It's a small, great story about the writer, Michael Casper, who discovers, by going through his record collection, that David Foster Wallace named some of the characters in Infinite Jest after the real-life characters associated with an uber-obscure record label at the University of Arizona, where Wallace earned his MFA. This was my favorite part; someone who knew Wallace, a US military vet turned fellow MFA candidate, talking about his interactions with the author:

Wallace, who was fresh out of his undergraduate years, was attracted to stories of experience because he thought his life was bare of detail. "Dave liked to hear me tell stories," he said. "He didn't know what to write about. He thought he had used up all he knew in Broom of the System.

"Dave used to say that his life story would be, ‘David sat in the smoking room of the library'-they still had smoking rooms in those days-‘trying to think of the next line to write.'"

Wallace is still gaining popularity: a website devoted to helping readers get through Infinite Jest, called Infinite Summer, popped up earlier this year. Regardless of the movie on its way, and maybe more of his writing to be unearthed—who knows? The guy was prolific.—David Foster Wallace put to paper the kind of work that'll ensure his legacy and influence over contemporary literature living on for a long, long time to come.

The lesson and the lede is that there's no quicker way to felch the sentiment and nostalgia out of something than to sit and watch six people at a table intellectualize the bone marrow out of it. The panel's lineup was kind of like The Real World as cast by a Kicking and Screaming-era Noah Baumbach: former Gawker blogger Emily Gould, Nirvana scholar and Come As You Are author Michael Azerrad, n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah, Sassy magazine scholar and the table's riotgrrl expert, Marisa Meltzer, and moderator Mark Grief, an n+1 co-editor and literary shaman. Oh! I'm forgetting someone. From the press release: "Aaron Lake Smith makes a series of fanzines called Big Hands that have been described as "an ongoing treatise on disappointment."" Aaron, 25, was dressed in a red flannel shirt. He was not being ironic, and it actually appeared to be a nice shirt, though he probably hates it.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Aaron Lake Smith tried to remember his roots.

The room was fairly packed, and they got going at about 7:10 p.m. I'd brought a bottle of Diet Coke and Rum to mix in my seat, but this proved to be relatively difficult, as most of the people around us were actually listening pretty intently on what the panel had to say. I put down the sauce and picked up some old bills and started to write on them. I took the following notes: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Azerrad's opening shot is something about Nirvana. Him and (Aaron Rose Smith) talked about 9/11 as the end of the 90s. The 90s ended a year after the 90s ended? Gould is quiet. Smith said parties were better in the 90s, but he was 15! Huffing glue is no longer socially acceptable, that's why. Term "cultural touchstones" has now been used seven times. Hamrah comes in with Anita Hill! Hamrah also noted that Winona Ryder shoplifting was the end of the 90s, nobody can tell if he's joking even after he says he's joking. 90s of light, 90s of darkness? Glee vs. Malaise? Heard these terms seven more times. Meltzer: Riot grrl, Riot grrl, Riot grrl, Riot grrl, something about Sassy. Makes a salient point that it was cooler to be a lesbian in the 90s. Emily looks bored. Azerrad is still talking about Nirvana. Sleepy. No phone service; intentional? Are they blocking me? This is My Dinner With Andre meets I Love The 90's. Except they're now talking about I Love The 90s, and the difference they fail to point out is that VH1 actually tries. Meta. Pop culture intellectualizing as sedative, falling asleep. Emily talking about Drudge breaking Lewinsky "stained dress" thing and I wake up. Hipster says 90s discussions were more interesting and I'm starting to believe him. Collectively, they're not so bad, taken apart, I feel like they're lobotomizing me. Mark Grief predictably tells everyone how wrong they are.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Michael Azerrad was the George Martin of Citizen Dick.

I stopped taking notes sometime around when they were discussing the "imminent failure of rap rock as evidenced by the Judgment Night soundtrack," because that about encapsulates the entire thing. But two more decent things happened.

1. Emily Gould was asked something by a girl in the second row what it's like to journal and chronicle one's life on the internet, and she somehow tied it back into the 90s. Not so interesting was the line of inquiry or the answer Gould gave so much as the confusing, ridiculous way she tried to make it relevant to the topic. Gould looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and sheer confusion, and I'm pretty sure Azerrad answered for her with something about Nirvana.

