Dear Keith Gessen: "What is This Intellectual Mumbo-Jumbo??"
For starters: I like you. It was fun waving at you last night from my car as I went by!
Now, on to the other stuff.
Your blogged point is well taken! Though what I really took away is: that no one can resist ad hominem.
Two things:
1. As for me, I understand Mark's piece just fine. I done read the whole thing, two whole times. And as you know, I didn't even go to no college!
I happen to disagree with his extrapolation of his experience and thoughts to the rest of, like, us—thrusting them (as it were!) well into and beyond the realm of the personal-political. That is a lot of what I think other people (your/our readers!) are reacting to, as well. He is expressing something insanely personal in his discussion of societal institutions. That has happened before in the history of essays, ha, right? It is fascinating, and his views are to me a little disturbing, and different, and it has created some excitement. And why shouldn't Mark's work, published in a journal, be criticized—well or poorly, or both, simultaneously. Perhaps when you publish something, you might like it discussed!
What is all this horror at attention—even if some of the attention is mockery? Your response is that readers are too accustomed to the stupid, or are actually too stupid, to actually understand your publication?
2. As for your little dig at us, being a "news-aggregator" site. What can I say? Certainly we publish more original reporting and essay work than n+1 does. I see that as you saying it doesn't count, for some reason. Like perhaps it is too stupid.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to editing this great piece on Robert Lepage's thingie at BAM.
See you next week at Emily's birthday! I'll be the one in the "I'm with stupid" t-shirt.
xo
c.
P.S. Everyone should know that he or she can subscribe to n+1 here!
I'll be "stupid."
^ I'm with him.
1. What's the second thing?
b)
I WELCOME mumbo-jumbo.
But hey! At least Keith thinks you are as Internet as Gawker.
Gold Star for Choire!
…still need to know when it's ok to have the 'no conversations' rule.
+1. I like to read scholarly-literary junk-type stuff and then be explained to what it was I just spent my time burning my brain cells on.
Yeah, doesn't that make Keith's blog just a N+! aggregator?
These people are self-important children and the spankings Scocca and Abe gave them were undeserved kindnesses. There were actually a couple of nice insights in Greif's already adequately trashed recent piece. Problem is, we all already read "Notes on Camp."
As for the less derivative portions of this sage's "ongoing investigation of what happened to our modern utopia," here's one sample that Gessen offers:
"The utopia of television nearly came within reach in 1992, on the day cable providers announced that cable boxes would expand to 500 channels. Back then, our utopian idea rested on assumptions both right and wrong. "[Original boldface suppressed.]
An essayist who can make po-faced pronouncements about what might have brought about "the utopia of television" is already a person everybody can afford to forget about, no matter how well he executes the task he set himself.
And what shall we say of Gessen, who regards Greif as the next GWF Hegel, only more difficult, knotty and translated-from-the-German-sounding? Oh sorry, it's already been said several times above.
Dear Keith Gessen, see you tonight at the Happy Mondays/Psych Furs show completely off my face on drugs, tripping with Bez. We can chat then.
"He is expressing something insanely personal in his discussion of societal institutions." That to me is the crux of the issue, although I would add the following: "He is expressing something insanely personal (about which he knows nothing about, personally, which makes him seem like a horse's ass) in his discussion of societal institutions."
Oops — strike that second 'about'
seconded. even with the extraneous about.
Mr. Gessen,
There is a difference between "Ulysses" "Knotty" and say a post-structural deconstruction of Hegel and post-colonial dialectics circa 1982 "Knotty". One is genius the other is radioactively obscurantist.
Nowhere did I see on the cover of N+1 the necessary public health warning that is required by law before ingesting such toxic prose.
Ulysses is also well written.
Oh, man. Keith, baby. You're back in PRIME form. This is like when I found out there was going to be a sequel to Bill and Ted. Like OMFGZ NO THEY DIUNT.
That was nice of The Awl to put a link to the n+1 subscription page. I almost clicked the "Forever" subscription but then it suddenly felt like I was buying a burial plot or a cryonics capsule…so I stopped.
But "Forever" in this instance is like, 2 more years, tops.
Ultimately, I object because I'm being lectured as to what my proper place as a homosexual is–something that's oh so fucking easy for a straight dude to say. And said straight dude's ideas about homosexuals and our specialness are–even in their guise of concern–condescending, belittling, simplistic, and (yes) sentimental.
