Well, yee-haw, some people who use purdy words real good has up and started one of them dial-up internet word-parties! Or something like that. Just today, TheParis Review has launched The Paris Review Daily, a new blog that will serve, in the words of editor Lorin Stein, as a “cultural gazette” for the book-crazed internet denizens among us. I looked up the word gazette to make sure I was catching all the subtext, but don’t worry–it still just basically means newspaper! Whatever, dictionary.
Personally, I’m excited for a Paris Review blog. Plus, the first non-inaugural post is all about Terry Southern, underappreciated satirical novelist and weirdo (also co-screenwriter of Dr. Strangelove). In fact, The Paris Review Daily has declared June Terry Southern Month. Bold move, new literary blog, re-naming a month on your very first day. If Utne Reader picks a month to rename, I vote for Utvember.
Anyway, why a new blog? Stein sums it up nicely:
If you are like us, you hear a lot of gloomy talk about the future of reading, but you don’t quite recognize yourself in these discussions: books are the reading you care most deeply about, and you doubt that’s going to change. You love your favorite blogs, but you also know when to turn off your devices. You read your favorite magazines faithfully–and if sometimes you skip the fiction, it’s not because you think new writing is in some sort of inevitable decline. It’s probably because you are what Roberto Bolaño called a “desperate” reader, on the lookout for a story that will speak more directly to your condition.
“Perhaps the critics are right,” wrote William Styron half a century ago, in the Review‘s first issue: “this generation may not produce literature equal to that of any past generation–who cares? The writer will be dead before anyone can judge him–but he must go on writing.”
In the same spirit, we say there is plenty to interest us in the writing of our moment, and not only in the writing. Everywhere we look, whether it’s the new painting, film, or YouTube clip, we find beauty sufficient unto the present day, the only one we’ve got.
(Thanks, Galleycat.)
Source: The Paris Review Daily
Image by bslmmrs, licensed under Creative Commons.
