nick antosca (interview)

i am in bold; nick is centered

it starts with nick:

We are the roommates in question here and here. Both of those stories are the result of *this email exchange, begun by me [Tao: THE EMAIL EXCHANGE IS A FOOTNOTE AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS]. I will discuss that in more detail later on.

Last week, on the same day, you and I both got book deals with separate independent presses. I was pleased, even though we made almost no money. We made almost no money because you didn't want to write about the trials of the immigrant experience and I didn't want to write a potboiler about college students investigating a pseudo-historical mystery. And neither of us has rich relatives who run publishing companies.

My parents are rich. So are yours probably. I told Jami Attenberg she was rich. She denied it. Everyone denies being rich. If you are not homeless, if you can afford to eat out, then, to me, you are rich. I'm tired of people denying they are rich. When I have like $200 in the bank I go around saying that I'm rich. If I buy blueberries I eat them thinking, ‘I am rich.' If you can buy things you are rich. A homeless man is not rich. I think my parents are in debt somehow. Or else they’ve declared bankruptcy. Still, they are rich. I tell them all the time they are rich. They deny it too. If someone is carrying a twenty-dollar bill I will say, ‘You are rich.’

People deny facts. To avoid embarrassment, guilt, and feelings of either not being ‘macho’ enough, ‘superior’ enough, or ‘hard-working’ enough. Someone emailed me about your Gawker email. They emailed, ‘ewwww. ewwww. ewwww.’ They thought it was gross that you tried to get publicity on a gossip blog. They did not think clearly. Their response is the same as a person responding to homosexuality by going ‘ewwww. ewwww. ewwww.’ Later I will explain this more.

I didn't try to get publicity on a gossip blog. I have no interaction with gawker. I sent an email to a classmate at the New York Daily News.

I was not so excited at a book deal. A book deal means the book will be there. Life is boring. About two people have ever appreciated my writing in the same way I do. Not that being appreciated in a concurrent way with my own appreciation is so exciting. It isn't. It just feels good. Maybe there is no basis in reality why it should feel good. What is good about thinking the same way as someone else? I’m not sure. It might just be the same thing as thinking that homosexuality is ‘ewwww. ewwww. ewwww.’

I don't know what can be called 'exciting.' Maybe jumping across glaciers.

I was there when you told Jami Attenberg she was rich. It was pretty awkward. You didn't say it like, "You, Jami Attenberg, are rich in the sense that all people who have their health and can afford to eat are rich." It was more like, "You got a book deal for many thousands of dollars and now you're rich. I didn't, and I'm not."

But now you do have a book deal, although not for many thousands of dollars. Same with me. You wrote a surreal story collection about people who seem to be dying, and giant squids washing up on beaches. I wrote a surreal novel with herds of deer wandering through a burning suburb, and a person locked in a basement for ten years. Your collection is called Bed; my novel is called Fires. I wrote the first draft of this novel three years ago. I don't know when you wrote your collection.

About Jami. Yes, it may have been awkward. But this feeling of awkwardness is, again, I think, the same one one might feel for, say, homosexuality. The discomfort comes from kinds of preconceptions, which come from history, books, TV, society, the government, etc. not from concrete reality as un-screwed with by those things I just listed. If I think she is rich, so what. If one thinks clearly, then me saying, ‘You are pretty!’ would be the same as me saying, ‘You are rich!’ Where does the awkwardness come from? Probably from guilt. No one wants to be viewed as ‘rich.’ Rappers like to be called rich, I guess. If I call certain people ‘homosexuals’ they will take that as a terrible insult and beat the shit out of me. And kill me.

I wrote BED one story after the other junior and first half of senior year at NYU. Then one story a while later. The last story took like 300 hours. The others like 150 hours each. Which is embarrassing. James Frey would not say he is embarrassed by how long he worked on a story. He might be afraid that people would perceive him as a ‘pussy,’ if he said that. I guess. I don’t know him. What if I got a tattoo of a pink hamster on my face? I want to. People will feel discomfort. Those who feel no discomfort can be my friends.