This is exactly what I think too. Those of us who fight for (and do) gay marry, rarely view that as 'the end' of our goals, and because there's no societal expectation for what a gay wedding should look like, may often have to think through the assumptions much, much more than many non-gay marrying couples. I think someone yesterday wrote that even if you like sitting in the back of the bus, it's nice to have the choice not to. Which while it sounds a little re-belittling, is not to be forgotten.
Spot on, Dickdogfood.
I'd add that his discussion of women is just as off-putting: simplistic, ill-informed and (yes) repressively sentimental.
I just think it's awful weird how Greif's "utopia" — where abortion is as matter-of-fact as sports medicine and hotels, and long-term love is pegged as unreasonable, needless, contemptible sentimentality — sounds pretty much like every fictional dystopia ever conceived.
Actually Moff that is my life. Little did I know it was utopia.
Yeah, all the fictional ones, and also CeauÅŸescu's Romania.
@kitten: See? The magic was really inside you all along!
@Semper: Oh yeah, and all the unfictional dystopias too.
Brave N+1 World
Oh Keith we got it. We just found it turgid and tedious.
Also old-fashioned, right? Or are we all still blank slates?
Kidult Tabula Rasa's of the World UNITE!
@Mindpowered,
Maybe we're all blank comment-boxes, struggling to say something new (or at least patronizing, see below) before the auto-refresh forces us to start the whole thing over….
I hate that Auto Refresh. I'm busy googling the correct quotes from Monty Python and Heidegger for Chiore's schlong post and the damn thing refreshes on me and wipes out all my hard earned cutting and pasting.
Oh yeah, and beyond what Dickdogfood commented, this too.
Wait, Gessen's post wasn't self-satire?
The dig at Observer contributors was especially darling.
I like obscuring my not-particularly-admirable wishes, too, but I don't get on the Internet and make a big deal of it.
Aside: the "X and Y and Z" construction of which Gessen makes use is juvenile, the sort of thing that a 14-year-old makes fun of her 13-year-old self for writing. Use a comma or, better, choose one of the three.
I have to ask: Is there a "How To Explain To The Rest Of The World That You Went To Harvard And That's Why They'll Never Get You" class on the schedule, or was this vital information merely handed out in pamphlet form?
Oh, you don't know?
Obviously not part of the right Facebook group.
Durrrr… Why does he hate Pat's Ark so much? And besides, it was Noah's Ark, and they don't let gay d00ds on Noah's Ark, cause like, he was trying to bring a dude cow and a lady cow so they could make, like, more cows in his Utopia. So this was like, a mute point. My next door neighbours are gay ladies, and all they ever do is hunt mooses. Anyways, this pudding's not not eat itself.
i thought he had two of everything? what about GMO's? How did they get on there? they are MADE not to reproduce! gah!!!
(sorry, i was raised without religious practice by an ex-catholic and an ex-jew whose entire sex and drug talk was comprised of this: "don't ever do PCP".)
I just hope that after this all the supergeniuses and the posing-incomprehensionialists can still be friends.
Here's something:
1) You can be "intellectual" without being serious.*
2) You can be serious without being "intellectual."
Here's something else:
3) You can discuss a serious thing and yet the seriousness of the thing does not automatically make your discussion serious.
4) You can discuss a trivial matter and yet the triviality of the matter does not automatically make your discussion trivial.â€
________
* The intellectual style does not confer seriousness. It can be used seriously, but when it is used to create an aura of seriousness that is expected to carry the day on its own, the result is pretense.
†Hence: the Awl! (sometimes).
One can also use such an occasion to make a point in a patronizing way.
This. Very well put.
I wonder whose trip to midget wrestling at a bar or tea party I aggregated? Blitzer's? (Greif's????)
Also: N+1 is the negative of Glenn Beck… extremist nonsensical "intellectual" gymnastics for their own sake. It cannot be criticized because its defense is "you just don't get it."
Also, Also: that was not a "Mark Greif piece on abortion and gay marriage" it was a "Mark Greif piece Mark Grief." It just used "we" and "us" a lot.
