The Overthumbed Paris Review
I’m not sure I buy the Washington Post’s fawning praise of The Paris Review since journalist Philip Gourevitch took over the editorship of the world’s most famous literary magazine in March of last year. Gourevitch is quoted as saying “My mission was to revitalize the magazine, to give it new life for a new generation,” as well has “We want to be fresh. We want to be surprising.” I’ll buy the first. The second is a stretch.
The first: The Paris Review has redesigned itself as a leaner, more colorful publication with larger type and great space devoted to visual images. Good move. McSweeney’s, graphic novels and the general hyper-sightedness of our world has shown us that literature can be much more than words on paper. I would have gone so far as to feature illustrators too instead of just photographers as well.
Also, portions of each issue as well as the complete archive of the famed Paris Review interviews (in excerpt form at least) is available online. TPR makes enough pieces available from the current issue so that their website doesn’t seem like an exercise in digital tokenism. The interview archive sadly is little more than a well cataloged tease. One or two questions are available from each followed by a plea to purchase the issue or an announcement of when the interview will be available in book form. A few, (like Nelson Algren’s) are available in full PDF download but which ones are anyone’s guess.
This is bad presentation in several respects. One, the issue list price is still $12, an outrageous sum if what you’re after is one interview. Second, The Paris Review seems to have received some money from the National Endowment for the Arts to make this archive possible. Perhaps the transferring of more compelte interviews is in progress, perhaps the money only covers some of the catalog. I have no idea. But would it kill the magazine to explain the situation in a few sentences somewhere on its website instead of presenting this tremendous gift to readers the world over half-finished while calling it the “DNA of Literature?” Taking that metaphor, they’ve currently offered up enough DNA to produce a carpenter ant. Way too much of the code is missing.
This “new generation” Gourevitch courts wants their information quickly, mutably and generally for free. A literary magazine is not an oil well so free might not be feasible. Fine. How about $3 an interview, payable through Pay Pal? How about supporting the interview section with a few tasteful google ads? How about an interview membership for those who want to read the interviews–MFA students, devoted fans, scholars–but don’t need full issues. This is not the riddle of the sphinx. Gourevitch & Co. could pay an NYU graduate student to set up any of these features over a long weekend.
Finally, The Paris Review’s newest feature “Encounter”, a short Q&A with “an interesting, obscure” person not only leaves me cold but smacks of condescension. Look a non-literary person! Someone you’d never run into at Elaine’s! Someone who’s too real to be in fiction. And we found them, yay us and our love for the common man!
Maybe the idea is a kind of human eco-tourism, which fits in the age of reality television and Lonelygirl15. But it is neither fresh nor surprising. It’s at best warmed-over Joseph Mitchell without the humanity. And with the considerable brain power contained within the walls of 62 White St., they could have done better.
Bottom line: The Paris Review will still publish the world’s finest writers of fiction and poetry. It has the cultural cache to do much more without compromising what has made the publication great. But it is still thinking like a traditional literary magazine and it may be the very last literary magazine in an age of unbound content with the freedom to do so. At the head of dwindling pack, The Paris Review should be leading the way into the future, instead of nodding at it while seated comfortably in the past (via Arts Journal).