The Paris Review Problem

(For Added Background, see my "Open Bar, Open Debate" essay at www.texasgang.com/king2.html.)

The Paris Review Problem is the same one which afflicts the static enervated in-bred establishment lit world as a whole-- a lack of new ideas and new blood. (Their idea of new blood is to import properly screened homogenized and tame conformist MFA writers from Iowa.)

The Paris Review always was a wannabe knock-off of the Lost Generation. Always it was a one-man operation.

The Paris Review has a platform in the culture but they'll never find anyone who'll know what to do with it. The Money People behind the publication will likely choose someone they're comfortable with-- another Money Person like Rick Moody-- and it'll slowly drift further into irrelevance and obscurity. They should shut the relic down and let it take its place in literary history.

Literature should be NEWS. The only news in the lit world now is the Underground Literary Alliance. We're filled with new ideas and we're swiftly enlisting the best underground writers into our ranks. Kick-ass underground novelists like Tim Hall, Noah Cicero, and James Nowlan are some of our most recent additions (with more to come). We'll soon add the best underground poets in America to those we already have. Loud striking energetic dynamic talent is coming to US. (And yes, we'll have more women writers-- but no Galley Cats; no self-abasing self-censoring political-game-playing boot-polishing WIMPS.)

If the Lost Generation of undergrounders Stein McAlmon Hemingway Pound were alive today, they'd be with us.

As the Paris Review couldn't stand up to us in 2001, less can any status quo collection of conformist posers do so now. We're moving while the rest of the lit world cluelessly has their feet embedded in the ground.