Alsox3: "This is a tough and risky and controversial argument because obviously those legal rights, fought for by a previous generation, are real achievements… What Mark is suggesting is that by not being fought for now, more aggressively, they are in danger of being lost and eroded. Maybe he’s wrong about that, or maybe the argument is slightly different—not that they will be lost but that we’ll settle for them, when we should be demanding more."
Let me promise you the least possibly effective way to fight for those rights is a 10,000-word polemic in N+1. Keith, I would love to know What else Greif is doing to fight for these rights? Teaching kids literature at the New School?
I'm sure he's a lovely guy but, God, what a pseud.
Yes, that's just the word I've been fumbling for.
I'm sorry but using "you just don't get it" to dismiss criticism of this verbose piece of self-congratulation is the intellectual equivalent of the 400 pound woman on the Ricki Lake show, screaming "y'all just jealous" at her friends who are maybe trying to tell her a skinithgt tube dress is not appropriate.
What Greif has done here is squeeze 10,000 words into one simple *sentiment*: "me first". And to appropriate the language of the genuine civil rights struggles of entire socials groups, and then to further impugn said groups for not fighting hard enough, or, more candidly, in a manner that behooves Greif's transparent and profoundly singular personal desires, is well, you know, see the above about the 400 pounds of flesh shoved into and flimsy tube dress. No one is jealous or doesn't get it. We just see it for how bad it actually looks.
Mr. Greif's piece sets the still vital concerns of the Gay Rights and Women's Rights Movements back twenty minutes.
Didn't Nietzsche do "me first" better a while back? Look how well it worked out for him, crying over horses and all.
harvard dumb
AND Yale.
I am happy. Maybe other editors will respond to the Shadow Editors. It is too bad that the New Yorker is too professional. I would love to see an attempted defense of Gladwell's ridiculous perspective on basketball.
Oh, me too! I find the conversation much more interesting than the content!
@Atipofthehat, I get it, and maybe I was a little harsh. You've obviously acquired some knowledge along the way, but I enjoy authenticity as well as a good quote.
And if your comment was authentic, then I apologize.
Thanks–didn't mean to seem that way. I'm sorry if the tone seemed inauthentic or patronizing. This is actually stuff that interests me, so when I think about it or write about it, I try to lay it out (for myself or for anyone) as simply as I can (without oversimplifying, if possible). As to what's inauthentic, that's just what gets me so interested: how much out there is a fake version of what it claims to be?
A Russian concept seems to fit these inauthentic things pretty well, calling out "the falsely important" and "bogus profundities": a fun page of a strange site at link. http://doggo.tripod.com/doggposhlust.html
Side note re: Choire's opener: Can we hire Tommy Wiseau to call Keith Gessen and say "OH HI KEITH GESSEN" and then hang up, multiple times?
YOU'RE TEARING ME APART GESSEN
If nothing else, I vote we give Greif, Gessen, and N+1 each an honorary avocado for providing the material for excessively excellent making-fun-of-ness in these here pages.
Whether they choose to combined their avocados and create guacamole, I posit, should be left entirely up to them.
I am not judgmental.
Pardon — "combine." My non-Harvardosity is showing. Ahem.
And now the tens of n+1 readers who are not already awl contributors have been drawn into your leviathan.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMILY!
thanks! my party is going to suck!
URGENT: We need to find out WHAT THE FUCK D.R. ADAMS AGGREGATED FOR HIS Q-BERT PIECE AND DROP LASER GUIDED BOMBS ON THIS SOURCE AT ONCE.
For all mankind.
KG, blog comment: What *is* true on the whole about bloggers versus n+1 editors is that bloggers have refused to take what we used to call "the long march through the institutions."
Choire: I think you've got your marching orders.
Chairman Keith addresses his longsuffering lieutenants holed up in the barren hills, few but resolute, confident of ultimate victory over the running blogs of imperialism.
"Comrades! You have been invited to this forum today to exchange ideas and examine the relationship between work in the literary and artistic fields, and revolutionary work in general. Our aim is to ensure that revolutionary literature and art follow the correct path of development …"
Love how this range war of ideas was waged here and not on Gawker.
Who?
What's wrong with little brown dog food?!
Please – don’t give it another moniker. N+1 is bad enough. N+! is much worse. (And seems like l33tspeak!!!111!!!oneoneone)
This is the greatest literary feud since Scocca/Grief.