Everybody feels discomfort, except for a heroin addict with an unlimited supply of heroin. Could there be such a thing as a Platonic supply of heroin? I can't write slowly. I write fast or I get bored. Lately I'm mostly occupied by drafts of stories and manuscripts I have already written. I've been entertaining myself though by writing very short stories late at night. Here, for example, is one I wrote just before I fell asleep last night.

I dug a clot of hair and teeth out of my arm this morning. After I cleaned off the blood and bandaged the wound, I set the wet little thing on the table and examined it with proprietary amazement, like a cat sniffing something it has just coughed up or killed.

Wow, I thought. Now there's something you don't often do.

A summer rainstorm had recently passed, and the cool air coming in the kitchen window smelled fresh and earthwormy. I touched the thing on the table with my fingertip. It was small—nothing more than two smooth, tiny teeth about the size of dried peas plus some thin, wrinkled hairs, all of it gummed together with unidentifiable grayish tissue. Looking at the thing made me sad.

Once I thought about it, of course, I knew whose hair and teeth had been buried inside my arm. (Buried is a good word. The effect of discovering them—or, rather, realizing who they belonged to—was the same as if I'd torn up the floorboards of my house and found the corpse of a long-forgotten aunt stuffed in there, mummified and smelling of death.) After all, the teeth were unnaturally small, almost dwarfish.

I got a warm, familyish feeling in my heart.

My little brother!

On Tuesday I was thinking about the things that have affected how I write. Not necessarily the things I like the most, but the things that have most directly influenced my ideas. Those things are Calvin and Hobbes and the Marquis de Sade.

Lately I've been feeling 'fucked.' My pleasures in life are now (1) expressing this 'fucked' feeling in poems and my novel, (2) eating, and (3) vandalism. I have about $1600. Jobs give me despair.

You (I mean you personally) don't need a full-time job, except maybe for health insurance. You don't have student loans, so you only need money for living expenses. Jobs give most people despair. I work as an assistant in an office. I’m grateful to have a job.

I have stopped eating, just about. I've been unwell for some time and I have no appetite. I just eat a few handfuls of cereal a day and maybe an egg.

I wish I had the skills to charm people easily. When I meet someone who I don't like but who I have to pretend to like, I feel as if the smile I'm trying to hold in place is going to jump off my head, grab a kitchen knife, and stab that person through the brain.

That's how I felt around many people I went to college with.

I do not need a full-time job. You are right. Two people have told me to get unemployment. I do not have student loans. This is embarrassing. The embarrassment is irrational, has no basis in concrete reality. Therefore I won’t let it be there. But I will let the guilt be there. Guilt for reasons like being alive. Is it absurd to feel guilt for being alive because it precludes the possibility of someone else being in my place? Maybe the unborn should feel guilt for not existing. Depends on perspective. I sound like Joy Williams. She says that. ‘The unborn.’

You are a better charmer than me by far and you must admit this. Even if I like someone it is difficult to appear interested. I read Fernando Pessoa and Schopenhauer. After I read certain things much of the illusion of everything else that exists goes away. This isn’t true for everyone. Benjamin Kunkel read Pessoa’s The Book of Disquet, he has an article in the Believer about it, and he dismissed the book, sort of. Now he is all about success. In his book the guy is all about helping people in the end. Pessoa was all about not helping people because of not knowing whether or not, say, giving a homeless person $100 would actually help it. Not in the sense that if the homeless person would be happier or not, but in a more comprehensive sense, like, ‘Is happiness what the homeless person wants? What does the universe want for it’s people? What is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad,’ and from whose perspective?’ Which to me is obviously the more clearly, unpreconceptionedly thought out philosophy. Yet Kunkel read it and somehow did not process it in that way.

I haven’t read Kunkel’s book and probably won’t.

We live, with a third roommate who shall go unnamed out of respect for her privacy, in a one-bedroom apartment divided by fake walls.

