Anna Wintour, Fashion's Night Out's hostess (Patrick McMullan)

Wednesday, September 7

Reever Madness

They’re making another Superman flick with some British gent—don’t they know that for screen magnetism as well as real-life heroism, the buck stopped with Christopher Reeve? The beloved screen icon, who became an advocate for the paralyzed after a horseback-riding accident, is remembered at the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s “Night for a Cure,” a fund-raising celebration of Spinal Cord Injury Awareness Month. (It snuck up on us again!) Guests are to include W’s party-bot Stefano Tonchi (apparently unthreatened by the Fashion Week storm looming on the horizon!), that crazy, stupidly lovable Julianne Moore and little-known local musician Moby. If your summer-long yen for charitable endeavors hasn’t been satisfied, stop by.

Mondrian Soho, 9 Crosby Street, 7 p.m.; visit christopherreeve.org for tickets and information.

Thursday, September 8

A Night of Torrid Fashion

Once again, it’s the night Anna Wintour devised for the hoi polloi to have a part, however small, in Fashion Week—while the even hoi polloi-er will see their evening’s progress interrupted by crowds mobbing boutiques to degrees unseen the other 364 evenings of the year. Gucci debuts its automotive collaboration with Fiat, providing silk scarves and sunglasses so that visitors may achieve that Lindsay Lohan-striving-to-be-Sophia Loren look; the polo star (is there more than one?) Nacho Figueras hosts a party at Ralph Lauren; chic lingerie boutique Agent Provocateur shows off its glamorous and scantily-clad models; and alice + olivia stage a so-called carnival (complete with Sno-cones and cotton candy, if you’d like to break your diet). The night out is spread across the city, so choose a neighborhood upon which to concentrate (may we suggest the meatpacking district, home to 63 events?).

Gucci, 725 Fifth Avenue, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; Ralph Lauren, 109 Prince Street, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; Agent Provocateur, 675 Madison Avenue, 7 p.m.-9 p.m.; alice + olivia, 755 Madison Avenue, 6 p.m.-10 p.m.; visit fashionsnightout.com/fno for information.

Friday, September 9

Showtime

Fashion’s big (fiscal) week began yesterday, but the more high-flying designers tend to make late entrances. (Ralph Lauren’s not showing until the 15th!) Today’s clotheshorses are still early enough that you won’t be jaded by the couture overflow—after a while, the fancy togs stop looking like art and go into the mental pile labeled “We couldn’t wear this to Starbucks.” Today’s shows include Tommy Hilfiger (we hope his delightful rebel-rapper son, Rich Hill, is in the front row!), cutesy schmatte-shaper Cynthia Rowley, and the finalists from Project Runway. Hint: don’t go if you’re a Project Runway obsessive and don’t want the ending spoiled—or if you stopped watching the show, as we did, two years ago. This fashion show is for die-hard Tim Gunn gawkers.

Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week—today’s events include Project Runway at the Theatre at Lincoln Center location, 9:30 a.m.; Tommy Hilfiger Men’s at the High Line Chelsea Market Passage, 14th Street and 10th Avenue, 5:30 p.m.; Cynthia Rowley at the Stage at Lincoln Center location, 7 p.m.; visit mbfashionweek.com for information.

Saturday, September 10

Big Papa

Tonight’s the final preview of Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation of The Sun Also Rises, entitled The Select, which opens tomorrow. The company  previously produced adaptations of The Great Gatsby (an eight-hour production, in which the book was read aloud, cover-to-cover) and The Sound and the Fury. In preparation for the exhilarated exhaustion we shall feel about halfway through the expatriate exegesis, we’re writing the rest of this blurb in the style of Hemingway. This will be a good show, and we will watch it. We will go to the theater and watch the actors reading and it will be good. They pretend to be in Europe and they drink and celebrate being young and strong. They are strong actors and they have studied their Hemingway. The book they read is a good book and it is not overly long. It is about men, and also women. There is a—okay, this is too exhausting. But if you’re hungry for the tale of an impotent man and a very potent lady, and you find it too early in the fall to devote yourself to actually sitting and reading the book (that’s what November’s for!), then check out the nonparody—or self-parody?—Hemingway rendition.

New York Theatre Workshop, 79 East Fourth Street, tomorrow’s opening at 7 p.m., tonight’s preview at 7 p.m.; visit elevator.org for tickets and information.

Sunday, September 11

Ten Years Hence

The National September 11 Memorial will be dedicated today. In a ceremony featuring Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Barack Obama, the name-inscribed reflecting pools officially become a part of our city. The memorial, part of a site that has, in many of its particulars, been an object of contention and debate over the past decade, is to open tomorrow, putting to rest a small part of the history of local politics. Another history—that of our processing a now-10-year-old catastrophe—remains, of course, ongoing.

