Biblioklept on Patience (After Sebald)
Stealing from Conversational Reading
The Paris Review is in search of an editor:
Upon Plimpton’s death in 2003, Brigid Hughes, then the managing editor, was tapped to lead the magazine. She was soon shown the door (a circumstance which led to the founding of A Public Space, with the help of a cadre of writers and donors loyal to Hughes) and the journalist Philip Gourevitch slotted into the role, somewhat against type. Gourevitch’s Paris Review has been more consistently appealing than one might have expected it to be. (A great reporter does not always a great editor make.) But, given that Gourevitch has been more of a caretaker than a visionary, it was no great surprise to learn in November that he would be stepping down to focus on his own writing…leaving The Paris Review searching for its fourth editor-in-chief in seven years.
Garth Risk Hallberg Says it should be Dave Eggers, which isn’t such a bad idea. Love him or hate him, it’s inarguable that Eggers managed to pull together an exciting list of authors that made the McSweeney’s family of publications something consistently worth reading. He’s high-profile, he’s matured a lot since the Heartbreaking Work
Of course, it’ll never happen. Dave Eggers edits McSweeney’s, and I can’t see him jumping the press and journal he founded and nurtured to go work for a bunch of people in New York City. Maybe if they figured out how to make TPR a full-fledged subsidiary of the McSweeney’s empire . . . To be fair, though, Garth has thought this one through and has an answer for that:
The first obvious objection, then, to the marriage of Eggers and The Paris Review comes from Eggers’ side of the aisle: he already has a magazine. But the truth is that McSweeney’s (reportedly intended to have a forty-eight issue run, followed by a long hiatus) has, in its middle age, begun to run up against its built-in limitations. One need not slight the magazine itself (the recent “Panorama” issue, a loving tribute to the print newspaper and a manifesto on its behalf, reportedly sold out), or rehearse the whiplash speed at which subculture becomes mainstream, to feel that McSweeney’s some time ago made the move from innovation to institution.
The Paris Review, too, is an institution, but one with a broader mission and a broader potential audience – a place where readers of McSweeney’s, readers of Newsweek, and readers of The New York Review of Books might meet and mingle en masse. And because its appeal is less bound up with youth, it might offer Eggers, now pushing 40, new and different challenges…even as McSweeney’s continued under the able hands that one sort of imagines mostly run it now anyway.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it, although I actually see this as more of an argument against than for. Eggers is a creative force . . . he went out and founded McSweeney’s because he wanted a journal and a press to do his books his way. And guess what–it worked. Big time. And now he can pretty much do whatever he wants with it.
I don’t see him trading that freedom to go and try to serve a bunch of different masters over at TPR. But maybe there’s a really nice guest-editing issue in TPR’s future.
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Well, Garth is always good to read, and as you point out, he’s considered his arguments very carefully. But … Dave Eggers as editor of The Paris Review? DAVE EGGERS? I admit, on the ‘love him or hate him’ spectrum I weigh down the ‘hate him’ end, but even compensating for that, where has this guy ever showed the commitment to – hell, even the interest in – ANY of the things TPR stands for? He’s all about the twee (‘an internet tendency’ … the endless parade of packaging gimmicks like the ‘Panorama’ issue…), the topical; one gets the strong sensation that books fundamentally bore him (you’d have to search internet concerns for quite a while to find a piece of writing at once more condescending and indifferent as his recent ‘tribute’ to Salinger, for instance), and certainly what we do, book criticism, fills him with nothing but scorn, as the title of his breakout work makes perfectly clear.
As unfashionable as it is to say so, what I’m saying is that he entirely lacks gravitas. He would turn The Paris Review into a shallow parody of itself, and at Upper West Side literary soirees he’d imply that since it had ALWAYS been a parody of itself, he was just doing it a favor. Shudder.
You know who I think should be their new editor? You, Scott. Import into its editorial ethos your love of literary back roads, and make it a trumpet for your enthusiasm over the fact that interesting writing, good writing, and even great writing is being written everywhere in the world, not just at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I hope you’ve at least applied!
I second the motion!
Scott could definitely do this, I’d be very interested in seeing the interview slate he could work up for publication. :)
For some reason I get the feeling that they’ll pick someone I’ve never heard of, and then I’ll feel really dumb for never having heard of them. I really doubt that it’ll be Eggers. Even if McSweeney’s is going to have a hiatus, why would he leave until then? I just don’t see it.