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An invitation-only meeting of The New Inquiry, a "scrappy" online journal that offers literary essays and media criticism. The meeting takes place weekly in a clandestine bookstore (a "literary speakeasy of sorts") on the Upper East Side. Described in this NYT article.
Who?
"Members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment," meeting to discuss lofty topics such as Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.
In reality:
A circle-jerk of over-educated, underemployed elitists who think they're above the publishing and literary industry just because they cannot find the jobs they want.
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Believe it or not, I'm not here to mock the content of The New Inquiry. The journal is for the most part well-written and thought provoking, albeit incredibly pretentious at times. So let it be.
My problem, of course, is with the holier-than-thou attitudes of the 20-somethings who attend these weekly meetings. If you wanna sit around with your college buddies talking about the ins and outs of poststructuralism, be my guest. But don't you dare project an identity of an underdog struggling to make it in a city that just won't accept your brilliance. What did you say to the writer of this article to make her call you the "city's literary underclass"? Who do you think you are: starving, radical writers who just won't get acknowledged by the mainstream? (This isn't even true, because The New Inquiry has endorsements from Jonathan Lethem and other big-shots). One attendee, a junior at Columbia, comes to the New Inquiry meetings to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.” Don't you just love 19-year-olds who think they're smarter than everyone else?
Give me a freaking break. The people in this article are just bitter because they are over-educated and cannot find jobs. Helena, a recent Columbia undergrad, was apparently rejected from a top magazine. Rachel, a 2009 Barnard graduate, lost all interest in the publishing industry after a disillusioning internship at The New Yorker. Rebecca, with a Masters from Columbia in English and comparative lit, couldn't even get an unpaid internship. This article was written on her 25th birthday, but she was sad, "having graduated summa from Cornell, with a master’s from Columbia, only to find [herself] unemployed and back living at home with your parents." Frustrated and wallowing in self-pity and self-indulgence, it's clear that Rebecca and her friends attend the New Inquiry "salons" to stroke and fuel their elitist egos.
Boo Fucking Hoo.
Publishing is hard to get into -- I would know. But I will say this: the moment I graduated from undergrad (from a school not as good as Columbia), every single internship I applied to got back to me the next day. So I'm not sure why Rebecca had such bad luck. Could it have been that she went off to "write on a farm in upstate New York" for several months? And how could Rachel let the goings-on at The New Yorker, literally the most obnoxious publication on the planet, get her down about the entire NYC publishing world?
The real problem, I think, goes back to unbridled elitism. These girls aren't interested in working for just any publisher or magazine. They aren't interested in working for an unknown independent press or a big-time corporation like Random House. They need the perfect middle ground, a fine specimen of gritty intellectualism, fine writing, and underdog charm. And of course, it has to be trendy. Why else would The New Inquiry, in all of its self-imagined ruggedness, hold their "social debut" at the ritzy, hipster-chic Jane Hotel? Why else would they partner with Google and New Directions (a prominent indy press) and quiver in pleasure when a Vanity Fair writer criticized one of their essays via Twitter?
These New Inquiry club attendees are nothing but intellectually-masturbatory literary social climbers. Which would be just fine (albeit disturbing), if only the NYT writer had not called them the "literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment." It's not a freaking "establishment," and they're not barred. They just need to try harder to find a job.
