required reading for this post, curated by silvia:

emily gould, editor of gawker, quits
emily gould reflects on the highs and lows of professional blogging
new york magazine explores gawker, a seemingly endless fountain of bile

like many bright creative young people, i am planning to move to new york, and in that statement, the problem is encapsulated. new york is already teeming with bright creative young people. we all have manuscripts, and we are all really, really hoping you will read them. whoever you are. you can be the grandma of a kid who went to school with the kid of the veterinarian who neutered jonathan safran foer's west highland terrier. read our thing. read it. now make someone else read it. yes!

we are all applying for the same few jobs, and we are all doing what we can to direct more traffic to our blogs. i cannot emphasize sufficiently how many of us there are. we are all in various stages of accepting that to be successful, we will have to self-promote, a lot, an undertaking that we find distasteful, because it genuinely is. what the fuck are we doing wrong, that we have to be prostitutes all the time? we were told all our lives that we were incredible and talented. FUCKBUCKET.

and because we have been told all our lives that we are incredible and talented, and to wildly varying degrees are, we have giant and ridiculous ambitions. sometimes they take the form of phrases that will go on the front of our manuscript when it is a book. "Sublime... near-miraculous... this book brought me genuine sexual fulfillment." "Quite possibly the definitive use of words."

there are way too many of us, and there is not enough success to go around. this is the raison d'etre of (among other things) gawker, an organ of throbbing unremitting hate, which i used to think that i liked, because everyone liked it—it had its own angry and instantly recognizable lexicon, and it was easy to use, and it's always fun to learn new ways of speaking. gawker's dominant (maybe only?) mode is jealousy. read enough of it and you will hate yourself, and everything. for me, "enough of it" is about 15min worth. why the fuck are we subjecting ourselves to it? it's not even especially clever. anyone can write like gawker if they want, and many of us actually strive to do so. that needs to fucking stop. if we're genuinely talented and incredible, we can do better.

currently more and more is being written about the "creative underclass" (nymag's words, not mine), and much of it is being written by the creative underclass (cf. "all the sad young literary men," keith gessen). it feels like an already self-referential generation of writers is reaching its baroque period. hopefully this presages its own death, and the beginning of something else. i don't want to be part of a movement that spends its creative energy focusing on the means of its own self-mythologization. "i had a blog and a bunch of people read it and then i realized i was 'oversharing' but TOO LATE I'M A CELEBRITY AIEEEEEEEEEEE." trite. trite parade on trite street. international festival of hackneyed. we have learned that the squalid spiritual journey of the celebrity is a viable narrative even for bloggers. that is all.

if the problem is that we want to be celebrities—that that's where our ambitions are directing us—then we need to modify our amibitions. frankly, we need to grow up. a celebrity is a thing no thinking grown-up person wants to be. gawker must die. surely we are agreed on that.

in conclusion, boobs.