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.