Diary of a Mad Editor

Archive for the ‘ezines’ Category

I Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Pt. 2

My friend Mike, said to me the other day, “All that time you spend on the Internet, aren’t you afraid of getting your identity stolen or something?”

Well . . . no. I think you have a greater chance of getting your I.D. stolen offline than online, but even if there was a correlation between the amount of time one spent online and getting your identity stolen, I can’t imagine an identity thief wanting mine. Afterall, steal my identity and you get my bad credit to go with it. In fact, when I think about it . . . okay, no, but I have been thinking about what I should do about my finances. I’ve been scraping by these last few months, hoping things will turn around on their own, but giving the nosedive the economy has taken of late, that doesn’t seem likely. Bankruptcy is the option of last resort and I’m not quite there yet but, given that the debt consolidation loan I took out last spring didn’t cover all of my debts and the company recently issue me a letter saying that they are closing my account and won’t issue me anymore credit to consolidate any more of my debt, it looks like I may be screwed unless I win the lottery or something. That’s a big part of the reason why Asterius Press isn’t doing any print media projects right now (the real cost of print isn’t in the printing — it’s in distribution and promotion. If a zine or a chapbook could sell and ship itself that would be another matter. As it is, I’d just as soon burn a chapbook as publish one), and since I did manage to pay my webhosting through 2011, and I have plenty of space for Web projects, I’m putting all my eggs in that basket for now. In fact, I have a new ezine devoted solely to short fiction in the works for Summer 2009. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Revenge of the Troglodytes

Back in June, I responded to an editorial written by Ron Offen in my blog post “Gotta Be a Troglodyte If You Don’t Drive on the Electronic Superhighway.” Well . . . Mr. Offen is back with the second part of this editorial in the current issue of his poetry journal, Free Lunch. In “Poetry and the Web II: The Ephemeralization & Degradation of Poetry,” he takes his anti-Internet argument a step beyond and condemns ezine editors for publishing poetry online:

” . . . in recent years there has been a proliferation of so-called ezines appearing (I escew the term “published”) online. The reasons are primarily financial and practical, but are also philosophical. That an online e-zine is cheaper and easier to produce than a printed magazine seems obvious. The philosophical reasons are less so . . . . if such naysayers of print are right (which is highly doubtful), why would e-zine editors, who presumably care about the future of poetry, trust its future to a medium that is essentially anti-poetic? Why would they promote — to coin a word — the ephemeralization of the art?”

Where do I begin? That this sort of screed deserves a response, there is no doubt, but the reasoning behind his argument is spinning faster than a hamster’s treadmill and it’s making me dizzy. The credibility of Offen’s conclusion rests solely on the reader’s acceptance of that conclusion as fact rather than as a half-baked opinion. Aside from his own prejudices against web-based publishing the only thing he offers in support are the opinions of Nicholas Carr, a critic of new media and computer technology whose myopic and decidedly dystopian view of the future is well-known — and well-documented (ironically) in his blog RoughType among other venues.

Mr. Offen’s argument against poetry on the web in general and ezines specifically boils down to three reasons: Internet technology is unreliable, The writing in ezines is of a substantially lesser quality than what is published in print, and lastly, that ezine editors believe that print is obsolete and are hell-bent on killing print as a medium.

The idea that web publications are impermanent and, therefore, unreliable is not a new argument. Ezines go under just like print zines and, yes, that sometimes means that the poetry disappears at some point. But it’s absolutely disingenuous to suggest that print publications are more reliable than ezines because “when a print magazine that has published your work goes out of business, you still have a hard copy of your work.” That’s just silly. Most print poetry publications have a very small press run and an even smaller net circulation — which means that a lot of that published poetry isn’t even being read. And who is reading it? Offen asks “Who is . . . visiting [poetry ezines]?” (which I will address shortly), but who reads print literary journals? I’ll tell you who: the poets who submit and are published in those journals, professors teaching in writing programs and a scant few diehard fans and critics who are even aware of that print journals existence. The vast majority of readers are not interested, have no reason to be interested and have no means of accessing these publications. University libraries that used to routinely subscribe to and archive small press literary magazines now do so sparingly if at all. Failed magazines are largely forgotten, their issues languishing in shoe boxes, closets, lost to collectors of rare literature or just plain lost. So are print poetry publication really more reliable? I’m thinking, not so much. And as to who is reading poetry ezines . . . well, the same people who read print zines — and some people who don’t routinely read print zines or poetry in general. I will use one of my own ezines, The 13th Warrior Review, as an example. It gets regular traffic from well over 30 different countries representing every continent on the global map except Antarctica — thousands and thousands of readers each year who appreciate and love good poetry and not only read each issue but return time and time again to reread favorites. Each issue is part of a growing archive. And what if, for whatever reason, the ezine ever does go belly-up? Well, I still have all the files and I could just as easily do print collections/anthologies or can restore the publication in some other e-format if I’m of the mind to do so and have the money. The point is that I have options available to me that a traditional print publisher may not be open-minded enough to take advantage of.

I am also deeply offended by the notion that the poetry published in ezines is inherently inferior to the poetry published in print zines. This a sweeping generalization based on a prejudice and nothing more. Literary publications, whether they be in print or online, are only as good as the editors who publish them. To suggest that editors of print publications are automatically more discerning critics of poetry — Ughh! Talk about a “fallacy”? Good Christ, man! I’m thinking that Ron Offen doesn’t read too many ezines since, by his own admission, reading poems online makes him “cranky.” I think there are plenty of online editors who’d take issue with the accusation that we don’t care about quality. And speaking only for myself, I doubt very much that any of my own contributors would argue that they send work to me “because it’s easier to get published.” I’ve published a number of the same people Mr. Offen has and yet, by contrast, he’s published a number of people who certainly haven’t gotten a free lunch when it came to submitting to me.

Finally, I would take issue with the accusation that ezine editors are somehow cheerleading the death of the print medium simply because we promote digital publishing. While I have ecountered a few people online who are overly enthusiastic when it comes to e-publishing and stand in direct opposition to print, these individuals are rare. Most of us who engage in online publishing are book lovers.

I love print. I cut my teeth in print. I was an editor of print publication long before I discovered the Internet. What I’m selling isn’t the ephemeralization of art (and btw, Mr. Offen, you didn’t “coin” the word, an architect and futurist the name of R. Buckminster Fuller did), but the ephemeralization of publishing — and there is a big difference. What does ephemeralization mean, anyway? Doing more with less, right? It doesn’t mean choosing quantity over quality — it’s a means for producing more of the same quality with fewer physical resources. And how can that be a bad thing for the always cash-strapped small press?

The art of writing doesn’t somehow become less artful just because it is presented through a different medium. The reason more books are being published nowadays isn’t in spite of new media, but because of it (examples of Harry Potter books and Billy Collins notwithstanding — both are a phenomena that have little to do with the efficacy of either print or digital media and, thus poor examples and, fyi, when he was U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins created 180 Poems, a very popular poetry site so I doubt he has a major problem with poetry on the Internet). Can Mr. Offen truly be that obtuse as to fail to see this? Digital technologies such as on-demand printing, e-paper, improved reader devices like Kindle and the Sony reader are opening up a whole new world of art and information for us. The Internet isn’t killing the print-based media; it may well be the only thing that will save it.

So what if it changes us and how we perceive the world? The medium has always been the message from the time Socrates lamented that the birth of the written word might destroy the oral tradition up through the invention of the printing press and the telegraph machine, the telephone, the television and, yes, the personal computer and, now, the Internet. And, guess what? The world has not ended due to any of these innovations. We are still here regardless of the fact that everything changes. We evolve. We must continue to do so. That’s part of our job as human beings and as creative artists. Creative artists who stand in the way of that are not all that creative and I have my doubts as to whether or not they are true artists. So deal with that or do us all a favor and get the hell out of the way.

Pass the Sweet Potatoes and Shut the Hell Up!

Ah, what an eventful holiday! Terrorism in India. Black Friday violence. And family fun at the Turkey Day feast. Yep, I had Thanksgiving Dinner with my parents, my sister and my 16 year-old niece — What fun!

My Dad started out the day complaining about the cable TV. He’s always threatening to get rid of the cable and get DirectTV and, when his TV suddenly went snowy, he started again yelling, “This goddamn cable . . . I’m gonna call them people up and have’em take it out . . . that directv is supposed to be better anyhow . . .”

Well, I don’t know if directtv is better or cheaper, but I’m looking at his TV screen and I’m thinking maybe it’s not the cable this time. My father is going blind (macular degeneration) and has a habit of accidentally hitting the wrong button on the remote and turning off the cable box, so I said, “Here gimme the remote.” He hands it to me and sure enough, that’s what he did. Football restored. This actually made him angrier than if it had been a problem with the cable.

At dinner, my mother started her annual gripe-fest about having to cook Thanksgiving Dinner (even though she got one of those prepared dinners from the supermarket and didn’t have to do much except heat it up). My niece was in her usual bratty mood, bitching about lord knows what and my sister starts yelling at her and they get into it. Then I get involved because I just want to enjoy the meal in peace. Then my father (who’s still stewing over the mishap with the cable-box) enters, mumbling about the cable company and DirectTV and starts yelling at all of us because he most definitely wants to eat in peace and quiet. So everybody’s shouting and stuffing their faces. Ha ha. . . good times!

Anyway, I hope everyone else had a nice holiday. Tomorrow I’ll get back to working on a new issue of Gnome, among other things. I’m currently reading submissions for that issue as well as for the next two issue of The 13th Warrior Review if anyone is interested.