The apartment is essentially a long, narrow, dark corridor. Almost no natural light gets in. Does its resemblance to a birth canal ever fill you with a sort of queasy dread? How about my codeine-influenced fingerpainting (I call it "Norman Rockwell Headbirth") that covers an entire wall? We really need to paint over that.

Also, I found some little tables in the refuse room this morning as I was leaving for work. They're perfectly fine. I put them in the living room.

I feel nauseous dread. Yes. I saw those tables but did not comment. I do not comment. I drink my soymilk and walk to my room and sit on my bed.

Let's dispel a wrong impression that this guy (and by the way, I wonder who emailed him) seems to have: while you are my roommate, you are not a yale alum. You went to NYU. We should clarify this--first because most people don't like "yalies" and second because I would not be inclined ever to have one as a roommate again. (My last college roommate, an alcoholic with certain other addictions to boot, wept constantly, smashed windows, and punched holes in walls. When I said something like, "Listen, stop punching holes in the walls. Maybe you can afford to lose the deposit, but I can't," he said, "It's okay, we'll just hang a picture over it. That's what we do at home when my dad punches a hole in the wall.") So, you are from NYU. There is no collegiate connection between us. We met because we both had stories published in Opium Magazine.

Also, almost everyone I knew from college is now living off their parents' money--doing nothing or working in some sort of fun unpaid internship on mom and dad's dime. Unfortunately, you are wrong--my parents are not rich. One year when I was a kid, my dad, who I love and who is a musical genius, made $15,000 in the whole year. Now they're doing a lot better, but before that, when we lived in New Orleans, he would go around and paint houses or something. Then some people dumped our car in the river and threatened to kill us, so we moved out of New Orleans. I was four. As soon as I finish paying off my own debt (did you know that when you graduate, yale gives you a little clay pipe and some soap to blow bubbles with? this is true.), I'll start helping my parents pay off theirs. Which is all to say that I don't socialize with my former classmates much, the exception being [name removed], who you've seen around the apartment from time to time.

I still think your parents are rich. My parents were poor in Taiwan growing up. My dad ate like one bowl of rice a day. Still, if I saw him eating that rice I would call him rich. Anyone not a boy in Africa, one of those you see that look like skeletons, is rich.

People love to compete with others on how hard they have it. It’s a massive sort of distraction and waste of time not unlike creating work for yourself at work so as to appear busy and not get fired. I say ‘distraction’ and ‘waste of time.’ I mean if your goal in life is to reduce pain and suffering in the world. Some people go out of their way to have a shitty life then talk about the shittiness. Some people go out of their way to have a ‘shitty’ life, like by helping people all the time, being conscious of where their money is going, being conscious of, say, animals, then they talk about the ‘happiness,’ they are getting from not being a ‘shitty’ influence on the world. I do both I think. Most people do both. I need to have people I know who call me on my shit.

When I type these things I try not to think about myself, I just type as if a computer, having the facts be here.

I would rather paint 'Starbucks is Retarded' on Starbucks than win the Nobel Prize.

In the “big,” sense of starving people in Africa, yes, we are all rich. That, obviously, is not the sense I am talking about. I fear debt more than death or injury. I don’t know why, but it’s always been that way.

I was unaware that you've been vandalizing things lately. Don't get caught. We need your share of the rent. I haven't done anything illegal since college. Here the chances of getting caught are higher and I have a lot more to lose.

People need more guilt in the world. Start at the bottom, at the most miserable of conditions, and let the guilt come up but from the top to the bottom. I like it when a writer writes in the ‘big’ sense all the time. When they don’t ever exclude any information. Don’t block things out, don’t create a context less than the universe, which is a mystery. Therefore don’t have a context. I'm tired of everything I think, by the way, right now.

Someone said they want to screen what I post on my blog. Not to let me post something if it’ll ‘hurt my career.’ If they were not being ironic then they do not understand me or what I have typed on this site. I want anything but conventional success. Why would I critique society, Salman Rushdie, and Susan Sontag, the ‘establishment,’ then make it my goal to ‘become’ the ‘establishment’? People think I’m stupid.

