A moment away from a very busy week of production:
It’s too early to see whether the roll-out of Times Select is going to bung up the daily “most e-mailed” list–and whether articles behind the firewall, that is, primarily the celebrities of the Op-Ed pages, will even be emailable and thus eligible for the honors they have previously monopolized. Whatever. I’ve been meaning to go back to reading the daily paper edition anyway– the Times is one of the few newspapers that has actually done a good job of reproducing the paper on the web, by which I mean that when I look at the paper edition after having looked at the website, it feels very familiar–the web didn’t miss the high points, the way it often does at lesser operations.
I did want to comment on an article in the Times magazine from last week, and I went looking for it, and of course it is now archived and thus inacccessible without a financial transaction. From the Times, anyway. As I’ve said a few times before, a savvy googler will always find premium content squirrelled away somewhere, and so it is.
I have to admit, too, that I haven’t really finished reading this nice story for a couple of reasons. First, I guess, is the usual: I like Dave Eggers about as much as I like any really talented young popular writer I’ve never met. (Actually, I have met him, and he’s pretty cool.) I like him. I like what he writes. I like nearly everything he sets to paper, which is great, because there are a lot of popular professional writers who don’t fit into my general mathematical tables plotting quality against popularity.
Still, I am probably more weary of the hagiographies of Dave Eggers than even Dave Eggers is, and it strains my patience when the New York Times finds yet another reason to cobble together another exalting story badly concealed as a summary-trend piece. (It’s not JUST about Eggers! Lookit, he wasn’t even in the lead–it was about Benjamin Kunkel!
I imagine the pitch went a little something like this:
Writer: “It’s Dave Eggers, everybody loves Dave Eggers!”
Editor: “Yes, but everyone knows about Dave Eggers already.”
Writer: “But he’s just the peg! There is a whole new generation of literary critics.”
Editor: “Such as?”
Writer: “Uhm. The Believer women.”
Editor: “Great! Who started that magazine, love it!”
Writer: “Well, it’s edited by Vendela Vida”
Editor: “Great name! Who she?”
Writer: “Uhm. Dave Eggers’ wife.”
Editor: “Is there an echo in here?”
Writer: “I’ll find some other Gen-X literary types, promise.”
Time passes.
Editor: “Find anybody else? Two’s an accident, three’s a trend.”
Writer: “Yes, I think so. There are these kids at something called n+1. They’re in Brooklyn!”
Editor: “Yeah but Eggers is in Brooklyn.”
Writer: “No! He moved back to Frisco years ago!”
Editor: “Okay, good. But Eggers is in the lead, right?”
Writer: “Well, let’s say the first 500 words.”
Editor: “Awesome. Due yesterday.”)
Anyway, what I really wanted to say, before I indulged in that long patch of badly concealed schadenfreude–or was it weltschmerz? Whatever, I’m German, I’ve got it all in spades–was that a single pull-quote really caught my eye. It was from the lovely and brilliant Heidi Julavits, Egger’s executor at The Believer. Now, our little magazine has been compared favorably with The Believer, for the right reasons, I think. You can call it “post-ironic” or a vehicle of the “new earnestness,” but basically it comes down to trying to stand out in the publishing marketplace by actually being enthusiastic without being cynical–celebrate the written word, be funny, take care, try not to hurt anyone that doesn’t REALLY deserve it, and so on. According to the author of the article,
For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them – “to endow something with importance,” in Julavits’s words, “by treating it as an emotional experience.”
I thought, Geeze what an unfortunate pullquote. The way I normally operate, I don’t “endow” things with importance through a willful act of emotional positing. I do that simply by caring. I had no idea my generation was so far gone that it is almost an unnatural, philosophical act to openly sympathize.
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