t feel like either of those things. It was more as if I’d given up my name and photograph as an offering, for people to take shots and interpret those things—not me. That was the deal.

And, if you look at it that way, it’s kind of hard to argue. I have no interest in ruining other people’s fun. I like fun.

So, it’s cool.



... Enough! Ultimately the battle for the internet will have to take place somewhere OUTSIDE the internet, that is to say in the world of flesh and blood, and toward that end, readers of this Tumblr, I announce a TAKE BACK THE INTERNET PARTY.

This Friday night. 8 pm until midnight.
n+1 office in DUMBO
68 Jay St. #405
York St. F stop closest stop
Entrance on Jay St. a little past the intersection with Front

All Tumblr readers welcome! And others. Even if you’ve said terrible things about me on the internet, I forgive you. I know you didn’t really mean me. Even if you did.

[Keith Gessen]

(Image via Titlepage)

• "You disappear and then come back and people say, 'Hey, look at that guy.'"
• "His staff should build a podium for him, one that fits, and take it wherever he goes."
• "You know that on some level, at some moment, Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at John F. Kennedy and thought: Punk."
• "Old America: 'We've been here three generations.' New America: 'You're still here?'"
• "The eagle, you will note, is the centerpiece of my flag. It symbolizes freedom. Also the ability to see far away, so you can spot somebody doing something fishy and get him locked up."
• "His father died of AIDS, you asshole"

First four: Noonan
Five: Handey
Six: Gessen

So! Keith Gessen! If you would like to start living a more admirable life right now, please email us to set up a date with Sammy. Like we said, Sammy loves people and is very friendly. She is kind of scared of other kitties, especially boys, but that could change with time and love!

(If Keith doesn't want the kitty, anyone else is welcome to pick her up! She needs a loving home, as she is not as street-smart as the other kittens of Bed-Stuy.)

Photos: Allyzay

But it has nothing to do with the internet. It has nothing to do with “everybody.” Remember the old slogan, Choire—my sister had it on the back of her leather jacket when we drove cross-country in 1991—“Queers take back the night”? Well, we’re taking the internet back from you people. You’ve mucked it up something good.

TAKE BACK THE INTERNET!! From "you people," which means, specifically, Choire and Nick Denton. (Or maybe it is not "specific" at all!) Keith Gessen is going to reclaim the internet FROM THE GAYS.

QUEERS GIVE BACK THE INTERNET.

Choire and Emily [Keith Gessen Blog via YM]

[Key: Keith Gessen is the editor of n+1, an important literary journal, and the author of some novel about dudes trying to get laid. He used to date Emily Gould, a former Gawker editor. Former Gawker editor Choire Sicha wrote a story about how men are terrible novelists these days. Nick Denton is the publisher and acting managing editor of Gawker, a media gossip site that has devoted a bit of ink to the relationship of Gessen and Gould, which has upset both of them. Your day editor sincerely likes everyone involved, except Gessen, who seems like a tool.]

n+1 editor and novelist Keith Gessen started off by pointing out the shame involved in talking about the internet, possibly it's because it's something we confront by ourselves—we do it alone.

"Is it more stigmatized to masturbate to internet porn or to be so vain as to Google your own name?" he asked, adding that he hadn't done either in the last couple of days.

Commentary from the four panelists ranged from the pedantic ("many web sites today seem to use the concept of the 'page,'" according to Greif, although he did make other, funnier points) to, well, the pedantic: "How is the internet changing literary style?" asked writer Caleb Crain. Answer: The internet is always "welcoming us to the party, saying 'wanna hear something funny?' and 'Know who else is here?'"

Indecision author Benjamin Kunkel elucidated on porn versus politics on the internet—they are the opposite, as it turns out! Politicians fear exposure, while porn stars welcome it. Moe from Jezebel took a swig of Colt 45 when she stepped on the podium, which she had thoughtfully concealed in a brown paper bag.

During the Q&A session, Gessen said that it was common in the literary world to "pretend no one saw the last post about you on Gawker," adding that of course everybody read it anyway. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, being the one responsible.

As for why the internet makes us all such bad people, I would say that it's gone Warholian on us: in the future, everybody will be called an assclown on their own blog. As much as this hurts, we have no choice but to welcome it. Or drop out—delete your Facebook and nobody will remember you ever again.

No disclaimer about the author-subject relationship, whatever it was at the time of writing, is mentioned. We reported on this earlier via a tipster who said the magazine was "furiously scrubbing the story of all mentions of Keith Gessen. Which were, of course, numerous, laudatory and unencumbered with disclaimers."

Gessen is still included in the profile, and as for the lack of disclaimer, "the material didn't warrant any, did it? We're just happy to watch authors get hotter than their subjects," said EIC Michael Idov. Don't push it, mate. "The joys of a quarterly production cycle," he added.

[Russia!]

I'll say straight off that three weeks is too long for a book tour... Meanwhile, God knows what has happened back home in New York. Spring came and went. People threw parties, went to dinner, published magazines (I still get some of the invitations). From a Polish bar in Chicago, I watched the Rangers get knocked out of the play-offs. In Los Angeles, I lost my credit card; in Portland, my phone charger. I haven't missed a round of drinks since Boston. I'm pretty sure my girlfriend and I have broken up, though I can't seem to get her on the phone to confirm this.