THE DROOLING braindead mavens of what passes today for literary culture need to view American literature within context. From 1950 to 1990 that context was the Cold War. The leading literary figures during that period, including George Plimpton but also Robert Silvers of New York Review of Books, Norman Podhoretz at Commentary, the "New York Intellectuals" at Partisan Review and New Criterion, were COLD WARRIORS. Study their friggin' history! Is everyone in literature today an ignorant zombie? Are you going to tell me their political ideology had NO influence on editorial policy?
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The guy we should've interviewed was Mailer, before he passed on. Curious that a few months before his death he'd been giving his usual flatulent interviews to adoring boozhie audiences, then suddenly was gone. (Smothered by a pillow?) (Maybe his son cryogenically froze him a la Ted Williams. We can hope.)
Mailer was a good buddy of Plimpton's and likely knew the truth. He'd written a novel about the CIA-- I plan to read it-- and had a sequel planned before being talked out of it to do instead a crapsterpiece about Hitler.
I suspect the troll on the mountain will make a reappearance at my "Plutocracy USA" tale (www.literarymystery.blogspot.com). That is, if I'm not "accidentally" run over by a Detroit snowplow in the interim.
**********************************************************
(Note: This Friday, February 8, is the seven-year anniversary of the great debate at CBGB's-- specifically, CB's Gallery-- preppy editors of the Paris Review including Mr. Plimpton against the ULA. It was a real exchange of conflicting ideas-- one of the great moments of literary history.)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
20 comments:
Funny in this endless investigation of yours you can't find one piece in the Paris Review that advances the CIA. Maybe that's because the CIA knew that nobody but prissy Yalies ever read the thing, that nobody gave a fuck about it then, and nobody gives a fuck about it now, except a paranoid King who thinks Norman Mailer would have totally agreed, except, shit, he died.
Oh, and Johnny Cash would have agreed with me, but, shit, he died too.
King, congrats on the anniversary of the CBGB's "incident" too bad as you say there are no real champions like Mailor or Plimpton left in America who are willing to test the waters of intellectual and cultural debate and even passionate confrontation with the revolting serf prodigy.
Instead cowards and small minded posers who have no interest in either literature or fair and equal opportunity.
To "Grace": Funny that after all your lurking you still don't understand my motivations.
We saw in a previous post how an undergrounder expressed his disillusion with this nation's political system-- a disillusion many of us feel. In sum, we're tired of being lied to, and many of us believe we've been lied to as a nation at least since, oh, November of 1963.
We and my colleagues, within the ULA or outside of it, have sought ONE place, one spot in this society where we could stop the lies-- the realm of literature.
And look at you! An obvious apologist for the status quo-- apologies are 95% of what you post here-- and you won't give us your true identity no matter what.
YOU represent everything we oppose; everything I personally loath. You can't even guess the depth of my loathing for the likes of you.
What do we seek as citizens?
More than anything else, one thing: The truth!
I've sought to operate with complete transparency in my own activities. The lack of transparency in one segment of the ULA is why I've separated from the organization.
No more behind-the-scenes skulking around.
As a nation, we should be through with it.
As for you, where is your curiosity? That, if nothing else, should motivate you.
Regarding Plimpton and his friends, be patient. I'll get to him. I'm not on a trust fund, you know, and right now I'm trying to do many things at once, and still have to work to feed myself. My energy and time are limited.
Know this: We have barely scratched the surface in the story of how the lit world operates.
Barely touched it.
There's a lot more to it, as I indicated, involving more journals than just the extremely influential Paris Review.
The Ray Carver matter is directly connected.
I've tried to move on to other things, but it's assholes like you, "Grace," who are going to push me to look again into things.
I'm certain you won't enjoy what I discover.
More rantings from his Drunkness.
You don't want to talk about the CIA? Don't bring it up on your fucking blog.
Who are you freak'n' the Borg Identity!
What are you doing getting off on the black site torture tapes. Sounds like your making gangstar threats.
Or else what, milk- toast?
