Gossip Girl and The New Yorker

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November 18, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 3 2 min read

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coverFor some weeks now, in a pretense to professorial hipness, I’ve been using the TV show Gossip Girl as a sort of all-purpose pop-cultural referent with my students. Whenever I’m at a loss to explain a concept, I say something like, “This would be like on Gossip Girl, if Blair Waldorf told Serena van der Woodsen…” The ugly truth, however, is that I’ve never seen the show.

My students seem to take this in stride, and to find it both hilarious and tragic that I imagine it to be a cultural touchstone for their generation. In fact, they tell me, it is more of a cultural touchstone for mine. Other teachers apparently share my delusion that Gossip Girl is the central televisual event of the lives of undergraduates. Meanwhile, the undergraduates order Six Feet Under from Netflix.

So where, one wonders, did the Gossip Girl meme gain traction? I can’t answer for my colleagues, but Gossip Girl got my own attention through two roundabout connections with The New Yorker magazine. First, Janet Malcolm (of all people) penned an essay on the literary merits of the book series on which the show is based. Malcolm was critical of the TV adaptation, but noted, of the books, that

adolescence is a delicious last gasp (the light is most golden just before the shadows fall) of rightful selfishness and cluelessness… I would like to go on telling Blair stories until they are gone.

Then, Wallace Shawn – a great playwright and actor and the son of the late New Yorker editor William Shawn – landed a recurring role as Blair’s mother’s boyfriend. “The life of an actor can be very enviable,” Shawn told the New York Times this week. “If the phone rings and somebody says, ‘I see you as the leader of a group of aliens with enormous heads… I think that’s fantastic.”

That its glancing acquaintance with these two writers was enough, in my mind, to establish Gossip Girl’s centrality to the zeitgeist probably says more about The New Yorker’s role as a taste-maker for the thirtysomething set than it does about the CW’s role as a taste-maker for teens. Still, the primetime hours have not been quite the same for me since The O.C. went off the air. Janet Malcolm, literary to the end, would have me fill them with Gossip Girl books, but with Wallace Shawn joining the cast, I’m tempted to brave her disapproval and start watching the show.

is the author of City on Fire and A Field Guide to the North American Family. In 2017, he was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

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High Praise for Edward P. Jones

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August 26, 2006 | 1 book mentioned

In the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley writes a glowing review of Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children and has high praise for Jones as well:Now there can be no doubt about it: Edward P. Jones belongs in the first rank of American letters. With the publication of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, his third book and second collection of short stories, Jones has established himself as one of the most important writers of his own generation — he is 55 years old — and of the present day. Not merely that, but he is one of the few contemporary American writers of literary fiction who is more interested in the world around him than he is in himself, with the happy result that he has much to tell us about ourselves and how we live now.Perhaps Yardley (and I) are just rooting for a hometown hero. (I grew up in the DC area.) But after reading The Known World and many of Jones’ short stories, it’s hard to deny that he’s one of the best writers working today.In the NY Times, Dave Eggers is similarly admiring of Jones’ work. He writes that The Known World “is considered by many (including this reviewer) to be one of the best American novels of the last 20 years. It’s difficult to think of a contemporary novel that rivals its sweep, its humanity, the unvarnished perfection of its prose and its ultimately crushing power. The book’s narrative force is so steady and unerring that it reads as though it was not so much written as engraved in stone. It became a classic the moment it was finished.””Bad Neighbors” is a story by Jones that recently appeared in the New Yorker.

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3 comments:

  1. I watch it. For what it is, it's pretty good, the dialogue is good and clever and alot of times even drops some literary references. The plotting is pretty lame and they almost always use a "someone overhears something he shouldn't have or sees something he shouldn't have" lazy crutch to further the plot. It's no gilmore girls but then what is. And umm, the chicks are hot.

  2. I think part of the reason it makes such an impact for the late 20-30's set is that the lives of these teenagers much more closely resembles the dream-lives of much older, more settled individuals. To my knowledge, not only does the average 17 year old not spend the night sipping martinis at a bar and gallivanting about town in a limo, but that's not what they're shooting for anyway. Also- there was an incredible fuss made about the show that weighs much heavier on its 'older' viewers. It became very culturally relevant for all of the respectable coverage it got in major media, and for the controversy surrounding its content. My guess is that the 19year old college kids don't give a damn about cultural critique or media controversy, unless their film kids- and 20 year old film kids would sooner cut their own throats than admit to watching Gossip Girl no matter how good it is.

  3. I definitely agree with the idea that adults (of the early 30s and onward variety) care a lot more about Gossip Girl than anyone else. Sure the tween set reads the books and the mid-older teens (supposedly watch it for the fashion) but a) there are quite a few book series hip with the tween set, GG doesn't really stand out and b) I believe I read a report somewhere that the tv show's actual ratings from week to week is not as proportionally high as it's media exposure.

    I just started to watch it — I'm sorta a film kid — and it IS a pretty addictive replacement for the OC. I can get away with it by saying I watch it ironically. Something like that.

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Experiments in Publishing

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April 6, 2008 | 1 book mentioned 4

HarperCollins is trying a new model with an imprint that cuts out author advances in favor of a larger proportion of royalties and eliminates remainders (also known as returns) entirely. The industry has been debating the pros and cons of the move since the Friday announcement. As has been only sparsely discussed in the media, HarperCollins isn’t the first to try this business model. Millions contributor Ben profiled MacMillan New Writing last year:No agents are involved, the publishing house accepts direct submissions, and writers get no advance, but earn 20% royalties.Sounds good, no? But it’s not all upside. Not only are the writers’ contracts non-negotiable, but Macmillan receives all subsidiary rights to the book and a first look at the author’s second book. Critics have reacted strongly, calling the imprint “literary slave drivers” and “vanity publishers,” and indulging in apocalyptic predictions of the end of publishing as we know it.And for a little more color on “remainders,” a much despised element of the book industry, check out a post of mine from several years ago explaining the curious life cycle of the remaindered book.

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The new Paris Review

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September 23, 2005 | 1 book mentioned

The Paris Review, long recognizable for its fat, little, bookish profile, has been redesigned under the watch of new editor Philip Gourevitch. Also gone is the practice of emblazoning the cover with an abstruse piece of art (as opposed to, say, the New Yorker) and nothing else. “Maybe no one thought it before Mr. Plimpton died, but the venerable old magazine did need an update.” says Bud, who’s got a full accounting of the venerable literary magazine’s new look (and contents).

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