Log-Rolling
101: How Literary Magazines Promote Each
Other
At the end of the 19th century there were a
number of prominent literary magazines in the United States. Most were owned privately and they managed to
make a profit, primarily through subscriptions.
These magazines actively contributed to the intellectual development of
the country in a wide range of areas, from the literary to the political
arenas. During the first few decades of
the 20th century these magazines and their editors—people like H.L.
Mencken—were very influential in American life.
For example, Mencken’s reports from Tennessee on the Scopes Monkey Trial
effectively shaped the nation’s views on Creation Science vs. Evolution for
decades.
Today the Kansas State Board (or is it Bored) of Education
is actively working to remove Evolution from the curriculum in public
schools. Lately, a number of people who
visit the natural history museum at the University of Kansas
complain about references to Evolution in the displays—and these complaints are
becoming more frequent. In many parts of
the country Evolution is being challenged, not to mention Democracy,
Intellectual Freedom, and Tolerance—and a whole range of “Enlightenment” and
“Modernist” ideas. The idea of trying to
promoting honesty and integrity in citizens (not to mention public officials)
has fallen on hard times. Only recently,
as people watched hurricane Katrina flood the city of New Orleans, the Congress was working to
derail any further investigation of how someone in the White House outed an
active CIA agent. Similar probes of
powerful congressmen have also been squashed, so that a culture of corruption
and venality goes unchecked in Washington.
In the 19th century Ambrose Bierce ran a series
of articles exposing corruption in the dealings of the Union Pacific Railroad
and its friends in Congress. Muckraking
was invented in the 19th century.
But the odds that a 21st century journalist would today actually
try taking on a major corporation are close to nil. In part this is a failure of out culture,
both literary and political. I think a
large part of this failure is due directly to the fact that virtually every
literary magazine in the country today is devoted to Post-Modernism and other
forms of navel gazing.
How can all these literary magazines be so disconnected from
what is going on? How can they afford to
ignore the issues that are important to people?
—or that should be important—if anyone was discussing them. In today’s America, George Will is what passes
for intellectualism in the print media.
Andy Rooney is the about as intellectual as the television networks dare
to get. No wonder we are in trouble.
A large part of the social disconnect between the real world
and the literary magazines stems from the fact that the vast majority of
literary magazines do not have to turn a profit. Most are wholly-owned and subsidized by a
university. In a real sense, they are
little more than vanity publications used by editors to promote themselves. Most of these editors are trying to be
non-political and avoid any topic that might be controversial. They actively promote literary material that
is void of politics, not to mention moral judgments.
Recently I reviewed A
History of the Imagination, a collection of vignettes by Norman Lock, a
fairly prominent author who has been published in 5-Trope, The Absinthe Literary Review, Ambit, The Barcelona Review, Big
Bridge, The Café Irreal, etc, etc, etc..
I call these pieces vignettes instead of short stories because if they
were short stories they would display structure and theme. Instead these short pieces have stock
characters or characters borrowed from popular culture (King Kong, Lenin,
Freud) who appear like horses on a carousel.
Each of the pieces is fairly short, which is the current trend in
academic journals (called “flash fiction”). For example, Michelle Richmond’s new book The
Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, which won the Associated Writing Programs
Award for Short Fiction has several stories that are only two pages long.
I suspect that this trend is motivated by the fact that
getting promotion and tenure is based on numbers of publications, not on their
length. And a journal can publish a lot
of short pieces in place of a long fully-developed short story. This trend toward even shorter “short short”
fiction is not driven by ideas of quality.
They are the product of the current aesthetic in which the author tries
to shock the reader with his belief in the basic unimportance of the individual
or the human. Writers seem to be
competing with each other in portraying a fictional world where nothing matters
and no one is important enough to care about.
None of this is driven by the marketplace of ideas. Most readers today go for genre novels
(detective novels, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance) where there are people that
you can care about and themes (political corruption, corporate wrongdoing,
racism) that people are interested in.
Books that are “literary” fiction do not sell particularly well. Of course the big New York publishers are selecting “literary”
fiction based on the “literary reputation” of the authors, which is based on
how often they appear in the more prestigious literary journals.
So how do these literary journals survive?
Many of these journals are financially supported by
universities. The universities don’t
care what the journals publish, as long as the journal appears scholarly,
trendy, and apolitical. Universities support
literary journals for the same reason that some people buy a new car every two
years.
(What many people
don’t realize is that the university derives an indirect benefit from
publishing. Universities spend hundreds
of thousands of dollars a year on periodical subscriptions. But when a university publishes its own
journal, the university library can trade their journal for journals published
by other universities. This is called an
exchange program. It saves the
university many thousands of dollars a year, just in avoiding the paperwork of
cutting checks to other schools or to magazine vendors. It also makes it unlikely that a university
will subscribe to independent literary journals.)
The university doesn’t really care what gets published in
the journal, as long as it is acceptable to other universities. This leaves the decision of what to publish
entirely in the hands of the editor and, to a lesser extent, the editorial
board. As you can imagine there is a
great deal of temptation for an editor to use his control of an academic
journal to promote his own writing career, not to mention his friends. The temptation to do a little “log-rolling”
and mutual exchange of favors is probably too great to resist.
Most “literary” writers cannot support themselves from what
they earn from their writing. Unless
they are independently wealthy, they have to have jobs as teachers of creative
writing or as editors of literary journals in order to survive. Another source of income is giving readings
at other universities. This can be a
lucrative source of income, and there is a temptation here, too, to invite your
writer friends to come to your campus for a reading, in the hopes that they
will reciprocate in the future. A writer
can earn at least a thousand dollars from a reading, which is pretty good money
when you consider that the audience for the reading is unlikely to be more than
fifty people.
The whole literary marketplace is badly distorted by
log-rolling and the mutual exchange of favors.
An academic who has the right credentials (an MFA from a major program)
and a talent for self-promotion can go a long way. But a writer who is not connected to a
creative writing program at a major university has an uphill battle in getting
recognition in the world of “literary” publishing.
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Earl Lee is a librarian at Pittsburg (Kan.) State University and is the author of
several books, including a collection of essays and a political satire.
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