read: you’re the one that i want and nobody does it better, musically titled sixth and seventh books in cecily von ziegesar’s gossip girl series.  and as i was racing to finish them by the library’s due date, km jibed: ‘you have to get them back on time, there’s a fourteen year-old girl waiting for them.’  fair enough, but the reason i really began reading these books in earnest is the very smart balance of highbrow and low.  this is life in the elite in new york – holding your own at the heatherette show and at the guggenheim the next morning, aware of and vaguely impressed by celebs but more often obsessing over each other instead (viz: my undergrad classmate’s rag, or the i-love-it-already cityfile).  unfortunately, as the series runs on, this seems to fade into a blur of product placement – someone will start to carry a bag by a designer that’s flared out, or shop at a les boutique when they should have been at a nolita one – and the appeal of teenage trials, however sympathetic a reader may be to them, flags.

yielding seemingly endless entertainment, however: all the sad young gossip girls, the savagely smart metafictional tumblog that takes place within the world of the books and tv show – sort of.  its name referencing keith gessen’s self-referential novel (which itself references f. scott fitzgerald, progenitor of all good things american), atsygg presents artifacts – sec filings, ichat screenshots, and facebook photos among them – that meld the real world with the plotlines fans love, reminding us that what really exists isn’t on the page/screen or in our minds, but somewhere in between, in the land of zeitgeist.  it’s written by jonathan liu, who also writes for the aforementioned pink paper of real estate lust, and is not updated nearly enough for my liking.