TripMcCane

Zinester Sandy McCarthy was walking along, stepping in dogshit, having hipsters give him a critical eye, and having the homeless give him quarters. He had reached this place by denying what his real talent was and where his true interest lay.

His boss had sent him to get some copies made...Great, he was a 40 something messenger boy...Just before he entered the copy shop, he saw a woman he worked with laughing with a group of friends, all enjoying $3.50 coffees and eating fajita wraps.

"How exotic," he thought picturing the peanut butter, jelly and banana sandwich that shared his brown lunchbag with a Kit-Kat and and tangerine.

"Hi Mellisa," he said as he passed.

"Oh, Sandy, are you working through your lunch hour again?" And turning to her friends; "Sandy loves his job so much that I'm starting to believe he has something exciting hidden in the mail room."

"That's what I hear too," said Jim Flynn, his coif tamed by product and his clothes suggesting he was more important than his $20,000 a year job. And he was fine with that bogus image. "What's the deal -- you have an inflatable girlfriend keeping you company in there?"

"Right," laughed Gina Medow. "All the benefits without the committment and hassle, except for an occasional leak to patch." The table exploded in hilarity, with the exception of Jennie Hamilton, who had just started that morning -- the "cool kids" had invited her out to lunch to get a fix on her.

"Maybe he actually likes what he does," she intoned softly, putting an immediate mute on the table's mocking of the obviously out-of-the-loop guy from the mailroom.

"Oh," said Jim, "looks like the boss's favorite grunt has a fan."

"Thanks Jennie," said Sandy, tossing a sideways glance at Mellisa and her friends. "Maybe you understand me?"

Under her black bangs Jennie's face brightened. Behind her Lisa Loeb glasses her eyes sparkled more than they had all day.

"Don't you be comin' on to Sandy, newbie," said Gina with an evil withering smile. "He's all about the work. Aren't you Sandman?"

"I've got to get to the Copy Place. Mr. Case is waiting for these documents."

"I rest my case," said Gina.

#

Enjoy your $3.50 lattes and your ink-stained girlfriends, kgessen. Life is too short for wondering whether you deserve them. Or who deserves what. (As Dylan said in Love Minus Zero/No Limit: "...she's an artist/she don't look back.")

TripMcCane

@ian spiegelman: You're right - I wasn't approving of it, just saying that it certainly does help.

Smirk

Hamilton Nolan

Bell County

Sheila: Thank you for reading my book twice.

Mitchel: I know the night you're talking about. I apologize on behalf of those guys.

Ian: You've got to be kidding me. I mean, I wish you the best in your campaign against mediocre writing. But look around, chief. You work for Gawker. The premise of this site is that people can't even be bothered to read each other's comments.

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.

The rest of you should keep doing what you're doing. You're now a proud American institution. The Harvard of anonymous internet commenting, really. If I had honorary degrees to confer, I'd confer them.

kgessen

Interview cut off before last part of that:

"...in remainder copies of our crappy novels."

TripMcCane

frobisher

famousauthor

de wolfe

I thought about writing this comment for a time. "I thought". Hah. I agonized. Could it say those critical things, in bright, new ways, or would it be some wooden, Wertschmertz-afflicted twig, thrown into the bonfire of Gawker's vanity? There was so much that had to be urgently conveyed; I was paralyzed by some inchoate angst, yet my fingers typed.

And I grew five minutes older.

rosaluxembourgeoise

narnio

The difference between those books and Gessen's is that those books are well written.

Also, I'd say the problem is that the n+1 crowd is that it's not only is it bad writing, it's boring writing.

arseinstein

@Multiphasic: Writing about writing is rarely interesting in novels. Hunger would be a giant exception, but at least Hamsun had the good manners to starve and nearly die before he showed up with his book and announced he was changing literature.

@skahammer: I appreciate what you're saying, but I think the Gessen/N+1 phenomenon is the product of groupthink and fear (of not being famous). Elitism alone I can accept or at at least ignore. It's the elitism while celebrating mediocre writing that offends me. Still, Gessen isn't my enemy. Bad writing is.

ian spiegelman

Incher_George

No, actually, one point of going to Harvard would be learning how to spell naiveté.

sailor

A writer's enemies frequently include ignorance, fear, and babbling groupthink, but rarely include other writers.

Unless you're Norman Mailer, maybe. (Whom I admit, Ian, you're closer to than most.)

skahammer

Also? Is his first novel a novel about living? No, it's a novel about writing.

In music, this is referred to as the Fleetwood Mac Threshold: you've been in a band so damn long you can't write songs about anything other than being in a band.

The problem with issuing that same indictment against Gessen is that he's hardly alone in writing about being a writer; there's a Sagan-esque bill-yuns and bill-yuns of books on the same topic. It qualifies as a literarily venial sin (though clearly in Gessen's case, a less than venereal sin).

