This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Withoutcovers : //literary_magazines@the_digital_edge / edited by Lesha Hurliman and Numsiri C. Kunakemakorn ; introduction by Henry Hughes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-55753-252-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Electronic journals. 2. Literature—Periodicals—History. I. Title: Without covers. II. Hurliman, Lesha, 1974- III. Kunakemakorn, Numsiri C., 1971PN4833 .W58 2002 805—dc21 2002004466
Our ¤ne arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present. . . . But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. . . . We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art. —Paul Valéry, “La Conquête de l’ubiquité”
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface
xi
Acknowledgments
xiii
Introduction 1 Henry Hughes Founding editor, Sycamore Review What Is a Book? 8 R. M. Berry Author, Leonardo’s Horse, and professor, Florida State University Out on a Raft, Reading a Book 17 Heather Shayne Blakeslee Editor, Poets & Writers A Marriage That Might Have Been, or Living, Haply, Ever After 25 Michael Joyce Hypertext writer
The Literary Magazine, the Web, and the Changing of the Avant-Garde 36 Paula Geyh Co-editor, PostModern American Fiction and review editor, Postmodern Culture From Mimeograph to html: Literary Magazines Online 56 Walter Cummins Editor-in-Chief, The Literary Review No Use in a Centre 63 David Hamilton Editor, The Iowa Review The Editor in an Internet Age Robert Kendall Hypertext poet The Left Hand of Capitalism John Tranter Poet
72
82
When Horses Fly: Parables, Palimpsests and PBQ Marion Wrenn Editor, Painted Bride Quarterly The Same Thing a Little Better Speer Morgan Editor, The Missouri Review The Naked Litmag of the Future Howard Junker Editor, ZYZZYVA
103
107
89
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed: The Formation of Archipelago 110 Katherine McNamara Editor, Archipelago To Have and To Hold 120 Richard Newman Editor, River Styx Burgeoning Possibilities with Untamed Enthusiasm Guy Shahar, Ginger Murchison, Renée Bandazian, and Shawn Butler Editorial staff, The Cortland Review
123
Epublishing and Literature: Challenge and Opportunity David Lynn Editor, The Kenyon Review Illuminated Pages 132 Rebecca Seiferle Founding editor/publisher, The Drunken Boat Electric Dreams: What Words Tell Us Steve Heller Non¤ction writer Big Sky Country 145 Lucia Perillo Poetry and ¤ction writer Contributors
155
140
127
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
Like most editors of literary magazines in the United States, we were blindly searching for ways to publicize and promote The Sycamore Review while keeping our original goal—to be a forum for excellent writing. Our problem was that our staff consisted entirely of writers and lovers of literature—no business advisor or techie wiz to guide us into the next century, or even into pro¤tability. The presence of online magazines became apparent, even to us, and the questions arose: Would we? How? When? and the most puzzling, Why? The scariness of the move from black-on-white to HTML, space measured in megabytes, and the desperation of the ESC button elicited responses from adamant faith in the new medium to confused apathy. Nothing was resolved. By eavesdropping into the ideas of other writers and editors, we hope to incite conversation, debate, argument, and, most pressingly, questions—all while conveniently continuing the original goal of deference to communication and the word. We hope you enjoy.
xi
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments
From Friday afternoon discussions over baba ganoush and beer in mid-1999 to frantic state-to-state late-night phone calls, emails, and blind queries into cyberspace, it seemed for a while that we would never make the deadlines. Fortunately for us our initial enthusiasm for the project was contagious and spread to the contributors, editorial assistants, and friends who helped sustain us through the no’s and the maybe’s, and who helped us celebrate the completion of a worthwhile and, hopefully, timely book. We would like to thank Thomas Bacher and Margaret Hunt at Purdue University Press for their generosity and support of the collection (and for all of the “freebies”). We would also like to thank Henry Hughes in Purdue’s Department of English for his unbelievable amount of help, and for the objective tone he has set throughout this process. Also, thankyou to Ralph Burns, former editor of Crazyhorse, whose leads into cyberspace were invaluable, and Laura Anh Williams, for her cover (or without cover). We would not have been able to do this project without the help of the editorial assistants: Barbara Lawhorn-Harroun, Sam Van Horne, John King, Sean Conrey, Russ Brickey, and Bekka Rauve. And if we could give you all a winning lottery ticket (or at least pay off your student loans), we would.
xiii
This page intentionally left blank
Henry J. Hughes
Introduction
By the time Sycamore Review appeared in the late eighties, the steel clank of the printing press had softened to a pneumatic jog and those noxious petroleum inks were being replaced by mildly aromatic soy-based compounds. But still Gene Hussey waved a cigar over our wrinkled manuscripts, and a bevy of typesetters transferred the poems, stories, and essays into long columns of copy that we ran through a wax machine, cut up, and literally pasted to layout sheets that were shot onto ¤lm. Our ¤nal proofs were precious. We made the last expensive corrections with blue pencils, moving toward that ¤nished product of paper, glue, and ink—a journal, a book. It was a physical object we would hold, smell, and read, placing it on our shelves, pleased by its ¶at spine standing at attention. The books and journals around us—even those published in the last three decades—are evidence of the printing industry’s astounding revolution from hot metal to photographic to digital production. And now the digital product has its own life: the Sycamore Review, like many literary journals, owns a place in cyberspace, on the World Wide Web, its backlit letters rising out of the electronic sea. 1
2
Henry J. Hughes
In a discussion about online publishing it is dif¤cult to avoid the history and nostalgia of bookmaking. And why avoid it? It is one of the great narratives of human civilization. Robert Kendall notes in his essay that this move to put language into print was probably not celebrated by everyone; yet the move was inevitable. Printing presses from China to Germany put pages into the hands of readers, and the word became a very visual, tangible object for an increasing number of people. The development of a national magazine readership is a remarkable testament to the rise of print culture in America alone. By 1800, just over 100 journals of popular culture and literature had existed in the United States, and many perished shortly after their inauguration. In 1860, there were about 600 journals in print, including a number of literary magazines, such as the North American Review, still with us today. By 1870 the number of these publications jumped to 1,200, and in 1885 there were 3,000 magazines of various sorts in America. The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses in New York currently lists 500 literary journals and estimates the total number to be over a thousand. The number of literary magazines online leaps to the tens of thousands. But like lights on the wide sea, these beacons in cyberspace are hard to count—and for some, hard to count as real. Marion Wrenn, editor of the ezine Painted Bride Quarterly, ¤nds that there is a signi¤cant “prestige gap” between Web and print publication, and editors frequently report that many writers and critics seriously question the legitimacy of online publishing. Is it really a publication? Others simply refuse to accept ezines and ebooks as satisfactory replacements for paper and ink. Just as our staff cherished the cool weight of those ¤rst Sycamores, many of America’s literary lions still love the feel of warm paper under their paws. John Updike responded to the WithoutCovers project with a hand-typed note, courteously expressing his “vague dread” over the electronic revolution. “For me,” Updike writes, “the only publication still occurs in ink, on paper.” Updike’s editorials in the New York Times rhapsodize over the “sensual pleasure” of a book that “¤ts into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture.” And there is the practical ease—Updike says he can hold a book for hours without noticeable strain, and the “rectangular block of type . . . yields to decipherment so gently that one is scarcely aware of the difference between immersing oneself in an imaginary world and scanning the furniture of one’s own room.”
Introduction
3
The ¤rst novel in Updike’s Rabbit series describes the changes in the printing industry, and the author himself has lived through the revolution in manuscript production from manual typewriting to laptop word processing, and he is obliged to admit that new technology has made the physical labors of writing and editing (especially novels) easier. Many authors, including Steve Heller, take the digital revolution one step further: If we create texts electronically, he asks, why don’t we print them the same way? But for many, writing and reading are very different. In the Harper’s essay “In Defense of the Book,” William H. Gass croons over this same textual sensuousness, extolling the treasures of home and public libraries: “We shall not understand what a book is, and why a book has the value many persons have . . . if we forget how important to it is its body.” Though an experimentalist in his ¤ction, Gass argues that “words on a screen . . . are only shadows. . . . They do not wait to be reseen, reread; they only wait to be remade, relit.” Gass laments that he can not carry ebooks beneath a tree or onto a side porch, and they will never provide him the pleasure or dismay of ¤nding an old signature, some engaging marginalia, or a jam-smeared page, the cherished artifacts of a reading life. Gass’s nostalgic disparagement of the new media and the implication that they discourage the cultivation of an intellectual garden was addressed by Diane Greco, hypertext editor at Eastgate and author of Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric. In an online article appearing in HypertextNow, Greco claims that Gass is simply out of touch. Just as postmodern writers experimented with language, narration, and orthography, Greco says, the emerging forms of hypertext literature involve, for example, “montage, juxtaposition, and other techniques and sensibilities derived not only from writing, but also from ¤lm, music, and visual art,” and that “to work well in this demanding medium requires skill, intelligence, and above all, patience, for the form remains neglected by critics who, like Gass, prefer to dismiss what they cannot be bothered to understand.” In Blade Runner–like poetics, Greco muses: “I imagine a world in which no one defends print by defending a monument known as The Book, or by waxing nostalgic for the smell of paper and ink or the pleasure of reading paperbacks in the bathtub.” For many of the editors and writers featured in this collection, reading in the bathtub is still a pleasurable activity. And even electronic enthu-
4
Henry J. Hughes
siasts widely acknowledge that most people don’t like to read from a screen for hours. It is also true that most people didn’t talk for hours on the telephone or have phone sex when Bell’s invention ¤rst crackled in nineteenthcentury ears. Humans are remarkably adaptable. Perhaps no culture has better applied the demands of digital technology to its rich tradition of illuminated print culture than the Japanese, who knew long before Marshall McLuhan that the medium was the message, and whose wry humor and sensitivity gave rise to haiku computer error messages: You step in the stream, But the water has moved on. This page is not here. And, addressing the more serious disappearance of one’s own precious ¤le: With searching comes loss And the presence of absence: “My Novel” not found. During the same day, Japanese schoolchildren learn to build websites and brush the elegant strokes of kanji onto rice paper. Evidently, these arts are not mutually exclusive, and Gass and Greco probably need to lighten up. As Speer Morgan of the Missouri Review warns, there have been many false revolutions. Books are not going anywhere, but then neither is electronic literature. Sycamore Review’s current ad slogan is “Get Lit.”—and at least two possible meanings of this call to action are not lost on the e-minded. Kenyon Review editor David Lynn heralds: “ebooks are coming, and they will be more attractive, lighter, less costly, easier to read—of all that we can be certain.” Despite the occasional errors of Internet navigation and digital processing, the cyber revolution will favorably affect publishing. Several of the essays in this collection detail the bene¤ts of online editing. Editors can now make corrections to a ¤rst edition long after its ¤rst printing. Perhaps we will soon escape the cliché “written in stone.” There are also far fewer space limits, and novel-
Introduction
5
las and long poems may ¤nally take their place on the ¶owing pages of electronic magazines. Nonetheless, poets like Lucia Perillo are concerned that these relaxed demands for strict editing and limited space may compromise the quality of online literature. Many a writer, heeding the sharp order of “cut it in half,” has produced concise, focused, and simply better work. But the opportunities afforded online magazines are overwhelming. Most obviously, ezines are cheaper to produce, and publications like Painted Bride Quarterly were saved from ¤nancial drowning by the soft waves of cyberspace. For a few hundred dollars, a computer-furnished of¤ce can launch a journal, as compared to the several thousand dollars it often takes to print a single hardcopy issue. And ezines are typically free, handed over by what John Tranter at Australia’s Jacket calls “the left hand of capitalism.” Paradoxically, in an Internet environment bannered by endless ads—where Amazon.com peeks in on every literary link—money is no longer the greatest resource. “The primary commodity is not money, but labor,” writes Rebecca Seiferle, editor of Drunken Boat. Like several editors in this collection, she describes the long hours of hard work that it takes to bring a journal to light, but tells us that the rewards are dazzling. One of the greatest artistic advantages available to ezines is the opportunity to include multiple color images, video, and audio. Historian Paula Geyh recounts the brilliant avant-garde movements of the Dadaists and their desire to reconnect language to art, music, and drama, and she shows how this may be revived in the electronic, multimedia, hypertext literature of the digital age. There are already electronic “happenings” and “collaborative improvisation sessions” at SUNY Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center. And the digerati at Cortland Review, proclaiming that “poetry is written to be heard,” offer streaming audios of the magazine’s featured writers reading their work. Although critics of online publishing fear that the Internet is dehumanizing, these centers at Buffalo and Cortland have helped revive the human relationship between the printed text and the spoken word. Even more spacebreaking are the uses of hypertext and interactive programs. These modes have changed the very nature of narrativity and reading, and their in¶uence may already be seen in conventional prose. Notice, for example, the proliferation of parentheticals in the WithoutCovers essays—as if the writers were aching for a hypertext aside (or a link to the nearest ebar).
6
Henry J. Hughes
Regardless of how literary texts may be read in the future, it will certainly be easier to get them. Morgan predicts that the immediate future in electronic publishing will be in the maintenance, storage, and delivery of texts: “My ideal bookstore or newsstand of the future would sell magazines and journals of all sorts, books that are otherwise ‘out of print’ as well as all the latest ones—deliverable through the Web and bound in whatever way the buyer prefers, including fake leather.” With electronic publishing there would be (virtually) no out-of-print or hard-to-¤nd books and magazines. Need a copy of the ¤rst Gutenberg Bible; the erotic Ming novel Jing Ping Mei; the second, sold-out issue of Sycamore Review with a letter and poems by Charles Bukowski?—just order and print. Imprints still matter. Our psyches have not evolved to a point where, like the Organians encountered by Kirk and Spock, we exist as pure thought, having little need for a physical universe. R. M. Berry writes, “my book on the shelf is the single best veri¤cation that I exist.” But the Internet, with its endless permutations and interconnections, with its languages, sounds, and images, may be the best veri¤cation that we exist. Whitman loved the notion of “en-masse” and he used “leaves of grass” as a metaphor for the nineteenth-century Transcendental vision of human collectivity. How remarkable that in the postmodern age of splintered selfness and disjointed community we have brought such a metaphor to life, or at least we have created the ¤rst global network where our holy scriptures, pornography, letters, recipes, obituaries, paintings, songs, and poems can all be shared. Despite the axes of censorship, fatwa, and the sirens of commercialism, more and more educated readers are becoming netizens of the world. Katherine McNamara named her ezine Archipelago, an island chain linking people and their words across a vast electronic sea. As a sea of zeroes and ones, light and dark, images and sounds, the Internet allows us to sail the world in an instant, though the ocean, the boats, and the journey itself may—like that old Transcendental dream—be, after all, more metaphor than matter. Heather Shayne Blakeslee at Poets and Writers calls the Internet “the world’s biggest metaphor,” though her title is not without irony. It is “the newest physical and psychological repository of our culture’s dreams, faults, and excesses” and “has both opened up the world for us and safeguarded us in our favorite ergonomic chairs.” The Internet’s
Introduction
7
absorption of “authentic experience” is a concern for many of us. But unlike Woody Allen’s orgasmatron, which virtualized real sex, the Internet will not substitute for, but rather enhance, actual experience on earth (if, of course, thinking is actually actual). Warnings and concerns notwithstanding, for the editors and writers gathered in this collection, the Internet is real, perhaps more real than any form of publishing we’ve ever known. And though the content of an ezine may appear to some as a pale specter of light, it is truly the product of physical and mental energy, and not merely money. Just as the editors of the past cut and pasted those waxed columns of copy, electronic text must be cut and pasted into code, the JPEG images must be cropped and shrunk to size, the sound piped in through complex audio programs. To see a literary website up and buzzing is to behold a brilliant system supporting the language of life. It is as natural as a beehive, as human as anything we’ve ever known. References Gass, William. “In Defense of the Book.” Harper’s, November 1999, 41–51. Greco, Diane. Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric. Diskette. Watertown, Maine: Eastgate Systems, Inc., 1995. ———. “Sticky Fingers [In Response to William Gass].” HypertextNow (2000), 3 May 2001, . Updike, John. “Books Unbound, Life Unraveled.” New York Times, 18 June 2000, Op-Ed., Week in Review, 15.
R. M. Berry
What Is a Book?
P
art of what’s most exciting about the new electronic media is the way they have reopened the question of literature. As long as there was no real alternative literary medium, as long as every story or poem found its ¤nal realization only in some form of book publication, inquiries into the nature of literature seemed theoretical only. Anyone wanting to know what narration and metaphor at bottom were seemed involved in a speculative activity remote from what most concerned contemporary writers and readers; or, if she were actually involved in contemporary literature, then her interest seemed suspect. It was as if the mere question of why we called something a poem were hegemonic, a covert attempt to privilege the practices of one’s own group. But as soon as a serious competitor to books appeared—that is, a less expensive, highly plastic medium of realization and transmission that claimed to do as well or better what books and magazines claimed to do—then it wasn’t just that searching questions about literature became a practical necessity. It was that we recognized they had always been a practical necessity. It suddenly felt as though we were lacking 8
What Is a Book?
9
answers of the most basic kind: Why is a poem’s arrangement on the page more crucial to its poetic work than its font selection or the size of its page (the amount of white space)? Are printed poems representations of spoken ones, with punctuation, spacing, and line breaks the printed equivalents of breath stops, pauses, and in¶ections, or does a poem somehow exist independently of its medium—print, speech, handwriting, screen—with no equivalence whatsoever among its versions? And what about the vexed question of words and images? Would linking a poem to video images of a landscape described in the poem be intensif ying the poetry or adulterating it? I suspect that we won’t begin to know what the literary possibilities of the new electronic media are until we start accumulating answers, not merely to questions like these, but to the still more immediate question of why books enabled us to avoid posing them for so long. There is something about the materiality of a book that’s reassuring. We all know, or think we do, that the reason book publication feels so compelling to writers is that it opens doors, commands respect, wins grants, and makes further book publication likelier. But what we also know, although thinking we don’t, is that the tangibility of one’s book, its heft in the hand, is itself what feels so compelling. When I’m assailed by self-doubt, my book on the shelf is the single best veri¤cation that I exist. No son or daughter, no accolade or misery ever represents me to me more solidly. The threat of solipsism, of being sealed up inside oneself, which Descartes ostensibly overcame with his cogito ergo sum, wasn’t overcome in fact until Descartes published his Meditations. Only then did Descartes’s cogito escape its mental con¤nes and enter our world. There’s just no end of spirit. And that’s what makes ebooks, ezines, Web novels, downloadable poetry, and hypertext so unsettling. By depriving literature’s material embodiment of its primacy, they seem to literalize our metaphysical nightmares: all that matters becomes a transient, in¤nitely mutable manifestation of some vast realm of pure possibility we can never reach. Who cares if they call it a chip, not God? Material reality is just a printout. As long as novels were books, their tangibility seemed to protect us from all this. Of course, we always knew that the paperback of As I Lay Dying could undergo total physical transformation—change its cover, pagination, binding, typography, paper, kerning, leading, copyright, and layout—without
10
R. M. Berry
altering Faulkner’s novel in the least, but nobody seriously worried whether that meant I never held Faulkner’s novel in my hand. If occasionally someone doubted literature’s reality, we could point to it. In this way, the paperback of As I Lay Dying functioned synecdochically, as a part for that vast whole encompassing English departments and pink Borders facades and the half-inch-thick Random House employee phone book and the NYTBkRev and those countless public libraries with their miles of books, books, books. A certain open-endedness about what any of us intended in sitting down to read or write seemed offset by this tangibility. But as soon as my paperback of As I Lay Dying was replaced by a Palm Pilot, that is, a handheld illuminated screen on which any number of novels might brie¶y appear, literature seemed to etherealize. I mean, Faulkner didn’t write a compact disk, did he? What I now intended in sitting down to read and write seemed wholly up in the air. It felt as though we’d been returned to a preliterate void, uncertain what words like “publish,” “poem,” “page,” ever referred to, left to compose completely in the dark, but with this nagging uneasiness each night as we “logged off” the literary magazine. And so it makes perfect sense that, as Web novels and ezines have begun to appear inevitable, writers, editors, publishers, readers, have all started asking themselves, “Hey, what is it we do anyway?” Recently at the alternative press I manage, Fiction Collective Two (FC2), we took up the question of how to adapt our three-decade-old operation to the new electronic media. The chair of our board, Ronald Sukenick, presented a proposal for developing a line of ebooks and downloadable novels in collaboration with Mark Amerika’s AltX website. Sukenick saw the Internet as offering “a unique window of opportunity” for small presses and literary magazines, both of which are “threatened by a reduction of nonpro¤t funding on one hand and de facto censorship by the marketplace on the other.” He went on to diagnose the present situation: “Publishers in the conglomerate publishing industry rarely do literary editing any more, nor do they cultivate and support talents that may slowly grow from book to book, nor are they willing to take many chances on new literary talent, nor can they give many books a decently extensive shelf life.” Sukenick characterized the advantages of the new media in terms of dramatically reduced overhead and the consequent capacity to serve small audiences. “The
What Is a Book?
11
technology revolution in publishing, bringing with it the ability to produce books pro¤tably for niche, or even micromarkets, promises to bring new life to literary publishing. The problems and excessive costs associated with printing, warehousing, distribution and bookstore shelf space will all be swept aside, shifting the focus of publishing back to editorial selection.” Part of what interests me about Sukenick’s proposal is that, despite completely agreeing with its account of current publishing—commercial and independent—and also with its description of the opportunities offered by the new media, I, like several other FC2 board members, felt distrustful of it. Some of our reservations were, of course, practical, having to do with funding, editorial responsibility, coordination, etc., but underlying our questions, I sensed a deeper nervousness. Some of us worried about how our electronic line would alter the status of our conventionally produced and distributed novels. As Curtis White asked at one point, “What do we do with the books in the warehouse?” Although we had data on hits and site visits, no one was convinced that novels or story collections were actually being sold on websites. There was a lot of sur¤ng and sampling, but the consensus from small presses was that Web sales were negligible. Not even Amazon had made a pro¤t. Several of us admitted privately that we wouldn’t want our own ¤ction published primarily in electronic format, although we acknowledged that, over time, our feelings could change, but we doubted whether any reader ever felt as committed to an electronic image as to a printed page. Deleting ¤les seemed so much easier than burning your library. And was any of the excitement over new technology coming from consumers? It seemed that all the advantages lay on the producer’s side only. Perhaps most interestingly of all, throughout our discussion, everyone continued to refer to “books,” even when the subject was Web novels or downloadable ¤les. It was as though lines of text on a video monitor, at least where these lines claimed to be literature, seemed meaningful to us only as the videographic replicas of bound volumes. What I ¤nd weird here is not my own or others’ conservatism—no one knows what the Web’s future holds—but rather that what Sukenick considered liberating and I found troubling seemed to be the same thing: the capacity of the new electronic media to separate literature from its material embodiment. This capacity is what reduces cost and eliminates risk. Publish-
12
R. M. Berry
ers no longer must manufacture, deliver, store, preserve, or dispose of objects. And this intangibility of literary works is what allows for direct access of readers to magazines and presses, bypassing wholesalers, distributors, sales reps, chains, buyers, librarians, reviewers, teachers, retailers. It’s as if a novel or poem had become less a thing than the possibility of a thing, a digital potentiality materializing only to be read, and this disembodiment was what allowed for transmission at the speed of thought. Sukenick believed that if literary possibility were all that publishers had to produce, they would be free to take greater risks, cultivate talent, and exercise independent selection. Of course, Sukenick was under no illusion that, in general, publishers want to do these things, but his idea was that, for the handful who do, material obstacles are the primary problem. I, on the other hand, worried that dematerialization would quickly eliminate even this handful. It seemed as though, instead of a new way to publish novels, Sukenick was proposing a new editorial relationship to consumers, one in which each reader became his or her own publisher, fronting the money for printing and assuming the risks, while crediting the editor’s selection (which the investor would get to read only afterwards). A crisis of ¤nancial values now seemed to me to be masking a crisis of aesthetic ones. Editors were asking readers to invest in the literary possibilities they’d recognized, despite their bad credit history of defaulting on readers’ interest. No wonder Web shoppers weren’t buying. If not even publishers considered literature worth the risk, why should anyone else? The solipsist’s doubts seemed justi¤ed. Literature didn’t exist. The question that in the scramble for money had passed unanswered was: What ever made words matter in the ¤rst place? Books have always had a strange existence as objects. A spigot is an object, as a two-by-four or pebble is, and a jonquil may be considered an object, say, by anyone in a metaphysical ¤t, but already there’s something awkward about characterizing plants this way. Material objects are classically inanimate. Give them the power of self-development, and they resist our efforts at objecti¤cation, asserting a life of their own. For similar reasons, books have never rested quietly in the categories reserved for tricycles. On a shelf they can appear as oblivious as Tupperware, but once they’re read, they acquire countless attributes normally reserved for humans. We speak of books having ideas [“Stein’s Three Lives has a completely different idea of time than
What Is a Book?
13
Great Expectations”], of their saying something to us [“Molloy speaks eloquently of narration’s madness”], of their meaning it [“What does The Great Gatsby mean by ‘green breast’”], sometimes of their not meaning it [“I don’t think Spring and All really means to sound so Wordsworthian”]; and although all of these anthropological characteristics can be referred back to their authors, we also attribute to books a life of their own in just these areas. Shakespeare never heard of the Oedipal complex, but what Hamlet knows could ¤ll a book. And has. In some ways, the electronic media seem capable of enhancing and developing this autonomy of books—call it their power of self-transformation. Like humans, books can mature, undergo crises, deepen, get lost, be exposed, turn shallow, dwindle, die. On a computer screen, it’s as if we can see this happening before our eyes. A hypertext novel isn’t just different in meaning each time we read it. It’s different in letter, it’s materially different. I’ve dreamt of composing a ¤ction of typos (savoir for savior, taste for state) and malaprops (viscous circle, needles to say, uncrated conscience of my race). Part of following the story would be editing it, and the new technology could make this transformative reading actual. But by rendering my ¤ction changeable in this way, would I have acknowledged its autonomy or avoided it? That is, would I be uncovering a power latent in the art I practice, an expressive potential of literature unrecognized before computers, or would I be exploring a whole new realm of artistic expression, one as distinct from literature as photography is from painting? It’s a serious mistake to imagine that literature’s form of physical existence, those tangible ways in which it has resisted our dominance and erasure, have been immaterial to its mattering for us. During the ¤fties and sixties there was a lot of speculation on the relation of novels to movies. In a popular sixties introduction to ¤ction, The Nature of Narrative, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg presented an evolutionary account of narrative according to which oral narrative (epic) had been superceded by written narrative (fabula, romance), which had, in turn, been superceded by printed narrative (the novel), which at the time of the book’s publication (1966), stood on the threshold of its new evolutionary stage—cinematic narrative. This was expected by many to be the virtual end of printed narratives, since, for anyone thinking like Scholes and Kellogg, ¤ction had only an accidental connection to its material embodiment: i.e., speech, writing, print, ¤lm, car-
14
R. M. Berry
toon strips, mime, etc. The Great Gatsby wasn’t a novel that had been made into a ¤lm. It was a narrative realizable in any medium. Fitzgerald’s prose was inessential to it. In this way, the replacement of the novel by ¤lm involved no essential loss, that is, no serious threat to the continued existence of literature itself. I leave open the question of whether the last thirty-¤ve years have shown the folly of this view or have con¤rmed it absolutely. All I can say with certainty is that Scholes and Kellogg did not allow for the variety of sustained and productive response by novelists to the remarkable cultural event of narrative ¤lm. In retrospect, we can see that while many novelists did, in fact, focus attention on those (potentially lucrative) aspects of novels that make them translatable into movies, others responded to narrative ¤lm by transforming the novel itself. This occurred in two distinct directions. Some innovative writers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortazar, Manuel Puig) sought to develop certain traditional capacities of literary narrative that movies had rendered newly interesting: the alienating potential of visualization, the entanglement of illusion and spatial positioning, the con¶ict between seeing and memory, etc. This produced novels whose strangeness and power seemed continuous with that of ¤lm itself, as though representing a further development within the medium of literature of whatever ¤lm was itself a development of. When made into movies, these novels didn’t merely render narrative cinematic; they tended to render ¤lm literary, foregrounding the new medium’s stake in conventions of linguistic representation and the verbal organization of perception. But a far greater number of innovative novelists responded to narrative ¤lm by developing those distinctive capacities and conditions of their own artistic medium which had no satisfactory cinematic equivalent. Some, like Borges or Gilbert Sorrentino or Umberto Eco, began to explore the speci¤cally “bookish” aspects of their art, investigating ways in which ¤ction existed as material documents, messages, lexicons, lines of text, printed catalogues, scraps of paper, etc. Others, like Beckett, emphasized the syntactic and semantic entailment of narration in the grammar of its own sentences, while Donald Barthelme literalized narrative’s predicaments, making the situation of narrating a function of his meaning’s bare existence, of the letter’s irreducible autonomy. In the work of these writers, the arrival of the new cinematic
What Is a Book?
15
medium, with its immense popularity and representational vividness, became a liberating occasion, challenging and enabling them to deepen their experience of their own medium. It was as though, set off against the backdrop of ¤lm’s success, ¤ction’s materiality stood out as never before, rendering print, pages, titles, spacing (etc.) de¤nitive and indispensable. What had previously seemed like mere material accidents now became markers of ¤ction’s very life. The point of such recollections is not to console reactionaries or to underwrite resistance to the new technology. On the contrary, the only correct response to the Web will be to open oneself to the practical advantages and expressive possibilities that it holds. At FC2 we fully intend to exploit it in every way feasible. (Our website is http://fc2.org.) No, the point is to remain mindful of all the different ways serious and forward-thinking individuals can respond productively to change. Many artists and writers will want to commit their imagination and energy to the new medium, ¤nding out what it offers, what forms the desire for it can take, and how its surprising capacities can bring satisfaction. My present expectation is that this kind of exploration will soon reveal that the electronic media have inaugurated a new art, one as distinct from literature as music is from lyric poetry and ballet, both of which were originally inseparable from it. Although I am for the most part a spectator of this new art, not a participant, my hunch is that its possibilities are presently revealed by video games, television, and computer graphics more than by ebooks, hypertext, or Web novels. In the history of it that the future will compose, it’s probably just beginning chapter one. Others—both writers and editors—will want to explore the overlap of literature and the Web, developing innovative and cost-saving ways to support the old art and discovering in the process new artistic possibilities in literature’s surprising capacity for disembodiment. Such efforts hold great promise for the kind of ambitious and challenging writing that, given present economic conditions, has become too costly for material realization. For anyone suf¤ciently clear-sighted to know how words can matter even when systematically ignored, the Web and electronic media make possible unassimilated cultural praxis under conditions of exile. But personally, I take the greatest interest in those book-bound imaginations who recognize in the new media a chance to reinvestigate their own
16
R. M. Berry
ongoing existence. That is, magazine editors who, while building websites to make poems accessible to all, pause to wonder if poetry’s accessibility has ever been its real problem, and so ask what about our demand for access has smothered and objecti¤ed it, metaphysically cramming poems into the categories ¤t for Pop-Tarts. Or publishers who, amid their excitement over new cost-cutting measures, ask why readers seem so reluctant to invest, not dollars, but time and attention, and not in books as such, but speci¤cally in those books that aren’t just morti¤ed by their own words. Editors and publishers who uncompromisingly pursue these questions will soon ¤nd themselves gazing open-mouthed and boggle-eyed at lines of print, discovering in them the conditions for revolution. And this is to say nothing about those poets and prose writers themselves who, while adjusting to the prospect of publishing their labors on the latest dot.com, grow newly curious at the remarkable change their sentences undergo when transferred to paper. To all such fortunately positioned souls, I expect the secret of the world’s creation to be revealed. But perhaps most of all, I remain attuned to those rare and blessed readers who, confronted with the new phenomenon—hundreds of thousands of tiny black marks, each deliberately selected and positioned and arranged in inconceivably long sequences, often at signi¤cant personal cost and over years, perhaps representing some stranger’s last grasp at understanding or candor or peace, which now in the blink of an eye can be brought to light or consigned to oblivion—suddenly recall the question they intended to ask as a child: What is a book?
Heather Shayne Blakeslee
Out on a Raft, Reading a Book World’s Biggest Metaphor Hits Iceberg! —Headline describing the Titanic from The Onion, an online satirical newspaper
The Onion may have hit its comedic mark again with this typically shrewd headline, but the position of world’s biggest metaphor has since been usurped by the World Wide Web. The newest physical and psychological repository of our culture’s dreams, faults, and excesses, the Internet has both opened up the world for us and safeguarded us in our favorite ergonomic chairs. Writers—who for centuries have given us the same rewardfor-no-risk experience in books—have naturally drifted to the Internet as a means of ¶oating their stories a little farther. The steady glow of the computer screen has become in some ways a lighthouse for the wayward literary writer of some reputation. One of the publishing community’s dreams is that the Internet will provide a revenue stream from previously unpro¤table work—short stories, novellas, longish essays, mid-list novels—all of which will be borne aloft on a sea of ones and zeros to be downloaded, printed on-demand, or read on a website by the country’s literati. But despite a zealous publishing industry, readers are exercising understandable caution as they climb aboard the ¶agship of the electronic age. 17
18
Heather Shayne Blakeslee
For the ambitious reader who already seeks peripheral writing, the destination is often literary journals and the books of small presses, the gnarly creeks that may eventually pour writers into the mainstream of literary culture. Not only will readers ¤nd short stories and literary essays, but they will come upon poetry, cross-genre work, and other experimental writing. In addition to servicing that small population of activist readers, the journals have always served an alternate function, acting as a proving ground where emerging talent pays its dues and moves on to the higher rank of book author. In that new world the writers encounter agents and subsidiary rights, book tours and contracts. No matter how modest the tour or the advance for a newly promoted writer, there are no such accoutrements when one is published in a journal. By de¤nition, literary journals are marginal operations, where funding for printing and resources for distribution are always in someone else’s pocket. For all of these journals the temptation of online publication looms large. But the current limitations of the digital format may very well be for them an iceberg of unknown girth. Digital publishing of all kinds is in its infancy, and readers, much less sophisticated readers hungry for literature, are hard won. As corporate publishing becomes increasingly commercial, and readers proportionally less facile, the market for literary work will continue to be small. Literary journals moving online—whether it’s a lemminglike run after big publishing or a rational approach to keeping the journal a¶oat—could ultimately disenfranchise readers and sink a magazine that abandons a successful print publication for an online-only model. Magazines that understand the limitations of the Web—and also its vast capacity as a marketing tool—will fare much better. My own experience with literary journals is primarily as an advocate and a reader. As an advocate I wish those journals that move online the best of luck, and I send hungry students to as many of them as possible. In classes at Poets and Writers, a nonpro¤t literary organization, I teach writers how to navigate the literary marketplace, and in the process help them to understand which communities of writing might be most receptive to their own work. I show writers how to ¤nd the journals that are interested in exploring the same subject matter, style of writing, or set of aesthetic principles that they are. I’ve tried to impress upon hundreds of
Out on a Raft, Reading a Book
19
emerging writers that it is essential to know the market that they are about to enter and that to do that, they must read contemporary writing, particularly in literary journals. At ¤rst, some students groan, complain about the cost, and then go on to explain that journals are hard to ¤nd. But most students leave the classes I teach knowing that if they want to be a successful contemporary writer, they have to be more of a reader of contemporary writing. Though the quanti¤able impact from teaching my classes is probably negligible, somewhere out there a few small journals have increased their circulation by one or two. I’d be willing to bet that whichever those journals are, they are journals with a Web presence. Though I live in New York City, where I have easy access to an array of journals both at work and in stores, my students live all over the country and may not enjoy the same bounty on their own town’s bookshelves. When they ¤nd a journal, they want to know if it meets certain requirements that might make it a receptive place for their writing, and gathering that knowledge is faster, easier, and cheaper if they can do it from their computer rather than mucking about someplace where the few available volumes might yield nothing of interest. When I go out sur¤ng, I also want answers to speci¤c questions. Who is published in the magazine? Who is the editor? How can I get a copy? How much are subscriptions? When I think about how I use the Web to experience journals, the salient characterization is a search for information. It’s work. But I don’t read journals online. I may order a copy online, and occasionally I’ll peruse the work of an online journal that publishes essays on a topic that interests me. But ¤ction and poetry get no love from me as I sail around the World Wide Web. Perhaps the reason for my seemingly negligent behavior is rooted in my enjoyment of reading in general. Reading online isn’t, as of yet, a pleasurable experience. In Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” he issues three dictates for the creator’s work: it must be abstract, it must change, and it must give pleasure. I give special consideration to the last. Journals that exist only online might be bastions of experimental writing; they might be necessary, and certainly they serve multifarious and as-yetunknown purposes. But a delicious passage of writing meant for the page is not served by a vapidity-inducing monitor and a whirring hard drive. That setting is a distraction that lowers carefully crafted words into an unfortu-
20
Heather Shayne Blakeslee
nate crucible, reducing them to the level of work-a-day prose—the news, the ¤gures of my bank account, the results of my search using Boolean operators. I want that part of my world to have no association with the one in which I open my well-worn volume of Stevens’s collected works and read this passage from the aforementioned poem: And for what, except for you, do I feel love? Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man Close to me, hidden in me day and night? In the uncertain light of a single, certain truth, Equal in living changingness to the light In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, For a moment in the central of our being, The vivid transparence that you bring is peace. I will never have the same experience reading this passage on a computer screen as I do sitting in bed, the covers thrown over my knees, a warm leg pressed up against mine. And though I’m not the ¤rst to say it, and though I know it will raise cries that cast me as the romantic fuddy-duddy, I don’t ever want to read this passage hyperlinked on a screen. Or pressuring me to ¤nd my own ending. In that moment, at rest, I am free from the Javascripted ads that keep popping up in front of me every time I check my email, and I want to keep it that way. The world is populated by myriad readers, and the kind of writing that brings me the most pleasure isn’t the kind of writing that is best suited to the Web—information, news, and entertainment that comes in short bites. That idea is borne out on Poets and Writers’ website, which caters to literary writers. The most popular pages on the site are those that give readers information: contest deadlines, warnings about vanity presses, or the results of searching the online version of A Directory of American Poets and Fiction Writers. As far as our users are concerned, interviews with authors in the Outloud audio section or articles that are posted from the magazine get second billing to the parts of the site that ful¤ll a speci¤c need for information. Artistic insight is welcome, but it’s not primary in this case. I used to write an online column for Poets & Writers Online called
Out on a Raft, Reading a Book
21
“News from the Writing World.” I would cruise the Web, ¤nd four or ¤ve stories relevant to writers’ lives, and then write summaries of the stories with links to the original work for people who wanted more information. After more than two years of my writing in that format, we decided that more choices of stories and less teaser text were better for the users. Now there are twice as many stories with half as much text; the writers who visit the news survey, hardly a column anymore, have a more varied set of stories to choose from. Our users are happier; they want information, and they get it. But what if you’re a literary journal, whose primary content isn’t howto information or market news, but literature that was written to be read on a page? I would argue that instead of trying to force the Web into a clean analogy with print publication, the literary community should recognize that online writing and writing for the page are different animals, best suited to different habitats. Performance poets have already taken up this idea. They make a nod to the printed page with chapbooks and the occasional anthology featuring work suited both to performance and to print, but spend most of their time cultivating venues rather than presses. Given the choice, I don’t believe they would abandon the venues that are the lodestone of the community for a clattering print shop. Print journals should be as sav vy and map out all the consequences of going to an onlineonly format; as they chart a course for better serving their readers, they shouldn’t confuse creating a more easily accessible journal with making the writing more accessible. The Web is a terrible delivery system for a lot of writing, including much of the work that now ¤lls the pages of print literary journals across the country. NPR commentator Laura Sydell once commented on a Poets & Writers–sponsored panel treating poetry and technology that she sometimes feels guilty about using poetry on the radio—that poetry as an art form deserved more than she could give it in radio spots shaped for the listening public. Sydell explained that in order to craft a successful segment, she had to use short, accessible poems that someone could “get” on the ¤rst listen. Similarly, a journal could post a one-hundred-page novella on the Web, but most people won’t stay tuned in. Necessarily the format of the Web will lend itself to a certain type of writing. Online journals that want not just to survive but to thrive may be
22
Heather Shayne Blakeslee
forced to choose writing within the same kinds of parameters if they wish to attract and retain readers. If those parameters are not part of a journal’s aesthetic already, a Web version of the print journal that enjoys its own editor and identity—as do the Brooklyn Review and the Brooklyn Review Online—might be a better choice than trying to unsuccessfully mimic the print journal. Certainly there are talented writers who use the medium of the Web to their advantage, aptly creating literary art forms that thrive best online. But as a whole, artists in disciplines other than traditional print writing are better able to take advantage of the Web as they set about the task of communicating their art, musicians among them. The difference between communicating art and delivering information is great, though it’s often ignored in discussions about the “communicative” power of the Web. As a musician myself, I’m grateful that the Web gives an analogous musical experience to turning on the radio, or playing a CD. The visceral experience of music is best when it’s live, but if one is listening to a recording, it doesn’t matter whether the speakers are hooked up to a PC or a stereo. Soon they’ll all be one device. One of the outgrowths of that easy transition is that music fans now ¶ood the Web to ¤nd new music. I’m one of those fans, and in that capacity I use the Web in a wholly different way than when I’m looking for online literature. Because I can ful¤ll my primary directive (listening to music), I’m actually content to stay online for other, related opportunities—checking out concert dates, reviews, messages from the musician, bootleg trade offerings from other fans, etc.—all while I’m happily listening to sound ¤les. A similar phenomenon has occurred in writing communities that have embraced the Web and used the medium to create new art forms. Places like the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo have cultivated a troupe of loyal visitors; but again, the center primarily promotes writing that was meant to live on the Web. Given the vast difference in experience between reading online and just plain reading, turning loose a traditional poet in a medium where porn is king could be a death sentence rather than a life boat. Readers may take full advantage of sites that sell books, but they aren’t as of yet crashing the servers of literary journals. Even if I try to sit down and read a short story online, I can’t ¤nish it. Eventually I lose what might be a
Out on a Raft, Reading a Book
23
great piece to my own distraction, tempted away by the cruel amount of choices the Internet offers me. The Sirens of the Web are too strong a match for my otherwise patient demeanor and healthy attention span. I tell my students not to write to match the guidelines of what they ¤nd in journals or at publishers, but to keep looking until they ¤nd the editors who will be happy to read their work. Perhaps artistic consideration eventually will be the paramount guide for writers, publishers, and readers as they seek their natural place, whether it be online or in the green world. The variables at play in today’s publishing world have left all of us without a clear vision as to how literature, and the publishing industry that surrounds it, will be served or undermined by the Web. But I am curious as to how much, for instance, the traditional proving ground for new talent will be affected. I suppose the answer will become more apparent as the ratio of print to online journals comes into a sort of equilibrium; but even then, advances in technology may have inspired a new generation of adventurers eager to ¤nd their artistic fortunes. Will writers who publish primarily online move naturally into presses that operate online? Will separate readerships emerge, branching the tributary system of our literary culture even more intricately? In the time it takes these questions to ¤nd their answers, I’m sure there will be casualties—not just writers who can’t quite ¤nd their way, or large publishers whose largeness leaves them vulnerable to a quickly changing market—but also small journals whose producers didn’t carefully consider if they should move the magazine online. Surely there will be successful magazines that founder on the Web and pass away. Though I know the possibility is not great, I live in a subdued kind of fear that my subscription to DoubleTake will someday come with an announcement that the magazine will in the future be offered exclusively online. Such a proclamation would have the same effect on me as if the journal’s sponsors had announced they’d lost their funding, as almost happened before. In either case they would lose me as a reader, and I would lose their unique perspective on life in our world. If DoubleTake did move online, I have no fear that the writers I love would cease to write if they found their work didn’t translate well to the Web; but I would lose the beauty of ¤nding them in the strange juxta-
24
Heather Shayne Blakeslee
positions and graceful dovetails that happen in the pages of this particular print journal. I hope always to be able to lay it inside my bag and carry it with me, and to place it next to the previous volume’s colorful spine when I’ve ¤nished reading. I would like for the house to be quiet when my hand neatens the half-full shelf, and for the prose that circles in my wandering thoughts to keep drifting as I walk away.
Michael Joyce
A Marriage That Might Have Been, or Living, Haply, Ever After
A t eighteen I lived in brick canyons of slantwise light on the Upper West Side that I have written about more than once, surprising myself how much the light means to me in memory, ¤ltering as it did across lots of brick shards and plaster dust from the so-called urban renewal that brought me there as a young turk, a freshly turned-out government leftist, a rent-strike organizer, an Alinsky organization product of VISTA training in that ¤rst sweet wave when the domestic peace corps still dreamed of revolution. And, oh yes, I wanted to be a novelist. The apartment my poet roommate and I lived in on West 95th Street then rented for two hundred and ¤fty dollars and I remember marking when I saw it advertised, decades later, in The Village Voice for ten times that much, after new buildings had arisen from the plaster dust, yuppies had come and gone from the parlance though not the purview and the ¤rst dot.com boom was on the horizon. I only periodically recall substantial detail from those years, the 25
26
Michael Joyce
memories like radio stations tuning in and out in the days before digital presets (on West 95th the supers were improbably named Frankie and Johnny; also I remember once trying to organize in a slum ¶at where a young Hispanic mother brushed cucarachas from her bare breast as she breastfed her baby in a kitchen where the plaster hung from the lath and what smooth patches remained swarmed with a pulsing mahogany lacquer of cockroaches; and I recall that the father and mother of the owners of the Pomegranate Garden, the storefront Chinese restaurant where I ate noodles daily, were dressed in long black robes and sat reading Chinese papers and smoking cigarettes and smiling, unable to speak English); but I do very clearly recall walking with The Evergreen Review stuffed in the back pocket of my jeans. It was how I knew what to read, listen to, and see at the movies or on stage. I was a little nervous as I told this story to Barney Rosset, three decades afterward, in the kitchen of his ¶at on the fringe of Gramercy and Chelsea, worried that I had somehow gotten it wrong (although all my proprioceptive memory told me I hadn’t) and my jeans pocket wouldn’t have held a copy in the format Evergreen was then (I knew it went glossy and larger format later). It was our operating manual, I said to Barney. You know, like George Perec? Life, A Users Manual? He knew, of course, and it got him telling stories (crisper than mine here), of being with Sam in Paris and a bookstall near the Latin Quarter, of an as-yet-unpublished screenplay of Robbe-Grillet’s where time goes backwards. Like Pinter? I said, or Charlie Baxter? He knew these as well. Or like hypertext novels, I think, he said. I’ve always thought Krapp could be a hypertext. We were eating bagels at the kitchen table and behind us WebTV played silently on the television, the text on the TV screen vaguely like the screens I recalled from my sons’ Atari years, multicolored and slightly corpulent, like the lowercase letters of circus posters. It was thirty years after and Barney was moving Evergreen to the Web and he wanted to know if I would write something for it.
A Marriage that Might Have Been
27
I would have written anything he asked, even the line on the masthead that tells where in Nebraska or Iowa to write when you have problems with subscriptions, or the caption for a GIF illustration of a Miles Davis review from the sixties. It astonished me that Barney wanted me to write a hyper¤ction. It should not have. Evergreen was an operating manual. I knew (with a chill) who Sam was as soon as Barney started telling the story; Krapp’s Last Tape was ¤rst published in volume 2, number 3 of Evergreen. I ¤rst read Robbe-Grillet from the pages of one of those copies I carried in the back pocket of my jeans. Toward a new novel seemed the right direction to me as I sat in my aerie (fairly) high above 95th Street in the early morning hours and looked out across the street to see the proverbial other writer also writing in his window, a Royal typewriter before him, as one was before me, the two of us tock-tocking upon second sheets and into the summer night. Years later, when the New York Times Magazine whined about how the hyper¤ction novel was like Robbe-Grillet taken over to the computer, it was hard not to see this dismissal as a minor triumph. Thirty-plus years later and Barney Rosset was still publishing new work from all over in new forms. He saw nothing particularly unusual in it. It was the ¤rst time I understood the allure of convergence in the form of WebTV, which, until then, like most jaded digerati, I bemoaned as a (by then) Microsoft attempt to dumb down “our” Internet for teevee (un)consciousness. I was wrong. Barney saw the Web as another vital publishing medium and a place where he could keep track of the family (both actual and literary) via email. Evergreen online would do new work but he would also make the whole of his archive available online. He would wake new generations to Sam and RobbeGrillet and Kerouac; to H.D., Denise Levertov, and Marguerite Duras; to Amos Tutuola, Artaud, and D. T. Suzuki; to Che Guevara, Bobby Seale, and Charles Olson (constructing these triplets from Evergreen tables of contents is an indulgence, the ultimate desert island game, but also irresistible, especially to someone who, as a young man, met them so in these pages). Barney saw (and still sees) the weave of the convergent Web and its discourses in a less frantic and thus truly more utopian way than I ever did. It
28
Michael Joyce
was for him an ordinary, in the breviary sense of the daily of¤ce, or as Wallace Stevens has it in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” a matter of how This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory of poetry is the theory of life, As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands. (145, VIII, lines 136–144) From poetry to life to longed-for lands was the territory (and thus the history) of literary journals as I came to know it in the slantwise light of uptown streets. Barney extemporized, not in the makeshift but the Mingus sense, not so severe (and harassing only the powerful and the status quo, literary and other) as spontaneous, in the way Kerouac had it (in the same issue of Evergreen as Krapp’s Last Tape). Not selectivity of express but following free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought, swimming in a sea of English with no discipline other than rhythms of rhetorical exhalation and expostulated statement, like a ¤st coming down on a table with each complete utterance, bang! (the space dash)—Blow as deep as you want—write as deeply, ¤sh as far down as you want, satisf y yourself ¤rst, then the reader cannot fail to receive telepathic shock and meaningful excitement by some laws operating in his own human mind (72). Flash forward from the Upper West Side sixties, back from the Chelsea cyber nineties, another story, not worse, not better, but other. It is 1987 and my hypertext novel, afternoon, a story, has been published in ¶oppy disk samizdat, already the ¤rst essays are beginning to appear in the writing-theory equivalent of little magazines (Writing on the Edge, Perforations, and so on, still publishing). A graduate student at NYU is then, how-
A Marriage that Might Have Been
29
ever unbelievably, writing her dissertation on this ¤ction (she is the critic and writer Jane Yellowlees Douglas, now at the University of Florida and the author of The End of Books or Books without End, who will later join me in amber as we are anthologized, however uneasily and hybridized, no longer buzzing, in Postmodern American Fiction, a Norton anthology). At that time my friend, and indeed the John the Baptist who brought me as a novelist to the word processor, sociologist Howard S. Becker is on the editorial board of TriQuarterly and he has the notion that it should publish afternoon “just like it did ‘Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife,’” he writes me. He has given a copy on disk to Reg Gibbons. Time goes by. This is the marriage that might have been and I sometimes wonder (not for me—mind you and believe me—I’ve done well enough on the outside, maybe even prospered more than I might have—or should have—on account of my cloven hooves) whether it might have been different at this point had it all worked out as Howie wanted. I still have a copy of Reg Gibbons’s letter somewhere in my ¤les, sent a year or so after Howie handed the disk to him, as I remember, although the days have gotten compressed by both my own age and the compressions of the cyber one. Gibbons apologizes for not having read the work, he couldn’t (at Northwestern in the late ’80s!) ¤nd anyone who could help him read it on a computer. He suspects anyway that, had he been able to, it still wouldn’t matter. It isn’t what he sees TriQuarterly as doing. Fair enough. Honorable really, it is what an editor should do and the few great ones are able to: decide what it is you publish and then stick to it. Gibbons was fairer still. Another year or so later, when Howie had me to Northwestern for a reading and a lecture, there was Reg across the table of the seminar room, open and eager and, eventually, disappointed: It’s really only another postmodern ¤ction, I remember him saying—not dismissive as much as in wonderment—in the preface to a long question, which I do not recall, except that I remember thinking it another instance of how my life was those heady ¤rst days after afternoon, too literary for the geeks, too geeky for the literati. I think he thought he’d see Buck Rogers ¤ction, I remember telling someone. You know, a titanium hat like an upside-down aluminum pasta pot, a pair of rabbit ears riveted on it. Fiction to match.
30
Michael Joyce
He wanted David Foster Wallace, I think now (instead it was retro Robbe-Grillet). What would it have meant—for hypertext, for small magazines—had the so-called “¤rst” (¤ll in the blank: “serious” and “literary” are often used, although Laura Miller, writing in the New York Times Book Review, liked “meandering” and “claptrap”), hypertext novel been published in TriQuarterly? What would it matter? Probably not much. The past never changes anything, even in retrospect. What’s more, that “¤rst” (as inevitably and rightly happens to so-called ¤rsts in literary history) is under question. An angry Zork fan at a think tank in Sundance once raged at me about usurping his champion; Robert Pinsky has recently made his bid for the title with Mindwheel; I knew enough predecessors (including Zork), some even beloved, in 1987 when I wrote afternoon to include a series of sly homages to them among the intertextual ¶otsam, jetsam, and ef¶uvia therein. Even the term itself is literally under erasure. A new Viking expedition, under the ¶ag of Cybertext and led by the Norseman Espen Aarseth (with non-Norsewoman Janet Murray on the holodeck), champions chatrooms and videogames and virtual worlds as the new literature. One can imagine their candidate for the ¤rst hyper¤ction as being the primordial game Pong, with its starkly contending forces as much linked as alienated by opposing vectors. Indeed hypertext literature has largely gone somewhere I don’t recognize, or at least ¤nd, a place in it for myself. A good deal of what is being published in webzines resembles captions in a Victorian Lady’s scrapbook as interpreted by a Japanese anime toon chick. More interesting if more nervousmaking work (largely created by a program called Flash) puts text in motion as if a strict by-the-numbers working through the Futurist and Oulipo injunctions on the lee side of L3DA3DN3DG3 DU3DA3DG3DE poetry. There is, as mentioned, a brave new world of cybertextual gameworld makers, stirring up tempests of their own and veering toward and away from the far shores of literature (whatever that was) like drug runners in drunken boats. A few people are still writing, some quite well and good. More importantly there are real publishers and editors who are able to decide what it is they want to publish and who can see their way from poetry
A Marriage that Might Have Been
31
to life to longed-for lands. Some come from traditional little magazines, whatever that may mean, and copublish electronically. After Barney Rosset the dean of these is David Hamilton at The Iowa Review, who had the genius to select Brian Lannon, an extraordinary techno-literary critic and writer, as his electronic editor. In this same world Rick Barthelme at Mississippi Review also comes to mind. Others have made their way to electronic forms with a ¤rm eye on prior literary history. Ravi Shankar (not a sitar player, as his editor’s note points out) extends the literary paradigm to sounds and images (both still and moving,) as well as hypertexts (traditionalist that he is, he calls them that). Shankar, like Lannon, is out of Columbia University, and indeed it seems, if there is to be (or should be) a next New Yorker, it may very well proceed from the rich ferment of informed new media sensibilities there (where ¤gures like architect Bernard Tschumi and ¤lm professor and Crouching Tiger writer/producer James Schamus attend to mediated public spaces and mediated literatures alike). Elsewhere, The Little Magazine at Albany, its name almost surely selfconsciously echoing of Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, publishes on CD-ROM as well as the Web. Poet and novelist Ed Falco’s New River Review publishes good writing, a fair proportion of which moves (literally and metaphorically). Christian Crumlish’s Enterzone and Talan Memmott’s Beehive have become lively and in¶uential literary Web journals, while Camille Renshaw’s Pif has published quality critical essays and reviews of electronic literature. Jennifer Ley’s Riding the Meridian features a mix of hypermedia work, as well as “the diner” (a curated tour of Web works elsewhere), a Paris Review– like dialogue (often with writers) and a section devoted to “theory & practice.” Matt Hanlon’s smart and sassy Supertart, an outgrowth of his wonderfully droll and dryly quirky weekly humor webzine, Sane, seeks to attract comix, club mix, and gamer sensibilities as well as Euro-Irish-US-UK literati. Meanwhile Mark Amerika’s Alt-X Publishing Network (its motto: “where the digerati meet the literati”) has followed in the shopping-mall tradition ofthe American small press avant-garde, housing ebr, the electronic book review, and Black Ice Press as well as Amerika’s own self-feeding Grammatron empire. Last but not least, (my) hypertext publisher Mark Bernstein, whom I long ago dubbed the James Laughlin of new media, has for some time
32
Michael Joyce
sponsored a little magazine on his Eastgate Systems website in the form of a “Reading Room.” However curiously Salon and Slate, both which I confess I long ago gave up reading on account of their self-congratulatory tone and Seattle-coast would-be New Yorker pretensions, have, to the best of my knowledge, neither published electronic literature nor any signi¤cant criticism of same (unless one counts the aforementioned polemic by senior editor Miller, which seems to have led the way to her burgeoning career as Times Book Review second-stringer and book party anthologist, as well as paved the way as she, and Salon, make a righteous and rightward move away from digi- and back toward transparently lite-rati-ness). All of the truly literary electronic little magazines, like their predecessors and contemporaries, are characterized by their attention to good writing as it has been irregularly and contentiously understood through one full century plus a year, give or take a decade, of subversive, experimental, avantgarde, modernist and postmodernist prose, poetry, and performance in various media. To be sure, little magazines have long before the Web included new media in their purview, from the days of Gilbert Seldes’s seven lively arts, comprised (for anyone who’s counting) of Slapstick Moving Pictures, Comic Strips, Revues, Musical Comedy, Colyums (i.e., newspaper feature columns), Slang Humor, Popular Songs, and Vaudeville. Long before it was possible to package short ¤lms and soundscapes on CDs or the Web, fundraisers and subscriber evenings, run by little magazines from Lawrence, Kansas, to the Nuyorican Poets Café, Loisaida, U.S.A., served like purposes. Two laps around the ultimate desert island oasis of Evergreen yields the triples of David Amram, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Jon Hendricks, as well as Harold Pinter, Dziga Vertov, and Frank Zappa, among contributors (with any number of jazz records and gigs, ¤lm showings and happenings reviewed and advertised alike in the back pages). What would it have meant—for new media, for small magazines— had the part little magazines played in the development of truly multimedia forms been something they claimed? What would it matter? You see where I am going with this? Down that same street in New York, that same memory lane, circling back to recover what was never really
A Marriage that Might Have Been
33
lost, the marriage that was, and that might have been. The truth is there is real reason for little/literary magazines even now to claim a formative role in the development of new electronic media. As preposterous as it seems now from the perspective of the boom and bust and (maybe) boom again dot.com webwise world, there was a brief period of aporia in the development of hypermedia where the computer scientists and commercial interests had no sense of what to do with hypertext. This period—it can be ¤rmly ¤xed from 1987, the ¤rst ACM Hypertext Conference (where, by the way, afternoon ¤rst appeared), to 1992, when Marc Andreesen left graduate school at Illinois and took the makings of the Web with him—was what Robert Coover, in FEED, has called the “golden age of hypertext.” It is arguable that the literary, theoretical, and educational ferment in MOOs and maillists and Gopher sites on the Internet—and in Hypercarded and Storyspaced classrooms—at that time prepared the cultural bed for the decidedly mixed garden of orchids and kudzu that became the commercialized Web. I remember a long-ago conversation (perhaps it was just after TriQuarterly left me at the altar) with new media artist and cyberliterature theorist Stuart Moulthrop in which I wondered why the little magazines and university writing departments (aside from Brown) were so in opposition to hypertext literature. A professional paranoid, indeed an exquisite artist of paranoia’s pains and pleasures, Stuart pointed out the obvious: little magazines were assailed and marginalized by mass-market publishing, while they and their contributors and clients (the writing programs) were likewise assailed and marginalized by departments of literature—not to mention the dawning cultural studies programs. We hypertext types come along with our blinking lights and whirring disk drives, I more or less remember Stuart saying, and it seems like a ¶ying saucer; they are afraid the mesmerized kids will march on board. At some point (though not in any wise a historian, I would argue it was earlier than anyone would think, about the time of the disclosures that certain cold war literary journals had surreptitiously served the interests of the anti-Communists and CIA, a time that played out eventually in the last gasp of the anti-Vietnam late sixties) little magazines retreated to a fortress of letter-type aesthetics and ¤nely tuned literary sensibility. Battered and betrayed by the public sphere, they by and large consoled themselves
34
Michael Joyce
with becoming what one might call a canon en abyme, in almost precisely Derrida’s (1981, 93, 127, 219ff; 1984, 64 double sense of en abyme as both an endlessly mirroring series of internal references and simultaneously a heraldic setting out before itself of the mark, in this case the mark of the exiled literature-to-be. A u-topia of never to be. We live in an age when all marriages—made, muffed, or missed—are in some sense serial and subjunctive and only haply ever after (with afterwhat under question, and any ever hounded by perpetual nextness, against which only a happy sense of chance and happenstance seems a defense). Literature, even by littles, lives in auld lang syne, and only new media bear the burden of ever being new—which is quite a different thing than Pound’s (borrowed) injunction to make it so. As Sheridan says, “’Tis safest in matrimony to begin with a little aversion.” This wedding can work, and has. I know. I saw it played out once upon a time on WebTV. I carry that memory with me rolled up in some virtual back pocket like the operating manual for a brave old world of new-found might-have-beens and wills-to-be. Works Cited Coover, Robert. 2000. FEED. “The Passing of the Golden Age.” FEED, . Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1984. Signéponge/Signsponge, bilingual ed., translated by Richard Rand. New York: Columbia University Press. Kammen, Michael. 1996. The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Kerouac, Jack. 1958. “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Evergreen Review 2, no. 3. Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. 1998. The Rivals (act 1, scene 2). In The School for Scandal and Other Plays, ed. Michael Cordner. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Stevens, Wallace. 1959. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” In Poems by Wallace Stevens, ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Random House.
A Marriage that Might Have Been
Electronic Magazines and Journals Mentioned Alt-X Publishing Network. . Beehive: Hypermedia Literary Journal. . Drunken Boat. . Eastgate Reading Room. . Enterzone. . Evergreen Review. . The Iowa Review. . The Little Magazine. . Mississippi Review. . New River Review. . Pif Magazine. . Riding the Meridian. . Sane Magazine. . Supertart. .
35
Paula E. Geyh
The Literary Magazine, the Web, and the Changing of the Avant-Garde One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be satis¤ed only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
In his 1979 groundbreaking work, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard argues that “postmodern” “designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature, and the arts” (xxiii). Many of the transformations to which he refers are technological in nature, among them the advent of radio, cinema, telephones, television, and, more recently, the computer and related digital technologies, including the World Wide Web. The former technologies having already been largely assimilated by (at least) Western culture, it is the latter, digital technologies that now pose the greatest challenge to the traditional “game rules” of literature and the other 36
Changing of the Avant-Garde
37
arts—their aesthetic, formal, and conceptual possibilities and limits; the ways they relate to and in¶uence one another; how they are produced and distributed; and their role in our lives and the life of our culture. Throughout the twentieth century, literary magazines played many roles on the changing literary scene. Arguably the most important among them, however, has been their contribution to the development of various literary and artistic avant-garde movements, including Dada (though it eschewed the designation of “movement”) and Surrealism, the Beats, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. (This list could, of course, be considerably extended.) As the term “avant-garde” suggests, such movements have been in the lead of “the grand march of intellect,” as Keats once put it, and they have helped to de¤ne and rede¤ne the literature and art of the twentieth century. Yet the history of these avant-gardes’ literary/arts magazines seems always in danger of being forgotten because of their often ephemeral nature and their anti-institutional stances; they generally don’t get noticed or purchased by libraries when they are published and are acquired only in reprint editions after the movements are safe and “sanitized.” Historically, literary magazines have contributed to the development of the avant-garde in three fundamental ways. Acting as mediums of aesthetic exchange and cross-pollination, literary magazines have fostered the creation of avant-garde communities of like-minded writers and artists, whose collaborations often appeared on their pages. They have also been a means of dissemination for the avant-garde’s most daring and innovative, and thus often least commercial, works in America and Europe; James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, ¤rst appeared in Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap’s Little Review. And ¤nally, literary magazines have forged communities of readers and audiences for these works, thus enabling the avant-garde to gain a foothold of acceptance that would eventually extend to—and transform—a far wider literary and cultural scene. As the twentieth century drew to a close and the twenty-¤rst opened, the literary scene began to experience an unprecedented and spectacular shift from the “material” world to the “virtual” world, a shift that both carried along and was to some extent advanced by literary magazines. As literary magazines have moved to and proliferated on the Web, among the more surprising developments has been the online resurrection of many avant-
38
Paula E. Geyh
garde movements of the early- and mid-twentieth century, and the extension of their projects there. At the same time, literary magazines on the Web representing new, postmodern literary developments perform their historical role anew in advancing the emergence of twenty-¤rst-century literary and artistic avant-gardes. My aim here is to map out this joint dynamics of the old in the new, and the new in the old, in the past and present relationships between literary magazines and avant-garde literature, which might help us to better understand the future of literary magazines and literature itself in the face of online publishing. I’ll begin with Dada, to which I shall devote special attention, because the movement played such a pivotal role in the history of avant-garde literary magazines. Investigating the Dadaists’ practices helps us to understand the genre, especially those aspects of it that translate themselves into the workings of Web magazines. Even more crucially, the Dadaists explored the relationships between new technologies and literature and art in ways not dissimilar to those by which contemporary avant-gardes are exploring virtual and digital technologies—sometimes by deliberately echoing or referring to the nature of Dada experimentation, along with that of other subsequent avant-garde literary and artistic movements. In other words, avant-garde Web magazines both reconstitute and develop the structure of these relationships. By so doing, like their predecessors, they are creating a new space of relationships between literature and art and new technology. Thus, the literary/arts magazines of the Web give us deeper insights into the nature, to paraphrase Benjamin, of the work of art in the age of digital reproduction. *** In examining the underlying relations of economics, labor, and poetic form in his essay “Of Theory, To Practice,” Ron Silliman argues that “among the several functions of poetry is that of posing a model of unalienated work. . . . Once this template of useful activity was predicated upon the image of the poem as individual craft of the artisan type, while now the collective literature of the community, an ensemble of ‘scenes,’ is gradually emerging as more vital than the production of single authors” (61). Although Silliman’s argument directly concerns contemporary poetry
Changing of the Avant-Garde
39
movements, the phenomenon he describes was arguably at work throughout the twentieth century, as innovations in poetry emerged from a range of avant-gardes, including Dada, Surrealism, the Beats, and, more recently, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Certainly among the crucial questions of the past century were those of the character and politics of the relationship between the literary/artistic self and the community (both the community of writers and artists themselves, and the broader “public”)—questions that are themselves intimately bound up with that of the nature and purpose of art. There is in fact no artistic practice that does not, explicitly or implicitly, address these questions. The technological revolutions of the twentieth century were the primary driving force behind the transformations in this relationship and in the nature of art, transformations that Walter Benjamin was among the ¤rst to articulate in his landmark essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” As the aura of art dwindles in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin argued, art undergoes a fundamental shift: “Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics” (224). For the Dadaists, innovation and politics went hand in hand. “The new artist protests,” Tristan Tzara proclaimed in one of his many manifestoes—an assertion that would remain a constant of this and other avantgardes throughout the century. The Dadaists protested against the suffocating traditions and conventions of academic art, literature, and theater, and against the self-satisfaction and blindness of the bourgeoisie, which they believed had led to the horrors of World War I. “The of¤cial belief in the infallibility of reason, logic and causality seemed to us senseless—as senseless as the destruction of the world and the systematic elimination of every particle of human feeling,” the Dada artist and ¤lmmaker Hans Richter wrote. “This was the reason why we were forced to look for something which would re-establish our humanity. . . . All this grew out of the true sense of fellowship that existed among us, the climate of the age, and our professional experimentation (Richter 57–59). The Dadaists, Jean Arp recalled in “Dadaland,” “were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age” (qtd in Richter 25). The “cure” they envisioned was essentially a form of aesthetic shocktherapy: they sought to awaken society by scandalizing it. Art, it seemed,
40
Paula E. Geyh
had always been seen as the pursuit of the beautiful, the harmonious, and the spiritual: the Dadaists embraced the “un-beautiful” (including what Benjamin termed “every imaginable waste product of language”), the dissonant, and the quotidian (237). They gathered up the detritus of everyday life in capitalist society—torn tickets, scraps of newspaper, cigarette wrappers, string, images from magazine ads—and integrated them into their paintings and collages. Art from ashes. Although hostile to the Futurists’ glori¤cation of the machine world and mechanization, the Dadaists nonetheless experimented extensively with machines and machine processes. From Duchamp’s moving sculptures (he is credited with the invention of the mobile), Rotative Plaques and Roto-reliefs to the photographic innovations of Man Ray (including “Rayographs”) and the experimental ¤lms of Hans Richter and Viking Egeling, the Dadaists transformed art through technology by using the latter as a constitutive part of their creative, or, one might say, constructing—fabricating—practices. This use of technology contributed to their challenge of the bourgeois “cult” of the author and artist, and with it the honored status of authorial or artistic intention, through the deployment of improvisation, collaboration, and techniques that made use of simultaneity, chance (a throw of dice, a shuf¶ing of the deck), intuition, and the unconscious. “This conscious break with rationality,” Richter later speculated, may also explain the sudden proliferation of new art-forms and materials in Dada. In the years that followed, our freedom from preconceived ideas about processes and techniques frequently led us beyond the frontiers of individual artistic categories. From painting to sculpture, from pictorial art to typography, collage, photography, photomontage, from abstract art to pictures painted on long paper scrolls, from scroll-pictures to the cinema, to the relief, to the objet trouvé, to the ready-made. As the boundaries between the arts became indistinct, painters turned to poetry and poets to painting. The destruction of the boundaries was re¶ected everywhere. (Richter 57) The destruction of these boundaries allowed for the creation of an array of new “intermedia” or “multimedia” forms of art (cinema would of
Changing of the Avant-Garde
41
course be the primary example) throughout the twentieth century. The changes in art were material, in the sense of what constituted the “raw materials” from which art could be made; technical, in the invention and deployment of new technologies of photography, ¤lm, recording, and printing; and conceptual, in terms of the “creative processes” through which works of literature and art were conceived. Indeed, it became increasingly dif¤cult (and frequently impossible) to separate these domains. Driving nearly all of these changes was the Dadaists’ thoroughgoing spirit of creative iconoclasm. “What they intended and achieved,” Benjamin observed, “was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. . . . One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public” (237–38). The Zurich Dadaists’ infamous Cabaret Voltaire, where Dada began in 1916, was the scene of shocking (and frequently hilarious) artistic follies, provocations, demonstrations and revelries. Hugo Ball, the owner of the cabaret, inaugurated abstract (phonetic) poetry with his performance of “O Gadji Beri Bimba.” Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Henri Barzun, and Marcel Janco performed simultaneist verse and what the Surrealists would later dub “automatic poetry,” accompanied by whistles, bells, drums, and cow-bells. There were “noise concerts,” a borrowing from Bruitism; nonsense lectures interrupted by shouted commentary from the crowd; and improvised “tragico-absurd dance” and theatricals inspired by Janco’s startling masks. And there were the manifestoes: “From the day the Cabaret Voltaire opened its doors, we read and wrote manifestos. We did not only read them, we spoke them as vociferously and de¤antly as we could,” Huelsenbeck recalled in his “First Dada Speech in German” (qtd in Richter 103). Tzara was the movement’s most proli¤c maker of manifestoes, and they shaped Dada as much as any actual artistic practice: “Thought is produced in the mouth.” “Dada is nothing.” “I smash drawers, those of the brain and those of social organization” (qtd in Richter 33–35). Dada was “play” with a serious purpose. “What we call Dada is foolery,” Ball wrote, “foolery extracted from all the emptiness in which all the higher problems are wrapped, a gladiator’s gesture, a game played with the shabby remnants . . . a public execution of false morality” (qtd in Richter 32). From out of the Cabaret Voltaire and the spirit it unleashed came a
42
Paula E. Geyh
multitude of literary magazines: in Zurich, the ¤rst was Ball’s Cabaret Voltaire, named after its artistic “home,” followed by Tzara’s much better known Dada. Dada was notable both for its publication of many of Tzara’s manifestoes, which de¤ned and promulgated the movement’s ideas, and for the wide range of international authors (among them, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, Ball, Huelsenbeck, and artist/poet Jean Arp) represented on its pages, which helped to transform Dada from a local to an international movement. Tzara subsequently wrote for the Parisbased journal, ironically titled Littérature, which was founded in 1919 by Aragon, Breton, Paul Éluard, and Philippe Soupault. In Barcelona, the Spanish painter Francis Picabia edited 391, his “journal of protest against everything,” which published “machine-poems” and Picabia’s and Duchamp’s “machine-drawings,” which were inspired by Raymond Roussel’s idea of a “painting machine” that would “render all man-made forms of representational art obsolete” (Arnason 310). In New York, another branch of Dada loosely coalesced within the Arensberg circle (a group of artists and writers supported in various ways by the collector Walter Arensberg) and launched a series of short-lived Dada magazines. Marius de Zayas, a caricaturist for Life (the weekly humor magazine), and Edgar Varèse, the “discoverer” of noise-music, edited 291, a magazine named after Alfred Stieglitz’s famed Gallery 291, where earlier the Cubists (accompanied by a catalogue that featured the prose of Gertrude Stein) and later the Surrealists had their ¤rst American exhibitions. Together, Man Ray and Duchamp founded and edited several Dada reviews: The Blind Man, Rongwrong, and New York Dada. By publishing and circulating the ideas, literature, and art of Dada, these and other magazines linked the far-¶ung centers of the movement (Zurich, Paris, New York, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne) and disseminated its ideas throughout Europe and America. And they generated a synergy among the various branches of Dada—a synergy that lead to and inspired subsequent revolutionary developments in literature, music, dance, ¤lm, and the other visual arts. Dada became a prototype or template for many other avant-garde movements of the twentieth century that followed, though it should be remembered that they themselves were not without forbears, such as the Symbolists, Futurists, and others. The Dadaists’ highly unorthodox community
Changing of the Avant-Garde
43
of writers and artists allowed for an immense creative heterogeneity—“it is our differences that unite us,” André Breton observed—and rede¤ned the understanding of the nature of artistic community for subsequent avantgardes (Richter 174). They pioneered models of creative synergy and multimedia techniques that have been imitated and built upon throughout the century. Through their innovative uses of technology and embrace of technical change, they transformed conceptions of aesthetic form and beauty. Their oppositional stance toward bourgeois society and its political myopias; their vision of the artist as provocateur; their conviction that the purpose of literature and art was to make the familiar strange and to jolt the mind into a new awareness—all became hallmarks of many subsequent avant-gardes as well, among them the Surrealists, the Beats, and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. Even in “practical matters,” such as the deployment of literary magazines as a means for de¤ning and furthering the movement, the Dadaists inspired those who came after them. Literary magazines were a crucial component of such subsequent avantgardes as the Surrealists, who published 291 (a later incarnation of the Dada magazine), VVV, and View; the Beats, who were responsible for a multitude of mimeograph and more elaborately produced magazines, including City Lights Journal, Collected at Les Deux Mégots, and Poets at Le Metro (all named after places where the Beats hung out); and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, whose best-known magazines include This, Roof, Hills, and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Like the literary/artistic magazines of the Dadaists, these magazines and many others played a critical role in the development of these avant-garde movements—bringing together artists and writers into a collaborative community, disseminating their ground-breaking work and ideas, and building a readership and audience, beyond the habitués of their usual haunts, that would eventually lead to widespread changes in the literary and artistic mainstream. 291, VVV, and View connected the American Surrealist movement to its European roots and ensured the continuation of the movement in the United States throughout World War II, by which point it had ceased to exist in Europe (many of the European Surrealists emigrated to America when the war broke out). The destruction of the boundaries between the arts and the proliferation of new art-forms and materials set in motion by Dadaism con-
44
Paula E. Geyh
tinued apace with Surrealism (and with other, subsequent avant-gardes). One can see these processes at work on the twentieth-century literary scene, for instance, in the artistic play with combinations of poetry and image (collage, montage, concrete poetry, calligrammes) and in the emergence of the artists’ book (a cousin to the avant-garde magazine) as a major hybrid literary/art genre. Magazines such as Charles Henri Ford’s View, the most important and long-lived (1940–47) Surrealist magazine in the United States, celebrated such literary innovation and play on its pages. Since Surrealism is generally thought to be a more European than American movement, it is surprising to take a look at some of the contents of View. In the “Americana Fantastica” (January 1943) issue appears Joseph Cornell’s “The Crystal Cage: Portrait of Berenice,” an assemblage of original text, part of which is arranged in the shape of a skyscraper and “found” objets d’art. Even the special issue of View devoted to Marcel Duchamp was advertised, in the manner of “found poetry,” via a witty “Classi¤ed Personals” column evoking some of the most famous of Duchamp’s works. Among the entries: “LONESOME? Join the world’s greatest social directory. Members everywhere . . . Ask for MACHINE CELIBATAIRE” and “CLEVER dice trick: STRIPPED BRIDE . . . Never fails—instructions” (122). (Duchamp’s “found objects” and sculptures had, of course, a crucial “literary” component: they were often as notable for their titles—replete with alliteration, allusion, puns, and paradoxes—as for their visual aspects.) The cover of the Duchamp issue was itself a work of sculpture: composed of a triptych of cut-out ¶aps, it folded inward to create the image of “La Mariée mis à nu” (“The Bride Stripped Bare”). This feature also connected the magazine, as a literary/artistic hybrid, to the artists’ book. View was equally known for offering writers, artists and musicians opportunities to write about one another’s works, exercises that fostered perspectives across artistic/formal boundaries and sometimes generated a kind of artistic synaesthesia. Among them are Joseph Cornell’s paean to the career of Hedy Lamar, “Enchanted Wanderer”; André Breton’s commentary on “The Legendary Life of Max Ernst”; Lincoln Kirstein on “The Position of Pavel Tchelitchew”; and Parker Tyler’s “I See the Pattern of Nijinsky Clear.” A decade later, numerous Beat magazines linked the New York and San Francisco branches of the movement and kept them up to date on one
Changing of the Avant-Garde
45
another’s work. As Steven Clay and Rodney Phillips note, Beat magazines that were part of the ’60s “mimeo revolution,” such as Wallace Berman’s Semina and LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima’s The Floating Bear, “were produced for a community of kindred spirits as a literary newsletter—a quick way to get new work out” (14). Margaret Randall, editor of El Corno Emplumado, wrote that it “was never just a magazine . . . El Corno was a network— letters going back and forth between poets, between people. It was a meeting of poets like spontaneous combustion” (Clay 147). These magazines—and the networks they created—comprised in themselves, then, a sort of grand collaborative enterprise. In this sense, they resemble Benjamin’s vision of the artistic collectivity of the Communist art of cinema. They resemble this Benjaminian ideal, too, in the important role they have played in the development of intermedia/multimedia arts. Like the Dada and Surrealist magazines, the Beat magazines forged connections between their movement and various other contemporary avant-garde movements. Ted Berrigan’s “C” linked the Beats to Pop Art through its publication of artists’ comics and covers by Andy Warhol. Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar, while primarily a literary magazine, also had a lively interest in the visual arts: ¤lm stills by Carolee Schneeman and Stan Brakhage, and drawings and collages by Nancy Spero, Robert LaVigne, and Wallace Berman also appeared on its pages. In turn, many visual artists from the 1960s to the present have taken language itself as their subject (much of conceptual art would arguably ¤t this description), as one can see, for instance, in the works of the Fluxus group (Jackson Mac Low’s The Pronouns, a collection of texts that are both poems and instructions for dancers and other performers, is a typical example), John Cage, performance artists like Charlotte Moorman and Carolee Schneeman, and in the contemporary sign or discourse art of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. Since their arrival on the literary scene in 1971 with the publication of This magazine, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, too, have been interested in such experiments with formal boundaries. In the ¤fth issue of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the most important of the movement’s magazines, Barrett Watten linked Robert Grenier’s 1978 publication of Sentences to their project of “spatializing” the reading process. Sentences could be regarded as an artists’ book: it was comprised of 500 white index cards, on
46
Paula E. Geyh
each of which appeared a poem (which could be shuf¶ed and read in any order), in a blue Chinese cloth box with ivory clasps. “The work is unavoidably an object,” Watten observed, “it denies book format, in which binding would give only one of all possible readings page-by-page. Any sequence is a chance ordering, any poem could come next. The words rise off the page as the mind would like—well-lit, pure, detached—‘in eternity.’ . . . Cued by dissonance under scrutiny of arbitrary white, the sum total of the cards exposes the point in the mind where structure collapses” (Clay 241). Reaching that “point in the mind where structure collapses” has, in various ways, been a goal of the avant-garde throughout the century. Like the Dadaists and Surrealists before them, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have sought to attack and destabilize political and social structures through their linguistic foundations. The political tilt here, as with Dadaists, Surrealists, and the Beats, is toward the left. Despite the particularities of their historical moments and causes, all of these avant-gardes have sought to create revolutions in poetry, thought, and, by extension, society. Thus did aesthetic innovation and politics go hand-in-hand throughout the twentieth century. Radically conservative twentieth-century literary movements, such as the Fugitives, generally resisted such innovations and technologies. Rear-guard actions appear to require backward-looking media and clear genre boundaries, while the vanguard happily embraces new technologies and hybrid forms. *** At the beginning of the twenty-¤rst century, we are already in the midst of a transformation in literature and the arts created by the World Wide Web, a transformation that appears comparable in magnitude to those wrought by such previous technological developments as photography, lithography, and cinema. Once again, “the rules of the game” for literature and literary magazines have changed enormously. The Web increases “connectivity” among writers, artists, and movements, though it is connectivity of a certain disembodied kind. It has also become a primary means of dissemination for literature and art, altering the economics of literary/arts magazines (in general, the Web has made high-quality production, particularly for images, far less expensive) and vastly extending their potential readership. More profoundly, the Web is transforming the formal and conceptual pos-
Changing of the Avant-Garde
47
sibilities of literature and art. New forms that make use of the Web’s technological capabilities—hypertext and hypermedia—are taking shape and evolving online. And all of these transformations have multiple implications for the nature of the relationships between artist and community, and even for how we understand “author” and “artist.” Among the many surprising aspects of the Web is how crucial it has already (after only a little more than a decade) become to literature and the arts. The “ensemble of scenes” that comprise current literary and artistic avant-gardes are increasingly found in the “virtual” space of the Web, which now functions as café (though you must provide your own coffee), cabaret, gallery, bookstore, and newsstand. Email and chat rooms are part of this new connectivity, but more important are the online literary and artistic magazines. While mimeographing and stapling parties have given way to digital scanning and HTML-coding sessions, at a “local” level (though in some sense all places are “local” on the Web) the shared labor of publishing a magazine or review still draws individuals together and helps to shape a common aesthetic. The real revolution in connectivity, however, lies in the Web’s global reach. Just as previous avant-garde magazines acted as bridges connecting the far-¶ung centers of literary and artistic movements, so are the avantgardes of today connected by on-line, multi-lingual publications such as The Barcelona Review (published in English, Spanish and Catalan) and Corner Magazine (“an electronic online journal dedicated to the avantgarde”), which both link various literary and artistic movements in Spain, Portugal, Latin America, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States. Beyond individual magazines, there are online literary/arts networks such as Web Del Sol, which, its editors say, “cannot be classi¤ed as a literary publication or an Internet portal in the traditional sense (though it contains both subsets), but rather [is] a literary arts new media complex which pushes the envelope of both de¤nitions.” WDS provides connections to more than twenty literary arts magazines, some of which also appear in hardcopy form and others that appear only on the Web. It publishes electronic chapbooks (not unlike the City Lights Pocket Poets series) and is linked to the adventuresome Four Walls Eight Windows press. The connectivity among avant-garde movements fostered by the
48
Paula E. Geyh
Web has turned out to be temporal as well as spatial. Dada lives again on Ubuweb, named after Alfred Jarry’s infamous drama “Ubu Roi,” which includes the Dada papers and manifestos, and both historical and contemporary concrete, visual, and sound poetry. There are also links to websites devoted to Dadaists (and related ¤gures) past and present—Acconci, Apollinaire, Arcand, Artaud—whose range is an indication of the vast network of interconnections to and in¶uence of Dada throughout time. The histories of many of the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century have been preserved on the Web, and their projects are continued and extended through the work of latter-day adherents. As with the complex intertwinings and cross-in¶uences of early twentieth-century Symbolism, Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism, the new Web-based avant-gardes often return to or borrow from previous movements, building upon and adapting their ideas to a new age and a new medium. The “new” Surrealists are represented by Andre Codrescu’s cheeky Exquisite Corpse (which advertises itself as “surrealist in its history, futuri¤c in intensity”), which has recently moved onto the Web. Among its features is the Digital Exquisite Corpse Project, based on the Surrealist art game in which three or more artists contributed to a single drawing with little or no knowledge of what the previous artists had done, which is carried out through the use of Photoshop and email. The Beats, too, are alive on several websites, most importantly in JACK Magazine, an offshoot of Beat Generation News. JACK is quite articulate about the nature of its project: its editorial statement de¤nes it as “where the parameters of the Beat Generation are rede¤ned and expanded to embrace a creative movement that goes beyond personality wedged in temporal categories and public relations concepts.” Casting a marvelously wide net of conceptual connectivity, JACK claims to “ponder emanations and movements in modern literature and art that have been operating and vital since before the turn of the twentieth century but [were] eclipsed by the ‘Beat movement,’ such as Post-Apocalyptic Romanticism, Psychedelic Shamanism, Green-Pea Soupism and Biannual Surrealism, Cannabis Mumbo Gumbo, Burroughsian Utopianism, San Francisco Renaissance Poetry, Modern Urban Thoreauism and Forest Beatnikism, Black Mountain Poetry, and Language School Poetry—all creative phenomena that inform, as well as are in-
Changing of the Avant-Garde
49
formed by, what is popularly know as ‘Beat.’” JACK publishes poetry, short stories, road trip logs, essays, and art “that wrap around the concepts” of the “beat and beyond” phenomenon. A primary intention of the site is to “¤ll in the blanks” in the existing (and available) historical record, so that “the younger artists can get on with their work at a richer and more informed level.” In a statement that could serve equally well for all such avant-garde revivalist websites, JACK concludes, “This is not just archiving, this is restoring the unconscious to a status of new possibilities.” As the Web has brought greater connectivity to writers, artists, and movements, it has also created a more fundamental, technological connectivity among literature and the other arts, thus continuing, through a new medium, the century-long collapse of the boundaries between and merging of the arts. The digitization of text, still and moving images, and sound—now all conceived as forms of “information”—renders them all equally manipulable and combinable, profoundly altering what Valéry referred to as the “physical component” in the arts. This component, he observed in “La Conquête de l’ubiquité,” “cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power” (quoted in Benjamin 217). Still on the verge of most of the great technological changes of the twentieth century, Valéry presciently argued that “we must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art” (Benjamin 217). The intermedia and multimedia impulses that were apparent in many of the earlier avant-garde literary and arts movements and magazines discussed earlier continue today. Yet the capacity of the Web to act as a carrier of text, image, and sound with equal ease and ¶exibility has made simple those things that were much more dif¤cult—or even impossible—for literary and arts magazines in the previous ages of “hard copy.” The online magazines still publish reproductions of visual works such as photographs, drawings, comics, etchings, and paintings and, on occasion, musical scores, but now they can also include animation, ¤lm, and recordings of music and voice. The Cortland Review (“An Online Literary Magazine in RealAudio”) and connect feature audio readings of the poetry and ¤ction on their “pages.” Light and Dust Poets is an online anthology that publishes visual poetry and other work presented in graphic ¤les. As the editors of Ubuweb
50
Paula E. Geyh
observe in their “About Ubuweb” statement on concrete poetry, “the pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost.” In one of the great insights in the history of art criticism, Benjamin observed that “one of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be satis¤ed only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.” Dada, he argued, “attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the ¤lm” (237). The “tactile quality” of the Dadaists’ art—their concrete and abstract (now more commonly referred to as “sound” or “phonetic”) poetry; and the performative and multimedia nature of so many of their works—all seemed to be working toward many of the effects that were, at the same time, being developed in the new medium of silent ¤lm, and toward others that would be achieved only with the advent of sound ¤lm. Now, looking back across the epoch of the twentieth century, it appears that much of its art—both modern and postmodern—aspired to effects that could only be fully realized with the coming of the World Wide Web and its accompanying digital technologies, out of which are emerging new forms and categories of art, most notably “hypertext” and “hypermedia.” The fragmentation, intertextuality, and discontinuity that characterize so much of experimental modernist and postmodernist literature—for example, in the works of Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Pound, Stevens, and Williams; the works of Pynchon, Barth, Vonnegut, Fowles, Winterson, Reed, Acker, Leyner, Vollmann, Ashbery, Bernstein, Perelman, Howe, and Hejinian—¤nds a kind of ful¤llment in the inherently fragmented, intertextual, and discontinuous form of hypertext. Such experimental forms have, throughout the century, required a more “active” practice of reading and a greater tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty than the literature of previous eras. Now hypertext, this new form of literature, requires its readers to navigate a web of “lexias”: to choose (and click) the link they will follow to the next (though they do not know where, or even in what “direction” it will lead); to ¤nd the connections amid the fragments; and to weave them to-
Changing of the Avant-Garde
51
gether into a narrative that inevitably remains contingent, partial, and un¤nished. It is literature for a new age, and its fractured, leaping shifts seem ideally suited to a generation of postmoderns (or perhaps by now postpostmoderns) whose sensibilities have been shaped by the hyperspeeds of PlayStations, MTV fast-cut editing, and hip-hop sampling. It would be a mistake, however, to see in the new form of hypertext merely a repetition of the narrative and poetic strategies of modernism and postmodernism, or, for that matter, of devices borrowed from the printed page, such as the footnote, sidebar, and annotation, which seem to be forerunners of various aspects of hypertext. The medium shapes— and transforms—the meaning of the message. As Roger Chartier observes in The Order of Books, the meanings of texts “are dependent upon the forms through which they are received and appropriated by readers (or hearers). Readers and hearers, in point of fact, are never confronted with abstract or ideal texts detached from materiality; they manipulate or perceive objects and forms whose structures and modalities govern their reading (or their hearing), and thus the possible comprehension of the text read (or heard). . . . We must also keep in mind that reading is always a practice embodied in acts, spaces and habits” (3). Although it is not yet apparent (the ¤rst hypertexts date from the 1980s and the form is still developing) what it will eventually become, hypertext clearly is in the process of altering the way we understand the book, the author, reading, and literature itself. In “(Re)Placing the Author: ‘A Book in the Ruins,’” hypertext author and theorist Michael Joyce writes that “The constructive hypertext is a version of what it is becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist. As such it is both the self-organizing phase of the reader who replaces the retreating writer, and the readable trace, time remembered in the unraveling retreat of this replacement” (277). As noted earlier, hypertext is implicated in the ongoing transformation of the ¤gure of the “reader,” who increasingly takes on activities that had previously belonged to the author. Yet it also has profound implications for the ¤gure of the “author” (or artist), as did all the other preceding revolutionary technologies. Hypertext (or, for that matter, the entire phenomenon of cyberspace) can, in fact, be seen as an exemplar of the postmodern “disappearing subject” and the related
52
Paula E. Geyh
conceptions of the “death of the author,” which were introduced by such icons as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and have dominated the postmodern scene in recent decades. Like so many avant-garde innovations before it, the formal aspects of hypertext (and its af¤liated technology, hypermedia) must also be understood as carrying a certain political, anarchic, valence. As they are intended to, most readers experience hypertext as an extremely disquieting (or exhilarating) medium. It may well be the ultimate realization of what Roland Barthes hopefully described as the “text of bliss (jouissance)”: “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language” (14). Like Tzara, hypertext writers are smashing drawers. The World Wide Web teems with new literary journals that seek to take advantage of its hypertext and hypermedia capabilities. One avantgarde journal, lume, evocatively describes itself as “devoted to the exploration of possibilities for electronic writing—the possibility of form, the possibility of meaning, the possibility of a writing that is more (or less) than it was in print.” Among the most impressive of these publications is BeeHive, a magazine dedicated to “the advancement of Web-based literary forms . . . works that make use of hypertextual techniques and emergent technologies,” among them experiments like Ana Maria Uribe’s “anipoems” (animated concrete poetry). Like many other such journals, BeeHive publishes critical essays that self-re¶exively examine the nature of its own artistic practices—a self-legitimating move that is more or less de rigeur for rising avantgardes. In addition to its creative offerings, volume 1, for example, includes “an overview of feminist hypertext’s subversive honeycombing,” and “Mapping the Acephale”—a collaborative essay on Georges Bataille’s Acephalic man (harking back to Bataille’s avant-garde journal, Acephale, which featured Bataille’s writing and drawings by André Masson). Volume 3 includes Christy Shef¤eld Sanford’s essay “The Roots of Nonlinearity: Toward a Theory of Web-Speci¤c Art-Writing,” which enacts the theories it propounds through a mix of hypertext and hyperimage animation. As the Web and hypertext technologies have matured and band-
Changing of the Avant-Garde
53
width has expanded, hypermedia—the merging of the electronic word, image, and sound—have begun to develop at a furious rate. Unlike the multimedia “happenings” of the sixties, hypermedia works do not require an array of costly and cumbersome equipment (projectors, stereo systems, speakers, lights . . .), and they are nearly instantly (and potentially eternally) accessible online. Drunken Boat is among the more interesting of the electronic magazines publishing hypertext, hypermedia, and digital art. In a recent issue, Drunken Boat’s editors argue that “An authentic . . . work of art is alive, a¶oat, stilled into interpretation for no more than a moment. It is the perfect conjunction of kinetic and potential energy . . . the kind of information that has no use and no value—and thus remains absolutely crucial for our sustenance.” There are also two online networks that are strong on hypertext and hypermedia. The Alt-X online network (“where the digerati meet the literati”) publishes some of the most innovative hypertext ¤ction, digital art, and theoretical work on narrative environments made for the Web, and it also includes “Hyper-,” an ongoing interactive “network installation” space. The greatest resource, however, is the SUNY Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center, shepherded by L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Charles Bernstein, which maintains a vast archive of poetry and connections to poetry resources; publishes a chapbook series, Biblioteca; features an online performance space, EPC Live, in which “happenings,” “events,” “collaborative improvisation sessions,” and informal discussions occur; and has an electronic gallery for visual and concrete poetry and digital art. While there is currently no online magazine devoted speci¤cally to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, it can be found in many of the online magazines mentioned here, and there is also an excellent archive of it at the Electronic Poetry Center. As Jerome Rothenberg observes in his introduction to A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, “the mainstream of American poetry, the part by which it has been & will be known, has long been in the margins, nurtured in the margins, carried forward, vibrant, in the margins (9). Yet, this raises the question of what, or where, exactly the “avant-garde” is, now that the modernist and even postmodernist avant-gardes (though the postmodernists, despite my use of the designation “avant-garde” here, did not generally consider themselves in quite those terms) have been legitimated,
54
Paula E. Geyh
“institutionalized” as it were, by the academy? The margins, it seems, are no longer quite so “marginal” as they once were. Properly speaking, the Web has neither center nor margins: all “places” on the Web are equally, instantly, accessible. Essentially, this is the great promise and possibility of this new generation of literary magazines on the Web. At the same time, it is clear that there must always be new beginnings in literature and the arts, whether we call them avant-gardes or not. Literary magazines will surely continue to play a crucial role in these new beginnings, whether they appear in the virtual or hard-copy worlds. For, as Mallarmé asked over a century ago, “what is the magic charm of art, if not this: that, beyond the con¤nes of a ¤stful of dust or of all other reality, beyond the book itself, beyond the very text, it delivers up that volatile scattering which we call spirit, who cares for nothing save universal musicality” (45)? It would, given the way it is inscribed in Mallarmé’s text, be naïve or, one might say, idealist to read this statement as a glori¤cation of “spirit.” I think we are much better off reading it or adopting it as our own, even if against Mallarmé, as an af¤rmation of new technologies of artistic (re)production, beyond the book itself, beyond the very text.
Works Cited Arnason, H. H. The History of Modern Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1978. Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994. Clay, Steven, and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980. New York: The New York Public Library and Granary Books, 1998. Ford, Charles Henri, ed. View: Parade of the Avant-Garde. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991. Joyce, Michael. “(Re)Placing the Author: ‘A Book in the Ruins.’” In The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Theory and History of Literature, volume 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Changing of the Avant-Garde
55
Mallarmé, Stéphane, “Music and Literature.” In Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters. Trans. Bradford Cook. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. Trans. David Britt. London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1965.
Web Links Alt-X Online Publishing Network. . The Barcelona Review. . The BeeHive. . Electronic Poetry Center. . Corner Magazine. . The Cortland Review. . Drunken Boat. . Exquisite Corpse Magazine. . JACK Magazine. . Light and Dust Anthology of Poetry. . Lume. . Ubuweb. . Web Del Sol. . Connect. .
Walter Cummins
From Mimeograph to HTML: Literary Magazines Online
M y memory of literary magazines goes back to a time when the Dustbooks international directory was a thin saddle-stitched booklet listing dozens, not hundreds, of publications. In those years many little magazines were printed by mimeograph or multilith, their pages rekeyed from the original manuscripts on a courier font typewriter. The paper was cheap, the output often hard to read, with crooked t’s and solid black o’s. Still, they published some very good poems and stories. Writers in those days didn’t have many alternatives. They could submit to the handful of university-based (for the most part) quarterlies or the ¤ve or six mass circulation outlets that published real literature. Many of those handmade magazines regarded themselves as the pure alternatives to the quarterlies, berating them for their academic stuf¤ness, their buttondowned contributors. That was a long time ago, and those magazines are no more than memories, some shelved in a few library collections or in someone’s closet, 56
From Mimeograph to HTML
57
the typewriters and mimeo machines are scrap. Few of them existed beyond a handful of issues, victims of minimal readership, cash shortages, or editorial burnout—perhaps all three. After all the tedious hours it took to produce them, how could they reach an audience? How many people even knew they existed? Things are different today. All editors need now is a computer with an HTML program and a website. They receive submissions electronically, accept some by email, convert the word-processed work into Internet-legible HTML, and FTP the ¤le to a server. No rekeying, no copying ¶uid, no inkstained ¤ngers. Within minutes—or, more realistically, a few hours—a Web magazine exists, a few mouse clicks away from an audience of millions. Of course, those millions still have to know it is there to be read. But once they do, access is easy. Although getting your hands on the great majority of print literary magazines is less dif¤cult than it was in the past thanks to super bookstores, it is still a challenge. Even the largest Barnes & Nobles and Borders stock only a handful, probably more in college towns than in the suburbs, yet only a fraction of those that exist. Over the years I’ve spent many hours trying to ¤nd copies of certain publications, driving to a university library or into a New York store like the Gotham Bookmart. Even there the pickings were slim. But that shouldn’t be surprising. We’re not dealing with People-sized print runs. The average literary magazine prints one or two thousand copies. Dividing the number by, say, ¤fty states, than means between only twenty to forty copies per state. Of course, actual distribution is skewed to the larger states with the greatest readership, so that New York or California might each get ten percent of the available copies. That’s still a paltry number. The mathematics is actually an exaggeration. For most literary magazines, the great majority of copies go to subscribers, mainly libraries. A handful get to bookstore shelves. Let’s face it, though, even if your local supermarket substituted Glimmer Train and Poetry for the Soap Opera Digest and The Enquirer, how many people would really buy them? Literary magazines, like most sources of art, appeal to a limited audience. That audience can grow. Still, the truth is, so many poems, so many stories, and so few readers.
58
Walter Cummins
Not only is the audience small, but the economics of the ¤eld also works against literary magazines. Even at a cover price of eight dollars per copy, circulation will not cover production costs. The magazines that last are subsidized by universities, a few other institutions, or wealthy benefactors. People who edit and produce literary magazines certainly are not in it for the money, and few have realistic hopes of ever breaking even. They edit for the pleasure of ¤nding good writing, giving it an imprint, and offering it to other people who want to read good writing. Their impetus is providing a public voice, even if that public is limited. Readers of literary magazines share the editors’ motives: they want to discover original writing by talented authors whose work doesn’t suit the commercial needs of mass marketers. Where else are they going to ¤nd good poetry and ¤ction beyond the weekly two poems and one story in The New Yorker or The Atlantic’s monthly offerings of the same small number? Once, it took ingenuity just to ¤nd the new poems and stories out there. The Internet has changed all that. Not only does the medium simplif y the publication process in time and expense, it simpli¤es the hunt for literature. In fact, if you know a few URLs, grati¤cation is almost instantaneous. Make the site a favorite, click, and an abundance lies before you. The Internet’s most comprehensive literary site, by far, is Web Del Sol. Founder Mike Neff started in the fall of 1994 with The Literary Review as the ¤rst print publication to sign on, later followed by several others that formed the core of WDS. For the Internet, 1994 is ancient history, and then it was certainly foreign territory for all but a sprinkling of literary magazines. Which editors understood the mysteries of HTML, the alchemy by which arcane codes such as
and
and
transformed strange markings into visually enticing screen pages? Neff did because of his day job. That and his willingness to devote countless unpaid hours to the project have made Web Del Sol into an Internet institution. The impetus for this institution was the dif¤culty of locating print magazines. According to Neff, “WDS was begun for the purpose of ¤nding new readers for contemporary literature. The catalyst for the notion was my inability to locate the literary periodicals at a Borders Book store in DC. We have a thoughtless manager to thank.” Now Web Del Sol hosts or links to many magazines, and Neff has
From Mimeograph to HTML
59
been sought out to create Web presences for a number of America’s most prominent literary publications. The magazines accessible through WDS include Exquisite Corpse, ZYZZYVA, North American Review, New England Review, Witness, Other Voices, Kenyon Review, Mudlark, Painted Bride Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Potomac Review, Indiana Review, Sundog, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, The Journal, and a number of others, along with links to a wide variety of literary sites. Beyond the print publications, most of which place selections—not entire contents—on the Web, WDS also hosts several Web-only publications, such as In Posse Review, Perihelion, and its own Editor’s Picks. Issues of the latter have included ¤ction, poetry, and essays by a number of writers widely published in print magazines, such as Maxine Chernoff, Jonathan Baumbach, Dorianne Laux, James Sallis, and Paul West. Editor’s Picks is one of a number of Web magazines that ¤nds established authors offering their work to the Internet. A recent click onto yahoo.com turned up, under the Arts and Literature Category, 450 magazines and 1,465 poetry sites. Some of these are Web versions of print magazines, but the majority are Web-only. They can be considered the contemporary counterparts of the typewritten mimeographed little magazines of the past, with two main differences: they can be found, and their typography is more readable. Are they read any more than they would have been in courier font on paper? Most likely. One way to tell is to add a counter to the site, a piece of software that tabulates the number of hits. The freeware counters suffer inaccuracies, mainly undercounting; but they provide approximate data. The Literary Review, printing an average of 2,500 copies an issue, most of which go to the same subscribers, passed 87,000 readers on its website according to a counter that has suffered several breakdowns over the years. Clearly, literary magazines enjoy a signi¤cant presence on the Internet, with nothing but growth ahead. That presence, however, raises several questions about the future of literary publication. Will Web magazines eventually supplant print? Will—because the cost of publication is so small—the sheer numbers of Web magazines multiply into a meaningless babble? Will standards evaporate with an outlet for everyone who turns out a story or poem? Will onscreen reading change the way we apprehend literature?
60
Walter Cummins
To try to predict the future, let’s begin with a review of the past. Clearly, the attitude to putting literary magazines on the Web has changed dramatically since the mid-1990s. When asked about the initial reactions of editors and publishers to Web Del Sol, Neff reports, “Mixed, but mostly negative. A few editors familiar with Internet could see the advantages immediately, while others were lukewarm or even a bit hostile. It all depended on understanding of the new medium. As understanding grew, so did their enthusiasm for wanting to have a website.” Now he ¤nds the attitude “Nearly the polar opposite. If you’re not on the Web in some form or fashion, you’re suspected of being a diehard Luddite, or perhaps a little stupid.” Several magazines have already shifted entirely from paper to the Internet, including Painted Bride Quarterly, which decided to solve its ongoing funding dilemma through the transfer. Others, like Mississippi Review and The Literary Review (with TLRWEB), have created Web-only offshoots, the former for a number of years, the latter just recently. Web publication offers a number of advantages beyond the saving of time and money. It permits the acceptance of good writing without worrying about the space limitations of a paper magazine; it facilitates the posting of photos and art works, and it opens the possibility of multimedia presentations, such as streaming audio readings by the authors. Onscreen reading is another matter. Most adults ¤nd it dif¤cult to do extended reading on a monitor, ¶at panel or CRT. The backlighting causes eyestrain. Part of the dilemma may be psychological; after years of handling bound paper, readers may ¤nd the very act of absorbing words from a screen a bit unnatural. Young people appear to have less of a problem; for them, focusing on a screen is just one more norm of daily living. The ergonomic limitations are sure to disappear in the near future, or at least become minimized as the market for ebooks and emagazines grows. Public schools are already experimenting with ebooks to replace the heavy texts that strain young backs and that can be upgraded without the cost of a complete new printing. For the public at large, Microsoft predicts combined sales of $1 billion for ebooks, emagazines, and enewspapers by 2005. Though the company has a major stake in the numbers, its projections are more conservative than those of consulting ¤rms like Andersen and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Even if Microsoft is overestimating, ereaders are almost certain to become ubiquitous devices of the future.
From Mimeograph to HTML
61
The standards issue is already resolving itself, especially now that many established writers permit and even seek Web publication. The Web is no longer a refuge for work that’s not good enough for paper. Of course, much ¤ction and poetry on the Web is weak, but so was much of that in the mimeographed little magazines. It’s just that the Web facilitates more of it. But there are many strong Web-only magazines, with clear categories of quality emerging. And the websites of quality print publications help set benchmarks of excellence. In a signi¤cant move, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) recently decided to allow membership to electronic publications. While there is much and will be more writing of value on the Web, the question of meaningless babble remains. As sites multiply, will there be overload? The question has a Malthusian parallel: will the population of literary sites overrun the human attention span supply? Or, echoing Julian Simon, will more sites expand our possibilities and lead to new riches? A recent article, “To Publish and Perish: Who Are the Dinosaurs in Scholarly Publishing” by Frederika J. Teute, raises similar questions about a parallel ¤eld, scholarly publication (Journal of Scholarly Publishing 32:2). “So, who will be the dinosaurs of the twenty-¤rst century?” she asks, and gives an equivocal answer: “perhaps it is printed books themselves that are the dinosaurs. There are too many of them, too costly to publish or buy. . . . On the other hand, the World Wide Web may atrophy from its overwhelming vastness, too convoluted, too linked, and with too much information.” The same uncertainty could apply to literary magazines. Print publications are relatively expensive to produce, distribute, and—for the reader— to purchase more than occasionally. The Web, though, can overwhelm with choice. An on-screen reader probably could devote twelve hours a day to literary sites and still fall behind as new uploads multiply. Yet, can there be such a thing as too much literature, especially good writing? The rap on today’s burgeoning amount of scholarship is that it is mechanical, produced primarily to jump the hurdles required for tenure. Some writers who teach, of course, need credits for job security; but that’s not why they turn out prose and poetry. They are drawn to writing the same way readers are drawn to reading—satisfaction of a personal need. Perhaps a better analogy to the new availability of literature and aca-
62
Walter Cummins
demic scholarship is a store stocked with wines from all over the world, thousands of bottles from California, France, and Italy; hundreds from Australia and Spain; a smaller number from Germany, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Hungary, and the lesser-known producers. There are choices for every taste and budget. Although buyers may return to personal favorites, they are likely to experiment, sample a different brand or vintage or soil. Still, even the most dedicated wine drinkers will never taste more than a small percentage of the labels. But ultimately, each one will be experienced by at least a few people, though certain labels are bound to be much more popular than others. Some will disappear from the shelves, to be replaced by offerings of other vintners. The goal should not be to limit the number of vineyards or shrink the stock on the shelves. Instead—if you believe that wine enhances life—it should be to increase the number of those who will enjoy the experience. It follows, then, that a good literary magazine is like a good wine. The more, the better. Not every one will be to all readers’ tastes, and some may appeal to very few. And no reader will be able to enjoy them all. But every now and then something new will come along and be a wonderful experience for those who discover and partake. The Web is like a well-stocked wine and spirits shop. While the potential audience of serious readers is not nearly as wide as that of wine enjoyers, it is still untapped. Neff of Web Del Sol has a goal of increasing awareness of what’s available: “My observation tells me that the audience has grown in proportion to the number of writers, poets, editors, publishers, agents, students, and literary others in this country getting Internet access and becoming familiar with the topography. There are tens of thousands of the above, and they frequent the existing literary watering holes. However, the millions of Americans who might enjoy such literature are still, for the most part, in ignorance of the work.” Web magazines will not make print publications obsolete, as television did not obliterate movies and radio. But these other media did change signi¤cantly because of the new outlet. That’s not to say that literary magazines will resort to top 40 or special effects to survive. They will have to determine their future role and purpose. That will happen gradually, as Web publications and the technology behind them evolve. After all, it’s only been a few decades since the days of typewriters and mimeo machines.
David Hamilton
No Use in a Centre
Onlinepublishing.org. What to make of it. What should I know except to know it is here? And that it seems perfectly natural, assuming technological evolution is natural for us. For the work of writing and publishing has gotten ever easier. “Scrape,” “scratch,” “scrawl,” and “scribe.” They’re all from the same root. So is “engrave” and so is “gravid”; we have impregnated matter with the word. But the long history of our doing so has smoothed the action continuously. We no longer have to dig in to make our mark. Matter dissolves in the word to light on a screen. Is it a “lighter” word in consequence? Sometimes it seems so as “impregnate” loses its metaphorical force. That the change should correlate with our positive desire to rid writing of any lingering masculinist aura complicates the matter but does not alter its underlying condition. We have not advanced as technicians of the word out of any particularly feminist desire to disable writing’s long association with the Pen and all its reputed “Might.” So far, after all, men have accomplished most of the technological monkeying, and though I can fancy that we did so as more or less unconscious self-castration, 63
64
David Hamilton
like Attis in Catullus 63, ridding ourselves of our most troublesome instrument, that strikes me as less than a persuasive interpretation. It happened mostly because humans are like that, always looking to improve things by making them “easier.” I’m old enough to have practiced ways that now seem quaint. I remember using carbon pages for making copies. When I began my dissertation, I invested in the state of the art, a portable, electric typewriter, but one that still lacked correcting ribbon. I couldn’t imagine, then, ¤nishing that many pages otherwise. Now I only use a typewriter for an occasional quick note and for envelopes. At each stage too, with the electric typewriter and with the personal computer, I remember writers speaking earnestly of the quicker way as permissible only for writing that didn’t really matter. That again, writing that you needn’t impregnate with your sweet thoughts. So one might write mere business letters that way, or committee reports; but stories and poems, those vital forms still required the work of pencil on paper. It seemed a moral obligation, and you can see how long that lasted. I assume some readers, not all that much younger than I, and no less serious as writers, will never have dreamed of those restrictions, and be no worse off for it. What is true of writing proved true of publishing. Simultaneous submissions followed from and were in fact made conceivable by Xerox and the home printer. When carbon made the copy, an original text meant something. With the dot matrix, we discovered that Xeroxes were more legible and “printed” a better text than the original. Suddenly it was more courteous to send a copy. Within a very short time, ink jet and laser printers became the norm. Now the original text has no material meaning, and we ¤nd it a doubtful concept. There being no indentation on the page any longer, no digging in of type, I can’t tell the copy from the original when I take a laser printed page to the Xerox unless I’ve signed the latter with ink that’s blue. Perhaps we could propose a feminist slant on all this and venture that the loss of a meaningful original is analogous to undermining primogeniture, that old identi¤cation of a unique and uniquely legitimate male heir. Now as more generous “mothers” of our work, we propagate widely, with equal affection for all our offspring. But that is also a doubtful interpretation.
No Use in a Centre
65
Curiously, though, as the tools of writing have changed, diminishing at each step our authoritative impregnation of matter with the word, we have not similarly rid ourselves of “giving birth” to what we write. Until very recently, anyway, that has only become a stronger concept. Chaucer joked about only “following his author,” (“as mine author sayeth”) and we generally give him credit for the joke of both claiming and disclaiming his literal paternity. At the same time he wrote it down and a copyist copied out each manuscript. Even when he was just “following” Ovid or Statius, the labor of writing made it his, but not because the work came from inside himself, from his digging deep, as we have been wont to say. The origin of the poetry seems not to have been all that insistent a question, however much it seems de¤nitively Chaucer’s. Or to put it differently, he may in fact have “dug deep,” whatever that metaphor can mean, but there was no particular romance attached to that idea for him. Fast forward a few hundred years, though, and we speak readily of going inside ourselves, “diving into the wreck,” and ¤nding the work uniquely our own issue. Until very recently, when assumptions about the self have come into doubt, that seemed most of that mattered. Now those assumptions too suffer de- and reconstruction, and I’ll leave it to others to correlate the constructed, improvised, bricoleured, jerrybuilt “self” to our growing ease with “going” here and there on the Web and grabbing pieces of whatever attracts us. Where does all this lead me, practically, as an editor? In a very short time our attitude has changed remarkably toward Web presentations. Habitually, we buy First North American Serial Rights, which revert to the author on publication. Such has been the tradition of literary magazines. The agreement means that we are the ¤rst on this continent (and almost always the ¤rst anywhere) to publish a given work, which remains the author’s intellectual property, available to her or to him for republication, normally in a book of essays, stories, or poems. When websites began to appear, essays, stories, and poems quickly appeared on them. A few pages of writing were “posted” on the Web, since there were “bulletin boards.” In a cover letter, writers might say to us that the story offered had been posted or “put up,” but that they would gladly “take it down” if we were to publish it ourselves. Their offer assumed that
66
David Hamilton
our publication, though no longer the ¤rst appearance of the work, held nevertheless a certain priority, one that the writer valued, that we valued equally, presumably, and that together we would care to protect. Their offer seemed to assume further that the Web appearance had been ephemeral, not quite real, but part only of a “virtual reality.” It did not take long, however, for “postings” to become realized as “publications,” both in the minds of the authors and of the site managers. Thus I write from a crossroads of attitude. One stream of traf¤c still yields the right of way to print publication. The other, gathering force each day, prefers to defend the growing authority of Web publication by declaring that the Web is its ¤rst serial presence, and not just in North America. Those writers ¤nd no reason to defer to print magazines and encourage such magazines, in their turn, not to print as original any work ¤rst on the Web, since doing so would undermine the growing authority of cyberspace. Which is quite all right with me. I’ve always assumed that magazine publication was primarily a stepping stone to the reappearance of it all in a book of one’s own, as we would say. The change in evaluation just reviewed would make it seem inef¤cient to put your work “up” ¤rst, then “out” on a magazine before ¤nally issuing a book. Be glad it has made its appearance in whatever form and get on with your next piece of work. If now publishers demur and ¤nd Web appearances less real than our print journals, that is another thing, but up to writers to discover. However they discover it now, it seems a ¶uid condition that will only ¶ow, as ¶uids do, toward and through the least obstruction. Meanwhile, we too have a website. It’s cheaper to put work up on the Web than gathered and printed within covers. We could cut costs by doing one issue a year that way, or two, or all three. We could put all our year’s acceptances up on the screen and take down or off a selection of them later, what we decide is “the best” after a little more exposure and time, or what screen readers (screening readers?) determine the best by some manner of voting, and print a yearbook rather than a journal. We could go further, put up all our “¤nalists,” and let site surfers select, from their own screening, the “issue” they want and print it out themselves. A great deal is possible this way and I rule none of it out, though I’m not rushing to accomplish any of it either. With a six percent across-the-
No Use in a Centre
67
board budget cut facing our state, no need to give away anything before I must. So far our site has gone, instead, in a quite different direction, both more abstract and conceptual, since so little is material about it. We have, on The Iowa Review website, a separate table of contents, “Featured Selections” going back over a year, of compositions that only make sense on the screen. These are hypertext or multimedia compositions, usually interactive in one way or another, written by digital a¤cionados, and for them, as an experimental form of art. Rather than an alternative to print publication, these works were conceived for digital space. It is not my bag, let us say, but its possibility is there, like cloned cattle. I have had assistants given to this sort of thing. It hardly becomes me to cling only to what my generation has valued. It behooves little magazines, I believe, to give newer things a chance. And so this new work, which is out there. It is not all we have, but it is the main part and I urge you to take a look; perhaps you have already. I confess that I lose my interest in it quickly. I usually ¤nd the interactive aspect a touch fraudulent. It’s not as if I really have much opportunity to make something, I just have multiple opportunities to follow. I generally feel like a lone child on an ample playground, given not only the opportunity to play alone, but that of being graded on how I play by some unseen and unforthcoming teacher. It’s as if I were performing a test, pegs and holes, that sort of thing. Perhaps that’s just my problem. “We could work on that,” some shrink might say. Often, too, the indeterminacy of the project seems to stem from an unwillingness on the part of the writer/ maker—and this is equally true of much experimental writing—to fess up to a thought or to an understanding that I can truly interact with by deciding whether or not I agree, and by how much. But enough; call me a curmudgeon and enjoy your new world. Another prospect of the website for me is archival, but rather than making our entire back contents available that way, a huge task that I’ll not get around to, I’d prefer to offer numerous small anthologies and gatherings. Just work I have particularly liked, grouped under one heading or another, so other readers might sample them again like so many chapbooks. I’ve made lists of headings and contents. Novellas, for example. We’ve run quite a few. Poetry by women younger than I whom I have never met, but whose
68
David Hamilton
work I’ve accepted repeatedly. What kind of grouping would that make? Whimsies, for there are several of those. All our Tim McGinnis Award winners. Parables of writing. Narratives distinctly midwestern, upper midwestern, even Iowan. Or narratives of other exotic places, no more probable. All the sonnets we’ve ever run, which I’ll bet are fewer than the novellas. And so on. When early computers were available for research, workers carried around stacks of cards with numerous holes punched in them. I imagined them in a library card tray, or a shoe box, and the researcher capable of shoving a skewer through from end to end and lifting out a separate selection depending on which set of holes he lined up. Clifford Gertz once described his original ¤eld notes as so arranged, though not on computer cards, but continuously available nevertheless for subsets and their possible stories. Now I can imagine all our past contents like that, resortable by varied samplings. It would be a museum of the ether in which all our shows, each newly curated, could stay “up” inde¤nitely. “So what?” you may be asking. What does the Web really bring us and what does that mean? Perhaps its meaning lies in making possible, inevitable, what Ms. Stein apparently foresaw when she said, “Act so that there is no use in a centre.” I think the loss of center follows from the work becoming easier in these technical senses and more available to all. Her line, though, by the way, is perfect iambic pentameter, buried in her Tender Button prose; maybe there always is a center, at least some dim memory of one, however we scale heights of vantage from which we may “act so that there is no use in it.” Nevertheless, as the work of writing and publishing has gotten easier, we have discovered the time and the means to be our own centers and depend less on others. We are now a starburst of centers with none that quite succeeds in putting its compass foot down assertively and so transcribing the one true circumference that de¤nes our culture and places all within or without it. We no longer have The Dial around telling us what to admire, or Poetry, or the Little Review. Nor even The New Yorker. Ezra Pound’s not calling the shots, not that several don’t try. But if recent waves of graduate literary and cultural study have taught us anything, one fundamental lesson is that that
No Use in a Centre
69
old center was an illusion anyway. It wasn’t as if Marianne, god love her, knew. She had her ideas and she cared; moreover, enough others listened to her, to Eliot, to Pound, that an idea was fashioned of what seemed true, and so they “constructed” an argument of the modern, an argument persuasive enough to be taken as truth for quite some time. But one that, apparently, we “see through” now. For curiously, a century later, Hardy and Frost, both of whom that argument had abandoned, seem more or less as available as Pound or Williams or Stevens. One can choose. And one can look lots of other places too, to African or Asian models, to movies, to jazz, to hypertext. One could rede¤ne American literature in terms of Poe rather than Whitman. One could return to the spirituals and the blues and derive a tradition from them, as the English did from anonymous medieval lyrics. We have an interview coming in which a poet thinks of herself sometimes as the reincarnated Edna St. Vincent Millay. Not H.D., not Moore, not Bishop or Dickinson; but why not? As in dressing up, there’s no longer a rule, except to please yourself, and put on a show. Much of the power of Moore or Pound or Stein lay in their personalities. They were the cool group and we knew it because they told us so. Kenneth Burke was in awe of Moore personally, and so was Williams. According to Kenner, Pound promoted Joyce not because he read and understood Ulysses but because he had met the man and believed in him. Then Laughlin believed in Pound and Williams, or they wouldn’t have stayed around long enough for us to notice. Meanwhile much in the larger psyche encouraged the belief that you had to go to New York (or London or Paris) to be in on the know, and whatever de¤ned the scene there de¤ned the rest, or ruled it out. But if we have no center, really, we can do without the geographical one too. Scenes are ¤ne. There’s still plenty of reason still to go to New York or San Francisco or Iowa City, but it’s harder than ever to declare that you are missing out if you don’t. And you can choose or even make your own. Workshops predicted the change. Cambridge was already an alternative. Suddenly there was Iowa. Now there are hundreds anyway, with of course the attendant dilemma that no single one shines brightly on us all. A few years ago I set out to do an all-poetry issue. I wanted to net many
70
David Hamilton
more poets within it and more kinds of poems than we were usually seeing, than were sent to us. So I sought out two collaborating co-editors, one to solicit minority and ethnic writers, the other the language poets and their fellow travelers. I sent invitations to poets we already had known and took more from what came in anyway, then we put the three groups together. But we arranged them alphabetically rather than by cohort. That way the reader didn’t always recognize the group from which the writer had come. A healthy enough confusion, I thought. While working on the issue I had an interesting conversation with the African–Native American woman with whom I was collaborating. She spoke of poetry in her childhood as emanating from the kitchen. Everyone was expected to do some, to invent rhymes, riddles, rants, raps or scat songs for home entertainment. It was poetry much closer to the decoration of what we tend to call artifacts when liberated from another culture. Or tattooing. Auden said once that cuisine was the art form that had risen highest and spread farthest in our culture, and that seemed right. But the Internet makes writing a contender. The Internet coupled with writing workshops and summer conferences everywhere. Once that’s started, why not prefer your own work to anyone else’s? That’s no more than George Oppen said to Louis Zukofsky. Zukofsky had asked him something like, don’t you really agree that my poems are better than yours? To which Oppen said, no, why should I? Mine are mine; why shouldn’t I prefer them? “Act so that there is no use in a centre.” The bravest always do. Robert Burns didn’t depend on London either, nor Emily Dickinson on Boston. Are our words “lighter” as a consequence? I believe that the answer to that is more yes than no. For we have discovered, I think, that it’s the reader more than the writer who fertilizes the seed and impregnates the word. The attention of readers makes the word gravid and fruitful. It’s hard to give up on Stevens, say, or Pound, and ¤nd them barren, when we have invested so much in them. It is not that they have taught us so much, it is that we have taught ourselves to see much of the world as if through the lenses they provide. But I’m speaking already of sources that diminish. The younger poets I meet don’t really read Stevens and Pound all that much. Charles Wright seems to have, but not necessarily his students.
No Use in a Centre
71
And so, yes, with much more of ourselves as readers invested more diffusely, the writing, generally, will become less weighty, lighter. You could argue that Ashbery was a pioneer in all this since he learned early to invent work that one likes most while skating over it quickly. One relishes the swirl and movement, and his lake is so wide already, how can you stop to dig in anywhere? Instead we keep skating, and he re¤nishes his rink just about every year. Why read “Flow Chart” when you can “put your name here,” his most recent title? But most of you have already found newer guides. So we can pass on to whomever.
Robert Kendall
The Editor in an Internet Age
W
hen the new technology made its way onto the poetry scene, it left a lot of people scratching their heads. It had others shaking their ¤sts. Clearly this was something different, but it wasn’t entirely clear whether it heralded a change for the better or the worse. After all, poetry had gotten along ¤ne for centuries without any help from these fancy technological trappings, which few people even understood and which threatened to get in the way of the words more than advance the art form. Many felt that the new technology should just stay in the hands of the businesspeople and bookkeepers, where it belonged. In fact, some critics went so far as to claim that poetry in this new medium wasn’t really poetry at all. “Look at it,” they said, pointing to some hapless example of the new work. “Where is the human warmth, the immediacy, the imprint of personality so essential to poetry? Everyone knows that a poem is the vibrancy of the human voice, the expressiveness of the human face, the dynamism of physical gesture as much as the words themselves. This . . . thing . . . however, is nothing more than a piece of dried clay with some 72
The Editor in an Internet Age
73
marks on it. You can keep your new invention—this writing of yours. I’ll have my poetry the ‘old-fashioned’ way, thank you.” Of course, we really have no way of knowing for sure what sort of reception was accorded the ¤rst written literature. But it’s a good bet that not everyone was enthusiastic about the new offerings. Unquestionably much was lost when literature found its way into the new medium. Not only was the vitality of performance sacri¤ced, along with the spontaneity of the improvisatory oral tradition, but the earliest forms of writing couldn’t even reproduce the entire spoken vocabulary, let alone the subtleties of articulation conveyed by the voice or modern punctuation. Yet few people would argue now that the liabilities of writing aren’t outweighed by its bene¤ts over purely oral transmission. Not only is it a more robust medium than human memory, but it allows the author to communicate complexities or subtleties that would be lost upon the ear. Sighting the New Land Now the World Wide Web is upon us, once again increasing the complexity of what we can convey through words and presenting new opportunities and challenges for writers and editors alike. Unlike print, the Web is at heart as much a visual medium as a textual one. It can be prohibitively dif¤cult and expensive for small presses to print and distribute anything containing color or unusual layouts that require oversize pages, yet current authoring software almost makes it dif¤cult not to include such visual elements in a webpage. Granted, this has produced many an unsightly or nearly unreadable creation from overenthusiastic neophytes intent on stuf¤ng a page with every busy graphic or ornamental font they can ¤nd. But in the hands of skilled writers, the inherent visual expressiveness of electronic text becomes a powerful new tool for communication. Visually attuned writers are also investing their work with the added dimension of motion, thanks to such animation technologies as Flash and dynamic HTML. Visual poetry is now appropriating techniques that were once exclusively the domain of well-heeled video producers, easily incorporating textual morphing, 3-D motion, and transition effects into its palette. Although not yet as friendly to audio as to graphics, the Internet has
74
Robert Kendall
allowed poets to reinforce the relationship between spoken words and printed text. Traditionally, the poetry a¤cionado would choose between one or the other—the live reading or the evening curled up with a book or literary magazine. Now Web magazines such as the Cortland Review routinely present readers with both options simultaneously, supplementing the written text with streaming audio of the poet reading it. A reader can now regularly experience poems as a true marriage between written words and the music of the voice. And what’s more, the spoken rendition can be lingered over, paused, and returned to as often as desired, just like a printed text. No longer is the performance of a favorite poem something to be encountered sporadically at live reading venues or hunted down in hard-to-¤nd recordings. This combination of sound and print is also taking other forms. The “audio track” may not necessarily be a reading of the written text. It can be music, sound effects, or spoken words that complement rather than duplicate the text onscreen. Then there are the more uniquely “cyber” capabilities of the Web that have found their way into poetry and ¤ction, such as interactivity and text generation. The most popular tool in the cyberkit is hypertext. This has allowed writers to create poems and stories in which sections can be read in different orders. Readers can recast textual passages in alternative juxtapositions and contexts, exposing multiple relationships, resonances, and meanings that would remain hidden in a ¤xed linear presentation. They can play with alternative viewpoints and even (though less often) alternative plot lines. They can explore literary structures based on spatial metaphors, moving through them as they would through an unfamiliar physical terrain. (In critical discussions of hypertext, the term “navigation” arises almost as much as the term “reading.”) Other forms of reader interaction have also found their way into literature, sometimes in very playful ways. (For more about hypertext literature, see the essays on my homepage at www.wordcircuits.com/ kendall/essays.) Computer algorithms of varying complexities can assemble texts on the ¶y and present the reader with a different con¤guration of the writing every time a page is read. At its simplest level, this technique has produced a plethora of quasi-randomly generated Web poems in the spirit of Dada, John Cage, William Burroughs, or Oulipo. More subtle uses of dynamically
The Editor in an Internet Age
75
generated text or conditional hypertext links can add variety to a largescale hypertext or help smooth the reader’s path through it. Controlled text variations can also unfold alternative versions of character or plot development similar to those found in text-based computer games. (For examples of all the electronic approaches discussed in this essay, see the Electronic Literature Directory at directory.eliterature.org.) Braving the Passage For many writers, the new digital tools at their disposal are as exciting as a ¤stful of plane tickets to exotic locales. These tools are letting them take writing to places where it has never been before. Yet the route isn’t always an easy one. Many of the tools are still crude. Mastering them can take months, if not years, of dedicated effort. It also requires an aptitude for decidedly unpoetic technical matters that seem to go against the nature of many creative writers. You can labor for hours with Photoshop ¤lters trying to get just the right look for a title. It can take days of hair-pulling to ¤gure out why an animation works with one browser but not another. As Dreamweaver or Flash or the HTML manual devour more and more of the precious time that you could have devoted to writing, you may start to question the wisdom of your commitment to the new medium. Many writers have become very accomplished with digital technology in pursuit of their artistic goals, some to the point of being able to freelance their skills professionally on the side—a nice fringe bene¤t of mastering the craft. Many others, however, experience something akin to culture shock when they ¤rst come into contact with the technical demands of electronic literature. Traditionally, complex technological concerns have been alien to the writerly consciousness. The sole technology writers have had to confront—writing—is one they have usually mastered the mechanics of long before they begin applying it to artistic ends. In fact, few of us in the developed world even think of writing as a technology, since its familiarity makes it seem more like just an extension of our thought processes. Those in other artistic disciplines have long been accustomed to dealing with technological complexities. A painter wouldn’t get very far
76
Robert Kendall
without in-depth knowledge of the properties of different paints or drawing media on different surfaces, the long-term stability of various materials, and other scienti¤c matters. A sculptor’s training must encompass a wide variety of elaborate techniques for molding and transforming substances, and large-scale projects can require engineering skills. A composer must understand the mathematical rigors of music theory, as well as the technical limitations of the instruments being written for. These creators consider the arcana of technology an integral component of their education, not something foreign to the creative impulse. Artists in many ¤elds often rely on collaboration to overcome the technical dif¤culties inherent in their work. Few ¤lmmakers or theater directors would think of embarking on a project without a host of highly trained personnel on hand to assist them. Successful artists often employ an assortment of assistants. Electronic writers are increasingly learning the value of collaborating with Web designers, graphic artists, and programmers. Yet obtaining the services of experts can be a challenge for writers. Since there’s usually little hope of signi¤cant income from their projects, electronic writers can’t draw on the sort of budget available for most ¤lms, theater productions, or large-scale art commissions. This is where the editor can step in to lend a helping hand. Engaging the Guide It’s sometimes said that the Web will make publishers and editors obsolete, since writers can now so easily bypass these middlemen and reach their audience directly by putting work on their own homepages. It’s true that work published in this fashion often attracts signi¤cant readerships and critical attention, and the stigma against self-publication is rapidly eroding on the Web. Yet even if someday there is no longer any cachet in having your work appear in a high-quality magazine alongside that of well-known writers (a turn of events that seems unlikely), the editor will still have a vital role to play on the Web. Many editors are proving themselves invaluable to writers interested in truly exploiting the resources of the new medium. Often it is only with an editor’s assistance that a writer can go beyond simply using the computer screen as a look-alike substitute for the printed page.
The Editor in an Internet Age
77
Talan Memmott of BeeHive is a prime example of a Web editor who strives to turn every publication into a rich, elegant visual experience. He spends a good deal of time laboring over graphics and complex formatting elements on behalf of his authors. The editors of Cauldron & Net, The Nepenthe Journal, Riding the Meridian, trAce, Xdrom, and warnell.com have also made signi¤cant contributions to the Web design of literary work they have published. Many of these editors have also arranged collaborations between poets and Web artists and then published the results. The Cortland Review, which offers streaming audio of every poem it publishes online, does all it can to help its poets deliver the audio goods. The editorial staff will either record the poets or provide them with detailed instructions for producing a high-quality tape, which the Review then converts to digitized audio. I direct Word Circuits, a website that publishes hypertext poetry and ¤ction with an eye to helping authors make the best possible use of the medium. Currently our editorial staff is working with Milorad Paviý to turn two of his works—a short story conceived for print and a play script—into hypertexts with graphics. Our skills with Web design and graphics aren’t all we are bringing to this project. We will enhance the interactive elements with Connection Muse, a software system I codeveloped with Jean-Hugues Réty to produce more sophisticated hypertext than is possible through HTML alone. Connection Muse makes the hypertext reading experience easier and more satisf ying for the reader in a number of ways. It will let us dispense with most of Paviý’s written instructions for reading chapters in alternative orders. At certain points in the original version, the reader was told to proceed to one chapter or another, depending upon what had already been read. Connection Muse can keep track of what has been read, use this information to determine which chapter should come next, and then automatically present the reader with a link to the appropriate chapter. Hypertexts like Paviý’s consist of many separate pages, which can make it dif¤cult to return a few days later to the spot where you stopped reading. Connection Muse automatically saves your place between reading sessions so you can always return to exactly the page where you left off. A related capability comes in handy in other ways. Sometimes hypertexts encourage you to jump around among several different narrative strands, which can cause
78
Robert Kendall
some navigation problems. Connection Muse can save your place within each individual strand, making them easier to negotiate—an approach used by Jackie Craven in a story on Word Circuits. My work with Connection Muse grew out of years spent wrestling with the problems that can stand between complex hypertexts and reader enjoyment. Though there remains much work to do on the system, we hope it will eventually help hypertext both to realize its full literary potential and to move closer toward the mainstream. The system’s ultimate goal is hypertext as accessible and easy to read as printed text that at the same time offers readers interactive choices more varied and signi¤cant than those currently possible through standard hypertext approaches. As our software development endeavors inform our editorial efforts, the relationship works in the other direction as well. The pieces we publish provide an invaluable test bed for Connection Muse, enabling us to re¤ne and develop its features in response to real-world situations. Working with authors can also give me ideas for techniques to try out in my own electronic poetry. Generally I feel that as an editor I get as much as I give. Besides helping them implement new technologies, editors can help authors in other ways to make their new media poetry and ¤ction stimulating or challenging but not overwhelming for the reader. Even authors skilled with Web design can have trouble achieving this balance on their own. For one thing, an author can’t always predict how readers will respond to an interactive text—what choices they will make, what paths they will follow. Editors can serve as guinea pigs, testing out the many different ways an interactive work can be read and often uncovering problematic scenarios that the author never dreamed existed. They can also expose compatibility problems that authors haven’t encountered, since they can test the work with a wider variety of different browsers, platforms, and system con¤gurations than authors have at their disposal. Clearly, online editors have a major role to play in helping the nascent new media literature grow to a healthy adulthood. The editors who really make a difference will be the ones who actively push the envelope of the new medium, taking on responsibilities beyond the traditional editorial duties. Fortunately, the production costs and distribution problems faced by their print-world brethren have been drastically reduced or elim-
The Editor in an Internet Age
79
inated by the Internet, freeing up resources of time and money that they can apply to these new editorial challenges. Bringing the Audience Along Another new responsibility arises for the online editor, though this one is easier to meet. A website can usually do much more than a printed magazine to bring its writers closer to their readers. It’s simple for an ezine to provide links to the homepages of authors, encouraging readers to ¤nd out more about them and their work. Editors can even set up online bookstores on their websites, allowing readers to purchase printed books by authors published on the site. This can be done fairly simply through the online bookseller Amazon.com, which will handle all of the ful¤llment, customer service, and shipping tasks and give you a cut of the pro¤ts. Including mail-to links with Web-published works can be very effective in encouraging spontaneous email messages to authors. Only the most widely read authors are likely to get mail from readers of their printed work, but it’s not uncommon for Web-published authors to receive appreciative missives from people who ¤nd their work online. More dif¤cult to set up but also fruitful are online discussion forums that a publisher can provide for author-reader Q&A sessions. There have been predictions that the Internet is likely to erode traditional notions of authorship. Some feared that the ease of copying electronic texts would turn online literature into an anonymous stew of writings that had been freely copied from source to source without attribution. Others speculated that collaboration would become so widespread that attribution would be rendered meaningless. It turns out that the Internet is actually giving new validity to the age-old idea of authorship. In a printed magazine, the author may be little more than a name at the top of the page, but online the real person behind the name can emerge to be easily contacted and engaged in dialogue by the reader. The Internet offers editors another means for making their authors more visible and accessible: the Electronic Literature Directory, which I supervise for the Electronic Literature Organization. This sizable directory database contains descriptive listings for literary pieces that exploit the dig-
80
Robert Kendall
ital medium in signi¤cant ways. Every listed work draws upon animation, interaction, audio, or other electronic elements that could not be accommodated by print. There are also descriptive listings for authors and publishers. We will set up a Directory account for any literary publisher who offers digitally enhanced work. These accounts allow publishers to create their own listings for anything they publish that is suitable for the Directory. Authors can also obtain accounts and enter their own work. Users of the Directory can browse all the electronic offerings of a particular publisher or look up individual authors to ¤nd their works, home pages, and biographical details. You can also browse the Directory by category to seek out, for example, hypertext ¤ction or audio recordings of poetry. In the future we will attach reviews and recommendations to many Directory listings, so a listing in the Directory will bring with it an opportunity for critical attention. At the time of this writing (early 2001), the Electronic Literature Directory catalogs over 800 works, 450 authors, and 100 publishers, and its contents are expanding by leaps and bounds. It attracts over 1,000 visitors a week. Clearly an abundance of authors and publishers are working hard to bring literature squarely into the Digital Age and their efforts are earning them a signi¤cant audience. Yet what about the perceived “legitimacy gap” between online and paper publishing? A widely Web-published author may still often face the question, “Yes, but what have you published in print?” Fortunately, the gap is steadily closing as the quality of epublishing increases and literary websites continue to draw more readers than most printed literary magazines. Serious recognition is now afforded electronic poetry and ¤ction through a number of major prizes, such as the $10,000 Electronic Literature Awards. NEA grant applications now acknowledge the Web as a legitimate source of publication credits. It may not be long before online publishing becomes more important than print for most poets and many ¤ction writers. Work published in print may look great on your coffee table, but when someone actually wants to get hold of your stuff and read it, the crucial question in some circles has already become “Yes, but what do you have available on the Web?” When Internet access becomes ubiquitous, the ease with which people can ¤nd poems or
The Editor in an Internet Age
81
stories online may make them increasingly unwilling to cope with the problems of obtaining them in print. Even when a reader can ¤nd a bookstore that carries the magazine she wants or is willing to special-order it, she may balk at shelling out the cover price if she’s really interested in only one or two pieces in the publication. And when it comes to printed back issues, forget about it. Thanks to the unprecedented ease of online distribution and the boom in homepage publishing, editors and publishers no longer control all the crucial pipelines from author to audience. With their importance as purveyors and distributors diminishing on the Web, their role as facilitators and mentors is likely to expand commensurately. Of course, the best print editors have always been more than just literary packagers. Yet all too often today an author’s sole contact with a print magazine editor is likely to be a form acceptance letter, and many poetry book publishers seem more interested in lottery-like publication contests than in long-term relationships with their authors. If the Internet fosters closer editor-author ties, this will be a very welcome change indeed.
Websites Discussed BeeHive. . Cauldron & Net. <www.StudioCleo.com/cauldron/indexns.html>. Connection Muse. <www.wordcircuits.com/connect>. Cortland Review. <www.cortlandreview.com>. Electronic Literature Directory. . The Nepenthe Journal. <www.freespeech.org/tumbleweed>. Riding the Meridian. <www.heelstone.com/meridian>. trAce. . warnell.com. <warnell.com>. Word Circuits. <www.wordcircuits.com>. Xdrom. <www.xdrom.com>.
John Tranter
The Left Hand of Capitalism
I think they’re right when they say that middle-aged men shouldn’t have children: they’re too old to manage the sleepless nights and the ef¶uent disposal problems. But here I am, well over ¤fty, father to a demanding baby who turned one a few months ago. The cute little feller is called Jacket magazine, and I’m as proud as any dad. The other day, the counter on the front page ticked over to 290,000. That tellsme that more than a quarter of a million separate visits have been made to the magazine’s website on the Internet (www.jacket.zip.com.au) since the ¤rst issue in October 1997. This is not quite like having a quarter of a million subscribers for a print magazine—buyers have to buy a print magazine, whether they want the whole thing or just one article, whereas a “visit” to Jacket might consist of a few minutes worth of browsing, say looking through an interview and a few book reviews in issue #4, or a whole evening spent reading through a number of issues. (They’re all there.) 82
The Left Hand of Capitalism
83
Many of my readers come back often for a regular literary hit; a few land there by accident (scanning the Internet for something cute in dinner jackets, perhaps) and leave immediately, never to return. There’s another difference: magazine subscribers subscribe; that is, they pay money. My readers get Jacket for free. I guess I’ll never get rich that way. But it sure beats trying to edit, print, publish, distribute and sell a print edition of a literary magazine. I’ve been there and done that. In fact I’ve been involved in editing and publishing poetry books and magazines for over thirty years, on and off. That was in the Age of Print: now, most of what I do ends up on the Internet. The shift to the Internet is the most signi¤cant change that publishing saw in the last century. An earlier change, the move from metal type to photo-lithographic reproduction, was also important, but it wasn’t what the trendy pundits call a “paradigm shift”; the Internet is. The Way We Were: Most of the poetry magazines that were around when I began writing in the early 1960s were printed using metal type and stereo plates on large and costly rotary printing machines weighing a couple of tonnes. In effect we were still in the age of Johannes Gutenberg, who invented moveable metal type over ¤ve hundred years ago. The basic printing processes were the same: all we had added was a degree of mechanisation. It is costly to get things done like that. The skills were dif¤cult to obtain, the machinery was expensive. It was also noisy, dirty, and dangerous. The Linotype machines that were used to set type for most books and newspapers took a crane to shift them, and the type was cast from vats of poisonous molten metal: a mixture of tin, lead, and antimony. Then in 1961 the IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter came along, and in 1964 the IBM Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter followed, a relatively high-speed, automatic typewriter that had a magnetic tape data storage unit and retrieval device. It was small, clean, and quiet, and a tenth the price of a Linotype machine, and anyone could learn to use it in half an hour. I know: I did. Fitted with a carbon-¤lm ribbon and a changeable type-ball that gave a range of typefaces in different sizes from eight to twelve point, it produced razor sharp output that was ideal for use on the new photolitho offset printing presses that were becoming common.
84
John Tranter
By the middle of the 1960s small versions of these presses were even appearing in many large city of¤ces, replacing the of¤ce duplicator. The Multilith 1250 litho press, for example, was inexpensive and relatively compact and gave high-quality output on foolscap paper. These machines didn’t need metal type; they could reproduce anything that you could photograph or photocopy, including drawings, snapshots, a page of typed letters, or a page of handwriting. So by the second half of the 1960s the equipment for producing a poetry magazine was fairly easy to get hold of and simple to use. The process was inexpensive, yet the output looked professional. In Australia, as elsewhere, this helped to start a ¶ood of little magazines and gave a new generation of young poets a place to be heard, a venue for argument and experimentation, and a shot in the arm. But it didn’t solve the main and the perennial problem of poetry publishing. This is the cost and dif¤culty of distribution—getting the material into the hands of its readers. You can solve all the other problems, but that one is intractable. Or it was, until the Internet. Contemporary literature is not a pro¤table market anywhere in the world. Sappho, Callimachus, Catullus, Li Bai, and John Donne all had a small audience for their poetry, and any serious poetry faces the same situation today. Bookshops now stock hardly any but the more popular verse. Canadian bookshops can’t afford to stock New Zealand poetry, and vice versa. Few Australian poets are found in the bookstores of Brooklyn; Scottish poets despair of big sales—any sales—in Normal, Illinois. Enter the Internet: it’s relatively cheap, it reaches everywhere there’s a telephone line (or a satellite drifting overhead), and it costs the distributor almost nothing. In effect, the purchaser does the work of accessing the material and paying for its delivery. Get this: in the ¤rst issue of Jacket I published an interview I had recorded with the British poet Roy Fisher and received an enthusiastic email from a fan. The fellow was grateful for the chance to read an interview with his favourite poet, he said. It was hard to ¤nd material on Roy Fisher up here in Nome, Alaska. Nome, Alaska? Excuse me?
The Left Hand of Capitalism
85
Video and stereo sound are still dif¤cult to send or receive on the Internet because they need a lot of bandwidth, and the telephone lines the Internet uses (the same lines that your telephone uses) don’t have much bandwidth. We still don’t have video-phones, for that reason. But for simple text—poetry, or prose—it’s quick, cheap, and ubiquitous. Okay, until a few years ago the Internet was hard work. You needed a degree in computer science to get a handle on it. Now, it’s easy to browse the Internet. Believe me. The latest Windows and Macintosh systems, with their graphical interface and easy “click and do it” modus operandi, have made a tremendous difference. The Internet was designed to be cruised by browsers, and current browsers like Netscape (now given away for free) are designed to be logical and easy to use. Most contemporary word processors even come with a built-in program for constructing Internet webpages. A child can do it; in fact, as most parents know, children are more at home in cyberspace than most adults. Are there problems? Of course. For the consumer, the ¤rst problem is quality, or rather the distinct lack of it. You walk into a bookshop and go to the poetry section: the hundred or so books you see have each gone through a long process of selection and editorial ¤ne-tuning. Most of them are likely to be of reasonable quality, personal taste aside. But on the Internet, it’s not like that. Most of the mass of poems you ¤nd on the Internet are bad. I mean, really bad: uninteresting, unedited, and de¤nitely not ¤ne-tuned. The wild, free spirits among us know that on the Internet, anyone can publish anything at all, and broadcast it all around the world, without the bothersome interference of censors, style police, or cantankerous editors. Cool! But as it happens, the bothersome interference of editors is what most readers want. They don’t like having to wade through some amateur’s ¤rst draft. They would much, much rather read a ¤nely-polished ¤nal draft by a hard-working writer, someone who’s spent years learning the craft, and who’s willing to incorporate an editor’s professional advice. Then from the other side of the screen, as a magazine editor, how do you ¤nd your audience? They’re all out there, but where? How do you reach
86
John Tranter
that poetry fan in Nome, Alaska, and tell him about the Roy Fisher interview when you don’t even know he exists? You have to depend on word of mouth, mainly, and hope that your magazine is so good that people will hear about it and look for it using one of the many free Internet search engines (programs that trawl the Web looking for sites that contain a key word or words that you instruct the program to search for). That’s how Jacket snares the occasional reader who’s looking for dinner jackets. The third problem is money. The sad fact is that apart from selling pornography, no small organisation can make any money on the Internet; not even enough to pay the phone bill. For a magazine to be successful on the Internet, it has to be free. Most sites are funded by advertising banners, those irritating, animated slabs of imagery that sit at the top of each site’s homepage and slow down the loading time. Advertising is so pervasive on the Internet now that it’s hard to remember how different things were in the early days. The Internet was set up in the 1970s to facilitate scienti¤c research among a string of U.S. universities. Initially it was a black-and-white, textonly thing, about as interesting as a blackboard in a lecture room or the message board in the hall outside—which is basically what it was. But though it depended on telephone connections to link itself together, its structure was essentially different to that of a phone network, and this was the key to its future. It’s built on democratic, almost anarchistic principles. The electronic messages that are the nerve impulses of the Internet are designed to ¤nd their own way to their destinations; they route themselves through the network of computers that make up the Internet. There is no supervisor in charge of the message board. This lack of central control meant that as well as the biological weapons researchers and nuclear physicists, other people in U.S. universities— long-haired hippies, for example—could set up virtual communities of like minds on the Internet and exchange recipes for marijuana cookies and terrorist bombs, and no one could stop them. So a culture of free exchange and mutual help has come into being in cyberspace, an economic model based on the hippy ideal of the barter
The Left Hand of Capitalism
87
of intangible goods. If you have a problem understanding a computer program, say, and ask for assistance on the Internet, you’ll get a hundred replies, with no strings attached, except that you’ll feel an obligation to help others in the same way. As ye give, so shall ye receive. An anthropologist might call it a “gift-exchange culture.” Conversely, it’s costly and bothersome to set up credit-card payment mechanisms on the Internet. I feel if I asked for payment for Jacket, my readers would simply go elsewhere. There’s plenty of free stuff out there, and it’s useful to remember that all the successful news and weather sites and the best reference and search engines are free. Even Microsoft with its millions was unable to buck that trend. According to David Walker’s Lighthouse site (http://www.shorewalker.com/ contents.html) Microsoft’s Slate, USA Today, TheStreet.com, Business Week magazine, and Salon have all tried charging users over the past four years, and all ditched the idea when the hurdle of payment sent their online audiences plummetting. Walker quotes Slate’s Michael Kinsley on junking the subscription experiment back in 1999: “Web readers surf. They go quickly from site to site. If they really like a particular site, they may visit it often, but they are unlikely to devote a continuous half-hour or more to any one site the way you might read a traditional paper magazine in one sitting. This appears to be in the nature of the Web and not something that is likely to change. And it makes paying for access to any particular site a bigger practical and psychological hurdle.” Research ¤rms such as Forrester Research, Walker says, have found only a tiny minority of consumers saying they would pay even small sums for news, ¤nancial information, music, or movies online. Pundits can point to no new online subscription success stories. Indeed, 2000’s most high-pro¤le subscription attempt, media news and analysis site Inside.com, simply con¤rmed the subscription model’s hopelessness; the publication reportedly has less than 3000 subscribers. The alternative to ads or subscriptions, of course, is to concede that the Web simply supports different business models from today’s print media world. How different? Weird things happen to capitalism on the Internet.
88
John Tranter
Think of one of those pink rubber kitchen gloves. If you pull a (pink) righthanded kitchen glove inside out, you get a (silver) left-handed glove. That’s what the Internet does to capitalism: it pulls it inside out. In the so-called real world, you have to make sure your revenue is greater than your expenditure; what’s left is your pro¤t, and the measure of your success. On the Internet, it’s the other way around. So Jacket is free, and thus—sadly—the contributors don’t get paid. At ¤rst I thought that would be a problem, but so far it doesn’t seem to be. The following are among the many kind souls who have given their work to Jacket for no tangible reward: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Carolyn Burke, Tom Clark, Alfred Corn, Elaine Equi, Roy Fisher, Mark Ford, David Lehman, Harry Mathews, Ron Padgett, Bob Perelman, Marjorie Perloff, Carl Rakosi, John Redmond, Peter Riley, Ron Silliman, Nathaniel Tarn, Shamoon Zamir, and Eliot Weinberger.
Marion Wrenn
When Horses Fly: Parables, Palimpsests and PBQ Endless unfolding words of ages! And mine a word of the modern . . . the word en-masse. —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”
The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is dif¤cult to know where we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and collective identity, objects from the past are the source of signi¤cance as cultural symbols. —R. Hewison, The Heritage of Industry
Other than porn, sports scores, and online trading, poetry has bene¤ted the most from the web. —Tom Hartman, Sr. Editor, PBQ
Nineteen-ninety-nine was a bad year for the Painted Bride Quarterly (PBQ). We owed money. We were out of money. We had a months-long backlog of manuscripts. The Painted Bride Art Center renovated and asked us to pack up and move out. Founded almost simultaneously in the ’70s, the Painted Bride Quarterly shares its name with the Painted Bride Art Center, and little else. Each is a separate entity. Though they allowed us to use their mailing ad89
90
Marion Wrenn
dress, we had only occasionally collaborated over the years and an awkward unease marked our relationship—we sort of eyeballed each other for what we might get (a consequence, I’d argue, of gutted funding sources). In an effort to revise that relationship, we made plans for a special section of PBQ featuring poets who had read at the Art Center. We thought we’d use PBQ to document that ephemeral art form—the poetry reading. With the help of poet Major Jackson (the Art Center’s former poetry curator and a contributing editor for PBQ), we built one of the ¤nest issues in our recent history, containing work by Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, and more. But as we began to design the issue, we realized we did not have the funds to pay the printer. It was an awful bind. Our best issue was adrift, starting to go under. Though in some ways these were typical problems for an independent literary magazine—PBQ had always existed in a crisis of money and space—this time things seemed particularly impossible. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to set us up as martyrs or selfrighteous whiners. At PBQ we get to do what I would argue (and have, often) is the best work writers can do for other writers: maintain and grow an offbeat venue for great writing. Still, friends and family have long thought us nuts. PBQ’s editors give of their time, resources, talent, and wit (often to wit’s end). They have also often been on the receiving end of (rightfully) frustrated complaints. Over the years, we have had to ask our writers and readers to wait. Too often on the cusp of being broke, we have asked established and emerging writers to indulge us as we built each issue and secured the necessary funding. We developed a reputation for both publishing extraordinary work and driving contributors to the limits of their patience. My editors tell occasional stories of having to dance around awkward confrontations at writers’ conferences or readings. I was once the stunned recipient of a Sunday-morning phone call that nearly put me off poets. A woman who had submitted work to PBQ months prior got ahold of my home phone number, called me, and let me have it. By the time she ¤nished, she’d threatened to punch me—and here’s the good part—“in the groin.” Lovely. It takes a poet to be so anatomically explicit. Though I was pretty sure she was off her meds, her anger struck a chord.
When Horses Fly
91
My ¤erce dedication to PBQ (as a viable venue for the work of [un]known writers) dovetailed with an exquisite guilt. Editing the print version of PBQ came with an overwhelming snarl of pressures: we were struggling to publish in a timely fashion; we had no of¤ce but a mailbox and several car trunks; we kept people waiting too long for our decisions; how could I ask a volunteer staff to read faster, meet more often; what good were we doing if we were alienating writers; how could we ask for funding if we couldn’t make the magazine on time; how could we make the magazine without funding. My head: she spun. It was all too hard. One wacky phone call and I was on the ledge. I started to think I might be crazy too. I took to denying these ¤scal/administrative woes at our editors’ meetings, instead serving crudités and dip and a Martha Stewart smile. My staff wanted to talk about the bottom line, and I didn’t want to let them see it. If I could create the surface illusion of things in their proper places, then maybe it would all work out: herb-encrusted goat cheese anyone? It was this kind of madness that ¤lled the air in ’99, the year we embarked on radical reinvention of the magazine. To tell the story of PBQ’s transition to the Web is to offer a snapshot of a moment in the history of a cultural artifact, the American small literary magazine. In the ’60s and ’70s many independent literary magazines were run off of mimeograph machines or on newsprint, side-stapled, and made available to hip literati. Soon these magazines took the form of thick paperback volumes, glossy full-color magazines, newspapers (complete with photos of featured writers), or slim perfect-bound volumes. PBQ was the latter sort, and had been since its inception in the early ’70s, never having had the ¤nancial breathing room to overhaul or update its look. By the mid-’90s, magazines began to move to (and spring from) the Web. Though using the Web solely for marketing purposes, PBQ created an early Web presence. At the 1995 Associated Writing Programs conference in Washington, D.C., then-editor Kathleen Volk Miller and I showcased the website that ex-editor Teresa Leo had created for PBQ. We were the only magazine with a computer monitor at our table in the book fair. Lots of people stopped to talk with us, and several tried to check out the HTML code Teresa had built. The site was terri¤c PR for the magazine. But as I recall we were one-upped by D. Edward Deifer of CrossConnect, one of the ¤rst
92
Marion Wrenn
full-¶edged Web magazines. He was also at the conference in ’95, touting the launch of his new magazine. Though he did not set up a computer to showcase his magazine at a conference table he got a local pizza parlor to name their daily special the “X-Connect”: genius guerrilla marketing. Whereas CrossConnect emerged as a serious magazine straight out of the new medium, we chose to use our website for marketing purposes alone. Offering a sample of the contents of our issues, we used the site to drum up an audience for the printed issues of PBQ. I suspect underneath this position was a deeper distrust of the new technology. Our “typographical minds” balked at virtuality. Pyrotechnics, we thought. Spectacle. The webpage was “less than” the printed page. We were cranky modernists. We eventually abandoned such typographical snobbery. While we waited, electronic publication began to emerge as a more serious form. Web magazines became more popular and attractive to known writers. By the end of the ’90s writers with substantial reputations were publishing online. For example, May ’99 saw Billy Collins’s ¤rst Web appearance (Cortland Review). Like CrossConnect, some magazines sprang from the medium (Salon, Nerve, Slope); others (like PBQ) adapted to the new technology. It was also in ’99 that poet and editor Daniel M. Nester rejoined the staff of PBQ (he’d taken off to do an MFA at NYU). In the time he’d been away, Dan had grown a healthy list of publications, many of which were Web publications. Dan introduced me to Tom Hartman, poet, essayist, Web designer. With a ¤ve-year-old website offering samples of each issue, PBQ had been desperate for a webmaster, someone who could commit to updating our site regularly (and, ahem, for free). Without a webmaster, our site was a mere billboard. It was as if we had been on the banks of the Internet, dangling a toe in the waters, afraid to commit. We’d watched intently as other magazines splashed in the new medium; we felt the surface ripple from where we sat, cautious. We had to be. We’re custodians of a thirty-year-old independent magazine. We feared that, Ophelia-like, our reputation would bear us up a while, then, laughing, we’d drown. Yet our caution was exacerbating our invisibility, keeping us stalled, masking the hard, good work we do. But there is, occasionally, magic borne of desperation: mad woman or not, I would not be the editor to fold a thirty-year-old magazine. Tom joined
When Horses Fly
93
the staff, and with a mix of energy, imagination, expertise, and curiosity, we began to transform PBQ. Now, at the shallow end of a new century, we’ve waded in, and we are uncannily at home. We now publish four online issues a year along with an annual print anthology (an idea we humbly pilfered from CrossConnect). The decision was a balm for me and a boon for Dan and Tom, whose energy and commitment to Web publishing ensured the success of our metamorphosis. We became PBQ’s midwives, preaching the virtues of Web publication as we delivered our own project. Dan and Tom have gone on to chart the geography of Web magazine terrain in several essays, interviews, and workshops. Recently, for example, at a writers conference in South Jersey, Dan called the Web the “future of the funk” for poets, likening the current state of affairs to “the Wild West.” Folks are staking claims and territories and building (sometimes-raucous) communities. At the same workshop Tom Hartman focused on “usability”—the access and immediacy the Web affords our readers—and the tendency among readers to “fetishize the book,” a habit that keeps some suspicious of Web publication. Since Marx, the term “fetishistic” has been used to describe a rei¤ed relation with things. The commodity fetish stands in for a whole set of beliefs and tensions; and the commodity becomes a fetish when we forget that our labor allowed us to buy it. It also erases the labor that went into its physical production. These products take on a mysterious quality; they become immediate and enchanting (perhaps because we are worshiping the money we use to pay for them). This is a fascinating and useful category at streetlevel. Think about your favorite dog-eared copy of Joyce, or Stevens, or Dickinson. Think about your delight in buying a book. I’ll admit my bias: I love the turn of a page, the book in my hand, its smell, the full sensual experience and presence of the book. What name do we have for the heady pleasures of such consumption and use? One is “commodity fetishism.” But it is within this set of desires that I sense fear. The Web threatens these “objects” and their value. This tendency to fetishize the book connects to a now diminishing “prestige gap” between Web publication and print publication. As Tom pointed out, by changing the “delivery vehicle” for its “content,” what PBQ “lost” in terms of its thing-ness, it gained in immediacy and accessibility. Our site had over 30,000 discrete hits with our ¤rst issue
94
Marion Wrenn
(that’s likely more readers than our entire print run over the last two decades). Audience expansion was at ¤rst a vexed issue for Web publishers. Access is directly connected to class and economic status. In the early ’90s, not everyone had the means for Internet access. But that has radically changed. According to USA Today U.S. libraries have been pivotal in leveling the playing ¤eld. “The percentage of the USA’s almost 9000 libraries that are wired with free Internet access grew from 76% to 95% last year” (Thomas 2001). And such access has had unintended consequences: “As a result of the increased traf¤c that high-tech innovation brings, many libraries also report an increase in circulation of old-fashioned printed books” (2001). It’s a great time for reading. So: we decided to create a hybrid publication by launching four online issues and publishing a print annual. We’re a retro¤t online literary magazine. But the decision to re¤t the magazine for full online publication was a doozy. Think: chopped vegetables and the downtown garret of one of our editors. A November dusk turns the dimly lit one-bedroom where we held staff meetings blue as we looked at slides from “Unsettled,” a photo series and essay by Scott Walden documenting the ghost towns along the coast of Newfoundland, which were created in ’49 when Canada forced rural residents to relocate. Black-and-white photos of ruined houses, collapsing and overgrown with foliage, gave me a way of thinking about our ¤rst online issue. The images resonated with me, having just fully copped to my staff about our current ¤scal crisis. I looked at Tom and said, “These are perfect. Ruined houses, that church collapsing in on itself—what a great image for PBQ.” We laughed at the awfulness of it. Our transformation was inevitable, and these photos marked the decay of an institution, the small independent print magazine. For me, they spoke to my underlying nostalgia for the book, the printed word. With the decision to go online made, we needed to grapple with several ¤ner points—like what to charge, how to number the online issues, and how, ultimately, to tell our contributors of the change (since we were literally midissue when we decided to move the magazine lock, stock, and barrel to the Web). Since the cost of printing issues disappeared with the move on-
When Horses Fly
95
line, we were puzzled: could a broke magazine simply stop charging readers? Dan’s thinking on this won out. Going online helped us see that PBQ is less engaged in the commercial economy and much more so in a “gift economy” (Lewis Hyde’s term). We pass along our treasures in the hopes of nurturing and inspiring writers, scholars, readers. As Hyde writes in The Gift, “a gift that cannot move loses its gift properties.” By remaining in print, and by keeping our print runs painfully small, our “gifts” went ungiven. PBQ online would keep poetry in motion. We could be the site of exchange, make gifts available, charge writers to write, readers to read, and to remember the resilience of poetry—a form that has morphed between page, stage, movie and computer screens during the last century. PBQ Online could channel the current of exchange among writers and readers. But what would we call it? What number would we give our ¤rst online issue? Would we, like Exquisite Corpse, call our ¤rst online issue “issue 1”? Or would we continue numbering them in the sequence of the print issues? We opted for the latter. Our ¤rst Web issue was called “issue 63.” We felt that PBQ online would be part of the magazine’s continuum, that by keeping the numbers consistent we would build a bridge between the print version and the Web version. Moreover, in tandem with our appearance as a Web journal, we began plans to build an electronic archive in which to store and make available the entire run of PBQ, presenting each issue in such a way that users might see what the actual print magazines looked like. Herein lies the lovely paradox of PBQ and the Web. The electronic archive will preserve a thirty-year history of PBQ; our annual book will preserve the work of the online issues. We also tangled over how to announce our decision to transform to the contributors for what started out as print issue 63. These writers had agreed to let us publish their work in a print journal, and now we were reinventing the so-called “delivery vehicle.” Perhaps because I had been humbled by years of apologizing to writers, I wanted our announcement letter to start off with a mea culpa. My staff talked me out of it; but I talked them in to acknowledging the feelings some writers might have about Web publication versus print publication. No apologies for the transformation, we agreed; but we would remain open and available to those writers who might want out.
96
Marion Wrenn
At the time, some of my more zealously Web-oriented editors thought I was needlessly hand wringing and inviting dissent. And after the success of our ¤rst few issues, I began to think I had fretted about the impact of the change on our contributors unnecessarily. We received numerous correspondences from contributors who were thrilled that their work appeared (in many cases for the ¤rst time) online. In fact, the author of “Leaning Volvo” (the only piece of ¤ction to appear in our ¤rst online issue) was solicited by a New York–based literary agent. I doubt that would have happened if the issue had come out in print. But recently I have noticed some emerging anxieties. As we were posting our third issue and beginning to build the print annual, a writer from the ¤rst Web issue contacted me for the ¤rst time. We had had her stuff so long she had moved a few times. Apparently none of the announcements or revised contracts we sent had reached her. A friend told her that her work was in PBQ; she contacted me looking to buy copies of the issue. Strange moment: I had to tell her we did indeed “publish” her poem, but that the poem was online; I had no “book” to give her yet. Since all of the contributors for our ¤rst Web issue would appear in the print annual, I told her she would eventually be included in a book. Still she balked. She was uncomfortable with her work being available online. Even after I let her know that the site had thousands of hits and that it was likely more people had seen her work on PBQ online than would ever have in a print run, she was hesitant. After several friendly conversations, I decided to honor her doubt and remove the poem from the Web issue and upcoming anthology. The Net gives us that ¶exibility. Until the anthology goes to press, the sites remain changeable. In this way, PBQ online helps chart the similarities between modernity and postmodernity. Flux, ¶uidity, and play are available online. The website is a postmodern form in that it is constructed around technologies of simulation (Web zines), virtual reality, ¶uidity, collage, and the ¤zz of spectacle. On the other hand, the book (as object) suggests ¤xity and permanence, markers of modernism. The shift from page to Web signals an apparent shift from modernity to postmodernity. But as many theorists suggest, these categories overlap. This can be seen in PBQ’s new form. The website is associated with the ¶eeting, the ephemeral and contingent—
When Horses Fly
97
even as its archive captures a thirty-year history—even as our print annuals will document and make permanent the work of our Web issues. Our electronic transformation is a snapshot of a cultural form in a liminal moment. It is also a re¶ection of our culture at a particular historical moment. We are in the later stages of a transition into a phase of “secondary orality” (Walter J. Ong’s term) from print culture. The residual traces and effects of typographic culture can be found here in a culture dominated by images. As Neil Postman writes, “Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration. Typography created prose but made poetry into an exotic and elitist form of expression” (29). The Web has revived and democratized poetry. Whitman wrote that the poet “places himself where the future becomes present.” So too does PBQ. With its independent status and open editorial policy, PBQ is home for a multitude of voices. You need no “name” to appear in our magazine, just good art, good writing (standards both ¶uid and ¤xed). Here is the “barbaric yawp” in e-time: the way we read is changing, the way we write is changing. PBQ online is poised at the edge of transformation. I know we are at the edge: people occasionally fall off. With the Web’s revelatory effect on poetry and the profound sense of con¤dence emerging among my staff, we’re defensive and exasperated by those who don’t share our optimism. When a recent contributor emailed me to thank me for accepting his work he felt compelled to let me know that he was nonetheless “disappointed” in our offer. I bit my tongue hard. As one of my editors put it, one wonders “what part of WEB and ZINE was unfucking clear in the twelve emails we exchanged?” No matter how convinced I am of the Web’s legitimacy, I realize we are on the cusp of a new way of communicating. Walter Benjamin’s ubiquitous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is a useful lens for my thoughts regarding audience, accessibility, and online magazines. According to Benjamin, an art object’s aura is contingent on its thing-ness, its existence in a speci¤c space and time, its uniqueness. Thinking about ¤lm and photography, Benjamin writes that aura is lost in the mechanical reproduction of art. I’d argue then that the Net thoroughly banishes aura. This can be traced in the way some writers shy from Web publication, in the way some feel it is not “real.” For example, we found a wonderful short story among our submis-
98
Marion Wrenn
sions recently. We wanted it and decided to publish it in the new online issue. When I contacted the writer, however, I suddenly found myself sparring with him in an email match. His work came to us in the gap between our departure from print and arrival on the Web. He thought my acceptance meant his appearance in a print journal. So he began to negotiate with me: I could only have the story online if I changed the contract and guaranteed him publication in the anthology. I told him I liked the story, and since we did not have much ¤ction his odds were good, but I hated setting such a precedent. It seemed that the more I explained the ¤rmer his demand. I realized there was an undercurrent threatening to pull me in: for him the “book” was real and legitimate in a way online issues were not. Here was the “prestige gap” opening up its maw and consuming a would-be contributor. I’ve grown extremely proud of the work we are doing online; I did not want a random contributor to have the power to undermine that. I told him no and withdrew my offer of publication. “No hard feelings,” he wrote. Benjamin’s essay is usually read as a solemn mourning for the loss of an art object’s aura in the age of ¤lm and mechanical photography. But he is ambivalent; inasmuch as aura is lost, a democratic effect is gained. The loss of an art object’s “aura” signaled by the reproduction of images allowed for greater access by folks who could not afford the original. But the spread of images and reproductions comes with consequences, not the least of which is that the spread of critical thinking and the kind of focused attention art objects warrant is not guaranteed. I suspect we hail our ereaders as cyber ¶aneurs—we know that they are distracted observers and that they are looking to an online lit mag for a mirror, a model, and a place to slow down the f(l)u(r)ry of images and information on the Web. We have created a place in which to concentrate and enjoy the effort. Benjamin’s lament was Adorno’s beef: we are becoming “deconcentrated listeners.” Distracted viewing prevents us from engaging in critical analysis. But I would argue that PBQ (and online lit mags with serious publishing histories) functions as momentary stays against distraction. The online lit mag offers a place to linger over and engage with “art.” Our digital recon¤guration has made me re-see the work of PBQ. Prior to our existence as a (hybrid) online magazine, I had not thought through the implications of the printed issues on the work we do. Let me
When Horses Fly
99
explain: when you read a book, the writer’s voice is the voice you hear. With a book in your hand and your concentrated gaze on the page, you are alone in a way that is radically different from an oral culture that shares its stories aloud. But the literary magazine, by offering multiple voices, plays with these boundaries; it presents a community of writers to its audience— and though the act of reading is a singular one, a magazine’s audience is indeed an imagined community. PBQ was designed to nurture that transaction between readers and writers, especially writers whose high-caliber work did not (yet) have a wide audience. But what I did not fully realize was the way in which the print version deftly erased the labor of its editors. True, the printed version is an object that allows for the writer and reader to engage with each other; but what the “book” did not suggest was the colossal struggle of its volunteer editors to bring it into being. I don’t mean to imply that we are wage slaves, but the stiff give of a print issue’s binding in no way hints at the lost sleep, the babysitters, or the borrowed stamps that go into each issue (ah, the consequences of commodity fetishism). For PBQ, editorial invisibility was arguably part of our aesthetic. No editor’s name ever became synonymous with PBQ. In its 30-something years, PBQ had grown into a democratic experiment in which editors read, discussed, and chose manuscripts for each issue, one in which no single voice could outweigh or stymie another. Our business was basically to get out of the way of good writing. But with the market pressures that thwarted our attempts to professionalize our administrative systems, we were so far out of the way we were nearly gone. Though the physical printed quarterly issues have disappeared, PBQ and its editors have become more visible. We can now afford to think creatively about upcoming issues—and several editors have taken the opportunity to do just that: Daniel Nester put together a section featuring poems by the writers who participated in our New York reading series; Chris Connelly recently edited a special section featuring international poetry. While some editors have complained that their aesthetic in¶uence seems too conspicuous, I look at our electronic tables of contents and heave a sigh of relief. With our third electronic issue, we’ve become the explorers I’ve long dreamt we’d be. No longer bound by the silken ties of debt and deadlines we in-
100
Marion Wrenn
curred as a (homeless) print publication, we are free to range and collect, design and desire. Our editors feel less harassed and more invested in the work of the magazine. Concurrent with our launch as an online magazine, PBQ found a new home. PBQ has recently af¤liated with Rutgers University, Camden. Though guerrilla independence has a certain sexiness, we too often found ourselves in desperate straits, too preoccupied with where to hold the next meeting (Dirty Frank’s or the local pizza parlor) to make good on plans for reading series, themed issues, or workshops. By partnering with the university, PBQ has joined a team of magazines housed under the newly conceived Camden Online Poetry Project. We now have a permanent home and of¤ces, a battalion of interns, and the pleasantly uncanny feeling of coming home (for years, PBQ’s editorial board has been made up of RutgersCamden alums). For a thirty-something independent literary magazine we made two radical choices: electronic transformation and university af¤liation. The effects of each overlap. We are exploring the limits and possibilities of online publication even as we open up the possibilities of PBQ; by af¤liating with Rutgers PBQ ¤nds itself at the center of a growing community of scholars, creative writers, and graphic designers. We’ve found both stability and the charged atmosphere of inspired thinking in Camden. But there are deeper anxieties playing out here. When I told British cultural historian David Morley about PBQ’s digital transformation, relocation, and af¤liation he said, “That’s more than a story, that’s a parable.” A ground-level case study of the cultural anxiety around technology and its effects on space, place, and con¤gurations of “home,” PBQ’s tale, he said, is worth telling. No good story of transformation is complete without a haunting. PBQ online has a ghost: the thirty-year-old spirit of its print version. Though digital technology radically shifts the ways in which we read and write—witness “¶ash ¤ction,” email, and Instant Messenger—the new technology is deeply in¶ected by print culture. The effect is uncanny. Though page numbers might have disappeared, residual features (like a table of contents, for example) remain. We are a book, and not. We are the book’s ghost, present and absent at once. Online the book (dis)appears. You can sense its presence
When Horses Fly
101
in our new con¤guration, and we plan to make the apparition stay with our print annual and electronic archive. In this way we will document the work of the past within (and through) the technology of the present. As the above anecdotes suggest, however, this ghost makes some uneasy. She whispers things about what’s real, what’s disappearing. Though her presence suggests anxieties and fears surrounding cultural change, I like having her around. She keeps us connected to the past. In a world of sequence and events that ¶ow in a single direction, a world of capitalist time, the ghost suggests resistance. Or worse, she tempts folks to the edge of the “prestige gap” and threatens to pull them in. Ghost and all, PBQ online ¤lls that gap. We occupy the interstices between Web and print through our hybrid form, our decades-long history, our resilience and adaptability. I’ve begun to think Dan and Tom and I are a latter-day Fred Friendly, Edward R. Murrow, and John Cameron Swayze—we’ve taken one way of telling stories and adapted it to a new medium. We come to the new medium with a long tradition of print publication. For literary mags, it is less about the radical shift in “delivery vehicles” and more about opening up the possibilities of the performance/consumption of the genres/forms contained within the magazine. Like the early pioneers of TV journalism we are developing a new form out of old practices and new technology. Tom makes the point that we’re in a historical moment much like that at the advent of ¤lm, when practitioners/innovators like the Lumiere brothers, Muybridge, and Kuleshov moved from ¤lming the equivalent of staged plays to discovering the unique features of cinema, making ¤lms according to the technology’s capabilities and not adhering to an earlier form’s expectations. Muybridge set a camera up and discovered all four hooves leave the earth when a horse gallops. I wonder what the Internet will help us discover about the literary magazine. Perhaps we’ll ¶y. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. J. M Bernstien, ed. London: Routledge, 1991.
102
Marion Wrenn
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations. Harry Zohn, trans. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Hewison, Robert. The Heritage of Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Metheun, 1987. Hyde, Lewis. The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Vintage Books, 1983. Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1985. Thomas, Karen. “Hyper-Wired Libraries Want You to Check Them Out: Web Resources Are Expanding Across the USA.” USA Today, 3 April 2001, D9. Walden, Scot. “Unsettled.” Painted Bride Quarterly 63 (2000). Available at <webdelsol.com/pbq/issues/63/63.html>t. Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself.” In Leaves of Grass (section 23). The Portable Walt Whitman. Mark van Doren, ed. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Speer Morgan
The Same Thing a Little Better
Commercial websites have undergone their ¤rst big purge. The stock market decided, almost in a single day, that it might not be such a good idea to value companies at a thousand times some fantasy future earnings projection, after all. As zealously as it had jacked up the values of such companies, it laid waste to them, and the result was that a not insigni¤cant number of people who assumed they had the ticket to retirement at twentyseven found themselves unemployed. Revolutions in infrastructure tend to go through such purges. Canals, highways, telephone and electrical systems, automobiles, now the Internet—while such projects may be a great idea, the success of any aspect or individual player is always up in the air, particularly in the early years of an industry. American automobile companies went broke or were “absorbed” by the dozens between 1900 and 1950. This is a good thing to remember when one talks about “revolutions” in publishing or the “vast changes” that the Internet will bring about in publishing, even in the relatively exotic market of literary publishing. The Missouri Review had the ¤rst literary magazine on the Web. In 103
104
Speer Morgan
fact, we were available online even before it even was a Web. During the mid-eighties, our magazine began posting stories, poems, and non¤ction pieces on “The Source,” and later on Compuserve. A few people were crazy enough—or enthusiastic enough—to download stuff we’d posted, but they had to pay a hefty per-minute fee for downloading at 300 bauds. We were doing it partly for fun, experimenting with ways to reach audiences, not really expecting it to have a signi¤cant effect on our economy. Many of the limitations and problems of those earliest days of electronic publishing have been solved, and our Web magazine is now a real partner to our print magazine. Due largely to the efforts of Hoa Ngo, our formidably capable managing editor, Marta Hall, content manager for the electronic magazine, and a cast of about a dozen others, the Web Missouri Review now can be accessed on a site (Missourireview.org) that makes available everything we’ve posted in instantly searchable form. In the not-too-distant future, a reader will be able to search for names, phrases, words, whatever he or she wants from our 25 years of literary history. Our editors are able to update the current Web magazine by the quick use of preset modules, allowing them to spend more time working with editorial selection and less with detail work. With photographs of our staff, audio interviews and readings of authors, an ever-changing table of contents, the Web Missouri Review includes features that the print version will never have. Tina Hall is marketing the magazine on the Web in ways that are making a difference to our economy for the ¤rst time by putting together promotions without the cumbersomeness and expense of mass mailing. Because it is so much cheaper to do, and quicker to set up, a Web-based promotion can be advantageous to the buyer. Returns on such offers are higher than returns on mass mailing, as long as potential customers have chosen to come to the site. The limitation of such marketing is that it requires a lot of traf¤c for it to really work; one can’t send spam mail to 50,000 electronic readers. The greatest limitations of Web-based book and magazine publishing are the ones inherent to the medium of computers. While a person can compose drafts of writing on a monitor, few can read ¤ction or non¤ction prose on the screen for enjoyment, no matter how fancy the screens and formats become. I print out even long emails because of the tendency to lose the
The Same Thing a Little Better
105
point of things when scrolling through. Due to the need for brevity on screen, literary work and feature journalism speci¤cally written to be read on Web magazines tend to be shorter, looser, at times more glib than detailed re¶ective writing for print. Ebooks are portable but still expensive and not as “natural” to read as books. One is still reading from a screen. They are useful for such specialized markets as expensive medical or scienti¤c texts but less so for writing meant for re¶ection and enjoyment. Ebooks have been going through “standards” wars since their introduction, and when there is ¤nally a victor, it is questionable whether people will want to give up their attachment to physical books. For reasons that have often been discussed—durability, transportability, expense, the ability to “see” the thing itself (a book or magazine), relative eyestrain—printed and bound material can’t be beat. I believe that the real future of electronic publishing may be in the maintenance and delivery of texts to points where they can be printed and bound or stapled. I am skeptical of home-based versions of such equipment, but my ideal bookstore or newsstand of the future would sell magazines and journals of all sorts, books that are otherwise “out of print” as well as all the latest ones—deliverable through the Web and bound in whatever way the buyer prefers, including fake leather. In the past, high-speed printing and binding equipment was too expensive, but those problems are being solved with lighter machinery that is already in place in some bookstores. The challenge of such bookstores would be to provide ways to access potential buyers’ interests—in other words, to make up for the ability of buyers to browse or have books recommended to them by knowledgable employees. Sheer availability isn’t enough. The superstores today offer books and magazines by the thousands, but most of it is wallpaper, and going to such places is too often like going into a discount chain and getting lost. How does one know what to buy? My ideal bookstore/information source of the future would be a place that is an odd combination of the present and future, where one goes and talks to people who are trained—and who enjoy and have a knack for—doing what the very best independent booksellers in America already do: ¤nding out their customers’ interests, talking to them, suggesting books and magazines to them. Good bookselling is the beating heart of the in-
106
Speer Morgan
dustry, a fact that the discount stores as well as the publishers who cater to them too often forget. At the eBook Conference last November, Dick Brass, who is in charge of Microsoft’s electronic book division, predicted that the last New York Times would be printed in the year 2018. After that, no paper. While I am not particularly attached to the New York Times in its paper format and know nothing of Mr. Brass, I think such statements are full of it. I strongly suspect that books and magazines will be around a while, however they are delivered. Revolutions in technology result in dead revolutionaries as well as dead kings. They are packed with surprises, backtracking, rediscoveries, and holdouts. Sometimes you have your revolution and then wonder “what’s the big deal, I’m still doing the same thing.” Or maybe the same thing a little better.
Howard Junker
The Naked Litmag of the Future
L
itmags became obsolete when the number of writers eager to appear in them exceeded the number of readers eager to be thrilled by an advanced peek at The New. That turning point coincided, accidentally, with the advent of color television, which affected black-and-white culture across the board and thoroughly co-opted populist storytelling. The real villain in the obsolescence of litmags was the proliferation of writing “programs,” which required in-house journals as necessary academic adjuncts, like hockey rinks or student unions. Editors for these litmags were recruited from the faculty; these (mostly) gentlemen were more or less wannabes, writers who had become professors as a decent (easy) way to make a living and who already resented having to take time away from their “real work.” For most of these hirelings, editing was just another departmental chore. Outside the academy these days are only a handful of full-blown, risktaking litmags: Glimmer Train, Paris Review, Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and ZYZZYVA. Entrepreneurial editors must resist obsolescence because we lack tenure; we do our best to resist by publishing neat stuff. We also resist by serv107
108
Howard Junker
ing the great tradition; we are conservatives who believe that the heritage of the word written on the page—in a linear format—can continue to command respect. I’m not as scared of the Web as I was in 1996 when we ¤rst put up a homepage. Actually, after several people had offered to help us set something up, but never followed through, Mike Neff generously included ZYZZYVA on his pioneering “literary jump site,” Web Del Sol. He shared the widely held notion that litmags would provide valuable “content.” I’ve always felt that litmags belong to a different, physical universe. They are the bricks of literature, where heft and feel—the actual imprint—matters. They can serve as the “content” of another medium only in the way books served as the initial content of Amazon.com—as commodity. At ¤rst, of course, everyone rejoiced that editors could be bypassed on the Web, where anyone can put up anything. In fact, everyone did. There were immediately zillions of ezines and “links.” And it quickly became apparent that this in¤nite slush pile is an oblivion of its own. Some “editor” is still needed to sort through the dross. Merely being made available is not enough. Someone else, besides the writer, has to stand behind the text. And litmag editors do that with their slow and expensive-to-manufacture paper product. What I do look forward to in the immediate future is epublishing. Books-on-demand will allow me to control my inventory and maybe even let me forgo the bother of having to deal with bookstores altogether. Bookstore distribution is terribly expensive for litmags, since you can only sell about half the copies you put out there, and the distributor takes half the cover price—the math is obviously a recipe for disaster. What will probably happen, though, is that the distributors themselves will kick me out, refusing to bother anymore with my puny 1,500 copies. I will then be left with my puny 1,500 subscribers, some of whom presumably love me, and with those few people who used to paw through my bookstore copies to see who famous was getting published and what the guidelines are. These noble readers can now satisf y their modest curiosity by logging onto my website. There will probably never be another $170,000 grant to explore Web possibilities, of the sort the Lila Wallace–Readers’ Digest Fund made to
The Naked Litmag of the Future
109
Ploughshares a few years ago, but funders are perverse and maybe some retrograde benefactor will come along to believe that old warhorses must be prodded into new arenas. The subsidence of dot.com fever will probably mean that litmags can continue on in their adjunct capacity for a few semesters more. But the ability to slow-read will continue to erode as everyone’s eyes are blurred by more and more screen-reading. Info will never be lit, but, like cheap money, “rich” media will drive out poor printed lit. In that sense, litmags will become a repository for all that the Web has no patience for: feelings, complexities, privacies, verbosities. As for hypertext, and all other Web-inspired styles, yes, I imagine there will be no end of newness coming soon. I shudder to imagine what effect years of Instant Messaging will have on my daughter. And yet, when asked to multitask, for example, and write a conventional essay, she can. It takes her time. She goes through several drafts. If only she’d use the spell checker. Or even remember that it’s “i before e except after c.” So I still have hope.
Katherine McNamara
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed: The Formation of Archipelago
Precarious In 1989, did we realize that the twentieth century ended? The world had changed; the change began, I would say, on February 14, when the nation of Iran issued a fatwa, a death-sentence, against the novelist Salman Rushdie. He was an Indian citizen with an international reputation living in London, and he was sentenced to death by a foreign government for a work of ¤ction. That was a terrible shock and sent fear instantly through writers everywhere in the world. I wonder if we recall that fear now. We should recall it. Its memory has affected all of literary life, in that we can no longer believe without question that free speech is indivisible in a civilized, democratic society. In those years I lived in New York and had a book contract with Viking, Rushdie’s American publisher. My editor told me that the chief 110
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed
111
of¤cers of Viking had for a month eaten and slept in different hotels every night, and that the cost of defending the Viking operations was more than a million dollars. (In July 1991, Rushdie’s Japanese translator would be killed, his Italian translator wounded; in October 1993, his Norwegian publisher would be shot and seriously injured. Rushdie had been put at once into protective custody by the British MI5 and would be guarded for the next ten years, until the fatwa was cancelled, if that is the proper verb.) It was a peculiar moment privately, too, because the book I was writing was about Alaska, and about Native people in Alaska. I knew Viking had published a book called Crazy Horse, by Peter Matthieson, which they had been forced to withdraw from circulation because the governor of South Dakota had brought suit against the writer. In those long-ago days I felt, on the one hand, proud to be part of the link to Rushdie and, on the other, puzzled because my editor would not discuss the matter of Crazy Horse. Perhaps he was legally enjoined from doing so. That long documentary book had come out in 1983, but was not circulated for eight years, until 1991, when Matthieson won the suit. But his victory had not yet happened when, in January 1989, I signed the contract for my own book. From the vantage point of obscurity, I realized that the writer’s position even in a middle-class world was— precarious. Knocked About For several years I had noticed, though obliquely, the disintegration of publishing houses in New York and their transformation into subsidiaries of enormous holding companies. Suddenly, early in 1994, two good, small literary imprints, Atheneum and Ticknor and Fields, were shut down by their conglomerate owners, while at Harcourt Brace, a distinguished old name belonging to another conglomerate, most of the adult trade editors were ¤red. A shudder of apprehension, or a sort of collective nervous breakdown, went through trade publishing. The last editor and publisher of Atheneum was Lee Goerner, who was my husband. We were married in 1988, after I had come down from Alaska to join him. He was known as a literary editor; before Atheneum, he had been at Knopf for twenty years. When after ¤ve years as publisher
112
Katherine McNamara
he was ¤red, and Atheneum closed, no other company opened its door to him. I watched him try, and fail, to come to terms with a corporate demand for return on investment that was so egregious as to subvert traditional editorial relations. Simultaneously, I endured the “orphanage” of my own manuscript at Viking. What I had thought about books and how they became published was simply, naively wrong. While I stormed about, Lee suggested reading Bel Ami. He could just as well have recommended Gissing; or I could have read the outcries of many a writer during the last hundred ¤fty years about the commercialism of publishers. Sooner or later, are not all authors disillusioned by this book business? Yet, I knew— I felt—that something irrevocable had occurred, that the texture of our culture, not just our own lives, had been altered, and that this alteration should be fought; that we stood on the high ground, even as it eroded under us. Lee, on the other hand, possessed of a most un-American sense of irony and no technical aptitude at all, bought a computer. For the next year, he listened to opera, took naps, learned his new instrument, the Mac; and then he died, of the complications of diabetes. Thinking about the Web: “Too Democratic” In 1996, having left New York for the quiet literary-university town of Charlottesville, Virginia, I had the vague notion of starting a new review of literary matters I did not see being attended to, at least in ways that pleased me. In my own work, and through Lee, I was acquainted with writers and editors, and asked several what they thought of the idea. The most interesting suggestion came from Sonja Bolle, then editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, who said I should think about publishing the review on the Internet. Her reasons were these: because the Net was “too democratic.” There was no hierarchy, unlike in trade publishing, but there were serious readers who didn’t care to “surf” the Net: they wanted “authority”; they wanted to know where to go to ¤nd good writing. “If you’re there, we’ll know where to go,” she said. On the other hand, the novelist and screenwriter Howard Rodman told me several literary journals existed already on the Net, as did ventures in self-publishing, and that “democracy of the Web” was a good thing, because it opened possibility. The novelists
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed
113
George Garrett and Larry Woiwode wrote me about serious writers with manuscripts in their trunks and writers who had been published obscurely, implying I would not lack for contributors. Woiwode, like a godfather, encouraged me to think of myself as capable of editing and putting a review on-line. Meanwhile, Robert Spaulding, a writer and painter in those days working as press of¤cer for a telecommunications company, wrote from Paris: “As for net journals . . . hey, some of my best friends are, etc. . . . No, what I mean to say is that it’s the network that is the form, not the form itself anymore. This sounds garbled, but you just have to experience it. I still ¤nd the idea slipping away from me. “Pay attention to this: the Net is the form. Work against it; but make it work for you.” Technology: Baf¶ed Technically, I knew nothing about the Net. I used an Apple 520 laptop with a black-and-white screen, and though I subscribed, brie¶y, to America Online, I detested the witless design of their set-up. I didn’t use a browser; the graphical Web didn’t exist for me. I needed to learn everything, but not as an amateur. Unfortunately, the word “professional” implied money, and I hadn’t any to speak of; that is, I had no investment capital. Nor did I consider trying to raise any until I had something to show for it. An inheritance would cover expenses long enough to see if I could make the journal work as an independent, noncommercial enterprise; this was what Michael Bessie, the publisher, would later refer to as “fuck-you money,” the private reserve any small enterpriser needs. I asked technical people how to use the odd forum that the Web was for my own purposes; but I hadn’t learned the lingo. I didn’t even know what questions to ask. The jargon of the Internet was arbitrary and referential. Yet, in the ¶ood of new terms I heard “PDF,” portable document ¤le, meaning (I understood) that a text could be encoded in such a way that it could be read offline and printed, but not altered, by the reader. Because copyright was already an issue on the Web—“everyone said” that writers’ works were “stolen” and posted without permission, or even rewritten, or even plagiarized—I thought
114
Katherine McNamara
this device ensured security. I didn’t know, quite, what “HTML” meant; it means “hypertext markup language,” or the way text and graphics can be reformulated as electrical impulses, transmitted to the ether that is the Internet, and decoded by the receiver’s machine. Or something like that. Citizens of the World Post-1989 I intended to organize, edit, and publish an online journal of literature, the arts, and opinion, to be called Archipelago. By mid-1996, I had registered a site as www.archipelago.org. By publishing on the World Wide Web, I expected to make Archipelago visible without restrictions of borders or transportation and production costs, to educated readers who were, increasingly, living in and being formed by more than one society. I saw that more of us were becoming citizens of the world post-1989, and that I could, adapting the epigram, publish locally and think globally. I meant to choose and edit by listening for the writer’s voice; to publish literature following its own rules, not those of pro¤t-making or a market; and to offer international writing, by Americans abroad and writers in translation. I would work directly with writers, not through agents. I wanted to give the lie to the received idea that good publishing and good literature don’t necessarily go together (on the Web). What Is Responsible Publishing? After Atheneum was closed, after my manuscript was returned repeatedly, and after Lee died, I thought I had better ¤nd out why the book industry, as it was called, worked the way it did. What were “content providers”? It is still impossible to use this phrase without contempt. What did “return on investment” mean? The most important question: who made the ¤nal decision about what books would be published? For it was clear that editors no longer had the decisive say; that is, if they had ever had it. What was “responsible publishing?” For Archipelago I planned a series of conversations with noteworthy American and European book people, retired or near retirement, who were
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed
115
members of an older literary culture being set aside by the massive restructuring of commercial publishing. They would recount their experience, speak of writers published and rejected, discuss editorial and ¤nancial decisions, and so on. The conversations, closely edited and crafted as readingtexts, would appear in each issue. They would become a sort of institutional memory annotating change and marking continuity with serious publishing on the Web. The First Issue; High Nerves By the autumn of 1996, several friends had bravely agreed to be contributing editors: Benjamin Cheever and Larry Woiwode, novelists; Odile Hellier, proprietor of the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris; and Jason Bell, poet and local computer expert, who had suggested the name “Archipelago.” (Shortly thereafter, Bell left for other waters, while John Casey and Kathy Callaway, both novelists, and Edith Grossman, translator, joined this ¶oating group.) The ¤rst issue seemed to materialize from thin air, even as I was all nerves. This is how the best of the literary world works: Benjamin Cheever, constant encourager, wrote a funny, clever essay and, to my delight and amazement, gave it to me to publish. At the National Book Awards dinner that year Frederic Tuten, whose novels I adored, asked without hesitation, “How can I help?” He made certain I got his latest galley, a reissue of his The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, from which I took his new foreword, “Twenty-¤ve Years After.” Kathy Callaway, poet and novelist and an old friend from Alaskan days, had written a series of fascinating letters from Estonia, where she had been a Soros Fellow, and gave me a selection. When living in New York I had seen brilliant poems by the Argentinean Maria Negroni. They were translated by Anne Twitty, whose skill was praised by Richard Howard, who sent them to me. Meanwhile, a critical reading of the American edition of a British poet’s new volume was thrust on me by a dismayed reviewer who asked to be signed “Fidelio”; I thought the use of pseudonym deliciously provocative. And, from Bruce McPherson, publisher of the excellent McPherson and Company, I obtained a sublime story, “The Great Street,” from a collection of stories by an Italian writer who has not won here the honors she deserves, Anna Maria Ortese.
116
Katherine McNamara
This was the ¤rst issue. It offered the kind of writing I thought a reader like myself would want to ¤nd, and probably couldn’t ¤nd collected anywhere else. Three of the contributors —Callaway, Ortese (I presumed), and Tuten—did not use computers. Negroni’s poems appeared in Spanish as well as English, and Ortese’s translator, Henry Allen, was (I thought) a master of tact. Cheever wrote a sophisticated and grumpy diatribe about the laxity of contemporary readers—still worth reading—while “Fidelio” waxed high-minded and poetical. So I felt compelled to write an editorial statement of some kind, and came up with the idea “Art and Capitalist Relations and Why Publishing on the Web Might Be Interesting.” Reading it now, I ¤nd it tells, in miniature, what I expected Archipelago to be and do: I was thinking of where a literary colony might be found, nowadays, and decided that, if one exists at all, geographically and culturally it would be an archipelago. A ¤ne, hard word, archipelago, evoking rockribbed peaks with green life clinging to their slopes, rising from some vast, erosive ocean. Evoking too, a terrible human history. Since 1989, the world has changed, politically, historically, culturally. That was a water-shed year, perhaps the real turn of the century: the year of the Velvet Revolution and the opening of the Berlin Wall, that led to the collapse of socialism and the triumph of unregulated capitalism; the year that began with a death-sentence laid against an internationally-known novelist. Our minds have been different since then. Contemplating that rather large idea I happened upon three articles of recent weeks which seemed to throw a more precise light on the context in which this journal was about to appear. . . . The context was sharply critical of the ideology of the market and the coarseness of trade publishers. I ¤nd my ideas have not changed. Nor has my sense of how the Internet might work as a medium of distribution: We encourage readers to write us. We encourage them, also, to put this issue on their hard drive, by clicking on the download link and
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed
117
following the instructions thereon. ARCHIPELAGO can then be printed; it will appear on paper as we have designed it, and ¤ll about 50 pages. We urge our readers then to pass the journal on to other readers. We are interested in the notion that the Worldwide Web might also be a publishing medium and a distributor of literature; we think serious readers exist in Buenos Aires, London, Paris, and New York as well as in the Dakotas, Key West, Modesto, Charlottesville. We believe they have more in common than they might have supposed, and will be interested to learn if we are right about this. We also hope that when they disagree with us, and with each other—we suspect that this might often be the case—they will let us know. We are certain that well-formed arguments about literature, the arts, and opinion help keep our minds open. Now the issue had to be put online. I’ll compress the tale. The original Web designer didn’t suit and was ¤red, weeks before deadline. Jason Bell, who knew where to look, found the right person, Mike Uriss, a local artist and designer, who drew a logotype in black and white, just as I wanted. I asked for the simplest possible design for presenting the texts with honor. At the last minute, a generous techie gave me the software for writing the PDF, the “download” edition. From this distance, I can’t tell how all came together, but it did, and the issue went live. A month later came the ¤rst notice, on paper, from London, in the Times Literary Supplement: Archipelago, is launched into cyberspace from Charlottesville, Virginia, joining the relatively small number of serious literary periodicals on the trivia-stuffed World Wide Web. . . . Ms. McNamara’s ¤rst editorial for Archipelago adopts a more old-fashioned tone, and ends with the curiously old-media invitation to readers to download the magazine and see how it looks in real, as opposed to cyber, space: ‘It will appear on paper as we have designed it, and ¤ll about ¤fty pages. We urge our readers then to pass the journal on to other readers.’ Next they’ll be saying, ‘I have seen the past, and it works.’
118
Katherine McNamara
Soon after, USA Today Online called us “Cool Archipelago.” Who would have thought it? Not a Democracy: A Small Magazine on the Web If I think Archipelago is a print magazine distributed on the Web, if I think it “really” exists in the download edition, my collaborator Debra Weiss, who became the journal’s Web designer, thinks otherwise. It was she who persuaded me to move away from the black-and-white format of the ¤rst year (because I had a black-and-white screen). “You’re graphics-resistant,” she laughed (as she still does), “and you don’t believe in color, but people really do read on-screen, and you ought to respect that.” She showed me that the technology of the Web could be friendly equally to texts and readers’ eyes. “We don’t have to be ‘webby,’” she said, and went on to construct an elegant architecture behind the screen, so that the design of the magazine never falls apart. She made Archipelago resemble a printed journal by designing a discreetly colored logotype and graphical titles, and by linking succeeding pages, so that readers could, in effect, thumb through each issue, while also linking each article to the spine of the contents page. She refers to my “helpful ignorance” of the Web. I’ll ask her to do something (she won’t give examples) a technically-adept person would dismiss as too dif¤cult. Hmmm, she’ll say, then ¤gure out the necessary coding. She reminds me, too, that in this association, we are not a democracy. We are not organized by committee; the integrity of the operation stands or falls on the two of us and our close attention to detail. (Here I must note my own constant failings and her never-ending patience.) She delivers, handsomely, what she likes to call “hand-crafted high tech.” Betting on the Future As Archipelago begins its ¤fth year, it seems to have proved itself worthy, in the lively tradition of small magazines. The series Institutional Memory, still charting the whitewater of trade publishing, is, in one sense, a book of used-to-be. Yet, I have used it as a guide to what Michael Bessie (again) calls “responsible publishing”—that is, holding your organization to a size you yourself can manage comfortably, keeping your aims in focus, and watching
Organizing a Literary Journal as the World Changed
119
your budget. And this, the heart of the enterprise: “The important question about the publishing industry is: how well does it serve literature?” I don’t believe responsible publishing exists when the expectation of (excessive) demand for return on investment becomes the principle reason for a company’s existence. Have the readers who used to buy good books gone away? No, I don’t think so. But can Archipelago, which has grown to twice the length of the earliest issues, be supported by its readers’ contributions? No, I suspect not. Rather, I observe that the arts have long existed because of an active, concerned audience—and because of subsidy by patrons: foundations, philanthropists, amateurs in the highest sense. Archipelago has no “market”; it produces nothing to “sell.” This quarterly of literature, the arts, and opinion has readers. It has an editor of strong views, a revolving cast of willing volunteers, and a designer who respects eyes as much as texts. It offers the works of human imagination. Recently, Archipelago became a nonpro¤t, tax-exempt corporation. I am about to ¤nd out whether this journal distributed to thousands of readers in twenty-odd countries can be made to support itself, at a time when (it is said) donations to the arts are drastically lower, and low, in a “global economy” dangerously confused with reactionary politics, and on the Web that has been invaded by marketers and designers with the taste of television-programmers. The nonpro¤ts are the beating heart of the Internet, it seems to me, and the Internet links the world to itself. “Archipelago is not a dot.com,” I ¤nd myself saying. What I think is: What an interesting time to be a publisher.
Richard Newman
To Have and to Hold
It comes with the job. As editor of River Styx, I’m often asked to lecture, put together small workshops, or sit on panels variously titled “How to Publish Your Poems,” “What Editors Look For,” or “Meet the Faceless Idiot Behind the Rejection Slips.” These appearances often feel like community service, but since it seems to scratch writers’ itches and since we do receive some funding from public granting agencies, I’m happy to oblige. I can, however, always count on the same three questions: (1) Do you accept simultaneous submissions? (2) Should I include a cover letter? (3) Will online publishing make literary magazines and books in general obsolete? I wish I could answer all three questions with a de¤nitive “No.” To keep audiences amused, I usually answer the last one by saying that my favorite place to read is in bed, and despite my own increasing dependence on computers, I’ll be damned if I’m going to take one to bed with me. It’s true—everybody I know loves to read in bed. And most people I know hate reading computer screens for long periods of time. 120
To Have and to Hold
121
I work another job as a quality assurance software tester at a computer company. If I ever have to do any serious editing or proo¤ng, I simply print it all out. Daily I’m reminded that paper and red ink were splendid inventions. Paper will not disappear. In my stratospherically high, high-tech company, we print out reams and reams of paper every day. The paperless of¤ce will never happen. But many of the people who attend the editorial tutorials are afraid that books are disappearing from our lives and that online publishing will replace publishing on paper. Nonsense. Sure, paper’s gone up at least 25 percent since I started editing. And with postage increasing faster than it takes to get our work and rejection slips back from magazines, virtual words are cheaper, but judging from the successive thicknesses of every year’s Poet’s Market, we’re in no immediate danger. At a used-book store recently, I picked up a ten-yearold edition of Writer’s Market. Not only are there many more magazines now, but there even seem to be twice as many categories. For every magazine that goes under or switches exclusively to an online format, I can think of at least three ambitious new ones starting print runs. And I’ve seen many an emag that hasn’t been updated in years, gathering virtual cobwebs in cyberspace. That’s not to say the Web has no literary uses. Poems of the day are good things, especially when they’re short. Some interactive poems can even be fun. Samples and tables of contents are excellent ways of showing browsers a magazine’s ¶avor, philosophy, or favorite writers. But you don’t know a literary magazine until you take it to bed with you—or at least spend a cozy evening together on the couch. Like the WWW itself, I think the best thing about literary magazines online is the email. Writers and editors can communicate better and faster. Fiction writers can send us the text so we don’t have to waste time typing it, adding the inevitable typos. Editors can work closer with writers to make sure we’re publishing the writer’s intentions with the utmost clarity. Also, through our various websites, I’ve struck up correspondences and close friendships with many other editors I’ll probably never meet face to face. “Do you get submissions from so and so?” “God, yes—he sends us work once a month!” “Us, too! Every little thought he has, he feels compelled to jot it down and send it out!”
122
Richard Newman
I’ve also noticed that, since so many magazines have websites lately, I’m asked to lecture and workshop and panelize less than I was before. Magazine sites post their speci¤c guidelines. River Styx also has an “Ask the Editor Anything” page where people email me questions about, well, anything: (1) What’s the name of the underworld boatman and that three-headed dog? Charon, Cerberus. (2) Do you consider simultaneous submissions? If you must, and only if you notify us immediately upon having it accepted elsewhere. (3) Should I include a cover letter? To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, I’ve been in this business a long time. Chances are if you send me a poem or a story I’ll know what you want me to do with it—or what you might want me to do with it if I don’t like it. The one thing we’ve had to specif y in our online guidelines is that we won’t consider esubmissions. Not that this restriction deters everyone, of course, but at River Styx we receive thousands of poems a month and around 250 stories. We only publish three issues a year—the odds of getting into the magazine are probably less than my average daily blood alcohol level. So many people send out their writings impetuously, almost as soon as they write them. I know I’ve done it before and winced a few days later. But if printing out the work, writing the cover letter, addressing the SASE, sealing it all, and putting a stamp on the whole thing doesn’t act as a deterrent, nothing will. I can only imagine how many more submissions we’d receive, how many ¤rst drafts, how many impetuous pieces that might not age as well as a writer hopes, if all submitters had to do was hit “send.” Electronic publishing won’t kill literary magazines. On the whole, they won’t die, though many periodicals are very sick. The sickness, however, is due to simple economics: too many magazines out there that too many people want to get published in but far too few people want to read. If only 10 percent of our submitters subscribed to or bought a copy at a bookstore, we wouldn’t need to rely so much on grants and public support. Alas, our grants get smaller every year, and River Styx, like many other independent magazines and even ones supported by universities, has been operating under increasing budget de¤cits. After 25 years of publishing, it may soon be our turn to get shelved, too. But at least people can still pick up one of those old issues, turn the pages, hold it in their hands—or take it to bed.
Guy Shahar, Ginger Murchison, Renée Bandazian, and Shawn Butler
Burgeoning Possibilities with Untamed Enthusiasm
Most writers are readers, and readers, one hundred to one, still want to hold the books and magazines they read, touch the paper, smell the ink, and enjoy the kinesthetic reward of turning pages, but publishers, all publishers, can no more overlook the immutable onrush of change than button makers could ignore the zipper. Just as no one will seriously contend today that zippers pose a threat to buttons, Internet publications are in no danger of making print publications obsolete. The print-versus-online debate has raged on for ¤ve or six years, and the argument, epitomized by the image of the computer and the book 20 paces apart, guns drawn at high noon, has gotten us nowhere. The problem, inherent in the question rather than in the answer, is in the word versus, which implies we will be left with one or the other, while the truth is that both will exist and enhance each other. Consider the poetry publication, and except for those published 123
124
Shahar, Murchison, Bandazian, and Butler
under the auspices of the healthy ¤nancial umbrellas of colleges or universities, the issue of cost immediately comes to mind as the culprit that has waylaid all but the few very best. The high cost of owning and maintaining print machinery, the declining source and escalating cost of quality paper, of¤ce space, editorial staff, binding, and ink, not to mention the enormous costs of distribution, advertising, and postage have sent many a poetry periodical the way of the manual typewriter. With high costs contributing to the high incidence of failure, the print publication, less and less likely to take risks, is leery about rolling the dice with poets unfamiliar to readers. Thus the known rather than the unknown and experimental becomes the standard, and when an editorial fraternity scratches the backs of fellows and recycles the same writers over and over—the huge and ugly reality of that nepotistic practice as old as papyrus—to appease a donor base of loyal contributors and readers, poetry, poets, and readers all fall victim, especially tragic in a struggle where everyone is essentially on the same side. It’s tiresome to reiterate the historical evolution of Internet publication; it’s enough to say it has arrived, and it has arrived with graphics, audio, and stylistic zing that makes webzines pop. Readers like what they see on their screens, and they are reading on the Net. While print poetry publications, available mostly in large city bookstores or by subscription, cost from $7 to $12 and attract a targeted intellectual and af¶uent audience, anyone with a computer can read an online poetry magazine free, and with computers accounting for more of more people’s leisure time, online poetry may reach even the unread, persons whom print poetry might never hope to reach. While it seems a far stretch to credit the Internet as a panacea to America’s literate shortcomings, those whose interest is piqued by even a bad poem online will sooner or later stumble onto a better one, surely a step toward turning away from the hypnotic distraction of television. They may even end up at a bookstore checkout with a poetry book or magazine in hand. Today, even an amateur searching the Internet will ¤nd some 90,000 poetry ezines. The argument that many of them are poor quality and will lower the standards of poetry holds no more water than the argument that a print magazine has never published a bad poem. Quality, whether it be in print or online, is the editor’s job, and certainly traditional publications have never been immune to putting out poor products. The publishing problems
Burgeoning Possibilities with Untamed Enthusiasm
125
with space constraints and errors in print are eliminated online, and feedback to the editors is instantaneous. One online poetry magazine that takes its editorial job seriously, The Cortland Review, the ¤rst online poetry publication to enhance its text with streaming audio, publishes interviews and original poetry and ¤ction in quarterly issues; book reviews, essays, and autobiographical pieces in monthly features; and poetry news and events weekly. While some contributors—some pretty impressive names have published online for the ¤rst time in these pages—have admittedly expressed initial hesitancy about online publishing, when they peruse The Cortland Review and note the respected contributors archived there, the hesitancy wanes. As they communicate with the editors and work to produce their piece in the best possible light, with attention to even the minutest of details, they are assured of the integrity of both the magazine and the staff. While copyright law pertaining to the Internet is rapidly evolving and the jury is still out on many issues, The Cortland Review acquires the rights of ¤rst-time electronic publication of a piece, with all rights reverting back to the author. Spawned in 1997, operating without the high overhead of its print counterparts and thus exonerated from any obligation to donors and fellow editors, The Cortland Review publishes highly esteemed poets—the awardwinners and the critically acclaimed—alongside lesser known and previously unpublished voices, the new blood that tends to race wildly through the veins of the literary world. No poet, however unsung, is disenfranchised. The Cortland Review’s primary goal is to provide its audience with moving, important, stimulating, and relevant material, and fresh voices are given the same consideration and awarded the same space as established ones. User-friendly, The Cortland Review is published on vibrant, easy-toread pages just one click away from free-streaming audio that generates a priceless intimacy between reader and poet. Hearing Billy Collins, Thomas Lux, or Robert Pinsky read their own poems is to fully comprehend that poetry is a spoken art. Like Frank Sinatra’s voice and Miles Davis’s trumpet, poetry is written to be heard, the voice of the poet commanding attention and guiding readers through each line and stanza with the phrasing, tone, and in¶ection that matches the poet’s intention. Streaming audio gives The Cortland Review archive a virtual “open mic” feature all day, every day, giv-
126
Shahar, Murchison, Bandazian, and Butler
ing readers the option of a poetry reading without moving out of their chairs. That immediately accessible archive, another feature impossible to print magazines, serves readers and researchers as an increasingly comprehensive library and will one day justly chronicle the text and voice of poetry’s past, all within cyberspace that takes up no space. Not limited as the print magazine is to a subscriber audience, The Cortland Review reaches out with a global perspective. With the click of the mouse, the world is transformed into a vast coffeehouse where poets from the United States share the stage with contemporaries from England, Canada, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand, promoting cultural awareness to readers identi¤ed from as many as 80 countries. It’s an old notion that the latest technology will destroy whatever went before it, yet the fear that the Internet will eliminate the need for books and magazines is wholly unfounded. While the Internet has not yet reached its adolescence, it already owns a generation of young minds. Inevitably, computers will make their way into every home and business just as the telephone did, and more and more people will be reading online. Still, people are buying more books now than at any time in history; more people are writing poetry, and the number of poetry books published each year continues to rise. The poetry magazines and journals, both print and online, will not only survive, they will serve each other. Most of the best print journals have created online versions of themselves, and the best ezines, though technologically innovative, are marching to the standard of the best of their print counterparts. The Cortland Review, armed with passion, opportunity, and streaming audio, savors its exploration into the burgeoning possibilities of the Internet with untamed enthusiasm, yet it strives for the excellence that has been the incantation of its older cousins, the print journals, since their beginning.
David H. Lynn
Epublishing and Literature: Challenge and Opportunity
Electronic or online publishing is already a fact of life, no more a matter of debate than, well, the moveable type it threatens to replace. The ¤nal hurdles to bits and bytes being a perfectly acceptable replacement for printed pages will be cleared in a year or two, perhaps less. By that I largely have in mind the development of comfortably readable and portable screens. Few people, myself included, want to read lengthy ¤ction or more than a few poems at a time on current computer screens. But ebooks are coming, and they will be more attractive, lighter, less costly, easier to read— of all that we can be certain. Now, what does that mean for those of us in the literary world? Will printed pages disappear entirely? I don’t think so. Publishing books, magazines, even small literary journals has become amazingly ef¤cient. It simply isn’t all that expensive to produce type on paper. And many of us will prefer, always I suspect, the tactile pleasures of carrying, of browsing, of poring over a paper page. But over time this will increasingly be 127
128
David H. Lynn
a somewhat indulgent pleasure for a limited market. Independent or institutionally supported presses will continue to produce relatively small numbers of books, limited editions that will be attractive, sought after, admired, and enjoyed. Indeed, this trend towards smaller, regional presses is already happening, driven not so much by the Internet but by the collapse of literary values in major New York–based and international publishing. For the multinational corporations that now own and control those large publishing houses all that matters is pro¤t. Not just adequate or handsome pro¤t, as in the past, but the greatest possible pro¤t, right down to every pinched penny. Poetry, short stories, and ambitious literary novels are growing rarer and rarer on the lists of those houses, the great old names of publishing. Editors pay enormous advances to snare, spend millions on promoting, the latest blockbusters in mystery, sci-¤, and romance, not to mention self-help and sexy diets. It’s presses such as Graywolf and Copper Canyon and Wesleyan and Arkansas, and on and on, that have taken up some of the slack. They are the ones now producing the most exciting new writing, the writing that matters and that shapes us. These and many other small presses produce wonderfully high-quality and attractive printed books that also contain ¤rst-rate literature. Yet the small presses face many great challenges, from scraping by on terribly frugal budgets, seeking foundation grants, looking for ¤nancial backers, to the practical dilemmas of cracking into national distribution. It is very, very hard to get a book from a little-known publisher into bookstores across the nation. And, of course, the major distributors are themselves increasingly owned by the same corporations as the large publishing houses (not to mention tie-ins with movie and television production companies as well). It may be that online publishing or other functions of the Internet will help independent presses solve the challenges of wide promotion and distribution. Books may be printed to order (this is already happening for some educational textbooks); promotions may ¤nd creative new initiatives not controlled by the expense of major magazines and catalogues; and, if the book itself ultimately disappears into a cyberspace version, distribution will no longer require shipping a physical object from one place to another.
Epublishing and Literature
129
So far I’ve failed to mention the rather separate dilemma facing the world of literary magazines, which is my own particular bailiwick. Such magazines have always faced a precarious existence, surviving from hand to mouth, issue to issue, one step ahead of the debt collector. For over a hundred years it’s been a simple fact of life that, while literally hundreds of small literary magazines exist at any one moment in the United States alone, every year many of them fade from view and memory, while others appear, fresh and invigorating. It’s that very freshness, that unexpectedness that has really created a reason for such magazines to exist. They play a role that no other institution can, bringing fresh writers to the fore, offering new editorial visions, moving on. Even The Kenyon Review was forced to close its doors for a decade in the ’70s, though many people continue to claim with ferocious passion that they’ve got an unbroken series of issues on their shelves, including that period as well. And KR was nearly shut down again in 1994 because of ¤nancial pressures. Since then, we’ve spent nearly as much time cutting expenses, creating a board of trustees, launching an endowment campaign as gathering the ¤nest writing from around the world. I believe we’ve managed to do both. With the Winter 2001 issue of The Kenyon Review, as a matter of fact, we’ve made a signi¤cant, and perhaps risky, step involving the World Wide Web. On our website, kenyonreview.org, the entire current issue of the magazine is available for visitors around the world to download free of charge. It is in PDF format, which means that what they will see on their screens and maybe on their printers, is the same design, layout, and content as in the magazine itself. I think this move anticipates other magazines following suit. Many other journals are turning to the Web, viewing it as a complement to their traditional publication, as a source of new possibilities, or as a ¤nancial alternative to traditional print. As long as I’m editor, and I trust well beyond that, however, The Kenyon Review will continue to be printed conventionally as well. For me the artifact is a signi¤cant part of the pleasure, the experience of reading the poems and stories and essays we have gathered together. So my bet is this: that having KR available in its entirety on screen won’t adversely affect our subscriptions or single-copy sales. I may be wrong. But I’m willing to take the risk for the sake of having more people around the world being able to
130
David H. Lynn
see what the magazine actually is, rather than its simply remaining a quaintly famous name that their English teachers may have mentioned in passing. Many magazines may not have the luxury of such a choice. Institutions are increasingly chary of ¤nancing literary magazines—it’s hard to quantif y just what they receive as a return on their “investment.” Greater status? More applications from hopeful students? Increased funding? Academic administrators face straitened budgets of their own and are skeptical about dedicating hefty sums to publications that reach a very limited audience. Editors of independent magazines all too often must dip into their own pockets, and rarely are those pockets comfortably deep. Small wonder, then, that many more magazines than usual have shut up shop over the past couple of years, both famous names and lesser known ones. On the other hand, there has been a veritable explosion of literary ventures on the Internet. Ezines already exist in countless forms and venues, from those mounted by small reading groups in cities or small towns or individual writing workshops, undergraduate endeavors, to sophisticated sites that have suf¤cient funding for creative enterprise. The Internet allows both a straightforward electronic version of conventional magazines, publishing stories, poems, etc., and more innovative possibilities, such as works that exploit hypertext, random structures, and text/art hybrids that aren’t possible in printed formats. Other sites offer specially tailored features. One particularly popular site, for example, is Poetry Daily, which publishes a different poem from a new book or magazine every day. Many people have their computers set to default at Poetry Daily when they go online. There are many other examples. Online sites also offer the great advantage of essentially unlimited capacity at very little cost. They can make vast quantities of material available to viewers, either for free or for a charge. One new venture is hoping to act as a storehouse for all the short stories ever published. Others already offer work published in hundreds of magazines for sale as individual pieces. The thorny issue of copyright is spinning out of control, and authors rightly worry about their creative work being exploited. Organizations such as the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and Poets and Writers are besieged by requests for advice from their members, and they are scrambling
Epublishing and Literature
131
for coherent policy and response. This will be one of the hottest, most vexing areas of the Internet in years to come. Of that I’m certain. Another critical issue has to do with one traditional role of a literary magazine: editorial selectivity. In traditional publishing at all levels, editors make decisions about what gets included between the covers and what doesn’t. They are exercising their professional judgment. The reputation of their magazine or press rests on the reliability, more or less, of such judgments. Readers generally have a pretty good idea of what they are in for when they pick up certain magazines or books from reputable presses. Authors who give in to the (often understandable) temptation of vanity presses sacri¤ce a credibility in the larger community for the sake of seeing their work in print. But how will this work on the Web? Who will call the editorial shots? How will an intelligent reader know? These aren’t little questions. It may be that the greatest challenge to literature and publishing on the World Wide Web will simply be the overwhelming-ness of it all. How can one choose intelligently among all the possibilities crying for our attention? How can we avoid the deluge of sites and links and navigational opportunities? While some readers will slowly develop a map of the Web that suits their tastes and judgments, “bookmarking” sites to which they want to return regularly, others will continue to trust the editorial judgments of magazines and small presses, and larger presses too, for that matter. Of course, this is also a false distinction, at least at this early stage of electronic development: many of us already exist with a foot in cyberspace while the other rests comfortably and securely propped on a couch, as we carefully thumb from one printed page to the next.
Rebecca Seiferle
Illuminated Pages
I imagine sometimes that, after the dot.coms have exhausted their milliondollar startup funds, after the electronic malls have closed, the Internet will once again be what it was in the beginning—a unique space for the free exchange of information, a kind of library that only Borges could have envisioned, full not only of all the texts of the world but the dancing alphabet, the shimmering hieroglyphics, the marriage of the letter and the image that hypertext makes possible. It’s only a dream. For at the moment, the Internet is clogged with banner advertising, with companies trying to make a penny per click, and most of these money-making attempts operate upon the assumption that the Internet is merely another advertising medium—an electronic marketplace that suddenly makes possible the distribution of goods worldwide. And yet it seems to me that the wave of failing e-enterprises in the last year, along with the wild ¶uctuations in the stock market, driven in part by the rising and falling of e-companies—where what matters seems to be not the pro¤t that one has made but the future possibility of pro¤t—is in a sense predictable, for the Internet is ¤nally not 132
Illuminated Pages
133
so much Borgesian library or electronic marketplace as a state of mind. A state of mind made visible and electronically transmittable. What do I mean by “state of mind”? I’m thinking of the editor—a book publisher who carefully attends to copyrights and permissions—who forgot to credit her original publication in my magazine, The Drunken Boat, when her poems were included in a poetry collection. Though she went to the trouble to correct the printed copy, she said that she’d originally left out the credit because her publication in The Drunken Boat had never “seemed quite real.” Without the evidence of a printed page, electronic publication can seem illusory, an idea, not a physical fact. Another well-published poet, who has cultivated a literary living by paying careful attention to every opportunity, credited her publication in our magazine as “her ¤rst on the Internet,” even though I had seen a number of her poems on another site the year before; she seemed to have forgotten the existence of the earlier work. So electronic publishing can vanish from memory. The Web is full of sites that were last updated a year or two ago, sites whose creators have gone off and abandoned them, leaving them to ¶oat in space, somewhat analogous to the “space junk” orbiting the planet. Would anyone cease publishing at a publishing house and just walk out and leave the inventory, the buildings, the printing press, assuming that a lack of interest in publishing had made the very material of publishing vanish? Of course not, yet the Web is cluttered by forgotten debris. In the vanishing personas of celebrity, the Internet is a more tenuous state of mind. I became aware of this when, in my ¤rst venture on the Internet as a volunteer editor, I was approached by poets who seemed to have the expectation that I would know who they were and publish their work automatically. Writers with little or no literary reputation in the world of print may be celebrities in the electronic world; their work appears in any number of electronic venues, and it is, almost always, work that would never appear in print, or which, if published in print, would appear only in magazines open to beginners, magazines that in Writer’s Market would be listed as category I markets. For many of these writers, despair at the lack of publishing opportunity in print has lead them to view the Internet as an alternative mode of publication. So even while they ¶ourish, becoming the equivalent of Internet name brands, it is on the odd premise, even to them-
134
Rebecca Seiferle
selves, that they inhabit a shadow world, a world that is less real for being electronic. They long to be published electronically in order to persuade the printed world to publish them. The opposite is true of many Internet editors who long to publish well-known writers from the print world in order to establish their own literary credentials on the Web, even though many of their visitors will not recognize those “well-known” writers. Just what constitutes “enough publication” or makes one “well-known” or grants a website “literary merit” is ¶uid and intangible. The Internet is often like a shadow continually pointing back to the body that casts it, clicking to the pages of the online booksellers, where the real objects, the real books, can be obtained, as much a way of mind as a state. On the other hand, poets who do have a reputation in print may view Internet publication with suspicion. An Internet editor related to me how she had courted the work of a well-known poet for some time, trying to persuade him of the merits of her magazine, always to have him decline because it involved Internet publication. Yet, eventually, she was to see this poet’s work online at another magazine whose editor had apparently persuaded the author that it was of suf¤cient literary merit. On the Web, “literary merit” is a combination of critical reputation, word of mouth, name recognition, often no more than the state of mind that the magazine evokes with its name. Beyond that, an Internet magazine may be less real to a potential contributor than the magazine’s editor is; the editor persuades by his or her personal reputation. While critical reputation, name recognition, and word of mouth matter in print journals, the top print magazines pay contributors, have a number of prestigious awards (along with money) to confer, may garner Pushcart prizes and nominations, and are carried in particular libraries or have a de¤nite literary audience. The assumption in print is that “anyone who matters” is reading American Poetry Review or Atlantic Monthly. On the Web, thousands of people may visit one’s pages. As I write this, the Winter 2001 issue of The Drunken Boat has just gone online, ending our ¤rst year of publication, and our site, which began with 100 visitors a week, is now at 1,000 visitors a week, more than the average literary journal sees in a year. Yet I have no idea who they are, where they are from, what they do for a living, or how their numbers have grown so exponentially. On the Web, poetry does matter to
Illuminated Pages
135
large numbers of people who are drawn back again and again, and not because they are looking for a place to publish their work. From the beginning, The Drunken Boat has solicited work by invitation only, though there have been a couple of exceptions to that rule; for instance, the startling work of the Australian poet Coral Hull came my way in an email query. We’ve had a number of queries, but in the ¤rst year, probably no more than two dozen people wrote or sent uninvited work. Unlike the print world, where journals often are beset by submissions while making ends meet with a handful of subscribers, we seem to have a wealth of visitors with only a handful of the uninvited knocking upon our door. To Internet novitiates, the Web can seem intimidating technically and in terms of the overwhelming amount of material that it presents. A creative writing student once told me how she had been interested in getting involved with a new college journal until she learned that it was to be “online,” “where there’s so much poetry, and so much of it’s bad.” Undoubtedly, she had visited some search engine, typed in “poetry,” received over two million entries for the word, many of them Joe or Jane’s poetry written just this morning. A well-known poet described most of the work on the Web as “very thin.” I think, at times, Internet publication suffers from the lack of economic pressure that has made editing necessary. For print editors, ¤ve more pages, an extra inch on the height of the book, can push the project into another level of expenditure. Surely the prevalence of the sixty-page poetry book is partly the result of economic pressures, with the result that many poets wishing to write a publishable volume have taught themselves to think in terms of the short suite, the book preoccupied with a couple of themes or dealing with a particular subject, with the result that many critics expect a book of singular preoccupation. Any change in a book costs money, and mistakes are set in print until reprinting. On the Internet, it takes a few minutes to alter the code, to save the ¤le, and upload it on the Web, and revision is an endless possibility. On the Internet, two or two hundred pages do not make for any more expense. What costs is storage space, a factor that only large images and moving audio/visuals can impact. Length of text becomes inconsequential; there’s no economical reason to ask authors to prune. I suspect that this is one of the reasons that much of the poetry and ¤ction on the Internet is of poor quality; the function of the editor has always been
136
Rebecca Seiferle
founded in economic necessity—to trim words, to trim pages, to trim costs— and without that economic necessity, many ¤nd no reason to edit, with the consequence that much Internet work reads like a rough draft. On the Web, editors have to be entirely impelled by taste, perceptions of quality, or a writing philosophy. Whatever appears on the Web is a re¶ection of an editor’s sensibility, loosed of the bounds of material constraint. Yet the advantage of limitless space is that the Web lends itself easily to projects, to the passionate obsession, as in the work of Coral Hull, to the driven sequence like Mordechai Beck’s Moonsong, or to recovery by translation of Leah Rudnitsky, a lost poet of the Vilna Ghetto. I ¤rst heard of Rudnitsky from the Israeli poet and translator Karen Alkalay-Gut, who sent me a translation of a poem describing the terrors of the Nazi occupation in the form of a simple and haunting lullaby. To me, it had obviously been written by a talented poet. Pestering Karen for more information, I was rewarded when she was able to ¤nd mention of Leah Rudnitsky in the archives of the Wiesenthal Center. Rudnitsky had been a notable poet, winning a prize for a long poem on the Lithuanian Holocaust during the occupation of the Vilna Ghetto. By means of the Internet, our email correspondence between Israel and the United States, a search through electronic databases, we had recovered the work of this noteworthy poet, and also her name, for while she had been often anthologized in Israel, it was often without any biographical information and with the misspelling of her name. The Internet is also an active force for the revision of traditional forms. In our ¤rst issue of The Drunken Boat, I published an interview with Ruth Stone that I had conducted conventionally by telephone and tape recorder over a couple of sessions. But in subsequent issues, I’ve began developing a form I called the “e-view,” an interview conducted by email focusing on the poet’s current project: David Romtvedt’s Cowboy’s Introduction to Poetry, Eleanor Wilner’s new work and thoughts on “cultural memory,” and Tony Barnstone’s Readymades. The medium seems to create the message, to grant new privileges and powers. In both the Romtvedt and Barnstone works, poems were surrounded by prose—introduction, afterword, interspersed explanations of the project—much like the early works of the Dadaists or Surrealists where the work was presented not singly but in the context of its idea. The Internet is ideally suited to such explorations, and it
Illuminated Pages
137
remains to be seen if this tide alters the view of poetry in the print world, which still seems to be ¤xated on the idea of the perfectly publishable single poem, preferably under forty lines, and the sixty-page MFA thesis manuscript. With our contributors, we prefer a group of representative poems, to give some idea of the poet’s range and sensibility, rather than a single poem. Similarly with reviews and essays, I’ve encouraged the writers to expand beyond the limitations of newspaper review, which one of them said was usually “just a longer blurb,” into considerations of craft and theory. The Internet’s technical aspects and plethora of pages has given a great deal of in¶uence to gatekeepers, sites that have established themselves as portals accessing any number of sites, and also exerting a kind of editorial evaluation upon those sites. Some webmasters and editors of well-known sites have established themselves as ¤gures of liaison between print and Internet. Many writers, venturing onto the Web, prefer to be escorted by these keepers of the gate. Sometimes the stamp of reputation is conveyed by numbers, the ubiquitous counters keeping visible track of how many visitors a site may have and serving to persuade the visitor that 120,000 visitors cannot be wrong. Some of these webmasters, though without particular literary talent or reputation, have become signi¤cant ¤gures in the literary world, visiting writers’ conferences or being asked to host an electronic panel at AWP or the MLA. Many of them come to Web publication by business routes, having worked in software, computer design. They are met by writers and editors who are drawn to their sites by the promise of legitimacy and technical expertise. A situation that resembles the conventional relationship between the publisher and the editor has resulted. The webmaster/publisher runs and hosts the site, overseeing its editorial direction and its technical elements. Various editors will then “work for” this publisher, inhabiting a certain niche within the electronic framework that the publisher provides. In the world of Internet publishing, the primary commodity is not money but labor. As near as I can tell, poetry magazines on the Web suffer from the same lack of funding that they do in print, but on the other hand, they don’t need much money to keep going. Anyone can begin an electronic magazine for a couple hundred dollars. The only fees are the acquiring of a domain name (in itself not a necessity though it helps enormously in developing name recognition) and the fees associated with
138
Rebecca Seiferle
having the site “housed” by any number of services, varying widely in cost and services provided. What is needed is volunteer labor to do the editorial chores of evaluating and selecting work, ¤nding new work and replying to extensive email, and doing the markup—the HTML work. When I ¤rst thought of starting The Drunken Boat, the greatest impediment was the HTML work, ¤nding someone who could do the technical computer work; it was this technical expertise that my former publisher had provided. And I think it is this lack of technical expertise that often keeps people from beginning their own websites, for the poets and writers who might be drawn to these enterprises are often Luddites, opposed and antagonistic to technology, sometimes fanatically so, or else indifferent and uncomfortable with the technology. There is a certain sort of snobbery at work sometimes; that the “real” work is “printed” work, that the only work that matters is work for which someone (i.e., a publisher) has paid to bring into existence, not the work that someone (the Internet publisher) has labored over to bring into existence. This, too, is a state of mind. A kind of antitechnology bias among the literate. I decided to teach myself HTML while designing and doing the markup for the ¤rst issue of my new magazine, The Drunken Boat. A simple guide, Teach Yourself How to Build Web Pages, and looking at different pages on the Internet were all I needed. Basically once the design of the page has been established, it’s fairly easy to put page after page into HTML, using simple commands. Some of the commands are frustrating—for instance, HTML doesn’t have true quotation marks or apostrophes but presents them as the marks for inch and foot. It can be blinding work at times, requiring long hours to put an issue together, trying to proof the text surrounded by various commands, adding hundreds of links. However, the process of learning HTML wasn’t any more dif¤cult than ¤rst learning to use a computer, an old Osborne with the commands tied to various keys that had to be memorized. As people become more familiar with the Web and the new software programs that make it very easy to convert ordinary word processing pages into webpages, I imagine the Web will become less dependent upon the gatekeepers. Rather than a large site functioning as a kind of ¤lter and hub for other sites, I think webpages will become communities. The newest, most effective search engines are those that rely on links, and these links be-
Illuminated Pages
139
tween sites of similar taste and interest will create communities on the Web. So The Drunken Boat presents features and links of various websites, from the South African Isibongo to The Caribbean Writer to LA Poetry Festival to emagazines like Archipelago and print publishers like Copper Canyon and Boa Editions, spokes in a wheel, but without ¤ltering them through our own editorial sensibility and without presenting them with the quirky headlines and catchy phrases of electronic, literary salespeople. Web publishing shares many of the aggravations of print publishing. A contributor sends in a newly revised text without realizing that the text must be entirely cut and pasted into code. A shape poem or step poem, which requires a snarl of code to achieve, may not seem worth the trouble at three in the morning. And there are new aggravations, like the proliferation of emails or the JPEG image that someone sends, not realizing that it needs to be shrunk to a manageable size and that blows up one’s mail box. But on the Web, many more things seem possible, a future in which poems have readers, in which the author no longer has to be pruned and trimmed to economic pressures, in which exploration of text and its presentation occurs in an almost in¤nite space. The editor is free of many of the overriding pressures of print publication—production costs, inventory, advertising budgets, publicity costs, slush piles—and Web work has a certain magic of its own. To stare at the page of a poem, ¤lled and surrounded by HTML code, and then to view that page with a browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer is like looking at the snarl of thread on the underside of a cloth and then inverting the cloth suddenly to reveal the image of the tapestry on the other side. It’s always remarkably beautiful to watch the text and image take shape. As if one had imagined a certain page into existence and then watched it materialize in the light on the screen. Like the illuminated pages of a monastery, webpages are full of light, ¶uid in the electronic library; the entire page impacts the eye, not just the text upon it; one is struck by the page rather than hunting the text within it. Most often the comments I receive from readers/visitors are that the pages are beautiful; contributors “love the look” of their own work. It is not just text anymore but a state of mind, a visible presentation of oneself into the world.
Steve Heller
Electric Dreams: What Words Tell Us
In March of 2000 I had just ¤nished a narrative essay called “Walking Through the Moon.” It dealt with the lowest point in my life: the months immediately before and after my divorce from my wife of 27 years. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that during those same months I was haunted. Haunted by memories and—as it seemed to me then and still seems to me now—spirits of everyone I had ever loved. I am not a religious man and have a deep skepticism about all things supernatural. But anyone who has ever felt the foundations of his life crumble beneath his feet, no matter who did what to cause it, will instantly recognize what I am talking about. For nearly a year now, ever since Mary and I separated for the last time, the people of my former life, my married life, have haunted my new one. They visit me unannounced, at any given moment of the day. Sometimes they pop into my head as memories, in scenes precisely as I recall them from real life. Sudden recollections. But just as often, it seems, they come to me as phantasms, daydream ¤gures, and the scenes that unfold in 140
Electric Dreams
141
my conscious mind are composites of various conversations from various times and places. Reformed conversations: What was said. What was unsaid. What still needs to be said. The essay describes a hike I took on the Konza Prairie a few miles from Manhattan, Kansas, where I still live. During this hike, I let the ghosts come to me—whenever, wherever, in whatever manner they would. A week or so later, I sat down to reconstruct the experience—¤rst on the electric gray screen of my desktop computer, then ultimately on paper. Today I walk this trail literally as well as in my mind’s eye. I was here, am here, on the Konza. The people I will encounter on the trail today have spoken to me in the same ways every day of my new life. I am taking this walk deliberately to let them all have their say. As many of them, and their words, as I can bear. Postmodern critics often speak of the “instability” of texts. For me, this notion has always related to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: Nothing in the universe is stable; the very act of regarding anything necessarily changes it. The act of writing resists but does not defeat this principle. “There are no new stories,” our writing teachers teach us, and they are correct. But we don’t write to create something out of nothing. We write to tell ourselves stories, to ¤nd order in chaos, to give structure to our unstable lives. Words tell us where and who we are, I claim in “Walking Through the Moon.” In the essay I am reading a trail guide that tells me exactly where I am along the path through the Konza Research Natural Area, “an 8,600 acre tract of native tall grass prairie set aside for long-term ecological research.” In literal terms, the claim depends on the reader’s standing beside the properly numbered trail marker, reading the proper guide pamphlet (there are different guides for different loops). But the truth is I wrote those words on the keyboard of my Compaq Presario PC in a rented house on Wildcat Ridge in Manhattan, Kansas, where I now live with my new wife, Sheyene. The journey I took on the glimmering screen of the Compaq was as much a journey through the mind as across the prairie. Where and who was I, truly, when I wrote those words? Memory is an unstable text. A little further into the essay and the hike, I come upon Marker #3, which stands beside a narrow wooden bridge across King’s Creek. At this point I recall a confrontation I’d recently had on
142
Steve Heller
this same bridge with my oldest son, David. David had just turned 18 and had not yet accepted the divorce, nor the new woman in my life. “Give her up, Dad. Do it for us. Do it for all the friends you’ve lost, for everybody who still cares about you. Do it for yourself.” I do not respond. I am ice standing in air. “Give her up.” Neither of us says anything further. The sky above holds its breath; the stream below is the only moving object on the prairie. Then all at once the bridge beneath me undulates and begins to creak. I am walking again, straight toward David. As I approach, he tenses, unfolds his arms, makes his hands into ¤sts. His expression says: Don’t. Please don’t make me do this. And I want to tell him: Yes, don’t. Remember what I told you about the day I hit your grampa Heller. Nothing will be the same afterward. You can never take it back. When I am almost upon him, David drops his ¤sts to his sides, but does not give way. I walk right through him, through my vision of him, the atoms of his lean, hard teenage body dissolving like a hologram as I pass. I keep on walking: up the bank, around a bend, across a second bridge, and up the next rise. I do not look back. Although the snippet of dialogue in the scene above is drawn from actual conversations with David (one of which we had on this very same bridge), the David in this scene is a phantasm, a daydream vision I saw on the bridge on the day I hiked the Konza alone. On that day I recalled not only the confrontation David and I had at this same spot but other similar conversations in living rooms, cars, and coffee shops. As in many daydreams, remembered conversations merged and blurred. The fragment above is a faithful rendering of what I both recalled and dreamed the day I hiked the Konza alone, accompanied only by a variety of haunting memories and dream visions—the same kinds of awful waking dreams experienced by anyone who has gone through a traumatic, life-changing experience. In the wake of the trauma, dream conversations with children, lovers, parents, and friends occur again and again, day after day. The visions—but mostly the words—haunt us. Unstable memories, unstable lives. Writers create texts, and texts are also unstable. How can a well-meaning person tell the truth?
Electric Dreams
143
“The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously said. So what about the medium of the text? Shortly before I ¤nished “Walking Through the Moon,” I was invited to submit it to a new electronic journal, Oklahoma Review. I’d never published anything in a refereed ejournal before, and wondered who would actually read it. Like most writers, I had a strong bias toward print, and I had helped establish two literary journals, Mid-American Review and Hawai’i Review. However, the nature of this particular essay had also made me acutely aware of the fact that although I had always imagined publishing “Walking Through the Moon” in the traditional way, in print, I had actually created it electronically, on my Compaq Presario. Unstable memories, unstable texts, unstable media. The words on my color monitor are really nothing more than arrangements of tiny electric charges. Printed words are solid marks on the page. But are printed words any more “real” than the vision of David that I walked right through in my mind’s eye one day on the bridge across King’s Creek? If you could create a text electronically then publish it in print, what difference did the medium of publication really make? I decided to take my chances and submit “Walking Through the Moon” to Oklahoma Review. Just as I was getting ready to mail off the essay (I chose to do this rather than to submit electronically), I ran into Tim Schell, coeditor of a ¤ne print journal called Clackamas Literary Review. Tim complained of the fact that while Clackamas was deluged with ¤ction and poetry submissions, good literary non¤ction was hard to come by. I had a feeling Oklahoma Review would accept “Walking Through the Moon,” and I had nothing else to send Clackamas. However, the editor of Oklahoma Review, Ken Solstad, had previously informed me that OR allowed not only simultaneous submissions but simultaneous publication in a print journal. So I asked: Would the editors of Clackamas consider publishing something that might appear at the same time in an online journal if both magazines received proper credit? His initial response was no. That would be a reprint, he explained, and Clackamas printed only original work. However, neither of us had considered such a possibility before, nor its consequences. The more we talked, the more intrigued Tim became. “Why don’t you send us the essay and we’ll see?”
144
Steve Heller
In the end, “Walking Through the Moon” appeared in both journals, with the knowledge and consent of both staffs. The simultaneous publication seems to have been good for everyone involved. Oklahoma Review’s website contains not only a reference to the essay’s simultaneous appearance in Clackamas but a direct link to the Clackamas website, where one can sample contents of that magazine and order a copy of the issue containing the print version of “Walking Through the Moon.” Unstable memories, texts, and media. An unstable universe at every stage of the process, from inception through production and reception. Where is all this instability taking us—and who will we be when we get there? Is the medium the message? This is no longer the right question. Words tell us where and who we are. Now, and only now. In the moment of making the stories of our lives. In the moment of reading and interpreting those same stories. The relationships among writer, reader, and text are never stable, and neither are our lives. This is exactly why we strive to make the words solid. To make them last. To create the illusion of stability where there is none. Nothing maintains this illusion like the feel of turning a crisp page with our thumb and fore¤nger. Despite my good experience with Oklahoma Review, I remain biased toward print. It’s still the best way to live with the ghosts who travel with us.
Lucia Perillo
Big Sky Country The Brain—is wider than the Sky— For—put them side to side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside—
Only last year did I purchase a computer with suf¤cient power to connect to the Internet. I have to call it power, because I don’t understand the meaning of the numbers assigned to the various megahertzes and rams and gigs. Before that, I had viewed computers as glori¤ed typewriters: my hands had begun having trouble with ¤ne motor movements, and I was grateful for the opportunity to edit without constant retyping. The decision to hook up I made reluctantly while on sabbatical, in order to communicate with my campus from afar. Otherwise, the purchase of a new computer seemed frivolous, and it disturbed me that, barely four years after I bought the ¤rst one, such an expensive heap of plastic should be consigned to the land¤ll. On the other hand, I also was afraid of turning into a Luddite. This is a common persona among poets, who prefer to be photographed in their book-lined studies with their hands draped over their manual Olivettis. 145
146
Lucia Perillo
Poets generally don’t like to admit they watch TV or surf the Net or listen to pop music, my relationship with which had become analogous to that which I had with computers. Pretty much I stopped following rock and roll after I left college. I had my crate of albums from the ’70s and I ¤gured that was all I needed. I also didn’t own a TV and once, when a screenwriter from LA stayed at my apartment (a friend of a friend, he was writing a script whose culminating chase scene took place at the particle accelerator in the town where I was living), he looked around before commenting witheringly: “No TV. How ascetic.” But I digress. My subject was rock and roll. A few years after the screenwriter slept on my couch I lucked into a boyfriend who had a CD player, and I found myself liking some new music after years of (like Bartleby) preferring not to. I also realized that I had somehow turned into my parents, stalwartly defending Mel Tormé against the onslaught of the Beatles. A friend with a young son was recently bemoaning hip-hop music (one of the many crises in this nation precipitated by the rise of Eminem), lamenting that he would not understand the music his son would be listening to as soon as he graduates from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” “Look,” said the boyfriend with the CD player, who had by now morphed into the husband. “You’re getting worked up about something that doesn’t even exist yet.” CDs came along around the same time computers started populating people’s homes as an element of the postmodern feng shui. The beige machine on the desk unencumbered by paper: these nooks reminded me of the interior of the starship Enterprise. I saw my ¤rst residential model at the home of a fellow graduate student and immediately berated him. He also had a microwave. This was evidence of a level of bourgeoisie that ought not be tolerated in graduate school. But in the last year of my attendance, the graduate school instituted a program that made primordial laptops available as loaners to technologically deprived students. I took one home and fell in love. The computer resembled a toaster oven, its color that ubiquitous greeny-beige: Caucasian zombie skin. It was nearly silent, thank God: my old IBM Selectric was so loud that my roommates complained about the havoc it wrought upon their sleep. Of course the computer changed my mode of composition. My longhand notes and journal entries dwindled, but as I said, that was all going
Big Sky Country
147
to hell anyway. The computer brought the possibility for endless revision of lines, and my composition process slowed. No more writing in my truck at white heat in the middle of the night. Now it was the same line written with the position of the clauses swapped two dozen ways. Each line was arrived at by rigorous testing, not so much by intuition anymore. As I’d begun to realize the limitations of my innate musical gifts, this process seemed to suit me. My undergraduate training had been as a scientist: now each potential line became a hypothesis. Having said this, I must admit that often I’ve thought about returning to the typewriter, to recultivate my ear. And to force myself to commit to the line as written: Ginsberg’s “First thought best thought” (actually, this is a dumb idea, and indeed Ginsberg’s manuscripts expose his fairly meticulous process of revision). Last week I spilled my water bottle on my keyboard, which necessitated this reversion anyway. “Mere” typing felt painful, literally, but in the end the two poems that I wrote satis¤ed me. The experiment led me to conclude that, though writers make much fuss about their tool of composition, the choice probably does not impact the poem all that much. The individual brain, I would hope, is stronger than the means by which the letters print. Shortly after I graduated from college, I worked a brief stint as a counselor at a nature camp. During our ¤rst week of training we played various touchy-feely games, one of which involved answering dialectical questions. Would we prefer driving in a Cadillac or a horse-drawn wagon? Did we prefer listening to city noise or the sound of a waterfall? I was insulted, because the answers meant to be elicited were obvious, and among the group there quickly evolved a fascistic insistence on the correct response. Would we choose a typewriter or quill pen? Everyone but me said quill pen, and forever after I was branded as a weirdo. Needless to say, I left the job before any kids even got there. But again, I digress. I was deliberately taking a circuitous route to the real subject here, which is cyberspace, a system whose chief problem is its lack of a Dewey Decimal System to organize what it contains. As a result of the medium’s hypertrophied growth, its content seems to me too knotted and densely packed, like a tumor full of ¤brous tissue. So I ¤nd wandering there unpleasant, as if I were trying to walk through a jungle laced with
148
Lucia Perillo
vines: I end up having to claw all this stuff out of my face, my mouth full of grit. And since I already spend much of my time sitting in an uncomfortable chair and staring into a machine that has ruined my vision, I’m not eager to spend my leisure under similar conditions. Writing is solitary enough, and at least a trip to the library affords a little human interaction. My most recent trip concerned Emily Dickinson, about whom I needed a fact to plug into a poem. I could have punched her name into a search engine and gotten the answer I needed in a ¶ash. (Cyberspace shares Elvis Presley’s motto: Taking Care of Business in a Flash. The acronym TCB and then a lightning bolt—you see it all over Graceland.) Instead I went to the library and checked out a 600-page biography I intended to skim for my needed fact. But the book, I quickly realized, was written with great lyricism and insight, and I was drawn to a section describing the armaments of childbirth in America in the early nineteenth century: Blunt hooks to bring down the thighs in a breech delivery, sharp hooks (crochets) and knives and perforators to puncture the baby’s head when it was completely impacted or dead. . . . Most often surgeons had to kill the impacted child to save the mother’s life. Ah, I thought, so the drama of partial birth abortion has always been a part of obstetrical life: I would not have learned this without the book, and I would not have been able to note the reference, another tome to put on the bedside stack. I might have caught the gist via a hyperlink, but the one thing cyberspace can’t handle is length: it does not know what to do with 600 pages. And I fear that while the one-page poem is suited to this medium, what of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” or “Howl”? What will happen to poems too big for the attention span of the general click? Cyberspace is suited to leaping and digression, which is undoubtedly how the mind works, one thing leading to another then another. I believe I have read John Ashbery commenting on how he intends to mirror this in his poems, which are often accused of being cryptic, not because of any rhetorical dif¤culty but because of their wild leaps, the trail of which (his critics would say the point of which) is often hard to follow. As a child, and to this day, one of my favorite mental games was/is reconstructing how my day-
Big Sky Country
149
dreams travel from point A to point Z. And the primary business of writing is also to slow, ¶esh out, and otherwise examine this process. Poetry in particular, I fear, will suffer from life’s general speeding-up, because it often does not have a narrative hook to lead the reader by the neck, and because it is writing that usually cannot be made into a movie (someone bought the rights to Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Man-Moth” for this purpose, but the screenwriter apparently hasn’t come up with an angle yet). Though even Buddhists are online these days, doing things slowly is generally not acceptable—we talk on the phone as we drive at 70 miles per hour because this “multitasking” supposedly makes life ef¤cient. Poetry, however, operates in a manner that is inverse to the multitask, and sitting down with a book that is only 60 pages long yet intended, ideally, to be read over and over again seems like the epitome of modern wastefulness. The most notable attribute of cyberspace is its egalitarian nature: everyone’s poem can have a place there. This must be wonderful for poets starting out, to have the opportunity to communicate with one another and see each other’s poetry as it comes into fruition. No gatekeeper, no critic saying that one thing is better than another. Yet when I was a younger poet (. . . and still, though perhaps I am now more stubborn in my tastes) I needed (and continue to need) and wanted (and continue to want), people to tell me that this this is better than that that. Not that I need agree with them—T. S. Eliot’s superiority to Elizabeth Bishop I still need some convincing of—but I want to hear the articulations of critics, because I’ve learned so much from the few I’ve known. No matter how we inculcate children with notions of self-esteem, with the idea that everyone has equal worth, when it comes to art, some things being better than others is part of what makes art’s productions challenging and fun. Establishing the hierarchy of our passions should be an important and ongoing mental exercise for all of us. Yet I don’t want to sound like my parents, telling me to turn the volume down, wincing when I try to approximate some John Lennon riff on the piano. The Internet has led me to experience poetry in some moving ways. When I was in the hospital, for example, I brought my computer to dial in from my bed. I clicked onto the Academy of American Poets’ website and for many hours had the likes of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens broadcasting from behind the pseudowall of my bedside curtain. It tickled
150
Lucia Perillo
me, the nurses’ wondering: “Who the hell does she have in there?” I also have clicked on the archived video clips from Robert Pinsky’s “Favorite Poem” project: ordinary people reading the poem that they treasure most. And extraordinary people as well, most notably the ex-president and his wife, Bill Clinton reading a patriotic Ralph Waldo Emerson number (a choice driven by ulterior motives, no doubt) and Hillary reading Howard Nemerov (a beautiful poem for which someone—could it truly have been Her?—must have delved deeply into poetry’s collective conscious). I found it amazing, and heartening, that so many people could be found who even had a favorite poem (though, as always, many “real” poets pooh-poohed this effort on poetry’s behalf for its smack of populism—the general public is supposed to be too dumb to understand us). My best catch from trolling this archive was a Frank O’Hara poem (“Poem”), which I’ve long loved and did not have a copy of because it is not generally anthologized: Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traf¤c was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up The Web gives me not only the text of the poem but also the voice and the face of the man reading it, and I get a kick out of this secret sharing with
Big Sky Country
151
a stranger, this intimacy/anonymity in our exchange of a passion. This is how the Internet has supplemented my relationship to poetry: it has provided me with a highbrow form of entertainment that falls somewhere between reading (yes, I do believe reading poetry should be entertaining) and the TV. It goes without saying that I worry about where the time I spend noodling around on the computer is being borrowed from, and this is why I haven’t sought out much of what the Web has to offer: what I’ve found so far is more than enough. The Poetry Daily site, with its poem each day, has enough archival material to keep a person reading for a good long while. In general, what I’ve found there are short poems, and I doubt I’d have the patience to read a longer piece off of the screen. Already I’m overwhelmed, almost—most days I do not check out the daily poem—but by virtue of the site I have come across gems, such as Kim Addonizio’s “Glass”: In every bar there’s someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him, a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone. Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing, the stupid love affairs, and the terrif ying ones, the ones where actual happiness opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him. And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles, the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining, toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker signals for another. Now the relatives are ¶oating up with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood, a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few ¶urries of snow
152
Lucia Perillo
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world at all, no traf¤c, no money or butchery or sex, just a blessed peace that seems ¤nal but isn’t. And ¤nally the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like; who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely, who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether, the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human? Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty, against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well? Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying; Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something, come close I want to whisper it, to pour the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you, listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober, while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass, while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay, give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop, I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up. This poem I found by accident, after reading that Addonizio was nominated for the National Book Award. A minute or two was enough time for me not only to learn who she was, but also to ¤nd this poem, which I treasure. The computer gives us that instant grati¤cation that is both the curse of our accelerated lives and their blessing: one thing leads to another, jump to jump to jump.
Big Sky Country
153
Such jumping is one of the fancies the Web has to offer: my fear is that it will rob us of the capacity to dwell. In the few hypertext poems I’ve looked at, the writing was abysmal, and students I’ve had who have been attracted to this form have used the technology as smoke to cover writing that itself could generate no ¶ame. Dickinson asserts that the brain is bigger than the sky, but most of us can’t really understand the particulars of big bangs or black holes, and not even Stephen Hawking has it all ¤gured out yet, though his brain, I concede, is pretty big. In creating cyberspace we have similarly created something that may be bigger than our brains—part of what made the Y2K crisis so devilish is that even computer programmers did not fully understand what they had created. Yet I’ve also heard on NPR that, at present, the whole Internet would ¤t on hard drives in the space of a closet. It’s a closet I’m always careful about entering, though, because my bowling ball might fall off the shelf and clunk me on the head.
This page intentionally left blank
Contributors
R. M. Berry is author of the novel Leonardo’s Horse and the story collections Dictionary of Modern Anguish and Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart. His literary criticism has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Narrative, American Book Review, and Context. He is a professor of English at Florida State University, where he teaches twentieth-century literature. Heather Shayne Blakeslee is a native Pennsylvanian living in Brooklyn. For the past five years, she has worked at Poets & Writers, teaching literary writers how to find markets for their work as the codirector of the Literary Horizons program. She is also an essayist and songwriter, and her debut album, Bones, was released in the fall of 2001 under her own label, Little Red Records. She can be reached at <www.heathershayneblakeslee.com>. Walter Cummins has published close to 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly, Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Confrontation and on the Internet. His story collections are titled Witness and Where We Live. Early in his career, he published two novels, A Stranger to the Deed and Into 155
156
Contributors
Temptation. Since 1983, Cummins has edited The Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing. Paula Geyh is the review editor of Postmodern Culture, an electronic journal published by the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. She is an assistant professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where she specializes in twentieth-century American and European fiction, literary and cultural theory, and film. With Fred Leebron and Andrew Levy, she is coeditor of Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (1998). She is currently at work on a book on the postmodern city and cyberspace. David Hamilton edits The Iowa Review and has published in a variety of literary and scholarly magazines. His Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm was published by the University of Missouri Press in 2001. Steve Heller has published nonfiction in Fourth Genre, New Letters, Clackamas Literary Review, Manoa, Oklahoma Review, Flint Hills Review, In Brief (from W. W. Norton), and many other periodicals and anthologies. Most of his recent published nonfiction is from a memoir in progress called Walking Through the Moon. His latest novel, Father’s Mechanical Universe, was published in 2001 by BkMk Press. He teaches creative writing at Kansas State University in Manhattan. Michael Joyce, called by The New York Times “the granddaddy of hypertext fictions,” has published numerous hypertext fictions on the Web and on disk. His collection of short fictions and prose pieces, Moral Tales and Meditations: Technological Parables and Refractions, was published by the State University of New York Press, and his essays, Othermindedness: The Emergency of Network Culture (2000) and Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics (1995), were published by the University of Michigan Press. He serves on the editorial boards for Postmodern Culture, Works & Days, as well as the Computers and Composition journal. He is currently an associate professor of English and director of the Center for Electronic Learning and Teaching at Vassar College.
Contributors
157
Howard Junker is the editor of ZYZZYVA, a journal of West Coast writers and artists, and of four anthologies of material taken from its pages, most recently, Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer (Heinemann). Robert Kendall is the author of the book-length hypertext poem A Life Set for Two (Eastgate Systems) and other hypertext poetry published at BBC Online, Iowa Review Web, Cortland Review, Eastgate Hypertext Reading Room, and other websites. His electronic poetry has been exhibited at many venues in the United States, Europe, and South America, and he has given interactive readings of his work in many cities. His printed book of poetry, A Wandering City, was awarded the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize, and he has received a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship, a New Forms Regional Grant, and other awards. He teaches electronic poetry and fiction for the New School University’s online program, runs the literary website Word Circuits and the ELO’s Electronic Literature Directory, and is codeveloper of Word Circuits Connection Muse, a hypertext tool for poets and fiction writers. David H. Lynn is the editor of The Kenyon Review. His most recent book is Fortune Telling, a collection of stories. Katherine McNamara is the editor of Archipelago. Speer Morgan is the editor of The Missouri Review. His last novel, The Freshour Cylinders, won an American Book Award in 1999. Richard Newman’s poems and stories have recently appeared in Boulevard, Flyway, Poems & Plays, Southern Humanities Review, Sundog: The Southeast Review, The Virtual Word, and many other magazines and anthologies. He lives in St. Louis, where he edits River Styx and codirects the River Styx at Duff ’s Reading Series. Lucia Perillo is a poet and fiction writer living in Washington. Rebecca Seiferle is the founding editor/publisher of The Drunken Boat, an online magazine of international poetry and translation at . Her third poetry collection, Bitters, was pub-
158
Contributors
lished by Copper Canyon in fall 2001, and her translation of Vallejo’s The Black Heralds is forthcoming from the same press. Her second collection, The Music We Dance To (Sheep Meadow, 1999), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and Pushcart Prize. Poems from the collection won the Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and were included in Best American Poetry 2000 and The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia, 2001). Her translation of Vallejo’s Trilce (Sheep Meadow, 1992) was the only finalist for that year’s PenWest Translation Award. Guy Shahar, Ginger Murchison, Renée Bandazian, and Shawn Butler are the staff of The Cortland Review. John Tranter is a leading Australian poet. Fourteen collections of his verse have been published, including The Floor of Heaven, a book-length sequence of four verse narratives (HarperCollins, 1992, and Arc, 2001), Gasoline Kisses (Equipage, 1997), Late Night Radio (Polygon, 1998), Different Hands, a collection of seven experimental prose pieces (Folio/Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1998), and Heart Print (Salt Publishing, 2000). His work appears in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. In 1992 he edited (with Philip Mead) the Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, a 470-page anthology that has become the standard text in its ¤eld, published in Britain and the United States as the Bloodaxe Book of Modern Australian Poetry. He has lived at various times in Melbourne, Singapore, Brisbane, and London, and now lives in Sydney. He is the editor of the free Internet magazine Jacket, at . Marion Wrenn is the editor of Painted Bride Quarterly.
![CornellWoolrich_Marihuana[covers,text_v.1.0]](https://epdf.pub/img/300x300/cornellwoolrichmarihuanacoverstextv10_5b5ae64db7d7bc55297b16f4.jpg)