The National September 11 Memorial is to be dedicated today and will be open tomorrow from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; access is available from the northeast corner of Albany Street and Greenwich Street with a pass, available at 911memorial.org.

Monday, September 12

Gaga-a-gogo

We’ve had enough Gaga-on-TV for a while after her simply exhausting appearance on MTV’s Video Music Awards. (Hey, we had plenty of emergency liquor left after Irene and needed to commemorate not losing cable somehow.) The lady vamped as an unstyled New Jersey dude, Joe Pesci minus the rudimentary acting ability, for the benefit of the gossip blogs that can’t stop covering the pop star! Nevertheless, we’ll drag ourselves to the television for the special Gaga by Gaultier, not for Ms. Gaga, but rather for the chance to see the iconic designer Jean Paul Gaultier (who designed Madonna’s cone bra, back when she was the pop star testing boundaries of taste and patience) in a 75-minute special. Not to mention the fact that it’s airing on teenybopper mini-network the CW, which gives rise to more cognitive dissonance than any couture-donning chanteuse could ever hope to evoke by dressing in drag. The promotions would seem to indicate that Mr. Gaultier is interviewing Ms. Gaga, and we imagine his questions for her would be rather more perceptive than hers of him. But heaven help him if he tries to put the new, butch, dressed-down Ms. Gaga into a cone bra.

Gaga by Gaultier airs from 8 p.m. to 9:15 p.m. on the CW.

Tuesday, September 13

3D Movies With 2D Critic

Two events tonight indicate the values of storytelling in very different fashions. David Denby, the contemplative, chelonian New Yorker film critic addresses the future of movies in an address titled “Do Movies Have a Future?” (We vote yes! But then, we just loved the new Planet of the Apes.) It’s going down at the New York Psychoanalytic Society—the perfect spot for Mr. Denby to plop down on a couch after the speech and talk about all the issues he plumbed in his porn-and-bad-stocks memoir American Sucker … Meanwhile, Mr. Denby’s magazine colleague Adam Gopnik joins the heterogeneous crew of Bravo hostesses Padma Lakshmi and Gail Simmons, beloved-beyond-belief chef David Chang, and predictable insult-jock Lisa Lampanelli at an evening of storytelling about food. Each storyteller is to speak on the subject for 10 minutes, without notes—just broadly, anything that comes to mind! (Anyone seeking insight into what it’s like to force oneself to gorge on reality show contestants’ half-baked soufflés will enjoy the Lakshmi-Simmons double dose, we’d imagine.)

“Do Movies Have a Future?” The New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, 247 East 82nd Street, 8:15 p.m., R.S.V.P. recommended for limited space; email admdir@nypsi.org for RSVP or information; The Moth, Great Hall at Cooper Union, 7 East 7th Street, 6:30 p.m. doors open, 7:30 p.m. stories begin; visit themoth.org for tickets and information.

Wednesday, September 14

Museum of Modern Rock

We know we said we’d had enough of Lady Gaga, but we meant only that we couldn’t bear to listen to her speak about her theories of art and gender anymore. However, her conscription into a gallery show of pop-music-themed art—as the subject of a portrait by Bonnie Engelbardt Lautenberg, wife of New Jersey’s Senator Frank Lautenberg—allows her to do what pop stars do best: act as a muse. Tonight’s opening of RH Gallery’s “Melodymania” exhibit showcases artwork about pop music—including a new portrait of Nirvana rocker Kurt Cobain by Mark Seliger, a cleverly titled print called Violins/Violence by Bruce Nauman and a photograph by Matthew Barney inspired by Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. (O.K., in that last one the tie to popular music may be a bit conceptual.) Other musical muses channeled by the visual artists on display at RH Gallery include Ennio Morricone and Joy Division—the first time those two have been landed in the same place since our iPod! The concept of pop-inspired art may seem a bit gimmicky to non-radio-listeners—but it’s at least in tune (get it?) with musicians’ tendencies to view themselves as artists and artists’ tendencies to tap into the more venal aspects of our cultural mosaic for inspiration.

Opens today (reception Sept. 13 at 7 p.m.), RH Gallery, 137 Duane Street; visit rhgallery.com for information.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

If David Denby—New Yorker movie critic, occasional cultural commentator, erstwhile online pornography addict—hoped to inoculate himself against snark by parsing it for over 100 pages, well … oh, boy.