2. Marisa Meltzer and A.S. Hamrah, who was the panel's oldest and crankiest (thus: funniest) member got into it over Meltzer's reason for existence, Sassy magazine. I have no idea how they got there, but Hamrah basically called it a sham, noting that it was a magazine written by 24 year-olds, for 24 year-olds. Meltzer looked like she was about to punch Hamrah in the face, and noted that no, it was written for 16 year-olds. Like her. Hamrah then argued that, if that was the case, it was written by a bunch of 24 year-olds who thought they knew what 16 year-olds would be into, which was ostensibly the directive of all teen magazines, but really, just 24 year-olds impressing their own tastes, beliefs, and style onto impressionable 16 year-olds. Like Meltzer. He kept laying into her: "You want to know what 16 year-olds enjoy? Use a focus group." The kid in the flannel shirt then noted that he's lied several times during focus groups.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Marissa Meltzer used to be a rebel. Now she writes for the New York Times. And Slate.

Sure, there was other stuff - my highlight was Smith talking about how he's roamed from globalization protest to globalization protest, even though nobody else thought that was funny - but you get the idea: intelligent people asserting their intelligence in a dumb game of one-upsmanship is no smarter nor enlightening than an episode of Best Week Ever, and I'd take the Best Week Ever over this any day.

The person I brought with me - who, incidentally, wouldn't let me leave early - noted that they were too busy indulging in their own nonsense (the independent, the "cool," the "cultural touchstones" nobody actually gave a shit about) to not miss a bunch of things that would've helped make the night interesting. Among them: "Rollerblading, Dave Matthews Band, Beavis and Butthead, Carl Lewis, The Rachel hairstyle, The Hale-Bopp comet, HIV/AIDS." Might I add to that list: Counting Crows, the advent of TR:L, Gin Blossoms, Can't Hardly Wait (Aaron Smith, I'm looking at you), Michael Jordan, John Grisham. Another attendee thought Emily was pretty funny, and so did I. She looked relatively incredulous at even being there. Understandably.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Emily Gould wanted to say something about hooking up to "Say Goodbye" in college, but politely declined. Mark Grief would enjoy this song if he heard it several times.

We filed out, and I didn't have any higher a score at Flight Control than when we walked in, sadly. At a bar afterwards, someone noted that having a panel discussion was almost, in it of itself, a very 90s thing to do. And after I was politely asked to leave said bar for mixing my own drink (the aforementioned previous failure of a mixology experiment), the same person noted how 90s that was. He was right: the psudeo-coffee-shop intellectualizing of something that could probably make for an entertaining conversation is as outdated as it is disenchanting and utterly annoying. And I was so, so relieved that we live when we do.

So Professor Taylor's main thesis:

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps

And he outlines his manifesto for reform in six points. All of it raises central questions about the purpose of education in our new information age. I got some peeps to discuss:

Kate Perkins is the managing editor of smarty-pants literary magazine N+1

The ivory tower, traditionally, has stood as a haven for the kind of scholarship that is at least indifferent to the pressures of the socioeconomic order – if not actively subversive to it – whereas today it's essentially a gold-plated monument of industry. Private universities charge tuitions affordable only to those in the same tax brackets as professional athletes, guaranteeing the next generation of American aristocracy. This is why schools like NYU (which do of course have innumerable fluffy ‘interdepartmental' study programs like the ones Taylor recommends) look absurd when their students – among the most powerful and privileged citizens in the country – are staging a protest on their nearly privatized Washington Square Park campus: their tuitions have a direct and transparent role in the erosion of the public good.

Even state and city universities disproportionately fund ‘profitable' departments in the axis of techno-pharma-sci-finance researches that yield the greatest gains in funding and reputation. CUNY's "Look Who's at CUNY!" campaign, e.g., advertises the achievements of graduate students and research fellows in ‘important' fields like ADD research and biotechnology. In this sense, graduate programs already do act as the "problem-focused programs" Taylor endorses. When universities operate in service of profits, though, it becomes difficult to tell what their responsibility is with regard to social problems and who, exactly, their problem-solving serves. It's easy to imagine a "Water program" serving not the public but the corporations monopolizing the means of its distribution, at, say, Black Water University.

If Taylor's right to describe the crisis of education as an industry crisis, it's not because, like automobiles or high finance, universities are inherent pillars of American capitalism. It's because social contribution does not equal surplus value. The genuine social utility and social prestige of universities should be based on their institutional independence from The Powers That Be. Taylor's 6 Steps make for relatively useless suggestions, since none of them relieve scholarship from its burden of profit. He's concerned with changing the internal structure of universities, rather than with restructuring the academy's place in the social order. Until that happens, no matter what bureaucratic rearrangements and curricular changes go on, they'll continue to produce the class divisions that make them institutions for the elite, by the elite.

