Free Magic Hours by Tom Bissell Page B

ULA and the Paris Review, when, in fact, the Paris Review ’s editor, George Plimpton, had gone into the debate with high hopes and fellow feeling but grew swiftly disgusted by the ULA’s infantile antics; of its crashing of “an effete, boring reading” given by the novelist Elissa Schappell at KGB, where the ULA was thrown out after clapping inappropriately, and for which ejection the ULA’s explanation is cast in the weaselly passive voice (“Alcohol was involved”); of its “Big Underground Invasion Reading in Detroit,” the ULA’s “first stop on its National Breakout Tour,” where “Underground heroes read, rocked and revved up the crowd,” which for all one knows they did; and of its “letters of challenge” sent “to many NYC publishers and writing programs,” about which good luck.
    With all this in mind, it will come as no surprise that occasionally—actually, way more than occasionally—the ULA is thuggish, cruel, and petty. Many of the writers on the receiving end of ULA vitriol have felt seriously threatened and, indeed, nearly terrorized. Many writers, including Dave Eggers (who at one time was sent poorly written mail from the ULA), were against the
publication of this piece; their concern was that anything that might fuel the ULA’s anger was a bad idea, as it might result in new eruptions and cause distress to fellow writers.
    But the ULA seems worth examining, to me at least. In January of this year, the ULA turned up at a reading held at Housing Works, one of New York’s most venerable used bookstores. The reading was intended to celebrate the alternative publishing community, embodied by the literary magazines Open City, McSweeney’s, and Fence. By all accounts, including their own, the ULA made a thoroughgoing mess of the evening. In a report ominously titled “The Incident at Housing Works,” which is posted on the ULA website, ULA founder (now publicity director) King Wenclas notes that the “crowd of several hundred was upscale and nearly all white.” (I would be very curious to learn of the racial makeup of the average ULA reading.) Wenclas regards the event’s audience as “pod persons with plastic smiles. . . . The ULA was among a cultural aristocracy that evening, an aristocracy filled with smugness about their meaningless art.” With the requisite ULA name-calling out of the way, Wenclas’s more substantial gripe quickly surfaces: “Many things are happening outside the doors; a widening gap between America’s classes; an approaching war. There was scarcely a vibration of any of this among the trust funders. Can our nation’s most nurtured writers be so out of touch with their own country (or even their own city)?”
    The readings that evening were given by Ben Greenman, a McSweeney’s contributor and formidably clever, very funny satirist; Tina Brown Celona, a Fence poet; and Sam Lipsyte, an Open City fixture whose willfully slight but, again, extremely funny novel The Subject Steve had the unluck to be published on September 11, 2001. Whether these writers or their audience are “trust funders” is a little beside the point; my own experience with the youth demographic of New York City publishing leads me to suspect that
most of them, in all likelihood, are not. (A quick resume check of my closest publishing friends, admittedly not the most comprehensive portrait, reveals a young publishing world hardly born on velvet. One friend hails from a hardscrabble Mississippi background, another from upper-middle-class Brooklyn, another from rural middle-class Virginia, another from middle-class New Jersey. I myself hail from a lovely speck of a town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I suspect our accumulated savings could probably cover a down payment on a nice apartment in the heart of Appleton, Wisconsin.) The only legitimate question, then, concerns