This isn’t intended meanly or personally or to ruin “our” conversation (whoever “we” might be—Americans? The quivering media elite?), but Mr. Denby’s efforts feel slight and second-rate when compared with those of a similarly troubled critic, Lee Siegel of The New Republic. Last year, Mr. Siegel managed to make lemonade of an acidic and very public Internet humiliation with Against the Machine, an eloquent treatise about the impact of electronic media on human connection. Mr. Denby admits to no such signal moment here, though a sense of general grievance about all those young punks performing freestyle punditry and photo captioning on the Web—“outsiders banging at the gates”—pervades the pages of his new book.

The only specific motivation for this anti-snark screed, jacketed in shiny yellow as if to mimic the buzzing stingers it decries, was a conversation Mr. Denby had over a pan-Pacific dinner in Seattle with Slate founder Michael Kinsley and their wives. “Somewhere between the Singing Fish Satay and the Pow Wok Lamb,” the critic writes in an afterword that’s pure snark bait, the two men decided that this particular brand of invective—sneering, fleeting, “trivial kneecapping”—is “becoming the characteristic discourse of our time.” Mr. Kinsley was fixin’ to write a long essay, Mr. Denby a short book. They thumb-wrestled.

Just kidding.

But maybe Mr. Kinsley was wise to cede this particular topic to his East Coast colleague. It’s exceedingly difficult to analyze humor—even malevolent humor of dubious quality—without coming off as humorless. And even if the diagramming is done lightheartedly, it’s hard to enjoy the experience of someone trying to tell you what constitutes comedy. Like porn—and we’re all too aware of how familiar Mr. Denby is with that, thanks to his 2004 memoir American Sucker—you know it when you see it.

THE AUTHOR SEEMS TO know what a difficult task he’s set for himself, and so he manages expectations, declaring legal issues raised by online snarkers “far beyond the range of this essay.” Deep philosophical questions like those grappled with so gracefully by Mr. Siegel are also beyond Mr. Denby’s ambitions. At the Internet’s frightening and exciting formlessness, he can only shake a fist.

That leaves him with history (both distant and recent), and semantics. Let’s not forget that in 1991, he returned to his alma mater, Columbia University, to reengage with the Western canon, writing about the experiment in yet another volume, Great Books. Should you have forgotten his erudition, there’s a subtle reminder encoded in the structure of Snark: seven brief “Fits” (an archaic word for cantos) in tribute to the Lewis Carroll nonsense poem “The Hunting of the Snark.” We pay a short visit to the ancients, lingering longest on the aptly named landowner-poet Juvenal, arguably one of snark’s earliest practitioners. There’s a close reading of Alexander Pope and casual references to Raleigh and Kafka.

One doesn’t for a second doubt Mr. Denby’s literary bona fides (after all, he went to an Ivy League college—twice), but a lot of this has the whiff of a hasty Google Book search conducted on a Saturday afternoon before the critic dashed off to claim a padded seat in the anodyne chill of a screening room. There’s no hint of chin-stroking trips into musty stacks, the rump pressed penitently into a wooden study carrel. … Nothing wrong with a little online research, of course. “We have this incredible tool,” is how Mr. Denby appraises the Internet to his audience of lucky laptoppers. “Let’s not screw it up.”

Also, let’s not spend too much time gaping at caddish tittle-tattle sites like juicycampus.com—where, to his touchingly gallant horror, “the pathetic old sex pathologies, cloaked by anonymity, all come bursting out, free and proud.” (Unfortunate flashback to the well-coiffed “kneeling women” that so captivated Mr. Denby on the computer screen in his Upper West Side study.)

Then there’s amihotornot.com, upon which perhaps no other Manhattanite has clicked since 2000: a “poignant footnote to the celebrity cycle” where average citizens rate each others’ appearances and arrange assignations. “When digits yield to flesh, good luck to them,” Mr. Denby shrugs tolerantly.

AND WHAT EXACTLY IS this so detestable snark? He doesn’t want to get “caught in a thicket of definitions,” but from time to time he dangles a branch. It’s “abusive or sarcastic speech that operates like poisoned arrows from within a closed space”—like, for example, when you write or read an anonymous remark on the Web and maybe snicker a bit and feel sick inside. It’s a “single harsh syllable that expels a puff of insolent air in its wake”—a kind of verbal flatulence. It’s “investigative reporting’s bastard, weak-limbed child.” It’s “annoying as hell, the most dreadful style going, and ultimately debilitating.” He’s just not gonna take it anymore!

In the fourth Fit, Mr. Denby taxonomizes further into “nine principles of snark”—indifference to the truth and so forth. (It’s O.K., though, to bash overpriced restaurants.)

