Wednesday 14

I thought that Jodee Stanley's article "The Changing Shape of Literary Magazines; Or 'What The Hell is this thing?'" was pretty spot-on, especially considering that it was something like a kind of middle ground between the three pieces we read for today. Her acceptance of the natural progression of literary journals, and media in general, breathed of practicality more than any kind of zeal for one extreme or the other. I want to believe in her idea that there's plenty of readership to go around for both print journals and online journals in the future, but my jury's still out on that.

Eric Rosenfield's piece seemed to have the most hope for print journals, provided they strictly follow his directions, as he didn't even really bother to focus on online publications. His point that editors of literary journals have failed to give people an attractive proposition, is in general pretty infallible. Overall, I feel that he can sum up his article better than I can- "My point here certainly isn't that literary magazines should stop publishing unknowns. Rather, literary magazines need to require a lower entry cost in time and money to make it easier for readers to take a chance on them. Because that's what we're doing when we buy a magazine of short stories and poetry by writers we've never heard of: taking a chance. The editors of literary magazines need to start recognizing that, stop blaming the readers, and realize whose fault it is that their magazines aren't worth the risk."

The Harpoonist article was by far the wittiest piece, however, it was the least enlightning as far as offering any kind of solution for the future of literary magazines. The essay seemed more like a showcase of "look how clever I can be" than anything else. Though to its credit, it was entertaining, and it did produce the "boycotting sandpaper" phrase, something that I will surely steal for myself in the future.