Gatekeepers

“First, would you trust a citizen surgeon to remove your son’s neuroblastoma?” asks Parisian media consultant Frédérick Filloux. This question, while intended as an argument for the necessity of professional writers and editors, actually points more directly at the dilemma facing writers and editors today. Most people—other than those who boast that they don’t read—believe that they could be writers themselves. In fact, during my tenure there, the Northwestern University Press published collections of poetry by four physicians, while during the same time period I know of exactly no poet who dabbled in surgery.

As for editors, the prognosis may be even more bleak. To the extent the editor is given any thought in the age of the Internet, it is as a crusher of dreams. There is a pervasive belief among unpublished writers that editors act as bouncers—“gatekeepers” being the popular term—who prevent a certain type of writing from being published. “Yes,” reply we editors, “bad writing.” “No,” protest these thwarted aspirants, “my writing.”

Now that the creators of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of new online magazines that spring up each year are free to publish all the neglected or misunderstood work they wish (without even the burden of word limits), what will come of this trampling down of the gates? a new literary renaissance driven by bold experimentalists heretofore gagged by the dictates of prevailing literary taste as held uniformly by every magazine editor in the country? We shall see.

Give 'Em Enough Rope

Reading over Ken Auletta's piece in the New Yorker on the e-book platform wars, I was struck by a quote by an unnamed publisher who complained that "[Amazon] chose to do something irrational—lose money—in order to gain a monopoly."

In fact, as the ghost of Sam Walton would willingly attest, selling products at a loss to drive out scrupulous, non-conglomerated competition could be deemed highly rational for the right CEO—unethical, perhaps, and illegal in many cases, but not irrational.

The Reality of Copyright

David Shields writes in Reality Hunger:

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Or at least you might think he did, until you check out the appendix of citations in the back and find it was said by Wlliam Gibson in Wired.

I read Reality Hunger with a thumb planted in the appendix to check the source of each section as I finished it, even those of a sentence or less in length—the exact opposite of the Shields’ intention, I know, but it’s how I was raised.

New Pages

I received an update from the New Pages website that the final issue of TriQuarterly, which is good excuse to call attention to them and to Poetry Daily, two excellent examples of online organizations, supported by member sponsorship, that guide new readers to their member print magazines.

Better Mousetrap/Same Old Mouse

Andrew Rice’s article in the Sunday Times magazine is admirable both for its scope and for its narrow focus. The piece profiles a handful of editors of online news and feature magazine start-ups. Many of them are refugees of paying jobs at now-defunct print magazines who have found that existing technology allows them to start up handsome ventures online on a small investment of time and capital; in the process they have also found making money is a separate matter, altogether.

What each of the editors—including Sam Apple of the Faster Times and Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant—have in common is that they had developed a new business model in hopes of circumventing the most pressing obstacles of making a profit writing online, one being that ad revenues are small and hit driven and the other being that no one will pay for news and features online. Implicit in the article is a new normal in which the energy, creativity, and innovation that used to be channeled into content is being channeled into a quest to find the means to earn a living online. A corollary to this new reality is that the content suffers in the process.

Rice quotes a passage from the Faster Time’s mission statement that proclaims: “The crisis of American journalism is a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.” Perhaps so, but each of these editors is aware that it is the tawdry and the profane that generates hits, and “great” journalism may be the very definition of an expense few online reader are willing to pay for.

Magazine Editing by Flash Mob

When I read this article in the WSJ, my first question was Why? However, the more I thought about the idea, the more worthy the experiment seemed. Magazine editing is an act of aggregating energy—the energy of contributors, or editors, of printers, and distributors—toward a goal of turning out an issue on a deadline.

Having 1500 submissions to cull from, the issue is unlikely to suck. Whether it will cohere is a separate question.

