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What's going on? Is the Dave Eggers Protective Brigade in action?
"Official" literary web sites like SALON.COM won't touch this
story. I guess they write about favorites like Moody and Eggers
only by groveling to them. SALON is so status-quo it's a joke.
NEW YORK magazine interviewed me in person Tuesday (March 5th) for
a story they were to run. Now the story's been "pushed back." What
up? It would've been a hatchet job anyway--that was the definite
drift I received.
As for the famous killed ATLANTIC article itself (and why no
quotes from that rag about this?)--much of the article is pure
crap. Like this:
"Like many of the significant cultural critics of his
generation--most notably Tom Frank, editor of the Chicago-based
BAFFLER, and Joshua Glenn, editor of the Boston-based
HERMENAUT--Eggers emerged from an early 1990's zine subculture
that, inspired in part by the punk scene of the decades before,
had declared war on the predigested products of the mainstream
media."
Funny how all the high-brow game players tried to gain credibility
by hitching their wagons to the zine scene. What in fact Eggers,
Glenn, Jim Munroe, Jim Romenesko, Keith Gessen and company were
doing is slumming, wearing the guise of zinesterism while they
racked up ivory tower credentials and careerist big media
assignments; while the jargon overeducated words coming out of
their mouths were little different from the regurgitated
pseudo-intellectual crap of the mainstream. They're all phonies.
Hold ZEEN BEAT in your hands and you know you have a zine. With
HERMENAUT, MCSWEENEY'S, and other slick unreadable product of that
ilk one can never be certain. These pretenders are in fact members
of the cognoscenti; literary-bureaucrats-in-waiting. At best,
they're Gorbachev-like reformers. But to the ULA, the mass media
can't be reformed, only overthrown, destroyed, and replaced.
---King Wenclas