In the real world, it often seems like you would like a form of conventional success. You talk a lot about advances other writers got, etc. When I first met you, we would be walking down the street or something, not speaking, and suddenly you would be like, “I need to sell a book,” and I would be like, “Yeah.” That happened more than once, like maybe six or seven times. I’m not criticizing that. I was probably thinking the same thing, just not saying it out loud.

You are right. I do say that. I do want conventional success. But not as an ends in itself. I want it in order to have more authority to call people on their bullshit, to undermine the kind of success that is an ends to itself, and to get interviews in, like, The New Yorker where I can say things that I currently say on this site to about two hundred people to like two hundred thousand people.

Also, hmm, in real life I like to say, ‘I need to sell a book,’ because I think it’s funny. Especially after not speaking. But I’ve had this site since we met. And if you look at the posts from the beginning this site is pretty much a questioning of ‘success.’ In real life I cannot say what I say on my site except to like one person. It’s too alienating and depressing.

People think irony is somehow immature, insincere, or ‘unhelpful.’ I think it’s less exclusionary. Consciousness itself is ironic in that it’s a kind of pretending. There’s nothing to be taken serious in the world. Seriousness is just a way of excluding information, maybe. So when I say something in real life it is never serious. Unless it’s asking ‘why,’ after having asked ‘why’ many times and reached the last ‘why.’ Something like that.

1982, Janine. People's Act of Love. These are some books I'm reading and liking right now.

I like about eight books. Writers are assholes more than other people are assholes. Does there even exist a book, in the world, that does not contain a cliche of language ('in the face of,' 'at the top of her lungs,' 'the small of his back,' etc.)?

Cliches can be manipulated to great effect. Some books use phrases like the ones you mention and it's fine. Not every book is purely about language or mood, which most of your stories are concerned with. That would be boring. Some books are purely about story or character, and that's fine. I don't share your indifference to plot. My favorite books have every element in balance. Books like Ada or Waterland.

You are right. Me thinking badly about clichés probably has the same basis in reality as someone thinking badly about, like, the color blue. I like it when someone calls me on my shit. Here’s a quote from a band called Propagandhi: ‘I’ll call you on your shit / Please call me on mine / We can grow together / Make this shithole planet better / In time.’

I think James Frey would call me a pussy if I said that. Most people might. That quote itself though assumes things, contains preconceptions. Pessoa would not care for it much. ‘Better,’ ‘Shithole,’ ‘Shit,’ and ‘Grow,’ are all preconceptions. No one knows what is ‘better.’ And one person’s ‘better’ is not another person’s ‘better.’ And without preconception there is no such thing as ‘better.’

Oh, why don't you talk about your NYU research project on - what was it? Fact-checking in blogs?

I lied to Gawker and Curbed to have fun because life was boring and stupid.

Why has it been so fucking cold lately? Are my violent shaking spells normal? Should I see a doctor?

The flu made me sad.

Seriously, about once every couple hours for the past week I've begun to shiver so violently I can't pick up a glass until it's ended. It's definitely not withdrawal, since I'm too poor to buy drugs that aren't prescribed to me. Onset of nerve disease, perhaps? This is true.

I have a poem about this. I don’t want to post it here. Joshua Beckman’s new poetry book is called SHAKE. It’s good. One poem he’s like, ‘Put down your cell phone. I’m sad.’

We don't have publicists. We probably won't ever have publicists. And we don't have useful connections, family or academic or otherwise. So we better do something ourselves if we don't want our books to vanish.

When I'm interviewed I'm going to call Kate Braverman, Susan Sontag, etc. on their bullshit. This will interest all the gossip people. Maybe I can mud wrestle Susan Sontag’s corpse and get shot out of a cannon through a rainbow. The rainbow connection. I don’t know.

