Gawker spreads
: I picked up a copy of the Chicago Reader and what to my wondering eyes should appear on the front page but a plug for New York’s Gawker. Can’t find the story online but here’s the lead (for which one needs a blog scorecard):
In late October, on the New York uberblog Gawker, a young writer named Jessa Crispin became the latest target of Dale Peck’s famously vicous verbal abuse. Peck, the subject of a recent New York Times Magazine profile, is perhaps best kown for his starring role in an ongoing lit-world debate over harsh reviews, or “snark,” which many say began when he kicked off his June 2002 New Republic review of Rick Moody’s The Black Veil with the fighting words “Rick Moody is hte worst writer of his generation.” He’d never heard of Crispin before Choire Sicha, his interviewer (and roommate), told him during an IM interview that she’d trashed Peck’s oeuvre and called him a “twat” to boot. But he was ready with a comeback. “i can see that someone who appears to be ditch-dirty stupid as jessa crispin wouldn’t get what i’m doing,” he typed, and then, several paragraphs later, “i think that people like jessa crisp-tits dislike my books precisely because they like books by industry favorites — they’ve had their tastes co-opted as it were.”
Crispin’s site is bookslut and it’s a Reader story because she lives in Chicago now. The story also plugs New York’s own lit blogger Maud Newton as well as Washington’s Ana Marie Cox, the Antic Muse.