Next up: Dan Kois, who services both sides of his brain via blogging for NY Mag's Vulture blog, and co-helming his own literary-ish endeavor At Length magazine.

In reading Kate's reply, I thought back to this article in Friday's Times, an follow-up of sorts to Mark Taylor's op-ed, currently hovering a few slots below it on the Most Emailed List. It's about a kid from California, currently somewhere between middle-class and lower-middle-class, having trouble finding a way to pay for college. In some ways it suggests that America's private universities may be doing a better job than we old people might imagine of challenging the traditional class distinctions of university life.

This kid applied to Cal, UC-Davis, UCLA, and Stanford. And now he can't pay for school, even though he got into all three of the public universities — because even in-state tuition to public universities, on top of room and board and hilariously overpriced textbooks written by your handsy professor, is way too high for his parents to afford. (Cal offered him $212 in scholarship money.) Too bad he got rejected by Stanford — that quasi-Ivy would have paid for him to go there. For kids whose parents aren't rich, great private schools — if you can get in — can be a better deal than public schools.

Of course, Brennan did not get in to Stanford. Only a select few underprivileged in America will make it through the rigors of growing up poor or lower-middle-class, the even more difficult rigors of high school, and the arguably even more difficult rigors of applying to private universities, to take advantage of this opportunity. And whether those select few will get out of those private schools without having been completely Ivyfied is a whole nother question entirely — you could make a good argument that giving a kid from a poor neighborhood a Harvard diploma effectively nullifies her poor neighborhood from all future economic consideration.

As Kate says though, Taylor isn't really talking about restructuring the academy's place in the greater social order — he's talking about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. Anyone who's ever been taught by a hapless grad student or, like me, has been the hapless grad student teaching unmotivated undergrads knows the system is broke. Anyone who's snoozed through a tenured mummy's umpteenth lecture on Pompeii or finished an arcane thesis only to find that no one cares about it or wants to give him a job knows that university culture needs fixing. Might Taylor's recommendations work? Sure, maybe. Maybe not. Who the hell really knows? I do know if on my first day at UNC they'd told me I could major in Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life, or Water, I would've been pissed.

Sure, some kids go into college loaded for bear to solve the world's problems (Education majors), or at least with a concrete sense of what they want to do to exacerbate them (Business majors). But what about the rest of us, who trundle off to college without a clue? My major was Dramatic Arts. Then I got an MFA in fiction writing, for God's sakes. Do either of those suggest a kid with a firm grasp on his future? Add to the hopeless ones like me the many, many students who, reasonably, just want to spend their formative years drinking, fucking, and reading great books. They're already majoring in Life, baby.

Hmm, smells like education by RSS Blog-feeds to me? We have two more contributors coming, but what do all of you smart guys and gals think?

So yeah. How awesome is it that when Jimmy Fallon opens the National Magazine Awards with a line about Gawker, we have his house band The Roots on Gawker discussing — and so articulately! — the ongoing Great Magazine Die-Off? Granted it falls short of our president going crazy at a Little League WNBA Final Four game, but it's still pretty cool! And timely! Certainly a reason for Jimmy to keep not-not reading Gawker or whathaveyou! (more on those exclamation points later!)

And did you read this op-ed in the Times from Mark C. Taylor, chairman of Columbia University's religion department? You should, it's very provocative. Dude is all like: universities are retarded, buncha Bernie Madoffs and Hipster Grifters. And the commenters at the Times were all like: Yo, son! We are all in debt because of our investment in "higher education" so you better watch your mouth sucka. We will intellectualize you into a pulp right here in the comment section.

But there's some truth to it, right? A quick perusal of the "Shut Up, College" tag certainly reveals that something is wrong. I mean, $54K to protest in an NYU lunchroom? Since I'm only good for inserting that slick-talking give-me-some-skin jive I got some intelligent people to parse out the issues. Credits include: N+1, The New Yorker, NY Mag, and The Nation. Lots of "N's" in there if anyone was in need.

They all disagree with Professor Taylor, so if you want to see an intellectual gang-bang this is the spot in like thirty minutes.

