🚀 go-pugleaf

Jerome Weeks, who seems to do most of the book page commentary for
the Dallas Morning News, did a column, "Why are our airwaves silent on
literature
and culture?"

I e-mailed him a challenge asking why he and the Dallas Morning News
were silent
on zines - the literature of this generation.

He wrote back:
"Not only have I written about zines, I've written about you. But my
point

was about paying careers in long-feature journalism."

I was frankly startled and ask him to follow that with a reference.
He sent this. There are indeed two references to Musea , a listing at
the
top and a short paragraph toward the end - but no other zine
references that I could find in the article.

I note that he seemed
to like these indie publications, but why then was there no regular
coverage of them over the years? Also note the article
was very old. IMO this does not cover zines. And barely introduces
names of other statewide publications.

Here is his response
in full. You be the judge.
_________________________
February 9, 1999



The good word about Dallas-area literary journals

Byline:  Jerome Weeks

Credit:  Staff Critic of The Dallas Morning News





Amazing - but true! The Dallas-Fort Worth area has more

bookstores than San Francisco.



It also hosts more than a half-dozen literary journals - from the

high-toned to the scrappy and hot-headed. The prestigious quarterly

Southwest Review has been published in Dallas for 84 years, while

anarchic, one-person 'zines such as Musea have popped up. There's

even a new statewide publication, !Tex!, that started with a bang.

An initial run of 153,000 copies in December gave !Tex! the widest

circulation of any literary journal in the region.



Texas, of course, has a history of major writers, from Katherine

Anne Porter through Cormac McCarthy. Still, literary journals in

Dallas must seem out of place to anyone who believes the area's TV

image of football and skyscrapers.



"We do get a kind of "Holy heck! What is this?' response from

some people," says Neal Easterbrook, editor of Descant, Texas

Christian University's 39-year-old fiction-and-poetry outlet. "On

campus, people tend to be either very respectful of what we do, the

tradition of work here, or they're ignorant even of the journal's

existence."



Despite the low fees they pay writers and their limited

readership - print runs of only 1,000 copies are common - literary

journals wield an outsize influence.



Says Willard Spiegelman, editor-in-chief of Southwest Review at

Southern Methodist University: "The importance of the small

magazine in America has always been in inverse proportion to its

circulation. There are always certain new writers, eager to break

in, and the magazines give them a leg up."



Think of such nonprofit magazines as the regional theaters of

publishing, drawing spare but supportive crowds and giving artists

a chance to polish their skills - before they go off to Hollywood.

Larry McMurtry didn't start out with Pulitzer Prize-winning novels

and TV miniseries. The Southwest Review published his first story

even before his debut novel, Horseman, Pass By, came out in 1961.



Small-press periodicals are also outlets for literary styles and

sociopolitical ideas that profit-oriented mainstream media see as

too obscure, too brainy, too downbeat, too explicit or too radical.



Common Knowledge, for example,is aimed at "the sort of person who

reads the New York Review of Books and TLS [the Times Literary

Supplement of London] back to back," says the magazine's

co--founder, Robert Nelsen. The magazine carries easily the most

distinguished editorial board in the area, including such "name"

intellectuals as Susan Sontag, modernist critic Hugh Kenner and

Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz.



Dr. Nelsen developed Common Knowledge nine years ago with Jeffrey

M. Perl, his fellow University of Texas at Dallas literature

professor. Although the journal prints poetry and fiction (of "an

experimental bent," Dr. Nelsen says), its primary voice is in

"meta-theoretical essays." But among these are also reports on

Bosnia or Islam and democracy. And that mix of fiction, literary

theory and skeptical liberal politics is intended to help "end the

battles among the disciplines on campus," Dr. Nelsen says.



For its part, the Southwest Review prints such Lone Star authors

as essayist Don Graham (Giant Country) and novelist Rolando

Hinojosa--Smith (Ask a Policeman). But Dr. Spiegelman says he

avoids "cowboys and Indians," meaning typical Texas fare about land

and cattle.



"Too often, the appeal to regionalism is a disguise for the

third-rate," he says. The region, he believes, is better served by

printing quality fiction from Joyce Carol Oates or Reynolds Price

as well as newcomers. As a result, the Review is regularly ranked

among such illustrious and better-funded journals as the Paris Review.