Who is snarking? Oh, honey, who isn’t? Joe Queenan and James Wolcott, two writers with piles of smart and funny work between them. Maybe Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, though maybe not. (“I realize the entire world is awaiting civilized judgment on this issue,” Mr. Denby writes, in one of the many moments where he casually undermines his own seriousness of purpose.) Tom Wolfe (who stands in perpetual weird opposition to The New Yorker) when he wrote about Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers in Radical Chic. The founders of Private Eye and Spy. My former colleague Choire Sicha, in this very newspaper. And definitely Maureen Dowd over at The New York Times, subject of the sixth Fit in which she and her fellow gliberati are basically blamed for Al Gore’s loss of the presidency in 2000—“snark’s greatest victory and snark’s greatest disaster.” (Would that Ms. Dowd and her cohorts were actually that powerful and popular; then Times stock wouldn’t cost less than a ham sandwich at the corner deli.)

Since then, we’re told, snark has only gained in momentum, thanks to computer users’ increasing comfort with blogging and commenting (“pipsqueaks who don’t have a coherent view of life,” scolds Mr. Denby, somewhat unfairly for someone who has been unabashed about exploring his own middle-aged confusion in print). So why is it that we just experienced the most transcendent election in two generations? And who among us has a coherent view of life, anyway? Is snark really so pernicious, after all? Are love, hope and creativity really so vulnerable and tender that they can’t survive its onslaught?

Perhaps it’s unfair to task the author with such questions; he insists that his modest denunciation of snark is not intended to elevate earnest sincerity soldiers like Jedediah Purdy but merely intended to help preserve superior forms of fun-making such as satire and spoof. Like, say, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. (Fawning over those two has become a truly tiresome default indicator of How Smart One Is.)

Closing this book, one is left with the impression that, rising sea of snark or no, satire, spoof and friends are going to muddle along just fine without David Denby as navigator.

Alexandra Jacobs is editor at large at The Observer. She can be reached at ajacobs@observer.com.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

David Denby, The New Yorker:

Ann Hornaday, The Washington Post:

Mr. Collins called Ms. Greene, "The priestess of radicchio, beurre blanc and arugula," but also noted that the critic had "become an attenuating natural resource at New York since giving up her weekly chief reviewer’s role eight years ago."

It wasn't always so. Ms. Greene was once so closely associated with the magazine that she appeared in a 1986 television commercial touting New York.

Ms. Greene appeared in the above commercial with theater critic John Simon (himself let go by New York's editor Adam Moss in 2005) film critic David Denby (who left the magazine in 1998 to become a critic at The New Yorker), and Dan Dorfman (who left the magazine in 1986 and went on to become a commentator for CNBC and a controversial writer for Money, followed by a stint at The New York Sun).

Of course, in the annals of commercials for magazines, this is nothing compared to The National Enquirer's ads from the same period or this great one for People that somehow name-checks Truman Capote and The Official Preppy Handbook. It also lacks the awesome jingle of Time Magazine's ads.

Sadly, the article was released too prematurely (tee-hee) to include this month's poster boy for self-love, David Duchovny.

But you probably already know about the perils of using internet porn if you read David Amsden's October 13, 2003 story in New York Magazine. Or Naomi Wolf's essay accompanying that piece. Or Amy Sohn's column from the same magazine from May 21, 2005. Or Pamela Paul's 2005 book, Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. Or Ms. Sohn's September 11, 2005 review of Ms. Paul's book, in which she dismissed its thesis despite having written about it a few months before.

Not a reader? Maybe you saw Rita Cosby's MSNBC report from March 3, 2006. Or CBS News' 'Eye on Technology' segment from May 1, 2007. Or Good Morning America's Pornography Threatens a Marriage from June 5, 2007. Or Fox News' 8 Signs Your Partner is Addicted to Porn from June 9, 2008.

Of course, that's not to mention the classics from The Holy Bible to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Medical Arts Productions to Philip Roth, Jerry Seinfeld to There's Something About Mary to American Pie, and David Denby, and countless others who have known for centuries that men sometimes masturbate.

Today's Post gives Cindy Adams a much-deserved page-one teaser: "WTC: Why I hate this lousy movie."

Inside, on page 14, Cindy--self-nominated as "New York's watchdog" (motion seconded! And carried!)--touches all the critical bases:

* Filmgoing experience? "Slow-moving and formulaic."

* Commercial prospects? Oliver Stone's "handlers are moving him around with a tweezer. Must be, like on that actual day itself, they, too, can smell death."

* Factual accuracy? "Goshen to Manhattan for a cop driver on an empty highway at that hour is an hour and 15....He couldn't still be driving at 6 a.m."

