This is one way to look at it.

Here’s another: Gawker is to Keith Gessen what Gary Baum was to Dave Eggers.

Granted, the analogy is a stretch, since Gawker professes none of the open adulation that Baum had for Eggers. But consider this, from Gessen’s 2001* article on Baum and his FoE! Log. Not only does it read like a recipe for Gawker, but it’s further proof–as if Gessen’s novel weren’t proof enough–that the fate of sad young literary men has always been his subject:

The Log was about fame: the fame that Eggers had and the fame that Gary wanted. It was about the wages of such fame, its conditions, its uses. There were occasional literary quotations in the Log, but they were not from Eggers’s books; there were references to literary figures, but only insofar as their careers were concerned. Larger questions were being dealt with here. How does one take the enormous apparatus of celebrity-creation and force it to do one’s bidding? How does one, to put it more succinctly, conquer the world?

It was a good question, a Balzacian question. And one was struck by the optimism of it, the innocence. I kept asking Gary whether he’d become disenchanted by the dirty secrets of the literary world, whether he still thought it a world worth conquering. He wasn’t, and he did. Because though Gary proved beyond the doubt of any reasonable reader that literary fame, and literature, is a vast and intricate conspiracy, the trick of the Log was that it wasn’t a conspiracy he abhorred. He wanted in, he merely wanted in.

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*Note: The article was originally written for the Atlantic, but for reasons Gessen explains in the postscript, it didn’t appear in print until the first issue of n+1, in the fall of 2004.

From “The Energies of Words,” Peter O’Leary’s history of the famous 1931 “Objectivists” issue of Poetry:

For an issue that launched a movement, it’s not particularly memorable for its poetry, most of which was written by second-rate poets who happened to be friends of Zukofsky, or by now canonical poets who are not regarded as Objectivists, such as Williams, Bunting, or Kenneth Rexroth, a progenitor of the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1950s.

George Gissing, New Grub Street:

A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed ‘Literary Machine’; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures of herself, to turn out books and articles? Alas! The machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for today’s consumption.

I’m very pleased to announce the launch of Chicago Review 53:4 & 54:1/2, a 368-page triple issue with a special section dedicated to the life and work of Barbara Guest. The issue costs $18 and may be purchased here, or you can subscribe to CR for a year–good for three issues–for just $25 here.

The Barbara Guest feature includes three previously unpublished plays by Guest and a portfolio (edited by Catherine Wagner) of five uncollected poems. The feature also includes critical and personal responses to Guest’s work by Charles Altieri, Eileen Myles, Donald Revell, John Wilkinson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Martha Ronk, Andrea Brady, Brenda Hillman, Nancy Robbin, Patricia Dienstfrey and Rena Rosenwasser, and Garrett Caples.

The issue also includes:

(more…)

From Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon:

[Paul] had learned to his regret that in the class struggle the double Nelson was not done.

For those who get their daily digital emunction via RSS: Campbell McGrath and I have been discussing my Bookforum review of his Seven Notebooks in the comments section of my last post. (And here you thought the “Tenzone” was exciting…)