[David] Lat ... will take over later this month with Alex Pareene, who has been a guest editor on Gawker.com. The Web site will be redesigned but the name will remain unchanged....Lockhart Steele. Is that really his name?
"I would expect [Wonkette] to evolve significantly," said Lockhart Steele, managing editor of Gawker Media, the site's publisher. "New bloggers bring new perspective and new energy."
Steele was impressed by Lat's "Wonkettey qualities": "He was very obsessive about people's good looks. Anyone who could make the federal judiciary sexy is a blogger we'd want to work with."
Anyway, the article notes that Cox's book, "Dog Days," is getting bad reviews but that she has a "mid-six-figures" contract for her next book. Hey! This book thing.... I wonder what Gawker Media is paying Lat to be half-of-Wonkette. Or is blogging supposed to be something you do to leverage your way to a book contract? That could be a problem if you've evolved yourself a blogger mind...
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds is reading "Dog Days" and being charitable: "so far I like it pretty well." He likes the detail about electronic equipment, of which there is a lot. Naming all the products the character uses? Isn't that so 80s?
ANOTHER UPDATE: The humor novelist Christopher Buckley gives "Dog Days" a good review in the NYT Book Review:
I don't spend much time in the old blogosphere myself, and to be honest hadn't clicked onto Wonkette until now. But if this sparkly, witty - occasionally vicious - little novel is any indication of Wonkette's talent, then Cox ought to log out of cyberspace and start calling herself Novelette.
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Well, if people don't like it, keep in mind that a court in Maryland just ruled that mooning is legal, even in a case where one of the victims was an eight year old girl. Apparently, 'indecent exposure' involves only the genitals (and women's breasts.) But if drop your drawers and show off your hamhocks, well now that's legal.
And is Glenn reading Wonkette's book...in his pajamas? Isn't that just good branding?
I find the whole Nick Denton family of products sort of tedious in their fashionable cattiness. The New York bourgeois gossip style has metastasized into previously unknown regions and subjects and needs to be aggressively treated, although maybe the boredom of oversaturation is already taking care of this.
And Glenn Reynolds has been "charitable" to Cox from day one. I remember some people accusing him of taking payola from Nick Denton to push Wonkette, but I don't think that's the case at all. The only payola Reynolds needed was a hot chick with a nice pair saying dirty things about politics. A randy geek's wet dream!
What can I tell you? My parents were crazy dreamers.
"Naming all the products the character uses? Isn't that so 80s?"
That sounds like a surprisingly apt remark from someone who claims not to read novels! :) I can't claim any authority on literary trends like this, but naming products does sound very Douglas Coupland to me. Maybe a little bit Don DeLillo too. But DeLillo'd probably use made up names for made up products. Anyhoo, I've never much like DeLillo, but I did enjoy Coupland. Besides his novels, I enjoyed his American travelogue essays the New Republic used to publish during Andrew Sullivan's era (if I recall correctly).
As for Christopher Buckley, I read one of his novels (his first maybe--about alien abduction or something) and didn't like it at all. Funny--at first I typed "didn't like him at all", but that's different.
(My point being that Buckley's positive remarks do not ringingly endorse Cox's book for me--which I probably also won't read because I rarely read novels myself, esp nowadays. There's just not enough time left over after everything else I like to do.)
"Lockhart Steele"... Pierce Brosnan was good in that.
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