THE POSITIVE MESSAGE OF NEW AMERICAN ART AND LITERATURE

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Infrastructure

What the underground lacks, to give it the ability to compete with the established literary machine, is its own infrastructure. I'm not talking about websites and blogs, which are lost in a sea of internet websites. I'm talking about magazines and review publications to give validity to our writings.

The establishment has its tottering flagships like New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker. The Eggers crowd has The Believer. We, likewise, need noise outlets-- not limited to print outlets (a radio show would be nice!), but as many substantive noise-making avenues as possible. It's one area where I and the ULA dropped the ball.

2 comments:

Tom Hendricks said...

There is one thing along these lines that I'm doing. I'm suggesting that there is a loose confederation of indies that include:
Lit - Karl Wenclas, ULA, zines
Music - Musea - Post-bands music, Tom Hendricks
Art - Stuckists - Charles Thomson
Film - Youtube indies
Media - any of the media indie media groups.
That these groups collectively are for the same thing in each of their fields and opposed to media and art consolidation into too few hands.
(respond to tom-hendricks@att.net)

Frank Marcopolos said...

I think any new publishing company would have to include in its DNA as much new-media (and old media, to the extent possible) outreach as possible. It should be about entertaining as much as possible.