Paris Review

Some of the most astute readers of literature fail to recognize themselves in the characters they most resemble.

Unself-awareness is always breathtaking, as is self-awareness; the difference between them is that unself-awarness tends to bring out the brazeness in both the mighty and the meek, while the self-aware are too often found hiding in shadows.

Tim R, a poet I published in the late 1990's, used to talk of Botsford as his, patron. Keith Botsford was a literary man from Boston who helped start Paris Review, and a one-time official of the CIA-hatched Congress for Cultural Freedom, the governmental organization that funded art missions like Paris Review as part of the Cold War. It turns out Paris Review was a kind of front for the CIA, infilitrating the intelligentsia, promoting American and European writers and what they called, 'the cultural freedom of the West'.

The history of Paris Review can be read as a quitely brazen usurpation of the beauty and truth literature is meant to express. The editor there, a man named Loren Stein, is now in trouble for the same thing one of our US Senator's is in trouble for--inappropriate male behavior--and has resigned. I suppose deception is a kind of power, at least in the mind of the deceiver; that he or she can make you believe they have something you want or need enough to either overlook their deceptions or to be commpletely unaware they exist. It seems like writers would be smarter, and if not smarter then wiser, and if not wiser at least not dumb enough not to know that an artist should really stay as far away as possible from power.

Full disclosure: I submitted three poems to Paris Review in 1999; all three were rejected.