25th
Gawker posted a video this morning of a bunch of internet personalities reading sneeringly from All the Sad Young Literary Men. Now, that’s not my favorite book in the world, but this video is just the worst thing and it represents a sort of laziness that shouldn’t really be tolerated. It actually illustrates the thing Keyhole has been mad about recently — “mere description masquerading as critique” — better than anything else I’ve seen. Like, you can’t just read from a thing in a mocking tone and kind of giggle at some parts and think you’ve made fun of it. You haven’t. You haven’t done anything. You’ve maybe communicated the fact that you think it’s a dumb book. What the fuck happened to thinking up jokes?
UPDATE: One of the people involved in the video notes that Choire is sitting in front of the WTC site when he’s reading the copyright stuff at the end. This is funny. I didn’t notice it when I watched it. Also, Julia Allison makes a joke about Google at one point, which is pretty good too but not so much a dig against Gessen as it is against herself.
