For the last few days, a youngster has been IMing me to ask me some questions for some blog story about how to best network at parties. At blogger parties. I didn't really say anything, because, WHAT? Except I was finally like, actually, I don't go to blogger parties and I don't "network"? Because, well, do I bear the hallmarks of a careerist particularly? And he was like, yes you do! You were at Alex Balk's going-away party! Right, so first of all, Alex is actually my FRIEND, "in real life," and second of all, I was technically (if not in practice) his BOSS from that which he was "going away," and third of all, that was NINE or TEN MONTHS AGO. And fourth of all, oh, fuck you all.

The point is that there is a very small cluster of overlapping scenes, based in Manhattan and Brooklyn, of people who know each other and sometimes drink and/or sleep together and sometimes give each other pills that they can use during the course of their workday, because somehow writing or blogging is actually too difficult to do without stimulation. (Whatever! I smoke through it myself, so I guess I shouldn't be judging.)

Those scenes are unrelentingly heterosexual, largely but definitely not entirely Ivy League, and composed of some people who like each other and some who don't and some who cannot tell who they do and do not like.

At last, this brings us to the matter of Jessica Roy, who is a student at New York University, although she is leaving for a semester abroad shortly, and her recent attendance at some parties.

Jessica, a blogger, had been in attendance at the Jezebel Incident, and she became the authoritative third-party source on the Incident. Her account was fairly clear-eyed and very good; I'd missed the Incident myself by mere minutes, being fortunate enough to have become trapped at a dinner around the corner, thank you Jesus.

Her latest account, delivered to New York magazine's website—though as interview subject, not writer, although what is the difference now, hmm?—is about going to n+1-related parties (note: not official n+1 parties! Let that distinction be made!) in Brooklyn.

Which is to say, get-togethers, in and near where people live, of some people who know each other.

It seems like right about now we should commission Jezebel's Tracie Egan to write some "what did you expect, in that neighborhood and in that outfit?" sort of postmodern, we're-all-feminists-here rape jokes. (Something like: What's the worst thing about getting raped at a Brooklyn literary party? Having to take the J train home! Or: How do you rape a 4th-wave feminist? You can't! She doesn't give a shit about what you do!)

Roy finds that everyone went to the same few colleges (almost true!) and argued about parts of speech and drank too much and were talking about a book that I personally haven't heard of much less read. Then she went to Carla Blumenkranz's birthday party. Keith Gessen and Emily Gould were there! So was Moe! Jon Liu told Roy that everyone there was "frenemies." That is true, except for the ones that are lover-emies. Ha ha, I just tried to coin something and it didn't come off at all. I suck.

"It just was all so fucking fake," Roy wrote. She thinks some crazy things, like that people can have their talent "stripped" from them (as if this were Dungeons & Dragons), but at least she has a healthy sense of fear.

And so it turns out that she was at what some of us would call a bad birthday party. (It was probably a good party for some others!) And she was a little drunk, and a few years younger than everyone else. It happens. It's a terrible feeling. (It's not as bad as the feeling of being a few years older, but if she comes back after her semester abroad, and puts in 15 years in New York, she'll maybe find out someday!)

This "tiny concentration of hyper-intellectuals has become a juggernaut that subtly controls everything that happens in the industry" is what Roy says she came to believe.

But most of these people to whom Roy refers can barely put on underwear before noon. Like, Gessen maybe controls what goes in his quarterly journal and what goes in his mouth, and that's about it. OH and what goes on his TUMBLR, let's not forget! As for any of the rest of them, they barely control what goes on their own blogs.

And by the way, there's a couple reasons you don't see people like Anna Holmes, who actually runs Jezebel, at these parties. For one, she's up early. Working! Doing work!

It's as funny that everyone thinks "everyone" goes to these parties as it is to think the attendees have power over anything. (The people involved surely find this hilarious too—ask Moe and Emily if they think they're in charge of the world of anything. I'd ask them this but I'm writing this on the Long Island Rail Road, because I am traveling as swiftly away from Manhattan as I can before another LITERARY PARTY or BLOGGER NETWORKING DRINKS begins!)

In any event. Boy howdy, is Jessica Roy gonna be pissed when she finds out about midtown and all the stuff that happens up there! Also no one tell her about City Hall please. She is gonna go really postal when she hears about that stuff.

But yeah. I remember when we threw a big BLOGGER DRINKS party on Houston Street, probably in 2002 or something, back when I was young enough to stay up late and still get up and have some energy to write, at that bar that used to look like the inside of an airplane, which is I guess where Rachel Sklar and Alex Balk had their birthday party four or five years later, after it didn't look like an airplane anymore, a party to which I meanly took an Observer reporter to so that he could narc them all out and then left. Ha, great times. Anyway, we threw this blogger party mostly, as I recall, so we could meet Leslie Harpold, who was the queen of all Internet writers (you did not want to call her a blogger). Leslie was always quick with a kind email to a young writer, and she had an incredible way of making a suggestion about something that you'd written that was both always right and never made you feel in the least bit bad, particularly since she could be so hilariously savage about people's work she hated. God I miss Leslie. She always liked to go for steak at the Knickerbocker even though it wasn't any good, she just really liked it there.