Disqus - Latest Comments for kgessen

Re: Keith Gessen Blog - On this day I’d like to give thanks to the...

kgessen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 23:49:09 -0000

We've been through this before, M. You don't see a connection; they insist on a connection. Ultimately, it's a law-enforcement issue.

Re: Keith Gessen Blog - On this day I’d like to give thanks to the...

kgessen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 18:40:07 -0000

I don't see why a frat boy can't be a moral compass. I think the piece just up at nplusonemag is very good. http://nplusonemag.com/how-bombay-became-mumbai

And to be honest, the most informative thing I've ever read about Kashmir specifically was Basharat Peer's memoir of growing up there in n+1 Issue 5 (not online, unfortunately). Partly that piece was about the hijacking of an indigenous independence movement by religious fanatics, but mostly it was about how the Indian army tortured everyone it got its hands on, in the most vicious and creative ways.

Re: Keith Gessen Blog - Last week the Nation published a heavy-handed...

kgessen — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 14:53:10 -0000

Yes, Yale, that's true. He wrote a piece but it didn't work out. I don't think that means he can't criticize n+1 anymore, nor that we can't point out where he's wrong or misleading. Got any other inside dope?

Re: another reminder

kgessen — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:43:58 -0000

Thank you, Ryan, for this party report. Let the record also show that this comment got flagged as spam by Disqus. WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF, Disqus? Two girls kissing? Or... two intellectual conversations?

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:28:54 -0000

And I would say, first, that I find it hard to believe that expression was invented by Quentin Tarantino, and second and more important, I would argue that a film like Pulp Fiction, which is all made up of quotations--except for that made-up quotation from the Bible--can't really by quoted from, in the sense you mean. DFW wouldn't do that.

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 09:05:12 -0000

Dear Lugnut and Tom---Thank you. This is some high-level commentin'.

Lugnut: I reject the biographic fallacy in your McSweeney's theories. Everyone's sensitive to criticism. I'm sure as hell certainly sensitive to criticism. I know this does not answer all the questions you've posed.

Tom: Thank you for that very much. You know, on the debates I actually tried to stay up until 4, and then at about 3:45 I realized, man, I don't want to watch this thing. It's not a football game. I'm not an undecided voter. I just want to see the score in the morning. So that's what I did. Score looks pretty good. But I've seen good scores before. It's not over till they spill the Gatorade bucket on your head.

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:42:45 -0000

You could certainly make a counterargument that actually DFW is a religious writer from the American heartland, that he is in line with these others but the tools available to him were so overwhelmingly within a certain tradition that he had to use them... you could certainly make that argument and it would be interesting.

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:41:20 -0000

DFW is of their stature but has different politics---he's liberal, part of a very liberal literary tradition, etc. Houellebecq like Limonov is a man of the right. You can't imagine DFW lamenting at any point ever that his country "is slowly slipping into the ranks of the secondary powers," or whatever the line is at the start of Elementary Particles.

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:39:21 -0000

You know, for a guy named Lugnut... good question. Do you have an answer?

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:18:28 -0000

Lugnut, Well, yes and no. I think this latter tendency you're pointing to--of sentimentality--has *always* been latent in the project. It's coming more to the fore now, yes. But it's always been there. Mark Greif has called the earlier, more obviously pomo dealings with this problem "an end-run around a class-based problem of sentimentality." Confession is the goal; satire is the mode. It's now taken the form of what Medvedev calls "the new sincerity." More on this later, I hope. But it's an error, I think, to argue that the project has been fundamentally altered. Why would it be? If it represents a particular class--and it does--well, that class hasn't changed.

Though it may change now! We'll see.

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:52:48 -0000

Michael, seriously, no problem. No one on earth can be expected to keep up with my relations with former Gawker editors in quite the way that I do. Actually, that includes me. I shouldn't be expected to, either. In any case, my apologies again. -k

Re: let's not sit around and give each other hand jobs

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 18:43:34 -0000

Tom! Thank you. You know, be careful what you wish for. What's your situation like over there--say, in mid-October? I guess I should just email you. -k

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 08:47:01 -0000

Sorry, man, I've got beef with those guys. So I won't be funding this project.

That said, I'm thrilled we got Jonathan Ames to comment on here. I think that's a real coup. One of the things they need in Russia is a Russian Jonathan Ames.

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:59:05 -0000

No, I'm sorry, I was just being a jerk. You can make all the inside jokes on here you want. -k

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:47:32 -0000

What?

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:32:23 -0000

Heh-heh. Speaking of which, the Atlantic seems to have put all their old articles online, or at least my old article. All about Lenin's tomb!

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200403/gessen

Re: thank the russians

kgessen — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 08:31:03 -0000

It's fixed. Thanks for pointing that out. Article here:
http://nplusonemag.com/dfw-1962-2008

Re: Dream

kgessen — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:50:09 -0000

Yup. Please stay tuned for more of my dream diary. I mean, it's either the news cycle or my subconscious, and I choose my subconscious.

Re: krug against the kruks

kgessen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:59:59 -0000

Thanks, man. Though you should start taking better care of yourself, if you want to see me at the 7 over 70. I'm counting on your vote.

