Keith Gessen Blog RSS

Declared winner of the internet (YM, 5 June 2009).

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Nov
5th
Thu
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Russian police have arrested the alleged shooter in the January murder of the human rights and labor lawyer Stanislav Markelov. He’s a fascist.

Russian police have arrested the alleged shooter in the January murder of the human rights and labor lawyer Stanislav Markelov. He’s a fascist.

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Oct
30th
Fri
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calling all Russians

Hi, are you Russian? It’s not easy, right? I know. But once in a while, something comes along, and it makes it all worthwhile. To wit: The great Ludmilla Petrushevskaya is coming to town in connection with Penguin’s publication of her new book, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby: Scary Fairy Tales. (*The* literary event of Halloween, incidentally.) But, rather than killing your neighbor’s baby, she’ll be performing a cabaret at the Russian Samovar on 52nd Street at 8 pm next Friday, November 6. I’ve seen her do this in Moscow and it’s amazing—she “translates” cabaret classics from German and French and Polish into what she thinks they ought to mean, in Russian. It’s really something. There’s also a reading at McNally Jackson on the 9th, but if you’re Russian you should really try to make this. No cover charge. Press contact Bela Shayevich (office: 718 210 3639, cell: 847 494 9011, bshayevich@gmail.com)—but otherwise just come.

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If Bloomberg’s New York doesn’t have civilization, it’s unreasonable to expect it of Putin’s Russia. So it ought to be understandable that Russians are only too glad to see more of fraud and subversion, in order to feel less compelled by force. They feel sorry for New Yorkers who think the only racketeers they will ever see perform are between the advertisements in replays of The Sopranos.
— More from John Helmer on RICO and the Nets.
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Oct
26th
Mon
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experiment

Like everyone else, we at n+1 have been trying to figure out how to keep a print publication viable without becoming a ward of the state or spending all our time trying to sell ads to BMW. So here’s an experiment. We’ve posted three of the eighteen pieces from Issue 8 online; the others are available for download in their handsome original format for between $1 and $3 at Scribd.com. Like iTunes. Full list below and also here.

Read More

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Oct
25th
Sun
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no obsolescence

Sometimes writers worry that invoking any kind of technology in their work is like inserting a ticking time bomb of obsolescence. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) opens with the adulterous bond trader Sherman McCoy accidentally dialing his wife from a pay phone when he meant to dial his mistress. Having given himself away, he hangs up in a panic.

Sherman stood by the telephone, breathing rapidly, almost panting. What was he to do now? He felt so defeated…

He dug out another quarter and summoned up Maria’s number into his brain. He concentrated on it. He nailed it down. Then he dialed with a plodding deliberation, as if he were using this particular invention, the telephone, for the first time.

Ha ha, Tom Wolfe you retrograde sucker! Your book is barely twenty years old and most kids these days don’t even know what a pay phone is!

And yet it’s interesting… what he describes, misdialing from a pay phone, it’s actually a little hard to believe. Seven digits, dialed separately, is a lot of digits—about halfway through you’d probably sense that something was wrong. You’d sense you’d made a mistake and retrieve your quarter and start again. Whereas with a text message—that’s just one button. And no stopping it.

The technology is almost gone but the technology that’s replaced it has actually *increased the danger*. Amazing. Wolfe wins again.

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Oct
24th
Sat
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foucault caption competition winners

We have our winners for the Foucault caption competition. This year in fact there are two:

Sangwon Yoon informs us that the caption under Foucault in TimeOut Tel Aviv reads: “Not the world, radical/extremist criticism of the world.”

This makes sense—in the pamphlet one of the participants says he was unable to read Foucault in college because he was still trying to figure out the world as it was, and wasn’t yet ready to read a wholesale radical critique of it.

Winner #2, SRolph, recalling Foucault’s reflections on the death of the human subject, argues that the caption actually reads: “When I become the subject of a caption competition, then you will know the end of man is at hand.”

That too makes sense. We congratulate the winners of this year’s competition!

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Oct
21st
Wed
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Wow. An excerpt from the “What We Should Have Known” Pamphlet, from TimeOut Tel Aviv. I wonder what it says there under Foucault?

Wow. An excerpt from the “What We Should Have Known” Pamphlet, from TimeOut Tel Aviv. I wonder what it says there under Foucault?

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Oct
20th
Tue
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neuronovel

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

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Oct
19th
Mon
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interesting, though

That he should mention boot-licking. We have a whole essay on boot-licking in issue 8. (In our ongoing attempt to break even, most of it’s behind a paywall, here. For $2? Recommended.)

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Oct
17th
Sat
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We, The Blue Mist, the devoted fans of Kentucky basketball, have been watching The Door for twenty-four hours. A Memphis TV station has trained a web-cam on The Door, which leads to the University of Memphis athletic department. The video stream currently registers 12,611 views. There’s also sound, and so The Mist can hear cars passing, the camera operators tittering. They must find it funny that we want to watch The Door.
This is awesome. How a magazine primarily devoted to sports can raise so many hackles is beyond me, to be honest.
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Oct
16th
Fri
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from Caleb's letter

Your claim in the sentence quoted above, which is a sort of joke, has two lemmas. First, you imply that marriage is a surrender of sexual liberty. I don’t think that’s accurate. Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity when handcuffed to each other as when not handcuffed. Marriage is indifference to handcuffs. There are always opportunities to escape. The strange discovery that makes marriage possible is that one has the liberty not to—the liberty to make the same choice, day after day—and that one happens to want to make a consistent choice. It is a paradox, at least. Will one happen to want to make the same choice forever? Maybe not. Separation and divorce are always possible, in our world, and maybe they give marriage its poignancy. The possibility of separation proves that no two people stay chained to each other unless they want to. It even seems to be the case that people who want to stay chained to each other sometimes can’t manage to. It is at any rate an error to think that marriage is a surrender of liberty. It is an exercise of it.

The second lemma of your joke is less seemly. It is mockery of anyone—in this case, gays—who wants the general social approbation implied by marriage. I suspect that you yourself will find this indigestible if you stop and think about it. Do you really intend to mock homosexuals, who have long been considered and in some circles still are considered pariahs, for wishing to have proof that they are no longer so thought of, at least as a matter of law? Your joke will only seem funny to readers who have taken social approbation for granted for so long that they now see only its conformist aspect and no longer its psychological and social benefits. Yes, yes, society bestows its approval conservatively; do you really think that people who have gone without it for most of their adult lives are unaware of that?

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Oct
15th
Thu
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Also, Keith Gessen?

pilgrimsoul:

Not a public intellectual!  This is a dude who seriously entitled his novel “All the Sad Young Literary Men.”

Ha ha, it’s true. I’m more of an internet theorist than a public intellectual. But what’s intriguing about this is that “x is not a public intellectual” is being used to mean “x is an idiot.” (x being me, in this case.) It’s like the early 90s discourse of the death of the public intellectual colliding with the late 00s discourse of internet insult. X is honored to have been a part of this moment.

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also

While all this was going on, the mobster Yaponchik died of his gunshot wounds. Police predicted that the gangster’s death could lead to an all-out war between Moscow’s major criminal groups. Keeping in mind that he was a very bad man who probably killed many people, does Yapnochik’s death make the video I posted of him getting shot funnier or less funny?

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