This week in the Times Book Review, intellectual feminist Naomi Wolf puts down her newfound Bible just long enough to pick up the Gossip Girls books. While flitting about the Young Adult section, she finds that the teen slut genre is promoting "escapist fantasies." Well, no shit — that's why they're good! After that, it's a lengthy debate on the use of "fancy" and Walter Benjamin's forthcoming hash-happy compilation. After the jump, Intern Alexis holds your hand and guides you through the Cliff's Notes of the Review.

Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things
By Naomi Wolf

We practically soiled our Sevens, dirtied our DVF and tarnished our town car with excitement over Naomi Wolf's essay on the rise in popularity of young adult slut fiction, aka books in the "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "Clique" series. We're not gonna front here; we've definitely, definitely spent some hours in the young adult section of the bookstore, sitting up against a wall with a Gossip Girl book strategically masked by a copy of the New Republic. Call it soft-core porn, call it cliterature, but there's nothing like reading about a bulimic 16-year-old Spence girl having sex in the service elevator of her Fifth Avenue apartment building, high on her alcoholic mother's Percocet.

Wolf concludes that these books (which prominently feature Sarah Michelle Gellar a la Cruel Intentions-types running around New York, LA and their respective upscale suburbs with their parents' American Express Black Cards at their fingertips), unlike their Judy Blume and Louisa May Alcott counterparts, promote some seriously bad
morals:

The girls try on adult values and customs as though they were going to wear them forever. The narratives offer the perks of the adult world not as escapist fantasy but in a creepily photorealistic way, just as the book jackets show real girls polished to an unreal gloss.

Hmm, that may be true, but we like our escapist fantasy creepily photorealistic, thank you very much! Let's get a Terry Richardson cover going up in this piece, shall we?


Fancy Nancy
 By Jane O'Connor
Reviewed by Emily Jenkins

While we were in the children's section of the Book Review, we thought we might as well stop and stay a while. Couldn't quite handle reading about Danielle Trussoni's memoir about her Vietnam War-fighting father or "The Relational Revolution in Psychology." Emily Jenkins's review of a book called "Fancy Nancy" looked like it was just our speed. It's the story of a little girl named Nancy who, she writes:

has redecorated her bedroom with feather boas, Christmas lights, paper flowers and showy hats. Her doll is named Marabelle Lavinia Chandelier. So enterprising is she in her pursuit of fanciness that she offers lessons to her plainly dressed family. They attend, taking notes, and Nancy helps dress them in bows, ornaments, top hats and gaudy scarves. 'Ooo-la-la!' Nancy cries in delight. 'My family is posh! That's a fancy word for fancy.' The message here is welcome fanciness (unlike physical beauty) is available to anyone with a can-do spirit and the writing is adorable.

All this fancy-talk caught our eye because, these days, the word "fancy" makes us cringe a little bit. Members of our close friend group realized that we say the word "fancy" way too much (to describe restaurants, authors, artists, neighborhoods, apartment buildings) and it's just too annoying. There's a new rule that's been instated: Instead of saying the word "fancy," we are to use a more descriptive adjective (expensive, up-market, well-educated, of fine upbringing, etc.) No more fancy except to describe cars and boarding schools. Cars and boarding schools are the only things that can be fancy. Oh, and our mother, Nancy. She can be fancy too.


Inside the List: Walter Benjamin

Taking the not-reading-the-actual-reviews ball and running with it, we loved this week's "Inside the List." Dwighty Garnery muses on the May release of Walter Benjamin's "On Hashish," a collection of Benjamin's writings on drugs. DG writes:

The best moment in "On Hashish" may be when Benjamin, the author of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," gets a world-class case of the munchies: "First I ordered a dozen oysters. The man wanted me to order the next course at the same time. I named some standard dish. He came back with the news that none was left. I then pointed to a place on the menu in the vicinity of this dish, and was on the point of ordering each item, one after another. . . . I came to a stop at a p t de Lyon. 'Lion paste,' I thought with a witty smile, when it lay clean on a plate before me; and then, contemptuously: 'This tender rabbit or chicken meat whatever it may be.' To my lionish hunger, it would not have seemed inappropriate to satisfy itself on a lion. Moreover, I had tacitly decided that as soon as I had finished at Basso's (it was about half past 10) I would go to another restaurant and dine a second time." Eat your heart out, A. J. Liebling.

Put that flaneur in your pipe and smoke it. No, really.