* The ethics of commodifying and aestheticizing the mass murder of thousands of people, thereby reinforcing the horrifying success of the terrorists in their principal aim of creating an unforgettable spectacle? "When it came to filming, the city wouldn't allow Oliver Stone to close off those streets again and again, dress them with ash and debris and personal belongings and bleeding bodies, and more screams and agonies and horror and people jumping from windows...[F]ilm crews were permitted establishing shots, skyline shots, outdoor location shots only as close as Canal Street. The rest was newsreel footage, CGI graphics and whatever real pain they could fake in the studios in L.A.....I now report these Hollywood people out for a buck should have left us alone."

Cf. David Denby in the New Yorker, calling United 93 "a hundred percent professional filmmaking" and "true existential filmmaking," in the belief that settles anything.

Plus, a restaurant manager kissed her! And a waiter!

Today's score:

Five Yorkies!

"Chiyo, lips painted in a crimson circle, does attain a surpassing chic, but her paramount desire, which is to preserve her virginity for the highest bidder and then become the mistress of a handsome married gent (Ken Watanabe) who was once nice to her as a little girl, isn't very attractive psychologically, and provides little that we can root for."
- BEASTS AND BEAUTIES, by David Denby, The New Yorker, December 19, 2005.

"Joaquin Phoenix, who plays Cash in the bio-pic 'Walk the Line,' is a remarkable-looking actor, with deep-set blue eyes, a long chin, and a scarred upper lip that serves as a nice equivalent to Cash's crags and creases."
- RINGS OF FIRE, by David Denby, The New Yorker, November 21, 2005.

"Bill Murray has strong cheekbones, a lordly crest of hair, and thin lips that he presses together in an act that suggests self-containment more than disapproval."
- LONERS, by David Denby, The New Yorker, August 8, 2005.

Related: "Sally, who always disconcerted me because she was lushly beautiful, and in dark auburn colors, like the one model in the fashion magazine who did not conform to cliché, Sally with her soft lips and lustrous head of reddish-brown hair had never said anything that was the least bit interesting..." - Great Books, by David Denby, 1997, p. 168.

"One of Shapiro's students, Francesca, a tall young woman with ripely rosy lips and a head of tousled hair, spoke English so well, with so little accent, that I had hardly noticed she was Italian." - ibid, p. 238.

—Matt Haber

Katha Pollitt's tale of Web-stalking her ex-"lover's" girlfriend ( The New Yorker , an ongoing series)

David Denby's chronicle of being addicted to Internet porn ( American Sucker, Little Brown and Company)

Neil Strauss' account of why chicks don't dig his skinny white ass ( New York Times Styles section, Jan. 25)

Joyce Wadler's saga of a weekend spent ordering in luxury meals, flowers, chocolates, books-David Denby's book!-and a masseur to her apartment. ( New York Times Sunday Styles section, Feb. 1).

Who will be next?

Stuff I Hate

Subwoofers; computer speak (e.g., "cookies"); conferences; birthday parties; Thoreau; Kentucky Derby; getting buried alive in Mexico; "sneakers"; breakfast cereal; the left of center; "my boyfriend"; "my girlfriend"; "schnizzle"; Rhodes scholars; "Hey Ya"; cupcakes; toe rings; Jay Mohr; thong underwear; Chase Bank; Chicago soundtrack; slurping noises; people who hold their fork like they're playing the banjo; the word "gift"; The American President , The West Wing and Sports Night ; "bow wow wow yippie yo yippie yay"; grown men wearing Yankees caps and Lakers get-ups; last Sunday's Times City section article about the electrocuted lady in which the writer-some film shithead named Jerome-managed to work in Reservoir Dogs ' Mr. Blonde, "the best marzipan on the planet" and his Greenwich Village neighbor, James Gandolfini; if I ever die in a freak accident I don't want some film ass to use that as a pretext to write some pretentious crap; office small talk 'n' giggling; not having a servant to go into public places; trying to buy a newspaper or Chapstick at this tiny newsstand when the place is fulloflottery-ticket-buying schmucks; gerund movie/TV-show titles; people who say "the store"-what store?; people who punctuate everything they say with knowing, self-congratulatory laughter like Jon Stewart; MTV's Jackass and Wildboyz ; that movie Helen Hunt was in with Jack Nicholson; all new music; white people working Spanish into their party talk, like el fuego , hola and nada ; running out of bubble bath; monster kids living above me and their mother, who stomps across the floor in her barbarian high heels; The Truman Show , Pleasantville , Far From Heaven , Mr. and Mrs. Bridge , etc.; Phish; "Happy Jack" Hummer ad; when Muslim cabbies talk to their terrorist friends; when everyone goes "ohhhh!" at the same time in a sports bar; the media; movies about the media being totally out of control; George Soros; Samantha on Sex and the City , even more so now with the cancer; E.M. Cioran; Howard Dean's head; guys named Ashton, or Schuyler; having to hear about the specials from the waiter; Martin Scorsese's next five movies; "Are you O.K.? Are you happy? You seem down-are you depressed?"; magazine photographers who shoot their subjects barefoot; the expression "chop-chop"; SNL sketches that parody TV shows; Lost in Translation -rather watch two hours of beer and whiskey commercials; Kevin Smith's next 15 movies; Pennsylvania; when my computer CD player can't read a CD; the Russian dry-hump girl I met on the Jitney years ago who said she was a real-estate agent but was in fact a stripper, did dance for me but that was it, spent the night but I couldn't sleep, afraid she'd stab me or the cat.

