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

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