In which our correspondent would accept a little backstabbing — and front-stabbing — if it meant a Toronto media scene worth gossiping about.
New York magazine, long committed to reporting on the lives and events of the tittering classes, recently offered up some space to a dissenter. In the magazine's online Daily Intelligencer section, a Frances Bean Cobain-looking NYU student named Jessica Roy was quoted at length via her blog, about her disillusionment with the New York media, specifically the downtown, youth-driven segment of the print and online media that swings literary: not slouching newsroom hacks, nor the children of Vice or Paper, these are occasional New Yorker and The New York Times contributors; more often New York magazine freelancers; the staff and hangers-on of lit mag n + 1.
The participants in this world are quadruple-rarefied. The real score is cool and hyper-educated and rich (though poor is passable with other, exemplary credentials), and it's best, as always, to be great looking. They are ultra-American, high-functioning, highly publicized, hot-branded with their Ivy League affiliations. They are characterized by privilege, inherited or doggedly pursued. They are recognizable from years of literary glamorization, and from your daily Internet go-round.Implicated in Jessica Roy's Caulfieldian diatribe are various Gawker staffers, tragicomedy exhibitionist Emily Gould and author/n + 1 editor Keith Gessen. Roy's ranty assessment of coke, nerd sex, self-righteous hyperbole and other party tricks of the flawed but average literary social life is pretty naive, and also warranted. Still. In a fair number of ways, including some gross youth-envy (kid's spending this semester in Paris, and has a few years less of RSI and sun damage and jadedness than I do), I envy Roy. At the very least, she lives in a town that's balls-out. I do not: Roy's rant would never be published in Toronto.The social world of Toronto media is boring, a kind of insidious boring that has consequences. Sure, Toronto lacks the vicious public backstabbing (and front-stabbing) of the New York media octagon, but we also miss out on the attendant adventure, intrigue, insider-ness and truly constructive criticism that comes with such institutional aggression.
What Jessica Roy identifies as social dangers, or at least compromises, have significant rewards. Ruthless competition among the upstarts to get published in the same few places is responsible for the success of gossip sites and city magazines, but also an ongoing regeneration of the old guard, which translates into big, viable online properties and new, maybe viable magazines (astounding in an economy that's grinding down print media like so many wasted cigarettes). In her original blog post, Roy calls the New York media an "elite, nefarious world where people trade intellect like currency." Exactly.
The long-discussed humble reservedness of Toronto, despite an enviable literary tradition, acts to prevent the media here from even approaching the buzz of Young NYC. As a non-wunderkind, mostly ignorant kid, I knew at least enough to head south to get started in writing. Somehow, despite a delicate constitution and a clingy relationship with my sleepy Ontario hometown and sweet parents, I sensed that my inclination would be toward writing that was nasty and brutish, short on precision but long on an emerging sensibility of noisy dissent, sex jokes, and eventually, more measured provocation.
I wrote mostly for U.S. alternative weeklies for some years, until I agreed to teach a class on Creative Journalism in Toronto this fall and commit to at least a few months of full-time Toronto living. Scary, because what's fun in California is usually considered gauche in Canada, which always carries with it a professional seriousness. Toronto is smart, but gutless. What drives party lore, editorial respect and reader click-throughs in the U.S. (well, not the conservative parts, but who cares about them?) rarely appears in the Toronto-based media.
Compare Toronto Life to New York magazine. Regularly shit on for its Rosedale-coloured glasses, Toronto Life lacks entirely the kinetic luminescence of New York, but is the kind of magazine that could, theoretically, also choose to gleefully discuss the plastic surgery of our biggest names, the dwindling punk rock community, the most transgressive local art. Safe is too easy to get right, as is the all-consuming earnestness of Spacing, Torontoist, BlogTO and the rest of it. This city has needed these outlets (and also Wavelength and the uTOpia series and their similars) to build a sense of self-confidence. But none of them address this other stuff, this gore, that we need to talk about to be real and relevant. By their very/current nature, they can't.
Even the New Yorker has offered windy diatribes on teenage It Girls, just because they're sexy and fun, and people are interested in people who are sexy and fun. It is entirely necessary that Toronto's media owns up to the collective sensibility of tepid inadequacy, a common editorial agenda that talks guns and drugs and sex without any blood or high or come. We don't need mindless provocation for its own sake, just a collective pursuit of something better and more worthwhile.Our careful and passive-aggressive national character is, indeed, a thing. Adding to this our tiny size and matching scope, this city's collective of young and youngish writers, editors, publishers and readers are hardly able to participate in any ongoing incitation of new ideas and methods, of offensives and defensives that might somehow offer literary levity. It's not really done. While gossip, the kind that fuels both Gawker and many journalists' sense of ego and social investment, is dumb, it encourages both social cohesion and competitiveness, bearing nerve.There's some of it, here, some excitement, which I know for sure because I am informed of the sagas and punch-outs and hookups and breakups of an incestuous handful of Toronto media characters. Like any city, Toronto's junior creative class is intertwined at all points. However, at all levels, we fail to produce any real glamour. The personalities that drive media interest here, one supposes, involve the likes of Leah McLaren, a much-derided figure who actually writes well but takes great pains to render herself average on a weekly basis, opting to use her coveted weekly space to write about her garden rather than the fuckery of the young urban female experience. Who else? The National Post society guy? I guess?
We have no Julia Allison, the current Wired cover star, and centre of much debate on media celebrity; no Sloane Crosley, PR teacup and author of the celebrated essay collection I Was Told There'd Be Cake, no Jared Kushner, the born-in-the-'80s New York Observer owner/babe. We do have a wide swath of talented writers, some of whom are really, really good, but a sluggish general interest in their professional or personal machinations. I really shouldn't have to get my media gossip via email or Facebook.Most literary people are tremendous nerds: caring about syntax and spelling, springing boners for re-reads of "Politics and the English Language," and loving books or magazines or newspapers enough to hustle for low pay, constant criticism and a tenuous place in a shriveling industry does invite them into an unflappable club of insiders for whom waxing rhapsodic gives way to frantically reading aloud better work in darker hours. It's shit, but fun.
The communion of excitable, tortured, competitive souls in New York is working off of specific examples from a long tradition of catty, urbane, self-involved commentary. From Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote to Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe to Graydon Carter and Spy magazine to Nick Denton and his bitchy Gawker empire, the NY media circus is ordered and replenished by an anxious, aggressive, semi-twisted sense of value, but value nonetheless. And these are quality writers. Their culture of gossip, and really, its pointed criticism, has paid off.
Here, we don't value each other's social contribution enough to give half a shit, or to start up Gawkers of our own. We don't tend to think that our jobs or writing or magazines matter enough to make fun of, and when we do talk smack, it's usually because we're embarrassed. Even the lone attempt at published satire, the on-again/off-again media and politics rag Frank, is lame and ineffectual.
It's a good and common impulse, to be nice and polite, but such collective support necessarily becomes insulting. Toronto's media lambs look to each other for permission and guidance and precedent, and the challenge of keeping the lights on and holding down one of a few good jobs usually trumps the prospective of challenging the literary mandate. In Toronto, we rarely bare our teeth. But, and I'm sure of this, we do have teeth to bare, and I would happily submit to the ravages of Jessica Roy's social media nightmare if it meant writing something I want to read.
Toronto news and views, updated every day. torontonotes@eyeweekly.com.