And then there was this cool piece on exclamation points, and it does a pretty good job of digging into its usage. But it leaves out racism! Because white people (this includes assimilated white-ethnics) blog like this: So cool! Perfunctory, even! Seriously! And Black people are like, "What are y'all trying to prove with all the grammatical histrionics, son. Be easy." And I have questions — some theories, but mostly questions — about why.

All that adds up to a great show we've got lined up. So stick around, but before the commercial break we're gonna toss it to this week's band: hipstah darling Lykke Li, in a Black Cab, singing "I'm Good, I'm Gone"

*this indicates both a riddle and a mystery associated with the particular phrase. at some point in your life, maybe later today, maybe thirty years from now, you will realize the profundity of that asterisk. it's kind of like what JJ Abrams did in the print edition of Wired recently, but on a blog and infinitely deeper.

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!

Now, it must be said that we met Roy at a party before she escaped New York, and found her perfectly pleasant. But HuffPosts like this aren't helping your cause, Jess! If New York City is not a "place for serious people," as previously alleged, then Paris is a hellhole where you can't get a decent vegetarian meal:

As a vegetarian and someone allergic to most dairy, eating food other than carbs was almost certainly out of the question. So baguettes and Nutella and lettuce heads it was. A few days in I started crying in the dairy aisle of my local grocery store when I realized I didn't know the words for "soy milk" and was too embarrassed to ask.

Fine, fine. But this line... this line should have been excised during the HuffPo's editing process (assuming they have one):

"I've found that the most difficult part of being here is the nagging inability to communicate my feelings to others in a sophisticated manner."

Us too. Unfortunately, it takes years.

Dear chums,
There's drinks tomorrow at seven at the Scratcher, 5th Street and Bowery, these, because sometimes its fun to honor something inhuman, will be in honor of giant rock formations, such as you see girding the highways of New England, granite in and around the Granite State, and here I am gripped by the urge to plagiarize something about a different sort of mineral, but looking at Auden's "In Praise of Limestone" see no lines ripe for insertion, though there are a few good ones, like, "I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; / That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad." But Xian, "That's such a downer," you, the list, say. "Do you really expect us to show up at this bar for the umpteenth time after spout some bullshit about rocks quote some depressingly pious mid-period Auden lines? What happened to the days when our inboxes would fill up with eighty emails about Norman Mailer making love to three-hundred-pound women? Where the fuck is Jon-Jon? He was fun." Right, I say. The earth is an oyster with nothing inside it. Not to be born is the best for man. The second best is the bailiff's order: "Break your embraces. Dance while you can."

As ever,
Xian

Dear everyone,
There's drinks tomorrow at nine at Scratcher, 5th and Bowery, these for this one who is certainly expressing something, who a few think is expressing something wrong, who is not certain that he is not expressing something wrong, who is telling something about suffering that is not a saddening thing to anyone hearing and not a dreary thing, and who very many are certainly wanting to be doing what this one is doing, wanting to be ones clearly expressing something, and who a few are very certain this one is someone great.

As ever,

Xian

At least, in these, he puts the time/place first so you can skip the rest of the email. Still!

[New York]

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]

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)

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.

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.

Whenever I’m in Los Angeles, I experience this unease. I don’t have a name for it. I go out to lunch and worry Sinbad’s going to be sitting across from me. I wait in line at a hot dog stand and hope I don’t spot Carmen Electra.

A celebrity sighting can really ruin your day. At night it’s even worse. Not too long ago I was eating in a favourite restaurant when Mike Myers walked in with a large group I hesitate to call an entourage. As the loveable star of the Austin Powers movies sat down with his people, you could see on the faces of the other diners that their wine had just turned to vinegar. What’s he doing here, their expressions said. What’s he doing in this part of town? Why isn’t he in his own area?

Increasingly, that’s where we want them: away from us. The Bible suggests that the poor will always be with us. Today it’s the rich who will always be with us. If they’re famous on top of it, that makes their presence all the more galling, not to mention disruptive.

Whole neighbourhoods of our cities have turned into ghettos of the celebrated, and there’s nowhere we can go to escape. They will always be with us. Who wants to live across the hall from the breakout star of Survivor: Guatemala? Riding the bus is bad enough without Ashton Kutcher taking the last seat. [TheNational]

First of all, Krotov lets us know that what goes on in Columbia's student paper is important, if only because "the Spectator's circulation rate is greater than that of many 'influential' publications."

Furthermore, the original Spectator review of Gessen's book was "instructive in its failures," and he takes issue with this part:

[Gessen's] "inclusion of highbrow intellectualism perfectly characterizes [his] tendency to name-drop literary or philosophical figures ... Gessen is so earnestly immersed in this intellectual façade that it is easy to imagine him referencing Heidegger in everyday banter."

Or maybe Gessen includes all of that "highbrow intellectualism" to illustrate the divide between his characters' realities and their profound political ambitions, and the "intellectual façade" might have more to do with their own failures of political disengagement than their writer's Heidegger-referencing yuppie elitism.

Anyway, the reviews are in. And boy are there reviews! Joyce Carol Oates, a terrifying critic if any are, weighs in for the New York Review of Books ("Gessen's humor is persistently Seinfeldian"). The Observer had a delightfully freewheeling, bitchy opinion. The NY Times appears slightly befuddled, and as Gessen himself said, even that fabulous literary heavyweight NYLON has given their opinion—negatively.

Because the media moves as a herd, one is basically required, at this point, to have an opinion or angle on this book. Why? Is it because n+1 is the most important literary journal of our time? (It isn't.) Is it because a novel bold enough to reference Fitzgerald in the title automatically merits discussion? Is it because this could actually be a new flagstone in the Way We Live Now—that is, if we're twentysomethings who went to Ivy League universities, saw that fact as an important pinnacle, and found themselves unenlightened and stuck years later, none the wiser?

Who knows. One of the passages Gessen chose to read was one that is oft-quoted in reviews, about the character Sam. (There's also a character named Keith, written in the first person.) It reminded me of the sad young literary men I have personally known, and exactly why I found them so insufferable:

His Google was shrinking. It was part of a larger failing, maybe, certainly, but to see it quantified... to see it numerically confirmed... it was cruel. It wasn't nice. Sam considered the alternatives: he knew people with no Google at all, zero hits, and he even knew people like Mark, Mark Grossman, who had never published, who had kept silent, whose name drew up the hits of other Mark Grossmans, the urologist Grossman and the banker Grossman and Grossmans who had completed ten-kilometer runs.

"But the sad trick of this snark/wonder binary is its shared terror of the serious. The former cannot show weakness for fear of being eaten by its children, the mocking commentariat; the latter, though able to take its own nostalgia seriously, does not want to grow up and deal with grown-up issues, as grown-ups do."

Us poor, poor kids. The fact that we deliver literary opinions as snappy one-liners that insult twee optimistic vegans in a small New York neighborhood on an interactive website is conclusive evidence that the rest of our everyday lives are just as silly.

Also, later is the review, Diamond might be straight-up calling Gessen a douchebag for his belief that he and his friends can save literature—or even write fiction, for that matter—but Diamond screwed up his quotation marks so I can't be sure if he called Gessen a douchebag or if Gessen called himself one. Read the review and let me know.

One of Gessen's protagonists in All the Sad Young Literary Men, studying for a doctorate in Russian history, discovers that erudition counts for little in his erotic life. But the author himself, with the soulful looks of a Greenwich Village bohemian and the oh-so-erotic arrogance of a Russian-Jewish intellectual, has had greater romantic success. Says one peripheral observer: "I don't really get it, honestly, the Gessen mystique; why these n+1 groupie girls love him so much." Nevertheless, they do; currently, one in particular, a former blogger with this site. Emily Gould, who used to date Neyfakh until a few weeks ago, has transferred her affection to Gessen.

It's been a long seduction. Emily wrote many of the items on n+1 in Gawker, last year, and even quit her blogging gig in a post about the literary magazine. After a party for the Winter 2008 issue, at which contributors and other guests were expected to offload copies from the back of a truck, Emily read Carla Blumenkranz's anemic review, 'In Search of Gawker'. "The status of Gawker rose as the overall status of its subjects declined, and it was this that made Gawker appear at times a reprehensible bully," wrote Blumenkranz—and Emily agreed. The post (A long dark early evening of the soul with Keith Gessen) began as a report on the n+1 party; it ended as a public resignation.

After quitting Gawker, and breaking up with Josh Stein, one of the site's crowd-pleasing bloggers, Emily Gould sought increasingly refined company. Leon Neyfakh's Observer may have a circulation of just 50,000, but it retains some of the patina from when it was a must-read weekly for Manhattan's business and cultural elites. In Gessen, she has found a boyfriend so high-minded that his publication has no measured readership whatsoever. "We think of ourselves as a research institute that has taken on the form of a literary magazine," Gessen once told an interviewer.

To be sure, Gessen's magazine adheres to the model of the Russian intelligentsia: women, as a friend of Choire Sicha's once said, are "mere accessories" in the world of n+1. But even the most feminist of writers can be drawn to the myth of the literary salon, however faded, in which the muse calls forth the genius in her lover, and shines in his reflected brilliance. Says a former friend: "Emily wants everyone—or at least a small sliver of New York's male media world—to think she's smart. And they want to fuck her. Both sides, thus far and pretty much, have gotten what they want." And Gessen, who now has a book to sell, will get so much more than merely private adoration.

The n+1 editor used to disdain the marketing machinery of the literary world. In his novel, the self-identifying immigrant rails against the nepotistic New York establishment in which, if a surname sounds familiar, that's because the person is a relation. And he used to have nothing but contempt for bloggers. "Wait 'til Gawker gets its filthy mitts on you," he said in a round table for the Harvard Crimson. "It's just strange, you know we live in a time when people can say whatever they want about you on the Internet and take no responsibility for it."

Of course, he didn't complain when n+1 began to receive blog attention, last year. I count 25 mentions on Gawker alone, last year, most of them gently mocking, but each reinforcing the semi-ironic message: "n+1 is the most important literary magazine of our time." One of the first reviews of his book is on one of Emily Gould's blogs. And now he's abandoned all pretense of detachment from irresponsible blogdom. Gawker has indeed gotten its filthy mitts on Gessen: he's dating one of the most untrammeled writers the site has ever had.

Emily rather famously rubbished her former boyfriend, Josh Stein, as "emotionally manipulative" though the assumption that she also dismissed him as a premature ejaculator is apparently a misunderstanding. The slanging match continues, months later. After a warning by her ex in the New York Post's Page Six Magazine against dating a blogger, she responded: "Josh is busy altering his odd sweaters with the $2K he got for his article and probably doesn’t give a shit about anything but that money, and the fact that the whole little scandal gave Gawker commenters another opportunity to marvel at the musculature of his torso."

For the moment, Emily is still revealing only with a six-month lag: she has been commissioned to write her own personal account of her experience as a blogger for the New York Times Magazine—where Gessen, despite his image as an outsider, has several connections. (I assume it will focus on manipulative capitalists rather than manipulative boyfriends.) But eventually she'll move on to the literary milieu. I can't wait for the too-much-information blog posts. Word is she's already honing a pitch for New York Magazine on her new area of expertise, the most important writer of his generation, Keith Gessen. That's synergy!

There's nothing that scandalous about any of this. Bed-hopping is an honored literary tradition. The only victims in this story are the more naive among the dreamy writer's groupies, who may have believed that he was a pure soul, or at least a potential soulmate. Oh, and the Observer's poor Leon Neyfakh—though he had plenty of evidence that Emily Gould's a heartbreaker. Both Gessen and Gould are, despite their self-involvement, talented writers: maybe the self-involvement is an integral part of the talent. Hypocrisy? Well, duh! Radical writers have always tilted against the publishing establishment—until the moment the doors open a little. Today's penniless bomb-throwers are tomorrow's self-satisfied rulers: that holds as much for New York's literary scene as for the Russian revolution with which one of Gessen's characters is so obsessed.

And that brings us to the closing anecdote, which is slightly unfair, because the author may have simply been looking after his father's dog. In Emily's account of the arrival of n+1's winter issue, Gessen in the style of a literary revolutionary drove the delivery truck himself from the Ingram warehouse in Pennsylvania. Now he leaves such menial work to the foot soldiers. n+1's great leader spent last weekend in Cape Cod, with his new muse, leaving one of his unfortunate underlings to make the following plea, complete with compromisingly bloglike links at the end, to their groupies.

Dear Stalwarts,

I received an urgent text message tonight from Delmore Gessen ordering me to organize a crack posse to converge at 11 am upon 195 Chrystie St. (Manhattan) to move the offices of n+1 magazine back to their rightful native home in DUMBO.

This effort commences from 11am-1pm, Saturday.

People, if you are reading this email (pimped out from the scratcher list), YOU ARE THE FORCE.

There is no other way but to show up.

Now to make this mass email more palatable, I throw in some video links to commemorate the death of the eminent reactionary Bill Buckley:

FULL BUCKLEY V. CHOMSKY:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1214894113898255184

BUCKLEY TO VIDAL: "NOW LISTEN YOU QUEER":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8

BLOATED BUCKLEY SWAN SONG ON CHARLIE ROSE:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2955116813086874076