I heard a guy named Nicholas Christopher say in a lecture that Susan Sontag was a plaigiarist, but what is Kate Braverman's bullshit?

I feel tired of explaining people’s bullshit. I will save this for other interviews. No one will believe me anyway. I use only facts, yet people try to argue with me. I think a large percentage of people with ‘educations’ view the world through abstractions, preconceptions, and other things that don’t actually exist. Each abstraction, preconception, or thing that does not exist exists because some information in the universe has been excluded from that person’s brain, I think. For writers, this percentage goes up somehow to like 98%. Writers not like this are I think Joy Williams, Fernando Pessoa, and that’s about it. Some I can’t know since they don’t have a lot of rhetoric in their fiction.

I wasted my time in college. Instead of working on novels alone in my room, I should have pretended to like the people who I didn't like. Things would be easier for me if I had faked like I was interested. I only began to realize that at the very end.

In college for about a year and a half or something I did not hang out with anyone, only wrote BED. My writing professor, Sophie Powell, said my character's existential despair could be solved if he believed in God. She wrote that on the story. I also argued against her and the rest of the class that Woody Allen is not a bad person for marrying his step-daughter. Everyone disagreed with me and I lectured them. Sophie Powell said, ‘Marriage is sacred.’ The definition of ‘Sacred’ should in the dictionary be ‘Ewwww. ewwww. ewwww.’ The only person who would’ve been on my side that day was Mal Coppenrath but she did not go to class that day. Mal Coppenrath has a poem forthcoming in 3 a.m. magazine called ‘fuck starbucks.’ Mike Young has a poem forthcoming in 3 a.m. magazine called ‘don’t fuck mcdonald’s.’ i told him to write one called ‘fuck mcdonald’s’ and he finally wrote one called ‘don’t fuck mcdonald’s.’ Mike Young is the literary editor of Noo Journal.

Woody Allen is not a bad person for marrying his step-daughter. But who cares? I mean, who cares that he is not a bad person? Even if I thought he was a bad person, I would still think that Crimes and Misdemeanors is one of the best films ever made, and that Deconstructing Harry is wonderful and amazing. Woody Allen gets it right. The end of Crimes and Misdemeanors is perfect and chilling. The religious man is blind and happy, blindly dancing with his daughter. The filmmaker is weak and disregarded, pitied by the woman he loved. The thoughtful, “normal” man murders a woman and escapes unpunished, even by his own conscience.

To further explain my “who cares” question, I think that while Roman Polanski may not be a bad person in general, he once did a very bad thing by fucking a young girl at a party. And I understand the argument that he is a bad person. But that doesn’t affect the way I feel when Chinatown ends and the woman is shot through the eye. It doesn’t affect the shock I felt when I watched Repulsion and the mirror swung around to reveal a glimpse of a hiding rapist.

Anyway.

I get manic sometimes, or maybe panicked is a better word, and send a hundred emails to a hundred different people at once, because I get suddenly overwhelmed with the belief that no amount of talent or skill that I have or can develop will help me, and the only thing that will help me is pretending I get along with people.

I don’t understand this ‘separate the art from the artist’ thing. Why? Why separate anything, ever? Yes, you can get pleasure from the art and ignore the artist. But why ever ignore things. The art cannot cause pain and suffering in the world without the people. THE PEOPLE. Never mind. I’m not going to argue this. Maybe in some other interview.

It is strange how to get published by a corporate publishing house. It must be chick-lit, written by someone from a foreign culture born in America writing their parent’s immigration stories, or it must be about rich people doing drugs due to existential despair, a kind of ‘existential despair,’ that may or may not be ‘nihilism,’ it doesn’t say, since the book has no rhetoric, just physical description. I don’t know. Lorrie Moore got published. Maybe you just have to… I don’t know.

A while back, someone from school told me I ought to email a kid who worked at the new york daily news. So I did. Our correspondence is linked to earlier in this interview. The only missing email is the last one I sent to him, which I've accidentally deleted. I told him to take Mylanta for his stomach and politely agreed that he did owe me.

