Laugh Literary And Man The Humping Guns (1 Viewer)

M

MULLINAX

Nos. 1 and 2 arrived today. Edited by Bukowski and Cherkovski. Norse and Richmond are contributing editors. No wonder it only lasted 3 issues.

Seems like more of a stapled-together pamphlet than a magazine or journal.

No. 2 has lots of Norse and Richmond in it.

What is it with editors submitting their own work?
What sort of criteria do they use?

Richmond: (thinking to himself) "Hmm, this submission by that Richmond guy looks pretty good".

Norse: (murmuring) "Hmm, let's give that Bastard Angel a shot".

Other contributors? You guessed it! Bukowski and Cherkovski.

Sheesh!
 
Seems like more of a stapled-together pamphlet than a magazine or journal.
Well, that's what many lit mags were at the time (and are today).

Okay, not so much today, as the internet has killed off about 80% of the lit mags and replaced them with web sites, which - sorry kids - are not the same thing in any way shape or form.
 
Okay, not so much today, as the internet has killed off about 80% of the lit mags and replaced them with web sites, which - sorry kids - are not the same thing in any way shape or form.

I have a handy rhyme for that:

If your mag ain't print, I don't submit. uh....submint.

well, it's a good thing I'm not a rhyming poet.
 
Buk probably rejected a couple of his own...sent them somewhere else...It is incredible to think of that stapling business though.

As for the online/print thing, I know this quick little thread is not the time nor place for a lengthy debate, but I like to operate under the system that a poem somewhere is better than a poem nowhere. I'm like a drug dealer who will take pennies.
 
As for the online/print thing, I know this quick little thread is not the time nor place for a lengthy debate, but I like to operate under the system that a poem somewhere is better than a poem nowhere.
I might have agreed with you 10 years ago, but as it turns out, this is all very temporary.

People have the idea that everything is archived and copied so much now that nothing ever disappears anymore, but that's just not the case. If you doubt it, I will send you my browser bookmarks from 1996. If a dozen of the hundreds of links still work I would be surprised.

Paper doesn't last forever either, but it lasts about a million times longer than the average web site. I can't imagine my favorite writers work existing on some temporary or obsolete medium where I never would have had the chance to read it.

Which is why I - and a lot of others, I assume - would prefer to have something published in a little mag with 150 readers than on a web site with a thousand viewers a day (2 or which will see your poem, or at least part of it, until they are distracted and click on something else).

And if you really believe that "a poem somewhere is better than a poem nowhere," you should check this out.
 
I haven't read that book, but I will. I've seen people make a lot of money taking things like old newspaper archives "off the library's hands" when the libraries get set to dump them.

I understand that libraries have cost and storage issues, but an 1850 newspaper on microfiche - or whatever the hell they put it on (that includes CD and DVD) - will be worthless in 20, 30, 50 years. It's a shame that a lot of our history is being turned into landfill.

--

And since it is a shame, I am selling some barbeque aprons and baby bibs that say, "SAVE OUR PAPERS!" over at shillingmartyr.com if anyone is interested.
 
oh yeah, I remember how surprised and miserable I was when I found out, there's something like a book 'out-of-print'. I couldn't imagine, that any book that HAS existed some time would not be available anymore for everybody. (that was in my late teens.) and I still think this is scandalous.

Maybe that's one reason, I collect a lot of papers or other 'historic' references/documents. (e.g. I have papers and magazines about 2 foot high only of those that appeared right after 9/11 - or totally different subject: about thousands of flyers, posters, concert-announcements of small bands of my hometown.)
 
I might have agreed with you 10 years ago, but as it turns out, this is all very temporary.

People have the idea that everything is archived and copied so much now that nothing ever disappears anymore, but that's just not the case. If you doubt it, I will send you my browser bookmarks from 1996. If a dozen of the hundreds of links still work I would be surprised.

Paper doesn't last forever either, but it lasts about a million times longer than the average web site. I can't imagine my favorite writers work existing on some temporary or obsolete medium where I never would have had the chance to read it.

Which is why I - and a lot of others, I assume - would prefer to have something published in a little mag with 150 readers than on a web site with a thousand viewers a day (2 or which will see your poem, or at least part of it, until they are distracted and click on something else).

And if you really believe that "a poem somewhere is better than a poem nowhere," you should check this out.

mjp: I agree. I had a bunch of prose poems on a web site some years back. I didn't print out the pages. Now, it's vanished, and I have no idea what was even there (although I have the original manuscripts). I would rather have a chapbook appear, in print, 20 copies, than be on the most widely read website in the world. Looking at it long term, digital media takes electricity, hardware, software, and technical support, all or any of which of which may not be available in the future. Paper lasts thousands of years.
 
Has anyone read Double Fold by Nicholson Baker?
it's about the purging of paper by libraries.
it's a very interesting book.

I haven't read the book, but I've read articles by Baker on the subject -- fascinating. Libraries chew books up and spit them out. According to Baker, some libraries have chopped up rare books so they could be microfilmed, then discarded the pages. Microfilm has a short life span, something like 20 years. It's crap. It's also low definition, hard to read, hard to search -- I work with it sometimes and it takes a half an hour to find a page I could find in seconds using digital media or in a couple minutes if it was still on paper. The problem with digital archiving will be finding the right software and hardware to read the media years after it's created. Try sticking a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk in your new laptop.
 
Paper doesn't last forever either, but it lasts about a million times longer than the average web site. I can't imagine my favorite writers work existing on some temporary or obsolete medium where I never would have had the chance to read it.

The Charles Bukowski Website on eBay in 20 years - first edition signed

Priceless
 
Well, exactly.

Even here - I consider this forum to be a one of a kind resource, and I much as I would like to pretend that it will always be available, that is unlikely.

Everything is temporary, but the web gives new meaning to temporary where information is concerned.
 
Don't try?

Check the quote:

"Somebody at one of these places asked me: "What do you do? How do you
write, create?" You don't, I told them. You don't try. That's very important: not
to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing
happens, you wait some more. It's like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to
come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if
you like it's looks, you make a pet out of it." - Charles Bukowski

Click H E R E
 
Ha, yeah, it's an interesting tool, but they did not archive millions of images, so a lot of image-based navigation is little more than mystery meat in those archives. So many links lead nowhere...

But it's interesting to see the way some sites have changed over the years.

I have used it but mostly not found what I was looking for, even when I know the exact URL. Many/most websites aren't archived, at least the last time I looked there. When they are, it's erratic as hell. They may have daily snapshots of the site for a month, then it jumps a year forward, then nothing, so stuff falls through the cracks. You might find what you want there if you're lucky.

Or maybe the stuff I'm looking for is too obscure. Perhaps they archive 99% of everything and what I want falls into the 1% nobody cares about.
 
Evolution indeed. You can even see a fragment of the first forum. ;) I don't know if that snapshot was taken very early in its life, or it was just that dead. Ha. I suspect the latter.

smog.net had it's 12th birthday in October. It went from being packed with stuff to being virtually empty. Now I don't know what to do with it.
 

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