YOUTH-LED BACKLASH
December 1st, 20071.) First, and most devastatingly, Emily Gould and Choire Sicha QUIT GAWKER. It’s unlikely that any of you care about this as much as I do, but I think Emily Gould is the best thing about the site, I was just praising her the other day, and now she’s bailing. Very curious to see where she ends up and whether she and Sicha will stick together. Maybe they can team up with Ken Layne and create a print newspaper that will crush Gawker and all other online media.
2.) I finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates today and felt disturbed.
3.) I freelanced a couple pieces for Metro recently, a profile of Steve Wozniak (I read all 288 pages of his memoir, iWoz, and felt disturbed) and of a young photojournalist in Nairobi.
4.) Today was my last day of teaching creative writing to high schoolers and we played Exquisite Corpse. Here are two examples of what’s in their excellent young minds:
Willy Williams ate seventeen taquitos, which contained too much death. It was extremely overwhelming and I hugged my dog in joy. His tail moved back and forth with pleasure. As he started jumping around, he tripped into a hole. He struck his head on a rock and it cracked open, emptying its contents onto the ground. “Whoopsey,” his mother said.
Cheese makes everyone in my family sick but I don’t care. I’m crazy about it, sometimes I can’t fall asleep at night thinking about hot donkeys. They just make me ouhhh…wanna touch myself. But all I could do was think about that dog in the painting that stared at me. It was just like Scooby Doo, but right now, I felt like Shaggy. Which is to say, I was ineffective, and unwashed. But my underwear is cleaner and better fitting than yours.