I was told there'd be hype.

In New York, they saved.

They saved on orange juice, sliced bread, they saved on coffee. On movies, magazines, museum admission (on Friday nights). Train fare, subway fare, their apartment out in Queens. It was a principle, of sorts, and they stuck to it. Mark and Sasha lived on the 7 train that year and when they got out, out in Queens, Mark would follow Sasha like a little boy as she checked the prices at the Korean grocers, and cross-checked them, so they could save on fruits and vegetables and little Korean treats. They saved on clothes.

...and when there was no meat, we ate fowl and when there was no fowl, we ate crawdad and when there was no crawdad to be found, we ate sand.

This post has sat fallow in "drafts" forever. At least a month. I've been hoping that he would go away. He won't go away.
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It started out with this excerpt, sent to me by a friend, with the commentary: If you have a SINGLE story, essay, article, poem, etc., sitting in a drawer, pull it out and submit it somewhere. Because this is fucking ridiculous. So I read it and suddenly I imagined him as an inspirational figure. I replied:

I would be slicing my wrists open right now if I weren't laughing at the image of us literally pulling crumpled pages of writing out of desk drawers, glancing up at a Russian icon-style portrait of KG, saying "Fuck it," and shoving it in an envelope.

The reply:

If that little fucker Keith Gessen finished a novel, any of us can. The wonders of Saint Keith and His Miracles. Let the testifying begin . . .

Those baleful eyes. That Romantic mouth, concealing his three rows of teeth. That college-writing-prof air, emphasized by his fashion choices and casual misogyny. You can't help but be mesmerized by the Gessen.

I asked myself, WWKGD? And so, ignoring my real work, I noodled around in Illustrator. (Can you tell I don't do this for a living?) And I uploaded the result, above. But it stayed in "drafts."

But then came this. Earnest! So earnest that he plays football, eschewing the hipster dodgeball conceit. Everything is said in earnestness. Except when it's said defensively. Yes, it's a tragedy that the everyday lives of young urban adults are no longer considered appropriate subjects for ambitious novels. Beg your pardon? What percentage of books published now are set in New York? It's gotta be at least 40% or I will eat my hat. Yet I resisted the urge to publish the post.

Then I (indirectly) found this article via a comment at Emily Gould's blog: "American life, at least the past 10 years, has pretty much allowed people to do what they wanted to do." Yep, a near-universal experience. Not that he can help that perspective, given his pedigree.

Yet still, this post sat in the drafts. And I told myself to forget about it. (A half-hearted attempt to quell my anger issues.) Because he is but one of the dozens of imminently forgettable young white male novelists whose books garner handsome advances but fail to deliver.

But then there was this, just today: "Is it more stigmatized to masturbate to internet porn or to be so vain as to Google your own name?" he asked, adding that he hadn't done either in the last couple of days. Sigh. Sometimes a little penis can be a dangerous thing.

You might argue that this is not a legitimate critique and I am being needlessly cruel and petty. I reject that criticism. I don't want to have an intellectual debate about a man who agrees to sit on a panel, mentions the wrongness of the panel topic, and then proceeds to talk at length about the topic. I want to punch him in his dazzling teeth. You win again, Gessen! I'm trotting this out of "drafts."

Shut up, sad little literary young man. Please go away.

Jay Reatard, Fading All Away