Multiphasic

That said, I am insanely jealous.

Smirk

Sheila

Smirk

ian spiegelman

Incher_George

Incher_George

There's a whole tempering process that he has neatly sidestepped before showing up and announcing that he has solutions to problems that may not exist. Also? Is his first novel a novel about living? No, it's a novel about writing. Everything about him is academic, it is practically all he talks or writes about. And I say that literature about literature is not what will save literature, should it happen to need saving. And that if Gessen's head had any living in it, he might actually have written about that instead. He set this up himself. He offers nothing that I can do anything with but reject.

ian spiegelman

BeRightBack

What bugs ME about Keith Gessen is just that sort of sentiment. His own blatant and obvious narcissism. How everything he strives for seems so caught up with his own self-esteem. It's fine to strive to be a purveyor and supporter of "high" culture, but why be so full of shit when you do it? Do it because you like it, not because you like yourself.

Also, it bugs me that he actually thinks of Gawker commenters as people. Essentially, no one is a person here. We're all the hollow extensions of certain aspects of real people pushed out into the anonymous electronic world. Nothing about this is real. As a real person, I'd never say half of the things I say here because real people have to have decorum and live in a society.

Pope John Peeps II

mitchel_stevens

gawkier

Especially the hate for the supposed "ivory-tower" attitude -- now that's truly grasping at straws for something to criticize. Look, I've got professors in my family, and they are sweet and stimulating people even if they're a bit unworldly. True, if they published first novels I probably wouldn't read them looking for key hints to the Zeitgeist, but I just can't see working up any legit hate for anyone described that way. At worst they're harmlessly ineffectual, not evil.

Spiegs, I'm looking at you especially (but not solely), while thinking of Gore Vidal's comment to Martin Amis regarding Amis' somewhat unfocused criticism of him: "Bit thin on the works, aren't you?" Go after the prose, folks. That's where the real targets are.

skahammer

MargotCanthus

crotchety

ian spiegelman

Moff

jackvinyl

cassandra

He has a face for radio, yes, but not the speech patterns for radio!!! Let's hope he sticks to video and never hooks up with NPR. I don't think I could listen to that!

themediatrix

keram2

He would be fine if he didn't believe he were the protector of all things literary, and just admit that he and his friends are the Michael Crichton/Danielle Steeles of modern publishing. But as long as they believe that the lazy lint they pull out of their navels reveals something about people, society, the human condition or anything other than their glorified "Dear Diary" pseudo-sensitive ramblings, they are wasting our fucking time.

cassandra

rosaluxembourgeoise

This does not reflect well on Harvard education, if that's supposed to involve knowing how to formulate an argument, or demonstrating minimal honesty in a debate.

rosaluxembourgeoise

At least that's what it says in the Bible.

Moff

ShoplifterOfTheWorld

But then, said concoction of highfalutin bullshittery is exactly why we hate him, actually. So, PARADOX.

Moff

SnootchBucket

And how they kept name-dropping him to anyone that would listen, while he was using a fucking toilet.

So, I hate his friends more.

mitchel_stevens

Multiphasic

DonPardoCalrissian

*By invoking same i do not defend either "it's us against the world" group of self important group joiners.

Mackintosh-Typos

Although ultimately I think that last little belligerent line gives away a lot regarding how threatened he feels. Can't sad literary people and snarky literary people and hip literary people and fatuous literary people all coexist? We can hate you and you can hate us and together we can sometimes bond together to hate them and then splinter apart again when we start feeling like we look too much alike?

After seeing that interview I think I get a bit more why people hand down a verdict of "ivory tower" on this guy. He doesn't seem to have any inkling of an understanding of people who are inherently "not like me" and rather than question or explore that his impulse is to silence it.

People who don't like him are people who were like him but then lost their way. Yeah, it's insulting.

Zorica

In Other News...

ElleChin

bowleserised

"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."

midnightspecial

BottomOnTop

lolsam

Incher_George

fiveinchtaint

rosaluxembourgeoise

+ Watch video

IHateNewYork

ian spiegelman

jackvinyl

+ Watch video

jackvinyl

MattGaymon

Yep, books taught me not to like him.

BalknChain

Adminitraitor

Phyllis Nefler

KarenUhOh

StrawBerryShortCake

kokotaylor

MisterHippity

Also, am I the only one surprised by the fact that this supposedly hot writer is not at all well-spoken?

DorothyMantooth

+ Watch video

I prefer to think of Gawker as the Greenman.

IHateNewYork

StrawBerryShortCake

blogissuchanuglyword

Itsjustcatnip

belltolls

Bell County