It's also probably better known, Dr. Spiegelman notes with a drop

of resignation and resentment, in New York than in Dallas.



Distribution woes



That's not necessarily due to rampant local yokelism, however.

Most small-press journals in America suffer from serious

distribution headaches. Dallas-Fort Worth may have more bookstores

than San Francisco, but it's hard for local periodicals to get into

them.



"Most chain stores won't accept any issues on consignment from an

individual," says Joel Weinstein, publisher of Mississippi Mud. "It

all has to be approved in New York."



To make matters worse, the Austin--based distributor Fine Print,

which had meteoric success placing journals with national chains in

the early '90s, went bankrupt in 1997. Small presses have shifted

their business to four or five other networks, Mr. Weinstein says.



"But those distributors are all regional," he notes, "and they're

mostly geared toward independent bookstores, not the chains."



Having published Mississippi Mud for 25 years - its name

whimsically plucked from a Tin Pan Alley song - Mr. Weinstein moved

from Portland, Ore., to Dallas last year with his wife, a

curatorial assistant at the Dallas Museum of Art. He's now trying

to find area advertisers for his next issue.



Fortunately for Mud, it has more than literary appeal. The glossy

annual is stunningly designed, making it as much an artistic

artifact as a literary product, Mr. Weinstein says. So it sells

outside the bookstore market - in venues such as the Dallas Museum

of Art and the McKinney Avenue Contemporary.



A very different solution to the problems of money and

distribution is to keep a journal cheap and quick.



Musea, Tom Hendricks' 7-year-old 'zine, grew out of his

frustrations as a musician. He saw the recording industry - indeed,

much of American pop culture - controlled by a handful of giant

conglomerates. So he set out to create an independent voice in print.



He photocopies several hundred copies each month of his own work

and the writings of like-minded authors. He distributes these at

the McKinney Avenue Contemporary and the same Deep

Ellum--Exposition Park retailers that stock other area journals,

such as the monthly arts calendar The Word.



Asked to describe the material Musea prints, other than poems or

essays, Mr. Hendricks says simply, "Rants. That's a good word." He

is proud of the fact that, as each issue (and his Web site, musea.

digitalchainsaw.com) proclaims, he produces it with "No

Advertising. No Government Grants. No Sponsors."



He does this by keeping costs down to $100 a month. "I figure

I'll always be able to afford that," Mr. Hendricks says. "So I can

keep this up forever."



Computer link



Perhaps the most novel solution to the distribution bottleneck,

however, is being developed for !Tex! A product of the Writers'

Garret, the local literary service established by Thea Temple in

1994, !Tex! was started with a $50,000 grant from the Today

Foundation, a conservative think tank involved in education and

printing suburban newspapers such as Cedar Hill Today.



Intended to promote Texas literature, !Tex! is designed as a

tabloid supplement to be slipped into newspapers and used by

schools.



Potentially, the most ingenious aspect of !Tex! is its

distribution through computer disk. That way, Ms. Temple says, any

newspaper can pick it up, insert its own advertisements to pay for

the supplement and then print it.



The National Endowment for the Arts, once a major force in

small-press journals, has almost disappeared from the scene. Yet

the agency gave the Garret $20,000 in November to develop !Tex!



Using computerization to buck the marginalization of literature,

turning a narrow audience into a populist one: If it works, !Tex!

could add new dimensions to the world of small-press journals.



"We believe literature is living," says Ms. Temple. "It's not

just something that's archived. It's an expression of who we are as

a people. So why not put it in the hands of the people? As many

people as we can?"





Jerome Weeks

Book columnist

The Dallas Morning News

JWeeks@dallasnews.com

_______
Zine news - there is now a zine wikipedia.
See  zinewiki.com  . The cover features
my beloved Zine World. Check it out and add your
favorite zines.

Tom Hendricks
ed. of the 14 year old zine Musea

musea.us
hunkasaurus.com
Myspace.com/musead
Myspace.com/hunkasauruscom
tomhendricks474@cs.com
Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hendricks