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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Leopold McGinnis, ULA
A Prevaricate Publication of Mendacious
Mistruth by New York’s Nebbish NYRB!
As readers of last week’s perniciously paroxysmal Monday Report by
Steve Kostecke know, the New York Review of Books (how many
review magazines do they NEED anyway? It’s like nobody has their
own opinion unless there’s a slew of ‘experts’ to give them one!)
lowered itself to mentioning the ULA. In an article of hilariously
overworked ‘prose’ they found room for this sentence:
A sodality of soreheads under the black flag of the Underground
Literary Alliance had no other apparent purpose than to complain at
tentshows that Moody and his whitebread buddies, a circle-jerk of class
entitlements with names like Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and David
Foster Wallace, had gobbled up all the royalties and review space, all
the MacArthur baubles and Guggenheim buzz in Bookie World.
It’s clear this author, one John Leonard, finds himself quite clever,
although one is at a loss why since his style has so many fits and
starts reading the piece feels like a Southeast Asian Bus ride. But
taking issue with bad writing, with alliteration that’s not a tool but a lit-
snob clarion it’s so loud and disrupting, was the subject of last week’s
report. This week’s takes issue with the very Basic Bedrock (eh? Eh?
Alliteration there – you see that?) principal of journalism. A little thing
we call fact-checking. When you make statements about other people
without looking to back it up, it results in something known as slander.
Or, more importantly, in you being wrong and losing any credibility.
The ULA takes great care to make sure the things we say are fact-
checked, backed up. Because we’re on the outside and places like
the NYRB are very interested in humiliating us, we have to work very
hard to make sure that there are no holes in our arguments. In
mathematical terms, that’s about a hundred billion million times more
fact-checking than the NYRB displayed in this article. If John Leonard
is so clever, why didn’t he do five minutes worth of research? Or the
NYRB, who surely has fact-checkers, do the same?
The ULA puts everything up on its website. We’re open. The Rick
Moody protests have been one of the very foundations in our history
of literary activism. News about our many unfortunate encounters is
all over this site, in our communal zine, “Slush Pile,” in other literary
publications. In fact, in just a Matter of Moments (alliteration) you can
drum up all sorts of information as to what our beef with Rick Moody,
quite legitimate, as you’ll soon see, is. We've even added a nifty
search bar to the front page, so there's no excuse! It’s easy! Let’s
show the NYRB how:
http://www.literaryrevolution.com/archive2000.html:
December 2000, The ULA protests Rick Moody’s unjust receipt of the
Guggenheim Grant (alliteration). The hostile article written about it at
least quotes our argument correctly: The Guggenheim “exemplifies
the practice of giving financial assistance to already SUCCESSFUL
and AFFLUENT writers, well-connected, who clearly don’t need the
help – while other writers abjectly struggle. The award to Moody is a
symptom of the elitist process of tax shelters that give money to those
who prove they don’t need it! It indicates absence of character in the
well-to-do author who accepted the grant.”
http://www.literaryrevolution.com/images/feb01moody.jpg:
Here’s another article from a magazine that I’ve never heard of but
managed, none the less, to get its facts straight: “'We see…tax free
money going from rich people to – other rich people' (The author is
the son of Hiram F. Moody Jr, an investment banker).” The
Guggenheim’s response: their award is “absolutely need-blind.” So
let us get this straight – millionaires need a foundation to give them
grants? (Tax-free, of course. Otherwise the rich would never give to
the needy rich!)
Hmmm, the San Francisco Chronicle got it right too, as you can see
here: http://www.literaryrevolution.com/images/sfchron601.jpg
Successful novelist Rick Moody…comes from a prosperous family.
Moody’s family…lives on exclusive Fisher Island off Connecticut. Last
year, he _applied for_ and _accepted_ a $35, 000 grant from the
Guggenheim Foundation.” (emphasis mine) The Guggenheim replies:
the awards have “nothing to do with financial need. We decide how
much money to give the fellow after the person is appointed.” Gotta
love the term ‘fellow’. Does anything else reek more of privileged
clique? So, after they’ve determined you’re rich enough, oh, and that
you’ve served on other ‘foundations’ which have delivered grants to
members sitting on the Guggenheim board, they decide “how much
money to give”. That sounds totally above board to me!
Oh wait, that comment was totally baseless. Let me back it up with
this article in the New York Post: http://www.literaryrevolution.
com/images/moodynypost1201.jpg
Hell, there’s a whole article, Further Fleshing (alliteration) out our
argument, here: http://www.literaryrevolution.com/Philly-502.html
And here is an Amazing Article (alliteration) further outlining our
arguments and going further, pointing out the ties between one rich
author, Rick Moody, giving tax-free arts awards to other rich authors,
who in turn…give money to Rick Moody! I quote:
One of the most frequently-appearing names, when public art monies
are involved, remains Hiram F. "Rick" Moody III, despite the
controversy over his 2000 Guggenheim grant. As Moody himself said
in a May 2002 interview, "I judged about a zillion awards this year. . ."
We at the Underground Literary Alliance voiced our concerns late last
year, when we learned that Rick Moody had been chosen as a judge
for the 2002 awards. Should someone who had already demonstrated
his lack of conscience--his noticeable greed--been chosen for that
role? … His selection was the signal of a system incapable of
reforming itself. "Would Rick Moody reward his friends?" we
wondered. THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HE DID.
Moby Lives did their homework: http://mobylives.com/Franzen_NEA.
html, an article we link to from here: http://www.literaryrevolution.
com/archive2002.html
Hell, I’m just another one of those dumb plebe (look it up, NYRB)
hack writers and it only took me half an hour to research and write
this article. Surely, my talentless, unpaid work is no match for the
NYRB's well educated, high-breed, remunerated stockhold of A1
Killer Reviewers. It couldn’t be that this unawarded, oft disparaged
collection of loonies was able to do something the NYRB, which holds
its position by the nature of the fact that it (supposedly) KNOWS the
lit world, clearly didn’t have the time, guts or integrity to do! But that
seems the case.
You’re slipping guys. One would think that you don’t know as much
as you posture yourselves to, that maybe your authority on the lit
world, with which you make your wild unsubstantiated statements,
isn’t really deserved. We here, at the Underground Literary Alliance,
at least expected a challenge.
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Leopold McGinnis is a Canadian author. His novel, Game Quest, about the
hostile takeover of a computer game company just before the meteoric rise of
the Internet, will be published this Spring and is currently being serialized
online at www.gamequestnovel.com.
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