Wednesday, February 14, 2007

The Game Is Up

It's time to blow the whistle on the games and secrecy of the literary world. Major players stand revealed as frauds.

Most especially, The Paris Review. We've been very patient with them (watchdogs and attack dogs that we are); parleying with their representative; awaiting a public statement that would reveal all.

Does anyone ask: Where is that statement?

If Paris Review was NOT founded with CIA money; if George Plimpton had no knowledge of CIA involvement, no steady connection with CIA employees through the years, then where is the statement?

There has been no answer to allegations posted on Paris Review's Wikipedia entry. Why not? What happened to PR's many supporters, to their Very Important billionaires and high-priced lawyers? Where's been a murmur even from the law firm Plimpton's father founded?

Secrecy: Why the secrecy? Why is everyone hiding? From what? Why does the realm of writers-- writers-- which should be the most open of all worlds in this society, consist of closed doors?

18 comments:

jimmy grace said...

"There has been no answer to allegations posted on Paris Review's Wikipedia entry. Why not? What happened to PR's many supporters, to their Very Important billionaires and high-priced lawyers? Where's been a murmur even from the law firm Plimpton's father founded?"

Jesus fucking Christ. Why is there no response from very important billionaires about something you put on Wikipedia? While we're at it, why doesn't Will Smith respond to what I said about him in a bar last night?

Oh, right: But hundreds of people are contacting you about this. But you won't post all this contact. Because you respect the privacy. Of people whose secrecy you hate.

King Wenclas said...

Distorting again what I said?
I didn't say hundreds of people. No-- I said I'd received about a hundred e-mails about the matter.
Most of them are in fact from one person, who has strong ties to PR and has been acting as a kind of behind-the-scenes attack dog. Again, we'll save more details about this for the ULA's upcoming Monday Report on the topic.
Re billionaires. I don't know if Drue Heinz, in her luxury, has much else to do but worry about the prestigious magazine she's funding. Does she really not care about their Wikipedia entry? Do the editors not? The board members? One then has to ask why they are there.
(They cared very much about the magazine two years ago when they decided to appoint a new editor.)
Grace, at least try to be believable when you post here.
(One could ask why it matters so much to you. . . .)

King Wenclas said...

(A glaring contradiction: "Grace" was recently telling us that Paris Review was just an insignificant publication of no standing. Now, suddenly they're too big and too busy to worry about their Wikipedia entry-- or about the reputation they're tarnishing?)

jimmy grace said...

The Paris Review is full of millionaires and nobody else, aside from their rich cronies, gives a shit. Clear?

King Wenclas said...

"Clear"? Is that an ultimatum?
No one gives a shit about the most prestigious, most hyped literary journal of the past fifty years? Not even their own editors??
But "Grace," I give a shit, because I care about literature.

jimmy grace said...

Christ, you can't even read. I said nobody gives a shit about the Paris Review except its millionaires and cronies. The editors would be included in that tiny, tiny group.

Apparently you care as well, but the tiny group doesn't give a shit about you, and nobody else gives a shit about the Paris Review. That's why complaining about them has failed to bring on the revolutionary avalanche you crave.

Kareem Abdul Shabazz said...

Wow. They are even more obscure than I thought. I thought their cirulation would be at least 50,000 which is still terrible, but it is nowhere near that:10,000


My. 10,000 is simply awful. No wonder the CIA story doesn't matter much. I wonder how many of those 13,000 are NOT writers or literary critics.

Paris Review isn't even one of the top Mags circulation wise:
Circulation rankings

Kareem Abdul Shabazz said...

EditI wonder how many of those 10,000 are NOT writers or literary critics.

Kareem Abdul Shabazz said...

EDIT #2:Paris Review isn't even number one of the top Mags circulation wise:

Sorry, I hit the publish button too soon, before I could correct my grammar.

FDW said...

Hello spooks.
Once again you go back to square one like dogs chasing your tails.
Same place you started from weeks ago.
All these points you're making were already answered in the meantime.
Like sociopaths who take advantage of accident and circumstance (other people) and then prey upon who ever might be wandering around within range getting a rise by the smell of blood, though in your sorry cases the blood you smell is your own drip drip dripping outta your own upturned schnozels after being punched in the nose repeatedly here, so you gotz yr, fingers and probably legs crossed hoping the readers of this forum are not familar with yr. programmed spiels.
You can only INVERT the facts, the statistics, CONFUSE in the grand scheme and thrust of the Bourgeiose ('cos confusion leads to fear and totalitarianism) and of course never appreciate the truth, namely, that fiction and poetry is a high art form, not (you spooks and scabs) capable of sharing in the bounty and signifance to society nor the basic life and death importance literature as any other art has to the life rather than the survival of societies. And fiction as in Ficciones the way Borges "sees" it, an intentional thing, rather than in your parlance "political" or S&M thing.
What else might a person, any one of the great inner individuals which overwhelms the small shadows you insist on throwing as exhibitionists and posers by their sheer numbers, in a democracy aware awake and to whom we the voices the witnesses are in service to. What you fear the most?
We are those who strike literature into the heart of the ill- literate.
And what is that greater shadow that subsumes your own but none other than the guillotine's!

