Are you excited for tonight's GOSSIP GIRL?
(OK, catch your breath.)
Now tell me: Does the show reflect poetry's diminishing cultural capital?
In the CW show (which returns tonight after a long, writers'-strike amplified hiatus), Dan and Jenny Humphrey's father, Rufus, is a former rock star who now runs an art gallery; they live in Brooklyn.
In the books (by Cecily von Ziegesar) upon which the show is based, Rufus is "a self-proclaimed intellectual and the editor of lesser-known Beat poets." They live in a "large and crumbling tenth-floor, four-bedroom West End Avenue apartment....[that] hadn't been renovated since the 1940s."
We learn (in book 2, YOU KNOW YOU LOVE ME) that "[t]heir dad wasn’t the best housekeeper in the world. It was hard to remember to shop for groceries or mop the floors when you were busy writing essays on why some poet no one had ever heard of was the next Allen Ginsberg. Most of the time Dan and Jenny survived on Chinese takeout."
Any candidates for the original of Rufus Humphrey?
Ed Park is the author of the novel Personal Days (Random House, 2008) and a founding editor of The Believer...
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