Oh, fuck you. I know it's part of your fucking paranoia to think that anyone who disagrees with Kingy-poo is now a CIA torture-loving stooge...but lordy, you bring up the CIA and then claim
"I've tried to move on to other things, but it's assholes like you, "Grace," who are going to push me to look again into things."
Yeah, it's my fault what you post. Must be the hypno-waves that me and Cheney are beaming your way....
You know me, but I don't know who you are. Why don't you reveal your true identity so we we can talk face to face.
Or are you afraid I'm bigger than you are and not up to it.
Otherwise come on let's have at at, I ain't afraid of no spooks.
Besides myself, I'm being pronoid, and really sympathetic toward you, chump.
Whatever deal you've made it's not worth submitting to the athema, which is how all such pacts end. Just read the great literature on the subject.
The literate know why and there's plenty of books and movies out there to inform the why.
Your program is defunct and dated.
We've already made the connection between the cold war CIA propoganda and perceptional conditioning "crossing over" into the establishment corporate publishing megalith.
Evidence: the literature by them that's out there tortures the reading public with boredom and triteness.
My name's Jimmy Grace.
I'm pro-art. In this fucked-up world this means not caring what the Paris Review fucking publishes and making my own art and taking my own chances. I guess that's my program.
If you think being bored by reading lit magazines is the same as torture you are worse than every trust-fund kid combined.
Stop misdirecting Jimmy come back beind the wings for a sec.
Do you care about what the CIA is pushing?
Do you think that misinformation exists, and do you understand what it's purpose is?
Do you see a connection between the misdirection serviced during the cold war thru literary journals and the practices of the CIA in our country and without our country?
Do you admit that there's enough evidence that the Cia has been involved in torture and trampling civil rights, and in our case since that is the common bond, trampling the freedom of expression and the right of privacy and that censorship and suppression of writers and poets logically would be one of the agendas of any goup wanting to control information and alternative points of view and creative expression and the alternative press that exists for the dissemination and distribution of, such is happening right now?
If not do you dream of being abducted and probed by aliens?
But then you are making your own art while there can be nothing of thew kind in a vaccum. Art is never sociopathic, well actually I never use the word anymore preferrin instead, AUTIST, by the way.
Either way you admitt to taking chances. Practicing unsafe art?
"Grace" doesn't care about the CIA, yet he sure cares about what one guy has to say on an obscure literary blog at the far corner of the literary universe.
In fact, as the emotion of his posts indicate, he carries very much about what we say about establishment publications.
Oh, I will have more to say about this topic. I'm merely asking this demi-puppet to remain patient-- which he has a hard time doing, apparently.
********************
By the way, for Christmas I received an Official Ernest Hemingway Bullshit Detector. I keep beside me when I check comments. For every "Jimmy Grace" post, the lights start flashing and the small machine begins beeping wildly.
*********************
As for myself, every time I read one of his posts, an image comes to me of cherry-colored slime-- an apt metaphor for such people.
**********************
People who post with fake identities on web sites are the moral equivalent of "shape-shifters" on science fiction TV shows.
***********************
Re Paris Review and Company. (Or I should say, "The Company.") The Richard Cummings "Monday Reports" on the ULA site, gossip though they may be, are a good starting point. If only a fraction of what he says is true, the information is devastating. I suspect the accuracy is more like 80-90%.
"Do you see a connection between the misdirection serviced during the cold war thru literary journals and the practices of the CIA in our country and without our country?"
No. Show me one single poem in the Paris Review that advances CIA interests. Because my belief is that the CIA was too busy fucking up countries, torturing dissidents and drumming up war to give a flying fuck about the Paris Review.
Whenever I disagree with you, you bring out the old personal attacks. First I was one of your old members in disguise. Then I was Steven Elliott. Now I'm apparently a CIA supporter. I bought a Rick Moody Paranoia detector and it's pointing at your ass.
Where talking about editorial policies, moron.
Can you point me to any 3 poems published in the Paris Review between 1975 and 1985 that isn't?
The onus is on you. You're the one who's contending here and making the angry monkey gestures.