Re: Keith Gessen Blog - One of the more clever things about my book—which,...

kgessen — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 08:13:07 -0000

Wow, Wachovia. That's sad. Isn't there a Wachovia branch at the edge of Flatbush, before the park? The place you'd always walk by and they'd say "Please come in, we'll give you a free pen," and you'd be like, Sorry, too busy, maybe next time. Boy.

I'm sorry about your German bank, internationalmodern. Don't be too hard on yourself, even though it probably is all your fault.

Alex, thanks for liking the first half of my book.

DuckBeater, but that's what I'm saying, they had a seascape up when I walked by that time and it was too bright! They need something in a much more subdued color, like gray.

Man, you guys all have the coolest names. I should get a cool name somewhere.

K

Re: escalation

kgessen — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:25:02 -0000

Good comment, chief. I look forward to the sequel.

Re: readings

kgessen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:35:43 -0000

Great! This tumblr is way better than Facebook--and I don't even need to post embarrassing photos of myself in a hot-tub!

Re: Keith Gessen Blog - Dear Readers: I’m sorry I haven’t been as helpful...

kgessen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:33:25 -0000

Oh. Odd. Response to this on the Cossacks thread. http://keithgessen.tumblr.com/post/45901630/cos...

Re: cossacks

kgessen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:28:46 -0000

M, and I in turn am honored to have been confused with you.

Vadim! Thank you for this long and thoughtful comment. I agree with everything you say here--with some small exceptions I'll note below--100 percent. Just for the record, I've been a critic of every American intervention (including, rightly or wrongly, Afghanistan and Kosovo) since 1998. Cf. for example this: http://www.nplusonemag.com/designated-haters

What I was trying to describe in that post--and clearly it didn't come across quite right--is how one very quickly gets caught up in the emotional situation. Georgia clearly was the weaker party here. And Russia is no angel!

Just to go back a little, here's what I wrote:
---
For a while yesterday I was pretty firmly in the pro-intervention camp, alone perhaps among responsible Western commentators but shoulder to shoulder with the many YouTube commenters who kept assuring the Georgians that “help is on the way.” It was not on the way, but why not? I kept looking at that map. Sure our troops were stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan, but at the same time they’d love to actually fight a war again instead of going on “patrol” and taking sniper fire. And it’s not far! Look—Georgia is so close to Iraq! Now, Turkey wouldn’t let us use its air bases when we were invading Iraq, but this is different—the Turks hate Russia! They’d gladly let us play through.
---

Not to be pedantic, but I did say "for a while yesterday"--meaning, "not anymore." And the exclamation points indicate a certain distance from that reaction. And I don't think *anything* I've written here can be construed as an analysis or a position-taking on the Georgian situation, except my endorsement of the Vpered statement--which I did endorse. If you're saying it's my *responsibility* to take an independent position, that's another matter.

But all that isn't to say I was just kidding when I brought up my quixotic pro-interventionism. I was thinking as I wrote that of the debate over Kosovo--an intervention that was supported by the liberal interventionists not just at TNR but at Dissent--and I remember a letter Dissent received subsequently from I think Daniel Lazare, in which he pointed out that, yes, if you take a short enough view of things, *all* wars will seem like just wars. That is to say, if you don't dig back too far in the history, you'll want to intervene on the side of whoever is losing. *That's not a bad impulse*. It's a noble impulse. And--if I were trying to make a serious point instead of making a bit of a joke-point--the left needs to take that noble impulse seriously. The Vpered statement does that. The other articles that I've seen from the left--by Ames, by that guy in the Guardian--do not. They tell us Georgia is no angel and insult us by assuming that's all they needed to say, as if we felt like defending people because they were angels, rather than because they were in danger.

The other part of my point was: Here is an intervention one *could* make an argument for, from a number of perspectives, even if in the end it wouldn't be a very good argument--in a way that frankly the invasion of Iraq was totally indefensible. But part of the reason we couldn't even have an argument about a Georgian intervention was that we were bogged down in Iraq. (It seemed. It seems now like we think we have the capability to do it all.)

And the *other* part of my point was that there was an *immediate* consensus among the commentariat that actual military intervention was "unthinkable"--and I couldn't quite understand why. The process of how they got to that unthinkable was not made clear.

And, you know, when I was thinking those things Bush seemed intent on watching beach volleyball, and not interested in any sort of intervention. Now that we've actually sent "humanitarian aid" to counter their "peacekeepers"--oh boy. The real point to go back to, historically, is not that the Georgians have mistreated the Abhazians, but that we have no business being in Georgia--we just don't. Even if they were saints, and Nato were a community of saints, we still should not be trying to draw them into Nato.

The one thing I disagree with you about is Cohen and the Nation. They were not the only ones dissenting from the Washington Consensus in the 90s. And the way that they do it, which is essentially always to say that because the US is wrong, Russia can't be... it's a dead-end. As my friend Marco Roth says, "Someone needs to tell them that they don't need to defend the Soviet Union anymore." That's correct.

Re: readings

kgessen — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:58:24 -0000

Cool, that works. By taking it out of the library, you kept others from taking it out, meaning they had to go and buy it. Who knows how many? You may have sold a dozen books. So thank you.