The piece is personally gratifying because of my admittedly tangential connection to the New York media blog. It's a concise and effective punchline to a setup that got going when Sulky brought me on board to write (very) few posts for the abortive Gawker Weekend project.
As a weekend editor, Sulks had gone through hell, spending each Saturday and Sunday doom-and-glooming over what to include on G-Weekend. He knew that Choire's vision made Gawker important and that he'd, at least formerly, thought very highly of the site. When he brought me on board, I was flattered. When I saw something I wrote on the site, I felt pride.
But during those few weeks, we started to get sadder about the Gawk. I pitched a couple ideas that Sulky thought were beneath the site. One Monday, I noticed that an idea I'd had was independently developed into a post by the weekday editors. This tells less of a story about Sulky's poor judgment (he was right not to like my idea) and more of one about the emerging cracks in Gawker's veneer, the sinking hill that had been their moral high ground.
If you're going to clown on media for having dumb ideas, you'd better have standards. After Sulks quit and Gawker Weekend died, leaving me with only an extremely dubious connection with the site (but with a firmer-looking connection depicted on my resume), we started taking a more critical eye to the blog we'd once admired so greatly and from whose halcyon days I'll admit to taking not a few stylistic cues.
By the time I'd moved to NYC, I'd come to hate Gawker. The comments section was filled with a mass of vitriol. The readers often contented themselves to assert that "I hate [subject of post]." The jabs seemed aimless, and it became progressively less clear who the good guys were. The opening volleys against a recently unassailable institution shot out.
It got to a point where Sulky rightly pointed out that Gawker should just end. The job is done, the metamorphosis complete. The Internet is firmly on at least equal footing with major media. Why continue?
Emily's post signals, in a sense, that finality. It's certainly the case that she and Choire were the only people posting lately who even looked like they knew what they were doing, and they brought the most heart to the project. They may be replaced by similar writing talent, but Gawker's reign as leader of critical-minded media youth has likely ended with their departure. And good riddance, given what it's become.
That is the part of Emily's post that is personally gratifying.
What should have broader appeal is that the piece is a masterwork of personal writing.
No sooner had I entered my apartment Saturday morning, back from my Friday midnight run to Atlantic City, than Sulks asked, "Did you see the Internet yesterday?"
"No."
"Go to Gawker."
I sat in the living room reading the piece. I said four sentences out loud while my roommate cut some sharp cheddar and put it on crackers.
"Whoa."
"Oh my God."
"No way."
"Thank you. This is the best thing I've read in a long time."
The piece plays to strengths of Gould's that Gawker's tone and style had managed to hide. The girl is funny and has a quick eye for observation, something that's worked well in the Gawk's detail-oriented flaw-magnifying universe. But as can be seen in her blog, she can evoke sadness, loneliness, and vulnerability in crisp, bright images that are the more moving for their apparent effortlessness. Of course, there's little room for that kind of thing at Gawker.
Read the piece. The recurring motifs -- inevitable disaster, everyone's personal view to the decline of New York, the intersection of the personal with the professional -- feel completely hashed out in spite of the brevity (oddly, commentary on the thing includes a main observation that it is an over-long post for Gawker).
The image that makes the piece's primary implication so delicious illustrates the writing horsepower that had been behind Gawker's now-departed driving spirits:
The Statue of Liberty looked like a little dashboard adornment beyond the B.Q.E.
Unpacking this sentence seems vulgar, but I can't really help myself. It says we who are involved in this media process, who are secondary and tertiary or dramadairy to the development of New York's cool, who are the "creative underclass," who live in Brooklyn, have forgotten some very basic elements of New York's enduring cultural centrality. I reacted to that line in two ways.
1) Am I actually being moved by a Gawker post? Despite diligent but failed attempts over the past few months to feel a twinge at emotion at anything I come across on the written page in McSweeney's or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even (gulp) The New Yorker, I was getting all tingly over a blog post, a handful of paragraphs.
2) I can't write like this.
This is a form-matches-content tour de badass that illustrates in its liberated formal techniques the very things that it disusses. In other words, it says implicitly by being better-written than a Gawker post can be what exactly is wrong with Gawker.
I'm thoroughly impressed by the bravery, skill, and finesse Gould shows here.
Whatever words continue to appear at gawker.com on Monday, Sulky and I have gotten our wish. Gawker is over. Thanks, Emily.
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