And because your main purpose here is to waste our time and energy, you should get a taste of your own medecine so you have a chance of becoming a better person.
This is my last dealings with you until you present your case.
Until then keep your nose clean and check your hair for bugs!
OK, here's a poem from the Paris Review site:
Abundance
A cool wind blows on summer evenings, stirring the wheat.
The wheat bends, the leaves of the peach trees
rustle in the night ahead.
In the dark, a boy’s crossing the field:
for the first time, he’s touched a girl
so he walks home a man, with a man’s hungers.
Slowly the fruit ripens—
baskets and baskets from a single tree
so some rots every year
and for a few weeks there’s too much:
before and after, nothing.
Between the rows of wheat
you can see the mice, flashing and scurrying
across the earth, though the wheat towers above them,
churning as the summer wind blows.
The moon is full. A strange sound
comes from the field—maybe the wind.
But for the mice it’s a night like any summer night.
Fruit and grain: a time of abundance.
Nobody dies, nobody goes hungry.
No sound except the roar of the wheat.
--
Hetero fluffy bullshit, but helping the CIA?!?
Eh, well that doesn't fit the proposition and the limits.
But this poem of Gluck's is a good example of propaganda-- a trend in american letters that's not just about bad poetry (it breaks the cardinal rule of modern poetry in that it allows a descriptive style to dominatr thereby watering down the optunity for the reader to sense and experience on the terms of entry of the poem.
But this cannot hide the really nasty attitude toward life and even toward the reader that quacks like Gluck hope to get away with the "playing dead", the sickening sweetness of heresays like this.
Perfect for the Paris Review and still servicing the cold war propoganda and contrived usupation of American letters contrived by certain agency and their recruits from the Ivy League.
Which you'll find begining with Gluck's early stuff in the Paris review and way before that.
The bullshit is right, but afraid the bullshit fluff is so thick it can hardly be cut and the situation seems hopeless.
Otherwise Jimmy old boy rustle up them three straw dogs from the period Ize bes aksing fo' so daze can be burned proper like!
A couple points:
1.) Did the CIA give a "flying fuck" about the Paris Review? I'd say yes. After all, it was their money which created the publication!
2.) Their agenda was served by presenting an internationally credible journal ("Paris" Review) which presented a liberal-- not radical-- example of American literature.
Recall what the trend in American letters and American criticism had been before 1950. Socially active writing was strongly on the march.
(A better journal to look into is Partisan Review, once an organ for the likes of Philip Rahv, which in its later days became the home of neocons! How did this happen? We know that Partisan Review was another which received CIA funds.)
Raymond Carver is the perfect example of how the trend in literature, firmly in place by the 70's, put there by the likes of Paris Review, had working class writers like Ray Carver-- supposed icon of the working class-- writing "minimalist" work which a Susan Minot and other trust-funders could model their own work after! Amazing, really. Working class art-- but find in Carver's published work much on the job, or unions, or strikes, or the boss, or anger. Not there. Why was this?
Missing are POLEMICS-- the polemics of American writing of the Thirties and Forties.
What did I find with my own writing "career." After I published a couple strong (albeit strongly edited) work in lit journals in the early 90's, I had lit editors and writers telling me that literature was not supposed to be polemical.
Don't even TRY to give me any b.s. about whether or not there were editorial policies in place.
Another case in point-- NY R of Books. Mr. Silvers was a subscriber of my newsletter. At one point one of their editors was looking for writing for Granta, and wrote me. (Granta had/has the same publisher.) Strong proviso-- nothing polemical. I had to tell her that left me out.
I'm kind of a living example of what happens to old-style American writers who stick to their principles. I've had essays and reviews published-- they've all in one form another been gutted BY editors, of content.
What happened to Carver-- even with the tame stuff he presented?
Not good enough!
And so his work was gutted some more-- and this ate at him-- gutted as we've seen with the examples so far presented.
This, my man, whoever you are, was criminal, criminal, criminal.
It was taking a talented writer and kicking him in the gut, knocking him into a hole which had been dug for him, by his publishers, then kicking him some more.
