Great little essay on publishing in literary journals. It’s true:

What’s the best possible outcome? Your story is accepted, and maybe a year later it appears and is distributed to the journal’s meager readership, who probably won’t read it because they only bought the journal in the first place so they could submit their work to it.

As I said in my TEDx talk, I realized this early on, stopped submitting to journals, and started a blog.

Great article. Bottom line: there will always be gatekeepers, and the more and more books that get published, the more readers will look to gatekeepers to tell them what to read.

we’ll still wind up with a literary marketplace in which a handful of blockbuster names capture most of the sales and attention, personal connections are milked for professional success, and relatively few authoritative voices have the power to lift some artists into the spotlight while others languish in obscurity. Writers who are charming in person and happy to promote themselves and interact with fans will prosper, while antisocial geniuses may fail. (It’s unsettling to wonder how the Salingers, Pynchons, Naipauls and David Foster Wallaces of tomorrow will fare in a world where social networking and glad-handing are de rigueur. Why should extroversion be required of a great novelist?) The result: not a whole lot better than the system we already have, but also (hopefully) not much worse.

the idea that the post-Gutenberg era — the period from, roughly, the 15th century to the 20th, an age defined by textuality — was essentially an interruption in the broader arc of human communication. And that we are now, via the discursive architecture of the web, slowly returning to a state in which orality — conversation, gossip, the ephemeral — defines our media culture.

As some of you may know from my flickr handle, deathtogutenberg, I subscribe to this theory.

Love this interview with Pettitt:

I often tell my students that they should start their literature work, their work here, by tearing a book to pieces: Take a book, take some second-hand book, that looks impressive — and just rip it to pieces. And you can see that it’s just made, it’s just glued, it’s just stitched. And it’s not invulnerable. It’s just that someone’s made it. It doesn’t have to be true because it looks good.