How easy is 'literary' New York?

Over the weekend, I found myself reading about the story of Jessica Roy, a student who gained brief notoriety for an unfriendly - but quite lifelike - evisceration of a Brooklyn literary-snob party she attended. It's a scene I think we've all visited: the pretentious wannabe who lives with his parents, throws fancy parties and reels in guests with lots of free booze and drugs. Such largesse is gratifying, but you can't help feeling sorry for the sucker.

I've had my own run-ins with the literati, at first courtesy of campus lit mags, then with one of those English-language reviews which is inexplicably headquartered in Paris (maybe the coffee's better?). The lesson learned was that, no matter how refined their taste in matters of punctuation and syntax, the self-styled literati are, with honorable exceptions, useless people.

The party that Roy attended brought her world crashing down around her - everyone she had admired, in reality so fake! So obsequious, ready to kiss up in exchange for a byline. The thought that kept coming back to me was how little any of them had really accomplished.

Those luminaries of which Roy had been in awe, what were their towering achievements? Some of them had founded Gawker, a jeering blog for those stuck in the peanut gallery. Another of them wrote a novel called All the Sad Young Literary Men, by all accounts a narcissistic mediocrity. And others edit N+1, the only one of their endeavors I'm going to qualify as possibly not worthless.

The cherry on top is a letter written by a 17-year-old from Alabama to the New York Times, which some hack at the Observer thought was so important he devoted a column to it (yes, he was another of Roy's idols). The letter's subject? How said 17-year-old is a future literary titan. Apparently, he's now being queried by publishers who'd like to publish him. In this world, it can't be hard to make a splash.

I'd like to suggest that aspiring writers take a leaf out of Hemingway's book: go drive an ambulance, preferably in a war zone. Death, shattered love, drinking problems - these things don't get old. Literary pretensions do.