What you are presenting to us, demi-puppet apologist without the integrity to tell us who you are, is insulting bullshit.
I wasn't born yesterday and I haven't been dealing with the literary world since last week.
Since 1992, to be specific, and I can give plenty of specific examples to illustrate everything wrong with that world as it currently operates. (I did 45 issues of such examples in my newsletter.)
I'll have more to say in some actual posts. . . .
To readers: Think for a minute why this guy is here. As Frank has pointed out, it's pure disinformation, nothing more.
"Grace" isn't addressing me-- he's trying to mitigate the effect of what I say on new readers.
If you cared to check all the exchanges we've had with this ghost, you'd see that he's admitted before that "Grace" isn't his name. When it serves his cause he goes back to lying up a strom.
And what is his cause?
Preservation of that status quo.
Makes one wonder who he is-- but with such a gutless individual we'll never really know.
p.s. I, uh, should also point out that the CIA genrally doesn't take out ads to advertise their presence!
(To prove my case it's actually easy to provide examples-- shows in Europe that Paris Review may have been presented at as an example of "hip" young American letters. Properly gutted of-- well, as William Styron himself said in the inaugeral issue-- of "axe grinders.")
What has been hurt from fifty years of meaningless fiction and poetry is American literature itself.
This is actually a huge subject, which no one is covering or discussing other than us.
1992
oned seThe Paris Review had
scheduled an interview with him once before when he was at St.
Elizabeth’s, but he canceled at the last minute because he deter-
mined that The Paris Review was part of the “pinko usury fringe.”
That’s the sort of thing I expected, but that’s not what I found.
I think you can chart his political changes right
from the end of the First World War and find that they correlate
with the growth of paranoia and monomania that connected eco-
nomics—finally, Jewish bankers—with a plot to control the world.
He started out cranky and moved from cranky to crazy.
Donald Hall, first poetry editor fot the Paris Review.
Donald Hall's book "Writing Well" was required text book I think 'cos of the Iowa U workshop's using it and Iowa's dominance. When I was at Temple in Philly in 1974-76. Writing Well disgusted me, disheartened me while I out and out despised the Iowa workshop style and moraes.
But ya know I decided to look into Dylan Thomas and whether his poetry was published in the Paris Review to put myself at ease. Here's what I found:
A CONTEMPT FOR DYLAN THOMAS
Wilfred Watson
Issue Content, No. 9, Summer 1955
then nothing no mention until an article about publishing by the great James Laughlin!
Ya know what can I say when this says it all for me.
Or am I just paranoid.
Do I think that the CIA was behind this factoid. Well, maybe more than that I can say the CIAKGB was behind DT's early untimely death?
When an agency tortures, kidnaps, and kills people in our own time then, again, the onus is on King's detractors I'd say to prove that a great poet wasn't assasinated.
Why not, and who cares? Right?
You clearly don't welcome debate, you're content to exist within your unknowing smugness, and so I'll say good bye and good evening and move on to other arenas.
Oh, wait, sorry, I didn't put that comment into its proper context:
"Anyway, sorry for disturbing your little corner. I guess I opened a door to the outside world and this disturbed you. Yes, I handle publicity for the ULA (my job is to get attention for overlooked writers-- always looking for some good ones, you know) and to build the ULA name. Toward that end, I do check up once a month or so on the attention the ULA is receiving. I didn't know, when you put the ULA up as a topic, that you weren't being serious; that you saw it as a quick way to make a few cute remarks, about vanity or such, without knowing what we're about, and plainly, not caring what we're about. You clearly don't welcome debate, you're content to exist within your unknowing smugness, and so I'll say good bye and good evening and move on to other arenas." --Wenclas, from a Google search
Weird and too bad about your terminal case of whatever and who ever you have.
I do so hope you are honest for once and are leaving until you're called into service again by the other jerk-offs,
And thanks for keeping the issue of the CIAKGB alive and kicking where it hurts and assisting readers here with looking over other pertinent posts from last year, and further info to be found at the ULA Monday Report archives.
Post a Comment