As Jezebel notes elsewhere, this bomb-throwing freelancer revenge rant burns bridges with admirable abandon. Been a while since I’ve read one quite so fun and strange. It’s a tough trick to write this, for instance:
We left Paris and went to the south of France to write the piece that I had promised would be 10,000 words. The Riviera is the perfect place to make you forget what a schmuck you are.
and retain any of the reader’s sympathy. Certainly it weakens the writer’s later “broke writer” lament. But who cares? Somehow, at least for this dear reader, Jacques pulls it off. I wonder what he’ll do for a living now.
Grab the popcorn. Elle on Earth, by Jacques Hyzagi, at The Observer.
Realizing I was dealing with a power angry maniac I called the meeting off and stood her up. Almost-famous people have a tendency to act even more obnoxiously than the famous ones. Graydon Carter, who knows a thing or two about fame, has this parable about a peasant like me arriving in New York from his hamlet and trying to make it in the big city like in a Balzac novel. The provincial enters a dark room and tries to find a door that will enable him to enter another room and so on until he finally reaches success but at each room the door to the next is more difficult to find. Usually in New York society very few arrivistes make it past the first room. I have no idea what he’s talking and it’s probably why his magazine is a giant bore.
I chose Edith Wharton when time came to learn about New York social cues and suffice to say there was no mirth in the house of ELLE. I thought the hell with it I’ll go somewhere else but by then CDG was set on ELLE and the Guardian, the same outlets I had to work (is it clear here that it was CDG I had to convince into accepting the outlets?) hard in convincing in the first place. I understood that once you set the process forward with the egomaniac genius and precise designer, the slightest change might send the whole apparatus crashing. Too often the fear instilled by mediocrity and incompetence, the two tits that nourish capitalistic societies, can only feed the beast if patterns and routines are kept as is. The slightest changes might unravel the whole company because they will unveil a paper-like deus ex machina.
