Chekhov's Mistress
My Paris Review Confession (updated)
Update
Note Ron Silliman, a past contributor of poetry to The Paris Review, has some perspective on Hugh’s departure. He gives us some background on the board’s background and says…
“This is a board for a little magazine with just 5,000 subscribers? It is really more like having your own thermonuclear missile for a home burglary prevention system. One feels sorry for Brigid Hughes, who at 32 is still twenty years younger than the Review itself & has never worked anywhere else, but just how did anyone think that this sort of board would not sooner or later assert itself?
But it’s really just a little magazine – in recent years, it hasn’t been able to hold a candle to Can We Have Our Ball Back or Jacket or Shampoo. Indeed, it’s barely more lively than the mausoleum of the living dead that is Poetry. How does somebody like Guinzburg, who was himself just two years out of college – albeit an older grad, complements of the War – when the Review first started, think it can reinvent itself as relevant today? I’m wagering that this is an impossible set-up. There is no way that this board can either reinvent the spark of youth underneath all the baggage that it is bringing to the table or transform the Review into something of value but altogether different (e.g. Granta for grownups). But the inertia of any object in motion is that it tends to stay in motion. At least until it hits the brick wall that is the real world. Whoo-hoo, Paris Review, full speed ahead!”
Ah, one more opinion (NYT) among the millions (thanks Tingle Alley) on this little magazine.
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: February 09, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