One objection might be to the theme, hustle—“which,” the article says, “can refer to anything from speed to the actions of a con artist”—as another example of how the point of the thing seems always these days to become the thing. It would surely be more compelling to see a magazine produced in 48 hours on the theme of sloth—which can mean anything from slow to an animal that dangles languidly from tree limbs.

h/t R. Faust

A Message from Abroad

in a post on the Author, Author blog in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra salutes the pluck of American little magazines, commends the work of recent TriQuarterly contributor Eliot Weinberger, and closes with this:

This is the kind of desanctified criticism little magazines have always excelled at: reconsiderations of often canonical figures that dispense with plot summaries and prose connoisseurship, and move quickly beyond their declared subjects toward a larger moral, social or psychological insight. The light it sheds on literature is brighter than that of the post-publication review, theory-addled academic appraisal or bookchat on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Notwithstanding the new virtual communities, little magazines continue to be the main sponsor of the vital US tradition of intellectual dissent, which one suspects may be needed more than ever in our busy new century.

Jose Saramago’s new book raises the question

Can a blog be considered literature?

The consensus: no— not yet, anyway.

As the Scottsman says putting aside the fact that this collection of entries was printed and bound, it had not been considered by its author as a blog in the conventional sense.

Chicago Underground Library

On the Chicago Underground Library blog, Denise Dooley posts an interview we did in conjunction with a donation TriQuarterly made of some of its archives to the library.

Also, visit the library's main page to learn more about its mission.

Teabagger, Spell-Check Thyself

For the want of a copyeditor.

A Great Upheaval

“Yes, the Railroad had prevailed,” Frank Norris writes in the closing pages of The Octopus. “The ranches had been seized in the tentacles of the octopus; the iniquitous burden of extortionate freight rates had been imposed like a yoke of iron."

On Sunday, we headed down to Pilsen for a reenactment of the 1877 Battle of the Halsted St. Viaduct. Everything old is new again... take a look at the video. The man with the bullhorn is Albert Parsons aka Paul Durica.

Yes and no are also adverbs

Marianne, Art Director of Northwestern University Press, made lithographs as going away presents for myself and Susan Hahn. The quote is from the foreword to the first issue of TriQuarterly. Newman’s manifesto of 1964 has received renewed attention lately. We printed it on the late TriQuarterly To-day blog, and it was picked up by the blogs of a few other magazines, including A Public Space. The thesis is remarkable, not merely for its prescience but for the fact that while most manifestos are preludes to irony, as the drafters ultimately fall tragically short of their aspirations (see Charles Foster Kane), Newman’s foreword actually established the editorial principles that would remain intact for the next forty-five years.

Title Sequence

For thirteen years, prior to May Day of 2010, I was the associate editor of TriQuarterly magazine and for that entire time served under the editorship of Susan Firestone Hahn. The events surrounding our departure can be tracked here, here, and here.

And my in own account of the events in Creative Nonfiction (Spring, 2010).

Because, in this case, an internationally renowned literary magazine, with a publishing history of forty-five years, was “transitioning” — in the sterile argot of a university’s communications department — to a website in said university’s continuing studies department, much of the focus of debate surrounding this action centered on the relative merits of print versus digital publishing, though it is fair to say that the move was as much the residue of the ordinary academic politics that pass — among a population over- represented by those who dribble a basketball with two hands — for sport.

That is the past. What is of interest is the present, and the reality of the present, as it is during any time of accelerated technological change, is of displacement, displacement of all sorts, though the sort of displacement that has always sparked the loudest ruckus in such times is the displacement of labor. Likely, there are fewer people today who earn a living from literary publishing than do playing professional baseball, and, as of last Friday, there are at least two fewer of them. Of course, in the eyes of industrialists and Republican lawmakers, such human discomfort is a signal of economic vitality, and to some degree they may be correct. I offer no apologies for print publishing. In fact, despite the straw arguments of digital-partisans, few book or magazine publishers have shown any measurable inclination to standing athwart history.

The question then is what comes next, for me, for us, for everyone. The fact is that circumstances are changing so rapidly that even technical consultants commissioned by corporations to anticipate the commercial landscape of the near future are often catastrophically (from the perspective of profit) wrong — catastrophic for them, anyway (what do the rest of us care?). Early adopters of the 8-track tape deck thought they were aurally experiencing the future of stereophonics; many Kindle owners reported a similar sensation while reading genre novels previously available as affordably only at WalMart.

What comes next? No one who grasps the enormity of the moment professes to know. I sure don’t. But we’ll see. Exposition suggests an ongoing revealing, an unfolding, not a resolution.