-George Gurley

Surreal Season of Discontent As Highbrows Take Hit

This winter has been even gloomier than usual for the city's intellectual class. Let's start with the travails of the rising generation: the almost comically grim saga of the 27 Lingua Franca freelancers who are being sued for money they were paid after the journal of academic life folded in 2001. On Friday, Jan. 16, they got a morsel of good news-if the prospect of a return to their financially challenged status quo could be called good news-when the Authors' Guild said it had secured Clifford Chance U.S. L.L.P., an international corporate-law firm with a healthy bankruptcy department, to represent them pro bono. This was greeted with a collective sigh of relief-albeit a brief one, as attention was quickly turned back to business as usual: filing 50-cent-a-word book reviews and polishing up tedious grant applications in the faint hopes of scoring such coveted slots as the one-year ALCS/New York Public Library Fellowship, with its impossibly lucrative $50,000 stipend.

"It was humiliating," said Joanna Smith Rakoff, a freelance writer and novelist, about being sued for $1,550, her payment for an article on a Quebec community college that was published in the fall of 2001. "When I got the note, I didn't have that money to give back to them-which makes you feel like such a loser," added Ms. Smith Rakoff, who is 31 and lives on the Lower East Side with her husband, also a writer.

"You expect them not to pay you, but you don't expect them to ask for it back," said Caleb Crain, a former Lingua Franca senior editor who's being sued for $1,000 for an article he wrote about evolutionary psychology and the arts that appeared in the magazine's October 2001 issue. Still, said Mr. Crain, who is 36 and lives in Park Slope with his partner, a book-review editor at Newsday , "knowing that a big law firm will represent people pro bono, I'm actually not that worried anymore."

The 27 freelancers, who had done work for both Lingua Franca and its sister publication, University Business , are being sued by the magazines' parent company, University Business L.L.C., for money they were paid after the magazines went under in October 2001, but before the company filed for bankruptcy in April 2002. The freelancers have been trudging down to the Battery for pre-trial hearings in New York's Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Out of 16 freelancers asked to appear, only two brought lawyers to the Jan. 6 pre-trial hearing.

The next hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 27. Associates from Clifford Chance are aiming to get the plaintiffs to settle out of court. "It's going to cost more in legal fees for them to recover the funds than they're going to recover," said Hilary Lane, a counsel in the financial restructuring and insolvency group at Clifford Chance, who's heading the defense. The claims filed against the freelancers, which range from $1,000 to $3,300, were hardly worth pursuing, she said. "It's silly that they're spending all this money" to recover such small amounts, Ms. Lane continued. "I don't know what he bills by the hour …. " She was referring to Robert Geltzer, the court-appointed receiver for University Business, whose fee will come out of any settlement. Mr. Geltzer didn't return calls seeking comment.

At the first pre-trial hearing, Judge Prudence Carter Beatty told Mr. Geltzer's legal team that they should aim to recover 10 cents on the dollar, The Village Voice reported. "Obviously, even less would be better-even five cents on the dollar," Ms. Lane said. "The ideal settlement is, he just drops the case and they don't have to pay anything."

Still, even if it all ends well for the freelancers, one gets the sense that the city's intellectual life has taken a sharp turn for the surreal. At cocktail parties, the smart set has been expressing hushed horror that the monologist Spalding Gray, who has been suffering from severe depression in the aftermath of a car crash in 2001, may have thrown himself off the Staten Island Ferry. On the Upper West Side, the intellectuals have been imploding left and right, in Technicolor. David Denby, film critic for The New Yorker , has just published American Sucker , an account of how, in the dizzy final years of the 20th century, he blew $800,000 in the stock market after his wife, the novelist Cathleen Schine, left him (for another woman, as she revealed in a New Yorker piece of her own earlier this month). Just blocks away finds Katha Pollitt, the writer and Nation columnist, hooked to her computer. There, as she confessed in an essay in last week's New Yorker , she spent countless hours online, scouring the Web for traces of her philandering ex-boyfriend's name after he dumped her.

