Friday, January 19, 2007

What Say Paris Review?

Now that CIA involvement in famed lit-journal The Paris Review has been confirmed, what say its editors? Have they spoken about this to anyone?

Now that the story has broken, it's incumbent upon them to address the issue; to state the extent of CIA financing and involvement, including providing a time-line of how long the influence lasted-- and whether it's still going on!

6 comments:

Patrick S. @ RedFez said...

Links to the NYT story and the original ULA Monday Report are now up at our homepage:

Underground Literary Alliance

Jimbo said...

Uh, I think what it shows is that what is being called literature in America is actually just a propaganda instrument. It's all a hoax like the lady said. What negative impact this hoax has had can never really be known. If they had acted in a less criminal way then maybe they couldn't be accused. If they didn't go around telling people that studying hard at some place like Pasadena city college will get them some place where being when they went to exclusive school in New England or Switzerland and know that the game is rigged in their favor maybe there wouldn't be this hostility towards them.

Jimbo said...

You know in a certain way it could be said that they are in part responsable for 911. While they were playing whatever games they were playing. Opening Amerikan Biznez skools in France or pizza huts in Hungary rigging literary competitions or transatlantic favor flipping for critic's praise where ever it might help people who went to the same exclusive boarding school as them, a real threat to America's security was being assembled.

M.D.G. said...

This is bigger than literature. This control is everywhere.

King Wenclas said...

The bizarre remark from "Chief" illustrates what's wrong with the literary world today. What this person sees isn't the catastrophic fact that this leading, renowned, celebrated etc. journal was a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. No-- no reverberations at all! Nothing there! But the ULA! Why, now there's the story; us humble powerless miscreants.
Blind mice: they see nothing and know nothing.
Not the bankruptcy and irrelevance of literature today.
Not the fraudulent pose of all the "hipsters" at Paris Review over the years.
Working for The Man, all of them.
It's THEY, the Paris Review staff and board, who should be most outraged about this story, and up in arms about it.
And yes, MDG in this instance happens to be right. The story is bigger than literature, bigger than culture. The story is about the shredding of our so-called democracy in the interests of the scheming of a select group of wealthy and well-bred individuals.
To them, PR, literature itself, was merely a pawn in their continual global chess-playing which was going on when Paris Review was founded and continues happening now, to the detriment of all of us; to the detriment of the world and America alike-- maybe worse, in the long run, to the detriment of literature itself.
Do the editors at Paris Review even care?
Will they say one word about this?
Or, as in so much else (big money takeover of CLMP for instance) will it simply be ignored?
IF the print media and all writers don't decry this, don't speak out about this, then it will once and for all reveal this nation's literary world as a giant fraud; a sardonic joke.

James Scott Linville said...
This comment has been removed by the author.