My Life and Thoughts

Patient readers! Since I got back to San Francisco last week I have been going about my business, waiting for the moment when a beautiful beaming woman would come up to me and exclaim: “Du hast einen Blog geschrieben!” But, contrary to cultural stereotype, she is not very punctual, this beautiful German woman, so today I take matters into my own hands.

My recent travels began in New York where I was, as always, delighted to see all the sad young literary men. On March 7, I visited Keith Gessen and Marco Roth at n+1’s new offices in Dumbo. Gessen, whose new book, All the Sad Young Literary Men, comes out in two weeks (it is really good!)…

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I was recently delighted to learn that my dear friend, the teen fiction sensation Lauren Mechling, now has a blog where you can read about her pursuit of flawless social functioning, and also about the time she spilled a cup of coffee on famous actor Jeffrey Tambor and didn’t feel bad about it. After spending an enjoyable half hour poking around Mechling’s website, I made an amazing discovery about our shared past. “My mother,” Mechling writes,

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During the three months of its existence, this blog has received over 160 hits from people Googling “Keith Gessen” (image, right, from Gawker), and I feel the time has come to recognize Keith’s fans for the interest they have shown in my life and thoughts. Let me begin by individually thanking the Googlers of the following phrases: keith gessen biography (Washington, D.C.; 8 min., 27 sec.); keith gessen blog (Winooski, VT; 7 min., 20 sec.); and keith gessen crisis (Denver, CO; 4 min. flat).

Sometimes in the course of my day-to-day activities, I just have to pause and think: how does my lived experience differ from that of my colleague, Ian McEwan? Like me, Ian McEwan probably eats breakfast every morning, and wears shoes. Like me, McEwan also has a website: http://ianmcewan.com. The existence of this website proves that someone must be maintaining it (the “first cause” proof); which, in turn, raises the question of what McEwan’s webmaster is like. How do his character, appearance, and biography differ from those of my webmaster? Does he bartend?

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I was totally on time for the reading at Stanford! I knew just where to park my car, and how to get to the Terrace Room. (Seven years of graduate study, my friends.)

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