13th
twat
Shouldn’t twat be eliminated, strictly on feminist grounds, as a term of abuse?
I remember when one of my fellow bloggers said we sounded like “twats” after an article about us in the Observer. To which my friend Elaine said: “Twats? Would you had sounded like twats! You guys sounded like dicks.”
I bring this up because one of my many new followers—
takebacktheinternet.tumblr.com
has called me a “gigantic twat.” Which, again, I object to.
Anyway, it’s worth looking at for a window into the minds of the techno-elite. Actually, I’ll quote the relevant passages here:
Saying that Gawker’s commenters represent a “class” is both offensive and indicative of a grossly antiquated Marxist worldview. What the fuck is class, anyway, these days?
Exactly. Tell the people who are getting moved out of my building in a gentrifying section of Brooklyn that there’s no such thing as “class” anymore.
Insinuating that Gawker commenters should direct their rage at their employers, rather than at people like you is further evidence of your outdated (and lame) outlook on the way the world works (or should work). Why should someone who has the leisure and freedom to read and express him/herself on a blog be angry at his/her employer? …
Because he exploits your labor and keeps the profits for himself.
We don’t all work in factories as unskilled laborers, anymore. The fact that an increasing number of people aren’t dependent on unions and collective bargaining to carve out a comfortable, dignified career is one of the best developments of the so-called information economy.
Now, we have the leisure of debunking complete dipshits such as yourself, [etc. etc.]
Right. If you prod these people just a tiny little bit, this what you get: The total refusal to acknowledge themselves as a class, with class interests; a claim that because they don’t work in a factory they now have more dignity (because, you see, there’s no dignity in working in a factory); and a total refusal to feel any solidarity with anyone. The idea that solidarity is an antiquated Marxist concept. I used to hear this a lot when I wrote for Feed in 2000-2001, just before the Nasdaq crashed. I’m not surprised that this rhetoric survived the crash and 8 years of the most brutal Republican free marketeering—but you don’t often see it so plainly in, well, one of my new tumblr followers I guess. Welcome, dignified techno-worker and free marketeer!
OK, let’s take some reader mail.
Your blog doesn’t suck, but I think you’re being unfair to Renata Adler, who deserves better than this world. You criticize her for taking too long to write her essay, but who knows, maybe Harper’s took too long to publish it. Your blog should totally cover the story of how editors at Harper’s routinely lose manuscripts in the gap between the back of their desks and the wall. Stuff just gets wedged back there, never to be seen again. Some of it does get found eventually and, yes, published late, like that one essay about the Super Bowl by David Samuels. Hadn’t there been other Super Bowls since the Super Bowl he wrote about? My point is this: in criticizing Adler for taking her time, aren’t you upholding just the sort of stupid speed that champions of the Internet like to point to as a virtue?
Yes, yes I am. If only I could type faster.
From Adler’s “A Court of No Appeal,” the essay that, when read, “no one,” you say, “even knew what she was talking about”:
Some days later, I had a call from Felicity Barringer, a media correspondent of the New York Times…. From the outset the conversation had nothing of the tenor of an “interview.” Ms. Barringer did not even pretend to any interest in Sirica [all this has to do with the fuss kicked up over one sentence—really, just one sentence—that Adler wrote about Judge John J. Sirica, in a book she wrote about her years at The New Yorker], only in “ethics in book publishing.” Would I give her my “sources”? “Come on. Yes or no. Up or down?” Her deadline: forty-eight hours. No. Why would I not disclose my evidence, if any, to her? Because, as the AP had reported, I was writing a piece of my own. Why wait? I was not waiting; I was writing.
I always liked that waiting and writing. There is speed, and there is speed before sense.
Come to think of it, this blog does suck.
Please send reader mail directly to me at kgessen at gmail. Keep in mind I only publish abusive or semi-abusive reader mail, or reader mail to correct gross and obvious mistakes in fact or judgment.
