My friend Kevin will often describe the way he’s feeling as “internet” — as in, “I’m feeling internet today.” That feeling, we decided, is a combination of boredom, overstimulation and hypomania that comes with having too many options and yet returning to all the same places you know. It explains how I can sift through a photo album of my ex-boyfriend on an interpretative theatre sojourn to Europe, poke my Mom and then become a fan of socialism.
Jonathan Goldsbie provides intelligent commentary:
Chandler Levack does the self-indulgent thing better than her colleague (and sometime boss?) Kate Carraway does. Though her writing is no less self-consciously self-conscious than Carraway’s, no less a part of a long-term identity-construction project in which she assumes we are all interested, what makes her a superior professional masturbator is an understanding of the emotional rhythm of writing.
Milton Berle once explained the cadence of comedy to Richard Ouzounian by “tapping at the script like Morse code: ‘Dit-dit-dit-dot, dit-dit-dit-dot, dit-dit-dit-joke.’” You could break down Chandler’s writing as irony-irony-irony-Klosterman, irony-irony-irony-Klosterman, irony-irony-irony-ohGodI’mlonely. And you know what? It works. It’s effective. It’s the approach I took when I used to write primarily about myself (though of course my allusions weren’t to Klosterman but rather my own adolescent pop heroes). The witty detachment renders the soul-baring honesty more affecting.
And so although the majority of sentences in her epic feature on Facebook elicit predictable eyerolling and the urge to utter snarky things on Twitter, they are interspersed with admissions of vulnerability that I both sympathize with and respect her for making. Maybe it’s because, unlike with Carraway, I (kind of?) know Chandler in real life and thus see her writing as the product of a concrete person rather than a shrill abstraction, but her occasional moments of sincerity come across as plausible (if deliberate) ruptures in the vocational-hipster persona.
Jason Richards provides painfully unfunny "satire":
When you try to attempt to quit Hotmail, a window appears on the screen that says "Internet Explorer has shut down unexpectedly." Ignore it. 30 seconds later, the window will close on its own and the affable voice of an Australian man says: "OK, you got us. We were just trying to distract you. Good job, mate."
SMAD provides Richards with a new orifice via NOW
comment board:
Wow. Do you feel like a big man, Jason? Do you? What a total fucking smug whistling rectum you are. You tried to rip the shit out of a 23-year-old who wrote an article to try to pay her rent. If you worked for Harper's and you were subtly deconstructing a New Yorker article, that would be one thing. But you work for NOW-FUCKING-MAGAZINE. You are pointless editorial copy that supports escort ads. Go get an intern to lick your balls under the table at The Rhino whilst enjoying a Zlatopramen you pathetic, shitty, horrible fuck.
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