Literary Magazine Club
{LMC}: And So We Begin
I’ve written quite a few times about how lamentations and garment rending over the death of literature, the literary, publishing, and the written word have been premature. No one can dispute that the publishing industry is changing, that our culture is evolving, that we are facing certain challenges when it comes to encouraging the general public to read when, it would seem, people would rather watch television or stare at the Internet, or do anything but read. A difficult path, however, is not an impassable one.
Publishing is dying! Publishing is dying! Publishing is dying! Go ahead, say it three times. You’ll feel better but chanting those words will not nor cannot make them true.
We have a fetish for sifting through the proverbial ashes of publishing, the age of letters, a culture of intellect, as if all hope is lost, as if all we have left is the faint memory of a time when we sat in parlors on velvet lined couches and discussed literature while smoking tightly rolled French cigarettes. We sniff with disdain when confronted with mass market paperbacks or pablum like Jersey Shore and big budget films that inexplicably gross $50 million (ahem, Jackass 3D). These “cultural abominations” (which are, in fact, not abominations at all) are more than some of us can bear. We begrudge their existence as if they are taking the place, in our hearts and minds, of the next staggering work of literary genius. We blame these distractions for the demise of all things literary and intellectual as if we must choose between the charms of The Situation and Snooki or Johnny Knoxville and the charms of, say, Adam Levin or Jonathan Franzen or Marcy Dermansky or Grace Krilanovich. I’ve said it before, but I will say it again—I choose both.
I love literary magazines. I love reading them, in print or online. I love editing. I love having my work published in magazines. Literary magazines feel like a neverending conversation between writers and readers and each day, I wake up excited, knowing I get to participate, in some small way, in that conversation. When I read a magazine like Everyday Genius, which surprises me, well, every day, I start to think that when people say publishing is dying, they don’t understand the meaning of death. I enjoy Annalemma in print or online, and sometimes, the writing simply takes my breath away. I read an issue of Ninth Letter, which is always gorgeously designed and edited, and I think about how I’m living in the right time to be able to read such a fine product. Last week, Blake asked what we thought the top five online magazines were, in terms of content, prestige, and design. I answered, but it was very difficult to stop at just five. So many magazines, both in print and online, are produced and edited so well that it is difficult to think of a magazine I don’t like. Certainly, there are those magazines where there’s no design, or a generic template is used, or I don’t quite understand some of the content choices, but even then, you can find surprisingly good writing, or, if you’ll forgive the cliché, diamonds in the rough. Publishing may be dying, but there are countless writers and editors who have not been notified of this untimely end coming to pass. The plethora of literary magazines actively contributing to the literary conversation are ample evidence, for me, that we have not lost the battle to other forms of entertainment. We’re very much in the fight.
I’ve been following The Rumpus’s book club for some time. I love how they’ve created a small community around books and how the club’s members are able to carry on a conversation about the same text even though they are all over the place. As I followed the club’s progress, I thought, “Why can’t we do that with literary magazines?” And so we have the Literary Magazine Club where each month (I hope) we’ll read a literary magazine and talk about it and revel in just how alive literature and publishing really are.
The club’s first selection is New York Tyrant 8. If you don’t have this issue and want to join in the conversation, you are welcome, and please go, buy the magazine. This is an interesting issue which I don’t mean euphemistically (“interesting”), but rather, in the true sense of the word. My attention was held. I read stories I wish I had written and stories that made me envy other writers and stories I immediately read again and, to be honest, a couple stories I hated with a surprising intensity. The writing throughout New York Tyrant 8 was thought provoking (Elliott David’s With Pieces) or experimented with form in really interesting ways (Josh Maday’s Dark Math). Sometimes, the writing was confusing and I thought, WTF (Andy Devine’s Apartment City). Some writers were familiar (Amber Sparks, Scott Garson) while others were entirely new to me (Noy Holland, Czar Gutierrez). I had an opinion about everything I read in this issue whether I loved it or hated it. I felt like, in reading the issue, I was having a conversation with the writers and with all the other people reading the magazine from the middle of a cornfield in rural Illinois. Over the next days and weeks, some of that conversation will take place here, through a series of guest posts about individual pieces in the issue or sentences from a poem, or the issue as a whole. We hope you will join in that conversation. There’s room for everyone. Next week, we’ll have a chat with New York Tyrant’s editor where we can ask him about how he assembled this issue and why he chose the work he did, and whatever else we can come up with.
In November, we’ll be reading the November issue of The Collagist (out on 11/15). In December, we’ll be reading Ploughshares, which has offered club members a special discount on a 1-year subscription. There’s also a Google Group. If you want to join the group or want more information about the club, where to get your leather jacket and tattoo, etc, get in touch.
Tags: jersey shore, jonathan franzen, LMC
I think the club will feel more complete when people start participating. As for viability, this site has a built in audience. In looking at The Rumpus club as a model, hosting the club under a larger project is the most realistic, effective way of maintaining it. If there’s enough interest and people actually participate, we can start to think about hosting the project on its own site. One step at a time….
I agree: there needs to be a better understanding of what we mean when we say publishing is dying. I take “dying” in that context as the death of an industry that has become extremely successful, commercially, after the printing press settled in and especially after the respect for intellectual rights to artistic works became consolidated. The latter was not a smooth or an always benign process, as Lewis Hyde shows in his latest book. The kinds of returns on books and other artistic works that exist today were unthinkable just a couple centuries ago. Artists went from patronage (or independent wealth) to entrepreneurship, and every day they have to become more and more involved with marketing and self-promotion. But if the number of writers keeps blossoming at such a pace, then, unless the number of readers willing to pay for what they read also blossoms, there must reach a point in which fewer and fewer authors can live off their writing. Publishers, already in trouble, will have a hard time squeezing profits out of their pool of writers. Writers will have to turn to other trades for a significant portion of their lives, as many writers around the world already do. Magazines will turn into clique reading, some books will be cherished by a handful of devotees that are incapable of making their favored writing profitable. And so on. I do think that publishing is dying that kind of death.
Having said all that, I don’t think that’s bad necessarily. A more artisanal practice of artistry, in which those people who toil are truly and insatiably guided by their talent and their love of art (their lifeblood instead of their livelihood, as someone said recently), is not a bad thing. Let’s recall that for centuries people painted and wrote without even stamping their names on their works. Their zeal was enough to carry them forward. We’ll still have great writers if publishing dies the kind of death I’ve mentioned. Our share of must-reads will still exceed our time to read them. And there’s real delight in having that kind of writing around. And in establishing communities around passions like reading and writing, such as the community you’ve suggested with the Literary Magazine Club. Profits or no profits, it’s wonderful to have people with whom we can discuss things we feel strongly about and are very committed to.
But maybe this is too dour a note with which to start the week. All the best with the LMC.
[…] most book clubs, the Literary Magazine Club asks its members to read and discuss a single work together. As the name says, however, instead of […]
If you love lit mags and talking about the content therein in book clubs, you should try The Summerset Review. We furnish Reader Discussion Questions, will provide a free print copy to meaningful answers sent to us, and offer $50 to the best reader feedback on pieces in our current issue. http://www.summersetreview.org
Hi Joseph,
We discuss one magazine a month, alternating between print and online magazines. We generally pick the next magazine by consensus, so I’ll definitely let everyone know your magazine is an option.
This stuff isn’t bad at all. I didn’t know about this mag, before.
True: In the tarot deck, the Death card means “change”, not death.
It might be partially my becoming more and more aware of an increasing number of small presses (not to mention literary journals) . . . but it seems to me that there’re more small presses all the time. It seems logical, too, that increased accessibility (via the web) must necessarily create growth. Call me weird, but I measure literary viability by the number and breadth and audacity of small presses . . . not what Bertelsmann / Random House is doing or to what degree they’ve dominated Barnes & Noble and Borders. I don’t care about Random House; it’s the small presses that interest me. The more small presses that are out there, putting out interesting material: the more vital the literary scene.
More people are aware of literary journals, now, and have easier access to them — not including webjournals, which are a great boon to literature. More and more people have easier access to small presses, which must mean that the audience is larger than it was pre-web… though I can’t verify that.
Also, how much has Amazon done for literature? How many people know about such&such writer because they were guided to that person when looking up somebody else on Amazon? How can literature possibly be anything but more vital, now than before? How can the audience be anything but larger than before?
While I can’t speak authoritatively on statistics: this broad literary death that so many people are moaning about has never made any sense to me.
But… as a final note: ever since I started the GLE Project, I’ve been trying to explain to people my vision of how the industry can be transformed, that the ‘surface market’ doesn’t matter, that Random House is totally irrelevant to anything, that small presses can be self-sustaining, writers can be self-sustaining through the literary community. It drives me crazy that after all these years I still don’t seem to have convinced a single editor that this not only is feasible but actually necessary. The web is a great gift for literature. The community can market and sustain itself with the smallest of effort, we do not need random House.
In regard to the LMC: It still doesn’t seem complete; I’m still waiting for discussion but we’ve all stopped discussing. I think that this can and should be taken away from Goo and its own forum established on its own website — perhaps you could host it on the Pank website? It deserves greater definition, greater solidity, greater viability / accessibility.
I think it’s great (and important) that you’re following through with this, Roxane. Brilliant way to spread the word that litmags are alive and kicking.
I think the club will feel more complete when people start participating. As for viability, this site has a built in audience. In looking at The Rumpus club as a model, hosting the club under a larger project is the most realistic, effective way of maintaining it. If there’s enough interest and people actually participate, we can start to think about hosting the project on its own site. One step at a time….
Roxane, thanks for spurring this on. The editor at the Southern Review is interested in getting involved as well
so what you’re saying is there aren’t any tightly rolled french cigarettes involved in this?
This is really really cool.
Also, I read the new issue of Octopus this weekend with my Jackass 3D glasses on and it made it even better.
[…] to happen in lit mag reading since Bill Henderson launched The Pushcart Prize in 1976: The new Literary Magazine Club over at HTMLGIANT—hosted and created by Roxane […]
What a great idea! I’m in. :)
Thank you, Roxane. :)
I’m in too!
Good ideas, here, especially the book-club choices. Applause, applause, on that. Still, I’ve got to put in something I’ve argued elsewhere: the problem with American lit just now isn’t so much the publishing, though God knows the mainstream looks frail & dessicated. The real problem lies with criticism, the out-of-date & ill-informed criticism s seen in the NYTBR & the other mainstream venues. I had my say about this ins “Against the ‘Impossible to Explain:’ the Postmodern Novel & Society,” which generated good discussion here on HTMLG earlier this year. Forgive me, but it seems pertinent, so here’s that link:
http://quarterlyconversation.com/against-the-impossible-to-explain-the-postmodern-novel-and-society.
Awesome idea! And you should consider Electric Literature for a future pick.
What a fun concept, Roxane! I agree with you when you say publishing isn’t dying (I’d even go as far to say it’s in its salt-and-pepper-haired stage of sophistication… I’d also readily admit that yes, my analogies are nearly always this bad) and I think Owen’s notion that “the web is a great gift for literature” is spot on — look at the success of sites like The Rumpus, HTMLGIANT and Fictionaut, and the freshness of new literary creations, like LMC, that sprout up seemingly every day. And that’s not even the tip, as the saying goes.
Also, just want to thank John for directing our attention to The Quarterly Conversation. I think where QC is, John, is precisely where criticism is headed: intellectual dialogue and criticism via the web, provided, like everything else on the internet, by the masses. And as is the case with everything else on the web, we’ll all have to be just a little selective about which criticism we turn to. After reading just a few articles, it seems to me QC is a great place to start when seeking out thoughtful criticism online. Thanks again for the link.
Looking forward to joining in on the LMC conversation.
What a fun concept, Roxane! I agree with you when you say publishing isn’t dying (I’d even go as far to say it’s in its salt-and-pepper-haired stage of sophistication… I’d also readily admit that yes, my analogies are nearly always this bad) and I think Owen’s notion that “the web is a great gift for literature” is spot on — look at the success of sites like The Rumpus, HTMLGIANT and Fictionaut, and the freshness of new literary creations, like LMC, that sprout up seemingly every day. And that’s not even the tip, as the saying goes.
Also, just want to thank John for directing our attention to The Quarterly Conversation. I think where QC is, John, is precisely where criticism is headed: intellectual dialogue and criticism via the web, provided, like everything else on the internet, by the masses. And as is the case with everything else on the web, we’ll all have to be just a little selective about which criticism we turn to. After reading just a few articles, it seems to me QC is a great place to start when seeking out thoughtful criticism online. Thanks again for the link.
Looking forward to joining in on the LMC conversation.
Wow! Finally a conversation about something that is near and dear to my heart. Include me/us in, please. I have much to say about a generation of authors who submit reams of dreck to literary magazines they haven’t read and have no intention of reading unless they get published!!! Can’t wait to see where this discussion goes.
– Rich Binkele, EIC, Inkwell
when i lived in london, i was invited to a club once, called the farmer’s club. it seemed innocent enough. when i showed up at the door, i wasn’t so relaxed anymore because the club turned out to be on pall mall, a very posh inner city address. when i entered and was given a shirt and a tie, i was confused – wasn’t this a club for farmers? – though later i learnt to say “i’m flabbergasted indeed”, instead. it turned out this club was the premier venue for present and past members of the british foreign office including spies and agents of all colors and sorts. hence my reluctance when you advertise a club here. but as long as i don’t have to wear a tie, i’m in.
when i lived in london, i was invited to a club once, called the farmer’s club. it seemed innocent enough. when i showed up at the door, i wasn’t so relaxed anymore because the club turned out to be on pall mall, a very posh inner city address. when i entered and was given a shirt and a tie, i was confused – wasn’t this a club for farmers? – though later i learnt to say “i’m flabbergasted indeed”, instead. it turned out this club was the premier venue for present and past members of the british foreign office including spies and agents of all colors and sorts. hence my reluctance when you advertise a club here. but as long as i don’t have to wear a tie, i’m in.
[…] kicked things off and got lots of shot outs at awesome places like the LA Times, Bookslut, Omnivoracious, […]