If ever there was a moment of generational split, this winter of our discontent is it. One need only consider the contrast: The struggling freelancers for a now-defunct journal of ideas are handed court papers, while the professional intellectuals, the ones with coveted staff jobs and 401(k)'s, are using prime literary real estate to lament their middle-aged romantic failures. The old guard is unraveling, the new guard is being sued.

What, as they say, is to be done-if anything? "It should only concern you if you buy the idea that American intellectual culture resides on the Upper West Side," said Dennis Loy Johnson, who runs Mobylives.com and is the president of Melville House Publishing, a small independent press based in Hoboken. "It's like the British royals," he said. "They've been inbreeding for so long that it's starting to show."

But if up-and-coming writers can't make a living publishing their ideas, what kind of effect does that have on New York intellectual life? "It has a disastrous effect," Mr. Denby said. "At the risk of sounding nostalgic, I think it really was healthier in the 50's."

"It's a very difficult way to live," Ms. Pollitt said of the Lingua Franca freelancers. "If I didn't have my column, if I had to put together a writing life, a living income, piece by piece, the way freelancers do, I think I would be worn to a frazzle."

Mr. Denby, for his part, is confident the intellectual spirit will prevail in the city. "Some people may double-track their lives," Mr. Denby said. "That's true for the kids at The New Yorker who work as fact-checkers or editorial assistants: They work hard during the day, and a lot work at night, secretly or not so secretly, on their own writing. There's a kind of samizdat literature that's created not by political oppression, but by commercial oppression."

And true to samizdat form, its practitioners are scattered, without an intellectual infrastructure of the kind that used to prop up the good old Upper West Side, before the bankers and lawyers moved in, before the David Denbys and Katha Pollitts became transfixed by the wondrous vegetable selection at Fairway. In its short life, Lingua Franca pointed the way to the future, not least in the lives its former contributors (as it turned out) would lead: overeducated, underpaid and increasingly reliant on the good graces of their former college roommates. You know, the ones who went to law school, who live on the Upper West Side and take on pro bono cases at firms like Clifford Chance. "I used to joke that it was absurd that the Lingua Franca office was in Manhattan," Mr. Crain said, "since everyone who worked there lived in Brooklyn-except for the people who lived in New Jersey."

American Sucker , by David Denby. Little, Brown, 337 pages, $24.95.

Now that the shell shock has worn off and we're unhappily accustomed to the nonstop barrage of first-person testimony-autobiography these days being the default mode for anybody who feels the itch to write-the appearance of yet another disappointing memoir only triggers a knee-jerk urge to blame the genre. Isn't it time to impose a ban? Or at least quality controls: No spilling of your life onto the page unless you're certifiably great (Hector Berlioz, say, or Ben Franklin) or exceptional (Helen Keller, Christy Brown) or a writer of supreme talent (Vladimir Nabokov, Doris Lessing). Most memoirs are marred by obvious suppressions, or by a splatter of embarrassingly candid detail, and either way the ubiquitous "I" is an irritant: It clamors for our attention, our sympathy, it asks us to shed a part of our precious individuality and identify . We can surrender to these demands or resist-and shamefully reveal the stubbornness with which we defend our own slice of personal space.

Blaming the genre is a satisfyingly impersonal response to the ego-glut, but soon we bump up against the incontrovertible fact that any given memoir is more than just a symptom of our enduring culture of narcissism. Open the book and there's the "I"-a little prod, reminding us that someone in particular made the choice about what secrets to share, what private thoughts to parade in public. In this case, the "I" belongs to David Denby, the longtime New York magazine film critic who graduated in 1998 to The New Yorker . Mr. Denby has decided to follow up his best-selling memoir Great Books (1996)-an account of a year spent re-reading the classics of Western civilization-with the sadder story of his brief, miserable career as an amateur investor speculating in the stock market.

American Sucker is actually a more local story than its excellent title would suggest. Mr. Denby grew up in New York, studied at Columbia (twice!) and eventually settled with his wife, the novelist Cathleen Schine, in a seven-room apartment on the corner of 76th and West End. The apartment-where the couple raised their two sons-is, in a sense, at the center of this book. When Ms. Schine announced in early 1999 that she was leaving Mr. Denby after 18 years of marriage, he decided that he didn't want to move out. He had some money tucked away (he'd inherited $325,000 from his mother in 1991), and he hatched a plan to ride the surging Nasdaq, make $1 million and buy out his wife's share of the apartment. You can guess the rest: Instead of making a million, he lost a million-and had to settle for less spacious living quarters.

