We need more serious debate and critique of these topics and whether we have a free press or a privileged press in this great nation. Kudos to King Wenclas for his shrewd skepticism.
some excerpts:
"...David Berman has been house poet at the trendy trust fund lit-journal Open City as well as The Believer...
...Ben Marcus, in his post at Columbia U, and through his friendships, is immersed in establishment cronyism. This is why he couldn't see anything wrong in last year's National Book Awards fiction and poetry awards, which were dominated by the privileged; the winners and many of the nominees coming from the upper levels of society and centered in the city of New York...
...The kind of experimental writing Marcus advocates isn't the same as the ground-up DIY writing experiments a Mark Sonnenfeld or Jack Saunders practices.
Instead, it's a tops-down institutional approach, created in the literary laboratories of academe. It's funded through the same kind of government-academy synthesis that over the years has funded experiments in genetics, space technology, and weapons systems...
...takeover of Critique magazine by a Washington D.C. entity named Heldref which was controlled by noted neo-conservative figure Jeane Kirkpatrick and her husband...
...The title of the Marcus Harper's essay was the hyperbolic "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It."
I wonder: when will this take place? The experimental movement Marcus advocates has been around for over 40 years and had little influence-- it consists of nothing more than stuffy professors in thick-stoned mothballed universities passing hermetic texts back and forth among themselves; the world outside their shuttered windows an unknown realm..."
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