October 18, 1999, p. 212
Matt Haber, who has a mind like a thousand flypapers tangled in a black hole, did us the service of finding the old New Yorker tale of Dave Eggers’ loss of a benefit’s worth of money years before NKotB’s n+1 got around to doing the same. Text, plus bonus “Where are they now?” game after the jump.
(L-R: Todd Pruzan, Diane Vadino, Sean Wilsey, Dave Eggers, Kevin Shay.)
The New Yorker explains it all to you.
Where Are They Now?
Todd Pruzan not unrecently published “The Clumsiest People in Europe,” which The Transom is pleased to report it has read. It is a found piece of writing by Favell Lee Mortimer, a nice English xenophobe who described the world, poorly, to children. The Transom has never been able to shake the not-delicious sensation that Ms. Mortimer is a hoax of Mr. Pruzan’s. If she is, she is a stealthy one. Mr. Pruzan seems to work at Details, and formerly was an editor at Print. (It is a nice time to mention that Mr. Pruzan and The Transom technically, actually, share dealings with the same agents.)
Diane Vadino’s a bit murky, ask again later. She might live in Brooklyn. Her last two Nexis bylines were in mid-late 2005, in the New York Post. She may be or may have been a writer for Spin but who knows what kind of craziness is going on over there since Sia Michel left? According to a single and expired weblink, apparently Ms. Vadino was once the frontwoman for The Patti Smith Explosion, backed by Mr. Pruzan and Neal Pollack. This is a joke that sounds somehow familiar from when it happened.
Sean Wilsey went on to publish a memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All,” which The Transom is pleased to report it has read, despite its thoroughly hateable title. But highly enjoyable! (Still would have cut 50 pages. The Transom would cut 50 pages from anything.) Still: Don’t you find that “disinherited” is the most important of the modern conditions? He still works at McSweeney’s! (And ditto that thing about the agency.)
Dave Eggers has a new novel coming out in October! Huh wha? How have we not seen a galley? Dunno what it is all about!
Kevin Shay, surprisingly enough, is a sometime code-jockey. He is the author of “The End As I Know It,” a new novel, from last December, about Y2K anxiety. The Transom is saddened to report that it has not yet read it.
So now you know! Time has made a success of them all! Oh, well, except the chick. That happens at a lot at these kind of places, such as book publishing houses, magazines, and newspapers. You know: everywhere.
