12th
faq
Now you’ve really done it.
What?
You revealed yourself to be a total fucking lunatic. To everyone.
But I never claimed not to be a lunatic. Reason, calm, sanity—that was never part of the schtick.
Well you revealed that you read Gawker. Even the comments.
But everyone reads Gawker—or anyway everyone reads it when it’s making fun of them. And the comments are the best part.
And the thing is, Gawker is a significant cultural phenomenon, like it or not. And it’s incredibly resilient: the fact that it continues to chug along despite being abandoned by two of its best writers is a testament to the fact that it’s got its own momentum, it fulfills some kind of deep social need.
If anything I’m guilty of not reading enough Gawker. I only read it when it makes fun of me. That’s dilettantism. Really I should be sitting on there all day defending everyone. In fact the government should have a grant for that. An NEA grant.
Anyway, I’ve always been interested in this sort of thing, at least intermittently. Haven’t you read my stuff?
Of course I’ve read your stuff. I wrote a lot of your stuff.
What?
I’m the voice inside your head, guy. You are a fucking lunatic.
OK, OK, I’ll stop.
So my tumblr got discovered and Gawker linked to it. Good. Let’s have it out in the open—when you write stuff about writers on the internet, they read it. There was a pretty good post about this here:
http://www.tomorrowmuseum.com/2008/05/24/we-live-in-public/
I found that by Googling “Keith Gessen” a while ago. And they say you shouldn’t google yourself.
You know, in addition to thinking of the inspiration for this blog, Curt Schilling, I also often think of this essay Renata Adler wrote it must have been a decade ago for Harper’s. It was about some bad experience she’d had in the media—I can’t remember now—maybe it was because of some New Yorker memoirs she didn’t like? The thing is, I remember that even at the time I couldn’t remember. She’d taken so long to write the thing—and had been angry for so long, presumably—that by the time Harper’s published it, no one even knew what she was talking about. And that wasn’t very effective. Anyway, Harper’s would never have let me use so many italics in my long rebuttal.
Good old italic. You can invent all the fancy blogging software in the world, you can send a man to the moon, you can implant chips into people’s brains to recover the use of their paralyzed limbs—but you’ll never beat italic. Nothing beats italic.