I was obviously startled by what happened--the email mysteriously getting from him to gawker—but like I said, I guess I was asking for trouble. Later on, several people pointed out that Chris Rovzar (who, I will say, at least seems sincere in those emails, doesn't he?) is somehow affiliated with a book by a recent yale grad that I mauled in a yale herald review a while back. A lot of the author's friends were upset about that review, apparently. Oh well.

As this guy says, karma is a bitch. But people who worry about karma while writing book reviews do not make good book reviewers.

(Actually, two minor notes about the review as I look at it again now, for the first time in almost a year. One—I didn't write that garish title, though I didn't raise an objection to it, either. And two—in the opening paragraph, some herald editor deleted the word "sex" after the word "oral," so instead of "swallowing after oral sex," it says "swallowing after oral." I don't know why that annoys me, but it does.)

Also, somebody else contacted me yesterday me and said that gawker's intern is a yale girl (which I did know, actually, though I'd forgotten) who happens to be friends with the author of that novel I reviewed so unfavorably. I met that intern once. She seemed like a nice person. Still, before I jumped in the water I should have checked to see what was swimming in it.

So it goes. I've been on the wrong side of weird grudges before. That reminds me, did I ever tell you about the jar of fermented juice and rotten meat someone left in my dorm mailbox with a threatening note? There was an earring attached to it. I think I was supposed to recognize the earring, but I didn't. Or maybe they got the wrong mailbox.

Here's what I think about Gawker. People think badly of you because of that email because people are stupid and do not think for themselves.

Gawker posts words like LINDSAY LOHAN and KATIE HOLME’S LIPS. Your email replaced those words with words like IMPETUS PRESS and MELVILLE HOUSE. This is the situation. You can argue either way which will reduce pain and suffering in the world. If people see on their computer screens LINDSAY LOHAN’S TITS or IMPETUS PRESS and that information goes into their heads.

Gawker exists to be ‘used,’ by any means possible. Anytime someone can replace the words TOM CRUISE with something even vaguely related to literature, news, politics, food, or just about anything, that is a kind of victory against western civilization. Many people like western civilization, though. So.

But. You had them take our names off the site. I can understand that. Thousands of people will think badly of you because you tried, they think, to use your ‘Yale’ alumni status to get publicity for your book. This is somehow unfair, or something, I don’t know. Nepotism is unfair and ‘bad.’

But I think you should’ve had them keep our names there. We can so easily defend the existence of that email on Gawker’s site morally, philosophically, and politically that actually I think—though most people will not think at this level; but only on the ‘ewwwww. ewwww. ewwww.’ level—that you should be thought badly of for giving in to the feelings of awkwardness and discomfort (not unlike feelings of going ‘ewwww. ewwww. ewwww.’ to homosexuality) and asking them to take our names down.

A couple things, though. Once it’s up there, you don’t get a chance to defend it morally, philosophically, and politically. It’s just up there with a bunch of insults from people whose job it is to be insulting, plus our names. For example, compared to how many people read that posting, almost no one is going to read this interview.

Also, if I’d known it was going to end up posted for thousands of people to read, I would have spent more than 90 seconds or so writing it.

Still. There’s no need to defend it. The facts are there. I mean, you’ve gotten a post there on independent presses instead of JT Leroy's pet dog's fake toys, or something.

I get attacked on this site a lot. Half the comments are people insulting me, I think. But many of the posts here are about trying not to think in terms of ‘identity’ or ‘self.’

I mean, what difference does it make if people insult you or not, except that you might feel a kind of discomfort… that discomfort would not be unlike the ‘ewwww. ewwww. ewww.’ that i keep referring to in this post. It is like saying, ‘Marriage is sacred,’ to Woody Allen and then Woody Allen divorcing his step-daughter. Woody Allen should not divorce his step-daughter unless for reasons not related to ‘Marriage is sacred,’ or other abstractions.

