Josh Schwartz

MONDAY

For several panicked hours on Friday, fans of Gossip Girl—and presumably, The O.C.—swamped message boards following the news that producers of the new CW show had offered former O.C. cast member Mischa Barton a role on G.G. as Georgina Sparks, an old chum of Serena van der Woodsen. A wave of invective ensued: “This is the dumbest idea I have ever heard,” wrote one irate commenter, “[M]ischa [B]arton is the most useless actress ever!!!” wrote another. Too harsh? Maybe … maybe not. Consider the history: Josh Schwartz, who now produces G.G., and the other O. C. producers opted to kill off Barton’s character, well before the show ran its course. Now they want her back?  read more »

In the new issue of the New Yorker, writer Nancy Franklin devotes some 1,600 words to digging into the CW’s New York-based coming-of-age drama series “Gossip Girl.” Her verdict?  read more »

For most of us, the universe of the Gossip Girl books can be a little mysterious. What is the meaning of all these places—the pizza shop, the 79th Street bus, that glam-sounding bar—that get name-checked so casually? We know from executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage that they’re using an amalgam of actual N.Y.C. school exteriors (Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute and the actual Upper East Side’s Russian Orthodox Synod of Bishops) in the television show, but which fancy-pants school in the book is supposed to be which?  read more »

The CW’s Gossip Girl—from teen-TV mastermind Josh Schwartz—goes to the heart of the city’s private-school elite and finds sex, drugs and a whole lotta drama.  read more »

In the October Harper's, Ben Marcus offers a lengthy state-of-the-novel essay, subtly titled Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It: A Correction, in which he spends 13 pages beating up Jonathan Franzen--snubber of Oprah and William Gaddis alike--and the middlebrow fiction establishment he represents.

Marcus' essay follows Franzen's own Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Perchance to Dream, from 1996. And Franzen's essay had followed Tom Wolfe's Harper's state-of-the-novel essay, Stalking the Billion-footed Beast, from 1989.

Using time-travel technology, The Media Mob has moved on to the year 2014 to read the next Harper's state-of-the-novel essay: Reading Harry Potter to The Machines: Crisis of Metaphor and Meaning in the Time of Our Robot Overlords by Josh Schwartz.

How do they all stack up?

Marcus: Experimental fiction is just as valid as mainstream fiction and deserves to be read despite critics like Franzen who think it a) is insulting and unreadable; and b) makes writers like himself feel dumb.

Franzen: Why isn't anyone reading anymore? Specifically, why isn't anyone reading young writers like Jonathan Franzen? He's good, I tell ya.

Wolfe: Fiction writers need to leave their comfort zone and do some reporting if they want to salvage the novel from preciousness.

Schwartz: These robots we built that control all aspects of our lives just don't get fiction.

Marcus: "As a writer of sometimes abstract, so-called experimental fiction that can take a more active attention to read, I would say that my ideal reader's Wernicke's area [of the brain] is staffed by an army of jumpsuited code-breakers, working a barn-size space that is strung about the rafters with a mathematically intricate lattice of rope and steel, and maybe gusseted by a synthetic coil that is stronger and more sensitive than either, like guitar strings made from an unraveled spinal cord, each strand tuned to different tensions. The conduits of language that flow past in liquid-cooled bone-hollows could trigger unique vibrations that resonate into an original symphony when my ideal reader scanned a new sentence."

Franzen: "The library America in which I found myself after I published The Twenty-Seventh City bore a strange resemblance to the St. Louis I'd grown up in: a once-great city that had been gutted and drained by white flight and superhighways. Ringing the depressed urban core of serious fiction were prosperous new suburbs of mass entertainments. Much of the inner city's remaining vitality was concentrated in the black, Hispanic, Asian, gay, and women's communities that had taken over the structures vacated by fleeing straight white males."

Wolfe: There's no such thing as a billion-footed beast, OK?

Schwartz: "0100000111110000011110000100010000010010100011001111011100001010111100001 110000010101010010011001100001100100001001000100100001000010001000010000101010101 0100000001000000100000010100000000000001100101011110101010101010111110101101111 0111100100111111110010011110101111010101010110111101011100010010011110111010111110 10111010101010001010110100011100111110001111110111101111110111111001111100111011100 1001100011100111101110011001101010." (The essay, such as it is, is written in binary code and hard-wired onto a ROM chip.)

Marcus: Numerous citations by bloggers, most of whom only read the excerpt online.

Franzen: The continuing existence of Jonathan Franzen.

Wolfe: Melanie Griffith's accent in Bonfire of the Vanities; The thoroughbred sex scene in Man in Full; I Am Charlotte Simmons.  read more »

Schwartz: Robots punished mankind with a mandatory curfew; Destruction of Harvard's Widener Library.