The race to the bottom of the too-cool-for-school intellectual barrel has been terribly exciting this week. For those not tracking the ins and outs of New York "intellectual culture," which isn't particularly either, a panel took place this week at The Kitchen, during which members of n+1 discussed "The Internet" with Moe Tkacik, who represents (a little early!) the fourth wave of confessional feminism. This was tied to a catfight that somehow involves Gawker, invasiveness, public and private life (though not yet in legal terms), the citizenry's ability to comprehend paragraphs of longer than two sentences and what heterosexual is sleeping with which other heterosexual on any given weekend. And also which of six Ivy League schools everyone happened to attend while or before they were sleeping with any particular heterosexual. But today, things get serious.

Writing on HIS TUMBLR, n+1 editor Keith Gessen recaps his involvement in the Great War Of 2008 For The Heart And Soul Of The Internet:

You know, in addition to thinking of the inspiration for this blog, Curt Schilling, I also often think of this essay Renata Adler wrote it must have been a decade ago for Harper's. It was about some bad experience she'd had in the media—I can't remember now—maybe it was because of some New Yorker memoirs she didn't like? The thing is, I remember that even at the time I couldn't remember. She'd taken so long to write the thing—and had been angry for so long, presumably—that by the time Harper's published it, no one even knew what she was talking about. And that wasn't very effective. Anyway, Harper's would never have let me use so many italics in my long rebuttal.

The piece to which Gessen refers was published in November of 2000, and ranks up there as one of the most important works on the media of the last few decades. (It is also included as the final piece in her 2002 collection Canaries in the Mineshaft, which I would send via Amazon to Gessen if only I knew his non-internet address.)

The story is this. In 2000, her book Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker inspired "no fewer than eight, arguably nine" pieces in the New York Times. The first four were about the book itself; the next four, including an editorial and a guest op-ed, concerned a single sentence. Felicity Barringer, who was covering media and who was married to a member of the editorial board, called to interview Adler about the sentence. Her piece appeared on the front page of the Business section. (Adler's sentence concerned Judge John J. Sirica, Chief Judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and said that he was "corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest" with "a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.")

Barringer was pissed, apparently, that Adler wouldn't explain herself; Adler explained that she was writing her own piece on the subject and would publish it when and where she wished. "Why don't you post it on the Internet?" Barringer asked. "You post a lot of your own pieces on the Internet, do you, Felicity?" Adler asked in return. (You see what I'm getting at.) The Barringer piece, published on April 3, 2000 was hostile and absurd, and she seemed particularly upset that no one showed any "urgency" to "resolve the issue." She also brought in FSG's Jonathan Galassi to trash Adler, which was very queer.

So the piece actually appeared in Harper's seven months after the Barringer piece. Which, in Internet time, is a lifetime. But what this piece actually documents, in retrospect, is the moment just before the public was successfully encouraged by corporations and political parties to mistrust the press. Adler writes: "I have always known, and even written, that the strongest, perhaps sole remaining taboo on freedom of expression, in this country, is any criticism of the press.... The Times, of course, is still drawing on trust and respect well earned some years ago." If only we were still in that situation!

There is an afterword to the Adler piece, in the collection, not in Harper's. It begins: "When I first wrote this piece, many journalists seemed to go more or less berserk." Not quite the same as "no one even knew what she was talking about." And:

"Some readers seemed bewildered by what I could have meant, in the piece, by 'totalitarian.' They seemed to think that it meant 'totalizing' or something. What I meant by a totalitarian reaction to a piece of writing was this: not debate (particularly not 'the free, robust, and wide-open debate' envisioned by the First Amendment); not even invective, or mockery, or expressions of rage, scorn, indignation, disdain, or argument of any sort. But advocacy of retraction, eradication, silencing."

The good news, at least, is that Gessen has no interest in totalitarianism, which seemed to be the working ethos of the early n+1 objection to blogging: That these people shouldn't say these things. (What can you do with these crazy people on the internet who didn't attend the same six colleges?) Gessen's even becoming a pretty good blogger.

This makes sense. For one thing, he's exhibited a hard time being edited in the past. (This is that one sentence about which someone might make a federal case, pun intended, as per the Adler v. Barringer situation, but let's just say I have the evidence and I would produce it when and where I feel I should, up to and including nowhere and never.) For another: Why not? It must feel good. He has even sometimes abandoned the comma in his writing, in a fit of the happy horse being freed from the stables. I only hope it doesn't end up in (his) tears. We've been told—by the New York Times, again!—that blogging is terribly dangerous. That may even be true.

In any event, for the record, I have not read the works of this "Curt Schilling" person to which Gessen refers but I look forward to seeing them in a bookstore near me.