I felt more confusion than discomfort. Mostly because things happened without my knowing them. Like I saw that Mediabistro article the day after it appeared, and it says “no one seems willing to confirm” that I sent the email. When I read that, I sent them an email that said, “I’d have been happy to confirm.”

Now I’m going to go watch part of Deconstructing Harry, which you can turn on at any point and still enjoy, then go to sleep, then go to work. It’s 4:41 a.m.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From: Nick Antosca
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 9:29 AM
To: Rovzar, Christopher
Subject: fiction from yale

hi Chris,

you don't know me. i'm yale class of 05, morse.

when i was an undergrad, Hud Morgan wrote a piece in the NYDN about a panel of young writers i was on. it was at p.s. 122.

i also wrote a story for Hustler about yale naked parties.

and i have a short story coming out in New York Tyrant, a new literary magazine which is being funded by a reclusive, anonymous multimillionaire.

anyway. here's the thing. in a bizarre coincidence, my roommate (an also-22 year old writer named Tao Lin - we live in a fucked apartment on wall street) and I both sold our first books on the same day last week to different presses. My novel Fires, which partly takes place at Yale, is coming out from Impetus Press this winter, and his story collection Bed is coming out next year from Melville House.

how about mentioning this in the column?

best,
Nick Antosca

On 27/02/06, Rovzar, Christopher wrote:

Hi Nick –

One question – YDN or Herald?

Chris

From: Nick Antosca
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 10:30 AM
To: Rovzar, Christopher

Subject: Re: fiction from yale

Live and let live, I say.

Actually in the other browser window I have open, I'm reading today's YDN article about the Talibani freshman. Someone just sent it to me.

On 27/02/06, Rovzar, Christopher wrote:

Yipes.

So I forwarded this email to my co-worker at the column and she forwarded it on to our friends who write the Gawker.com website. The editor, Jessica Coen, posted it.

I'm so sorry that happened – really, I am. But a lot of people read Gawker, so it's good publicity!

If you want her to remove your name, just let me know.

Chris

On 27/02/06, Nick Antosca wrote:

Uh, yeah, take my name off.

From: Nick Antosca
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 11:50 AM
To: Rovzar, Christopher
Subject: Re: fiction from yale

also, they know my roommate tao and don't like him, because he did an nyu report about blog fact-checking which consisted of sending fake stuff to gawker - which they immediately posted.

On 27/02/06, Rovzar, Christopher wrote:

Ok, his name will be off, too.

Maybe that's why they posted it?

Again, really, sorry about this.

From: Nick Antosca
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 12:03 PM
To: Rovzar, Christopher
Subject: Re: fiction from yale

My roommate's pissed. [Tao: I was happy.]

I am too.

Can you get them take the identifying details out of there too or just take it down?

On 27/02/06, Rovzar, Christopher wrote:

Apparently they can't take stuff down, but book names, etc, will be removed.

Again, so, so, so, so sorry.

From: Nick Antosca
Sent: Monday, February 27, 2006 12:37 PM
To: Rovzar, Christopher
Subject: Re: fiction from yale

I just got out of a meeting during which my cell phone was vibrating maniacally with asinine text messages - "is that u in gawker??" and (fatalistically, from my roommate) "publicity good."

whatever. an 04 grad told me i should hit you up, but i guess i was asking for trouble.

From: Rovzar, Christopher
Date: 27-Feb-2006 12:43
Subject: RE: fiction from yale
To: Nick Antosca

No, you should have hit me up. I'm very good about helping people out – especially Yalies who are working at being writers. I really think we should all help each other out. You weren't asking for trouble. This was an honest mistake on my part. People email me all the time about help, either advice, or with mentions in the column.

Quite frankly, all publicity is good publicity (I'm not saying I'm not sorry that it happened this way, because I am, very much so, and feel sick to my stomach about it). People say that because it's true.

Again, I'm really very sorry, and I'll try to make it up to you. Meanwhile, nobody will even remember this tomorrow, I promise.

Chris