I'll take the backstory, pussy.
Dana hits the high notes, but I’ll play rhythm guitar, like Bono or Chris Martin.
So I actually printed this out and read it during my morning constitutional. I would like to point out to Old Man Keith “Pussy Expert” Gessen, that back when Eggers got all up in the Advocates’ shit (you read that because of your alumni sub? Pussy.) about the underground, that there indeed was an Internet back then, one that even had things like this, which happened right around the time of his interview, the circumstances of which were detailed quite rigorously by a high school student (I would have thought it was Pareene, but he was like six then — actually, maybe that was a preschool project of his).
If you dig into it, you will see more than a little snideness and defensiveness about the $1.4MM paperback deal. mcsweeneys.org got started because Dave pulled the plug on mcsweeneys.net for a week in a jokey jokey insider way, claiming poverty while the entirety of publishing industry was tittering over his fat paycheck. But those sad sack MFA students who don’t go to those six schools, they thought Dave was actually as saddled by debt as they were (chortle). People actually offered to pay the hosting fees for him, just so their dream of underground twee humor might persist another week. I decided to show them they really could just make their own. But no one really wants to be an outsider — they are just looking for a ladder to clamber up that looks more stylish than the one before them.
This was after he had edited ESPN the Magazine and Esquire. Something you already know, pussy, because they probably talk about it at cocktail parties at Harvard. I don’t think of myself as underground, or not. It’s a false dichtomy useful to people like King and you, because it is a handy straw man you can spin around to suit your needs. Oooh, n+1, the lil’ magazine that could.
For anyone who has bothered to think critically about all this, they know the important issue is the exercise of power, and where you stand on that continuum. What your complicity is, and how you work to diminish social endowment that might be ill-got and therefore you are personally responsible for answering to in way that doesn’t reproduce the social inequity you fell into.
See, it wasn’t about lamenting that you decided to skip becoming an i-banker. That’s how far you assholes have moved the goal posts. You want to wring your hands about that? Of course you do, because no one is going to address the germane issue of Harvard grads puking their bullshit entitlement all over my town, my life, and my culture. The answer was right in front of you: you should have dropped out. But you didn’t. Pussy.