Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 14:24:35 EDT
From: jpl3 (Joe Lucia)
Subject: Re: Gravity Eight
To: tf01 (TIMOTHY FALCONER)

"Publication" is not simply getting a text to a reader. It's also about
legitimation, about selectively responsive communities. "Literary magazines" facilitate community by the intelligent participation of an editor in the process of shaping an ethos within which the presented writing can be situated. That may be an individual or a group ethos; whichever it is, it's central to how "literature" as an institution happens. Regardless of the channels it follows. Posting a story on TALK.BIZARRE may be a "form" of publication and it may build you a small, idiosyncratic community of readers. That's fine, but it won't make you a producer of texts that the larger "literary" community has much interest in discovering. For such as TALK.BIZARRE represent a kind of cultural marginalia. As the electronic publishing community enlarges and institutionalizes itself it will evolve mechanisms of legitimation analogous to those at work in contemporary print-based literary magazines. To believe otherwise is to misapprehend the power of disciplinary structures and the gravity they exert on discourse. In that context, TALK.BIZARRE will remain marginal. Now, that may not matter to you, but it has a lot to do with building communities adequate to the demands of particular participants. I want my writing to reach people who will attend to it with the degree of informed intensity it demands, who understand in some broader cultural, ideological, and aesthetic context where it comes from, how it's calibrated to, marked by, and articulated within a framework of practices and traditions that determine the horizon against which my work becomes "visible." Posting my poems on USENET just won't do that for me. Publishing in Poetry or Temblor or Five Fingers Review might.

Here's an analogy.

I'm an amateur guitar player. I've got some pretty good chops. I can
pick up a guitar and noodle and a room full of non-musicians will think I'm pretty good, that I can "play," which I can't, much, actually. Put me in a room full of musicians and they'll see what a hack I am. Publication has to do with that -- the recognition of performance at difficult levels of attainment based on standards established within a community of intelligent, engaged practitioners. That's why I'm willing to wait months, sometimes a year for responses from good literary magazines, and why I'm thrilled when they accept my work, however small the audience. I'm selective about where I send my work. I publish in places where it will reach the audience it seeks. And I'm not in any hurry to reach that audience. It's not "selfless" either, there's a lot of ego mixed up in it -- the struggle is to meld ego with tradition, practice, and community. Ego isn't something you walk away from by disavowing it's presence. What we "deny" has greater power over us that what we acknowledge. I guess your postings are doing their work--you got me to put down these thoughts, in any case.

Joe Lucia