Leland, Excellent article. In the 80's when I was still running around NYC thinking to be a poet I went to a reading of Dana Goia <http://www.danagioia.net/>, currently chair of the NEA. For a while we shared an as I remember pleasant and like minded correspondence. You should check out his thoughts. "In 1977 he moved to New York to begin a career in business. For fifteen years Gioia worked as a business executive, eventually becoming a Vice President of General Foods. Writing at night and on weekends, he also established a major literary reputation. In 1992 he left business to become a full-time writer." After I decided to focus energy on the histo presto career, and went underground with the writing, our correspondence ended. I have not kept up on his career. A phenomena not mentioned in the article is the literary e-zine. Writers who are net savvy tend to fuss about the idea of a distinction between a website and a website that gathers up a particular individual's (editors) idea of a select kind of writing (say contemporary southern literary humor) then goes about attracting as many writers as they can muster, at no compensation of course, that do contemporary southern literary humor and stuff it into a crack in the digital universe then say, "Here. Here is a literary magazine." Since these things don't cost much more than time they pop up all over the place and since they mimic the history of the small press and samisdat publishing there is a strong tendency to imagine a form then to construct a mirage to reflect the form. This phenomena is in turn reinforced by the traditional magazines such as New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly etc. that publish their print stories online, or have solely online publication of some stories, and is also reinforced by the college literary publications, that increasingly figure out that print on paper is more costly for their computer savvy audience and tend to go online. The upshot is that there is a whole lot of reading by contemporary authors that could be qualified as literary that goes untracked. Some of these authors are pretty phenomenal in their own rights... but it is the rare author that will break from the digital into print, and when that break is made the end result most often is remainders. What these e-zines do accomplish is to create nodes where one can return to expect to find a particular quality of reading experience. There is also an interesting literary development, based mainly n the UK, of folks working with cell phone system providers to solicit one-line stories from authors for broadcast over cell phones to subscribers. The authors get paid micro-cents for every read. These one-liners need to have the usual structural elements of a short story (very short) such as begin, middle, end, plot, characterization and climax and suspense. They are not easy to write and there is a good deal of competition. The literary activity on the internet is in many ways parallel in significance to video and YouTube only that to read requires a more difficult set of skills to acquire, maintain and master than to watch and listen to a video. In this respect it is comparable to the thoughts as to why some sports, such as baseball, are well suited to television while other sports are not so easily translated to the media. Kathy has suggested that I read my latest story /The Butcher in the Details /and post it on YouTube. I am thinking on it. ][<en -- To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to: <http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>