Kareem Abdul Shabazz said...

We are those who strike literature into the heart of the ill- literate.

The illiterate don't read. Fiction is not a high art form. There is high-fiction, but as much as I enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, I am not wont to put it in the same class as, er, a work by Da Vinci.

Ever notice that the working class is buying up descriptive fiction by the millions? Because the last thing most people want to do is read about someone having the exact same life as they do. Hence the popularity of sitcoms (entertaining and funny to some people) and commercial fiction (entertaining and intellectually engaging).

Reading about some dude's shitty job and drinking problems is something people don't need from fiction. My neighborhood is filled with the down and out, alienated, racists, junkies, all sorts of people. Fiction can't tell me anything about it.

Now, as usual, James Joyce was the perfect example of turning the mundane into art. Ulysses is about a single day in the life of a somewhat sad sap, but executed with amazing modernist skill, and of course not simplistic.

FDW said...

Bloom ain't a sad sap he's a modern hero. Modern heros are the average person in MODERNIST times they are the people Joyce saw himself in relected and who he thought would buy his book. Dubliners was a good example of this product while Ulysses is to break the ice a necessary terminal work.
Even Yeats was on this vibe: "The Second Coming" is perhaps one of the greatest news stories written in great headline banners of lines of the populist press of the 20th century. Read its there, the journalismo (tho anti-facts) gawks through in the idiom here in there. Read it again with this in mind.
Bottom line is that Yeats, Joyce, Pound, HD, on and on after and before (SUPRAREALISM) had a grand sympathy and at their best compassion as an operative factor in the MODERNIST work those same "qualitys" to be found in ULA writers/poets, for the people, the times, the way things might fall apart in the future and look to have had. 'Cos modernism is still with us, "bird lives!"
Take a gander at Wild Bill Black Olive's piece now on ULA's Literary Adventures, Pat King has up there currently and then go down aways of checking out other stuff 'til you chance upon Pat's own poem on time.
Post- modern post post Modern. Mere rationalizations. Give me a break!

King Wenclas said...

Joyce, what people want is excitement and narrative. Lots of very popular authors have covered the seamier side of life-- notably Ed McBain, but lot's of other detective writers.
(Look also at the proliferation of black detective novels, the underground kind you see sold at stands in Philly near Market Street, east of Broad.)
What we need is what even Franzen advocates (though utterly incapable of doing it himself): melding the popular and the literary. A return to this.
p.s. Whenever I hear someone talking in old categories-- "middlebrow" etc-- I know they're not thinking for themselves, but through the prism of their schooling/brainwashing; which means that their ideas are badly out of date. (Universities of course cover movements only long after they're over-- rock n roll even being taught now I hear.)

jimmy grace said...

Wow, Franzen's out-of-date approach would explain why nobody bought that book. Except, of course, for the thousands and thousands who did.
I couldn't get through The Corrections, but I don't think you can claim it was a popular failure.

FDW said...

And oh yeh, up there on Lit Adventures and down a bit to two weeks or so ago, Bruce Hodder's poetry. Especially and most important "Blair's Children". Hodder's the cat, brother. Check it out!

jimmy grace said...

That poem is basically a new version of that poem we all had to read in middle school that ends "we die soon." I googled it and found the author Gwendolyn Brooks, and then saw this in her bio:

After her first book of poetry was published in 1945, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Gosh. What a sellout. Or is it that what matters about art is whether or not it's good, not whether or not it's indy?

FDW said...

JJ that's ridiculous you can't bust the pianer without foist lerning to handle chopstix!

An' looky here Gwen Brooks wrote about pound in St. Elizebeth poem on as variations of "The House That Jack Built". An' whaz abouts T. Roethke.
Hey man we're in omn the Modernist movement but 'tis like Amodernisimo still originating/ continued in the Americas, and diss here "wave" bees Ahistorical (I'm not trying to defend Hodder nor not not defend him, BUT ya know the It. Renaissance aesthetic philosophers recognized now less than 6 kinds of "originality"(cf. Panofsky, the husband).
Weeze be pirates and "outlaws" over there over there, I thunks Missah Bones, and we do steal and pillage and raid but in a natural manner and with ease of irony oft, but we are not deliberated plagerists and insidious soul suckers like them thar upper dawgs and dippy- puppies! Peace,

will check JJ that writer and links you offered above. Maybe I can steal his wife and daughters.

FDW said...

Actually meant to refer to Elizabeth Bishop in the above.