The Schine-Denby breakup is getting plenty of ink this month. In a confessional aside in her long New Yorker "Personal History"-about a mad dog she owned for 18 months-Ms. Schine explains that she left Mr. Denby for another woman: "I had made one of those unforeseen middle-aged discoveries." Mr. Denby makes frequent mention of Ms. Schine in his memoir, but never says why she left him; instead he buries a clue on page 317: "Cathy was finishing a novel, her sixth, in which a woman leaves her husband for another woman."

There's another story (also local) nestled alongside the sad real-estate saga: At some point (the exact chronology is not specified), Mr. Denby decided that he would write a book about his adventures in the market. He tells us that he began keeping a journal in January 2000-recording the state of his finances and also "anything that seemed joined to the obsession of the moment, which, as anyone could see, was money." And we know that he began interviewing investment gurus and attending investors' conferences: He met Henry Blodget and Sam Waksal and George Gilder in the year when the Nasdaq reached 5,000, when all three were still heroes to a growing flock of giddy investors. He became friends with Messrs. Blodget and Waksal; he secured an interview with Arthur Levitt, who was then the chairman of the S.E.C. (In this city, access is not a problem when you're on the staff of The New Yorker and almost everyone recognizes your name from 20 years of movie reviews.) He visited companies and traveled to conventions. The making of the memoir is itself an important part of the narrative-the mechanics of the interviews, the locations, the mood of our intrepid reporter as he prepared for each new encounter.

The best parts of American Sucker are the vivid portraits of Messrs. Blodget and Waksal. As Mr. Denby gets to know them, so does the reader. They develop complex personalities, they evolve-like characters in a good novel. First glimpsed onstage at an investors' conference, Henry Blodget is the stock analyst as celebrity: "He smiled nervously as people grabbed his hand. Many wanted to touch, to come close. An interesting face: There was something mysterious in the long plane between his eyes and his jaw, something unfinished." There's room already for the duplicity that would later emerge, and room, too, for an "awkward and charming smile."

Entertaining his A-list friends in his loft on Thompson Street, Sam Waksal is more than just a medical entrepreneur who struck it rich. He's a charismatic host and a kind of Renaissance man: "There was merriment in his eyes, an invitation to the fun of enterprise, and, matched to that, an invitation to talk over an idea-any idea in the world. His appetite was irresistible." (So, apparently, was the lure of ImClone stock: Like Martha Stewart, Mr. Denby was a shareholder.)

Even after his "wayward friends" are caught up in scandal-Mr. Blodget fined and banned from Wall Street, Mr. Waksal packed off to jail-they're never mere villains. When Mr. Denby finally has to face the fact that Mr. Blodget is "a guy who mainly wanted to maximize his compensation," the realization "hurt like hell." After going to watch Mr. Waksal plead guilty to six federal charges, including bank fraud and securities fraud, Mr. Denby "walked away from the courthouse in tears."

The worst parts of American Sucker are about David Denby. Whatever happened to shame? Perhaps we're meant to admire his honesty, the complete candor with which he reveals his foolishness; perhaps we're meant to learn from his mistakes. But in what way is it instructive, or even entertaining, to read that in mid-1999, for a six-week period, Mr. Denby became obsessed with Internet porn? Or that he cured the insomnia brought on by his market anxieties with a cocktail of Xanax and NyQuil? Or that he repeatedly conned himself into believing that he'd found true love with a new woman? ("We greeted each other like long-lost friends who were astonished by their good luck in finding each other after so many missing years. Where have you been all this time? It was as if we had known each other in the past, in some earlier existence.") Or that 9/11 was his personal wake-up call: "I knew I couldn't be quite as passive as I was before September 11."

His biggest blunder was his investment strategy: all tech, all the time. He stuck to it despite his professed ignorance ("I wasn't lazy, exactly, but at some level, I thought the study of fundamentals was a waste of time"); despite the warnings of his New Yorker colleague, financial journalist John Cassidy (who told him bluntly in February 2000, "You're going to lose your money") and Mr. Levitt (who explained patiently that Nasdaq prices were "out of line with value"); and despite the fact that, all along, Mr. Denby was reading Robert J. Shiller and Thorstein Veblen and presumably thinking- really thinking -about the nation's obsession with money. Everyone makes mistakes; not everyone insists on broadcasting them. In the absence of shame, let's at least have modesty.

Mr. Denby is a capable writer. The problem here is not the author's prose but his judgment, which is serially bad (an alarming failure in a critic). He is indeed a sucker-how else could he have conceived that this dismal book would ever earn a "buy" rating?

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer .