“I was kind of anxious and nervous to meet important people,” he recalled that night. “At first we just talked about books, mostly stuff that he had published in his division. He gave me a couple books that he had published.” Alec paused after he said this for about 30 seconds to finish typing out a text message. “He also gave me this,” he added, indicating a totebag, “which is really cool. I’ve never really had a totebag before.”


As for the novel, part of which Mr. Callahan had read: “It follows three impressionable, sort of naive, romantic kids who go on this sort of introspective road trip...

“We didn’t discuss it too much. He just told me he liked it but that I needed to tighten it up.”

[Observer] (photo via Facebook via Observer)

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.]

The ranks of Glamour dating bloggers are nothing if not distinguished. There was tardblogger Alyssa Shelasky, whose dim-witted adventures in wannabe social climbing were amply documented here. Then there was dudeblogger Mike Cherico, fired for being a womanizing jerk who sparked an insurrection in the Glamour.com comments. Now there's Erin Meanley, pictured, who just debuted with a post about being 29 and not having a husband, already. Sigh. An even more ominous sign: In an email to friends, reproduced after the jump, Meanley explains that, now that she's a dating blogger, "I need some help with pimpage. Set me up!" Well, at least she's being honest, somewhere, about the transactional aspect of her "dating." We've redacted Meanley's email address, but no doubt she'll be combing the comments here for top-shelf prospective mates, so feel free to make like a pimp there.

(Photo via Mediabistro/Steve Burke.)

Ok, we'll be fair. Karlin does not call himself an alternadad. Though the interviewer suggests it. And Karlin did move to Fort Greene, because it seemed "mellower." Ugh. Anyway, he loves his son very very very much, so good for them.

Also Karlin's working on "a movie about children of divorce" because WE DON'T HAVE ENOUGH OF THOSE. We're writing a screenplay about someone who goes back in time to act as a marriage counselor to the parents of Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach. It's called Journey To The Center of the Universe.

If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about someone’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work... especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search.

It's understandable that Newton is, at first blush, upset, but are there really guys (or lesbians) out there who think they can just call up pictures of some woman's cooch on demand? That implies, first, an unusually specific type of physical lust. Not just for a naked body, or chest, or for a backside, but for the vag specifically.

But, fine, whatever, there are people out there with all sorts of kinks. But do any of them really have such a bold faith in the power of the internet — a network that any self-respecting perv knows like the palm of his hand — that they think they can just type in someone's name + "pussy" and actually get a picture of exactly that?

Alternate theory: Maybe the offense-giving prof was simply looking for a memorable post in which the lady writer's name was mentioned, for some reason, along with the word "pussy," which is, as keywords go, reasonably rare and especially memorable. The woman writer might have, for example, used a juicy (sorry) quote involving the term in a high-profile piece of writing.

Or maybe not! Perhaps the search was unambiguously offensive. Only Newton has all the clues, and she's being discreet. But everyone else should be installing Google Analytics on their Tumblrs or whatever, because they'll then probably have fuel for at least one outraged Google-search-terms post by Labor Day.

[Maud Newton]

(Photo via MaudNewton.com)

Novelist (and dude) Nick Antosca, 25, saw a girl reading a galley of a forthcoming book by Chuck Palahniuk, and "I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I want to get that!’ I wondered whether she was a reviewer or if she worked at the publishing house."

Another man, former literary editor Tom Meaney, claims carrying a galley three months before publication is hotter than "the right jeans or the right purse or whatever... it's just an incredible selective object."

But the women, not so m... oh wait, here's one who is totally into galleys! "Reading galleys on the subway is the closest the publishing industry comes to having a standardized mating call" said Karan Mahajan! Score! But the spelling is a little funny there... Wikipedia... ya, that's actually a guy.

Real women are polite, but unimpressed. Liz Maples, an assistant editor at a Farra, Straus & Giroux imprint, told the Observer she actively hides, on the subway, any reading material that gives away her status as a publishing insider, because she doesn't like being approached by strangers.

And then there's editorial assistant Ali Heifetz, at Norton:

“If and when [I saw] a cute dude reading a galley on the train,” she said, “he would be more attractive to me than same dude not reading a galley.
But less attractive than the same dude carrying a guitar case."

D'oh. But you know what? When the right girl comes along, she'll totally be impressed with your advance gallery. So keep carrying them around, publishing types, and holding them visibly at important mixers, just in case. But also try initiating conversations yourself, on even the barest of pretenses. Like, say, of writing a trend piece on literary hookups!

[Observer]

(Image via Lex in the city on Flickr)

What fame hasn't brought: Hilton dishes that "in 2007, I got laid once. One time. Which, for a gay man, is unheard of. That's like, celibate."

How sad and cringe-inducing. But maybe Perez just got way too picky after his 2006 makeout session with John Mayer. He had at least one really, really desperate groupie sending him a sex tape and everything! Now is no time to start holding yourself to "standards" or whatever, Perez.

[LA Times]

Karlin signed a contract for a book that was going to be tie-in for a new PBS series called "Spain ... on the Road Again," which starred flame-haired fatty celebuchef Batali and blonde actress Gwyneth Paltrow.

But in November 2007, a conflict arose when Mr. Pinsky allowed Mr. Batali to engage designers for the book, including one of Mr. Batali's relatives, instead of leaving the design to Mr. Karlin, as previously agreed, the lawsuit states. Mr. Karlin contends that Mr. Batali also expected him to write the book in its entirety, and refused to contribute recipes, pictures, or other material to the project, claiming to be too busy.

When Mr. Karlin asked to lessen his involvement in the book, the lawsuit states, Mr. Batali asked that the writer be fired from the project. He has not been paid, and is suing for $125,000, including the cost of two trips to Spain, according to the lawsuit.

Well, it sounds like Batali really flaked out here, and Karlin deserves to be paid for his hard work. Unless he's just making it up because he's, you know, a little bit of a dick.

[NYS; pic via NY]

I'm not sure that McClellan knows this (he and I have never met or spoken), but PublicAffairs was at first skeptical when McClellan and his agent made their pitch. Doubtful enough that, says [PublicAffairs editor Lisa] Kaufman, founder/publisher Peter Osnos called around first, asking White House reporters what they thought of McClellan. "They told Peter that Scott was a straight shooter," says Kaufman. "That if he says he's going to tell the truth, he will tell the truth."

Obviously, I can't vouch for McClellan's veracity. I have, however, had a chance to read his book. And having also known and worked with Kaufman for several years, I can say this: "What Happened" was not, as Rove et al. have charged, written by his "New York editor." Stylistically, that is just not her voice on the page.

Of course, McClellan stands to earn some hefty residuals if his book keeps selling well, assuming the credulous former Bush mouthpiece has toughened up enough not to accept any B.S. from his publisher.

[Salon]

It seems Sherman won't get to go to a promised event featuring Sex star Kim Cattrall, a party that would likely have figured prominently in the story she's freelancin for some big Asian magazine.

"It was the after-party that was the big thing for me," she told the Post.

Oh please, Ella. You don't need to go to that. You've clearly soaked up the naive, entitled, psuedo-feminist striving at the heart of Sex And The City better than virtually every person at this little "after-party," assuming it ever existed in the first place.

[Post]

(Photo via Post)

In the fourth grade, at a public school in Queens, Kopelson's teacher went on strike. He turned in to her replacement as his own report a verbatim transcription of a 20-page encyclopedia entry on explorer Hernando Cortez. He got an "A." "'Nice work!' Mr X commented. But, of course, unless the man was being ironic, he probably hadn’t read it – lazy bastard."

Kopelson also criticizes the instructor he submitted plagiarized work to at Yale. She taught a "contemptible" music class. So instead of doing his own work, Kopelson submitted a paper his brother had written for a graduate school seminar. It was 50 pages long and included citations of work in French, German and Italian. Kopelson was only 18, hardly able to write such a thing. Still, he got an "A."

Kopelson used the same paper from his brother as a writing sample for the GRE graduate school test. He got into the English doctorate programs at Columbia and Brown.

At Brown, Kopelson has a "very old, very flatulent" professor who didn't seem to have revised his lectures in decades. Again, he found this instructor and his class "contemptible." So Kopelson submitted as his own essay an article called The Beast in the Closet. He got an "A."

Later, he sent this article to the woman who wrote it as a sample of his own writing. Somehow, he wasn't caught.

Now, giving lectures in Iowa to students he also has contempt for — they tend to be poor students, since the English department is one of the few without a minimum GPA requirement — Kopelson plagiarizes other authors for his in-class lectures.

Also, if I'm reading his essay correctly, it sounds like Kopelson is also implying that he plagiarized David Sedaris for Kopelson's book about the humor writer.

But, hey, at least we know the odds are pretty good the professor wrote his own confessional. Plagiarism isn't quite so hot yet that anyone else would claim to have done this much fibbing. But once Kopelson gets a big book deal out of his admission (like the Lonely Planet guy!), that's sure to change.

[London Review Of Books]

(Photo via University of Iowa)

"He said this again?" she said, her voice rising in indignation. "I can’t believe he said that! You’d better check that because it’s simply not true."

When will Nan Talese, and the rest of the publishing industry, find a damn writer they can trust? If not James Frey, then who??

[Observer]

JARVIS: It's an economic decision, Howie. You know, it starts with a joke where a priest, a rabbi and critic get on a boat, and one of them has to get off. And that's really what this is about. There is no punch line here. It's that it's about saving the leaking boat of newspapers.

And, you know, criticism has changed necessarily, because it's not inherently local. The opinion about a movie in Cincinnati or Cleveland is not different...


HOWARD KURTZ, Reliable Sources, CNN: Jeff Jarvis, I mean, I certainly agree that if you're really down to a crunch and you've got to lay off the city hall reporter, or the school's reporter, maybe the critic is going to go first. But what about the local flavor of a newspaper? I mean, people arguing about whether Joe Jones panned or praised the new George Clooney flick.

Isn't that — wouldn't that be lost?

JARVIS: I don't really buy that. There is nothing local about it.

You know, when I worked for "The Chicago Tribune," in the same city with my parents, my mother would tell me about stories that she read in the paper. And I'd have to say, "Ma, yes, I know. I wrote it."

My own mother didn't notice my own byline. So I don't think...

KURTZ: Don't bring your family problems into this.

JARVIS: It tells you a lot, I know. But I don't think that that value of the byline is so great.

Transcript: [CNN]

(Photo via Buzzmachine)

"The idea is, 'Let’s take all the things that we think are wrong with this business and try to change them,'" said [Robert S. Miller, the founding publisher of Hyperion], 51. "It really seemed to require a start-up from scratch because it will be very experimental."

This is actually great, because once writers stop getting advances maybe more of them will stop fetishizing words-on-paper-in-a-bookstore and realize there is actually a way to publish your stuff for free to the entire world without giving up most of the revenue. You still need a good editor, but there's no reason he needs to come with a dead-trees publishing company attached.

[Times]

(HarperCollins photo via Times)

Roughly a year ago, Pollack started his "Playground" discussion forum. In the last couple of weeks, Griscom's Babble started a similar forum called "Babble Playground."

"We felt usurped, if not completely ripped of," Pollack wrote. Some of his commenters went and started a thread on the competing discussion forum about how their own Playground was totally better. Mature, right? Griscom deleted the thread, which he called "inaccurate and kinda tacky."

Then Griscom sent an email saying, basically, What, you exist? I'm sorry, I hadn't noticed your little chat board. ("We had no idea that you had social networking functionality on your site... I haven’t been there in some time.")

Then Pollack asked his legal counsel if Griscom could somehow be sued and made to starve in the street for daring to copy his brilliant "Playground" naming scheme, and they said Uh, definitely not.

So Pollack exercised the only attack vector left at his disposal, calling Griscom a yuppie and a square:

Babble is an expensive downtown urban loft rehab, where everything looks pretty, but it all feels so perfect, so smooth, so sterile, so target-marketed, so…fake. Offsprung, on the other hand, is like going over to the house of a good friend, a friend who has three kids and can’t afford to even dream about a nanny. The house is imperfect. It’s loud. There’s a weird yellow stain with hair clumps behind the toilet. But it’s home, and it’s comfortable, and it’s yours.

Then all the hipsters went back to ruining their children and the world forever, The End.

[Offsprung via NYM]

These are girls that grew up in the John Hughes era, and champion subversively feminist chick-programming like My So-Called Life and Gilmore Girls. Now they're glued to the couch every Monday night to find out if tone-deaf chanteuse Heidi Montag and lunkhead loser Spencer Pratt's on/off relationship is like, um, on, or like, um, off. (Hint: until it's no longer commercially viable, there'll be no resolution).

See, The Hills is a world where The Karate Kid loses. Where Jake Ryan never notices Samantha Baker, and the only thing Seth Rogen hits is his bong.

Wow, that's bleak.

Prediction: Ben Heller will be totally into the Hills in about three weeks. Or, at least, I hope so. His wife works at Us Weekly so it's hard to picture another scenario under which the marriage is saved.

HuffPo: Why The Hills Makes Me Love My Wife a Little Bit Less

My friend Alexis (a huge Colbert fan) sent me an e-mail predicting how Colbert might respond to my argument that Chinese food is more American than apple pie given how much we eat apple pie versus Chinese food, and how I should recover from that.

Colbert : "I eat apple pie every morning - with a jack and coke - and a bald eagle egg omlette."

Jenny: Well, there are exceptions - and you are clearly an exceptional American - for most would say Chinese food.

Other things he might do:
* Introduce the idea that the Chinese are taking over the world, starting with the restaurants. ("If that happens, I'm hedged. I speak Chinese, what about you?" or "That might happen. I suggest that your kids learn to speak Chinese. My mom's a tutor.")
* Bring up any comment about the fact that fortune cookies were copied from the Japanese by the Chinese ("We don't feel so bad about it, they've been copying us for centuries.").
* Of course, ask about the middle number as initial. ("The Chinese love the number 8. The Beijing Olympics are starting at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008. They really wanted this Olympics.")

Lee's friend was right about the apple pie thing. All the studying seemed to leave Lee looking just a tad over-prepared and stiff, but it's hard to fault her when she kept the discussion focused on her book and scored the requisite-but-never-guarnteed book plug from the host at the end.

Huffington Post: Preparing For "The Colbert Report"

[Times, KanyeUnivercity.com]

Feb. 26, 2008 / 2:27 am

OMG OMG OMG OMG

I can hear my neighbors having sex!!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHHH!

HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT I DON’T HEAR THE GODDMAN JACKHAMMERS IN THE BUILDING NEXT DOOR BUT I CAN HEAR HER MOANS???

It’s going to be So. Awkward. seeing her in the elevator.

...I guess this also means that in case I ever decide actually bring a guy back to my place, I’m going to have to blast music at the same time.

[Julia Allison]

The Billionaire's Vinegar, New York writer Benjamin Wallace's forthcoming book has already been optioned for a film by Escape Artists. It's the story of "Hardy Rodenstock, who tricked a really rich man into paying him half a million dollars in 1985 for a case of 1787 Chateau Lafite Bordeaux wine that was purportedly, but not actually, once stored in the wine cellar of Thomas Jefferson." When Wallace moved into Karlin's building last summer, they talked all about it. Karlin decided he wanted to make it into a movie! But "dicussions fell apart" and then Wallave sold the book to someone else. So Karlin optioned a related New Yorker article and went to work!

Wallace refused to comment about how much of a dick he must think his neighbor is, but his agent cracked a joke about it. A joke we will steal:

The living situation sounds like the makings of a great sitcom.

(As always, we would love to hear arguments with compelling anecdotal evidence for or against the basic "Ben Karlin is a dick" thesis laid out here. Comment below or send them here.)

Oenophile Row: Brooklyn Stoopmates Race to Produce Wine-Fraud Flick [NYO]