Tiny Darts of Rebellion
‘Morning, sunshine.
Today, there is an alacrity about things.
Today, there is coffee, for the first time in weeks. And glorious sunny beautifulness out there.
Therefore, it is not a day that I feel like hanging out in the ol’ Artsy Garret Apt ™, doing fricking internet research.

Ah, but isn’t this sort of sacrifice – not to mention maintenance of the pallid complexion -- that the artistic life is all about, after all?

See, I decided to devote this weekend to sitting down and researching the haps on various literary journals. Coming as I do, from the World o’ Journalism, Henshaw, I know my newspapers. I know my public radio stations. Coming from the world of, well, people who eat and sleep and go into bookshops, I know my magazines. But. I do not come from the world o’ academia, my dear Mr. H., so I have no fucking clue about lit mags.

But I’m supposed to. See, here’s the deal: When you enroll in an MFA writing program, you’re supposed to be constantly sending your work out to small publications with arresting titles like Stony Creek Review and Autumnal Corners Quarterly – publications read far and wide… by other academic people who are also feverishly sending out their own work to the same journals.

And in order to send your work out to these places, you need to familiarize yourself with them, so, on any given day, you might end up sending 17 bucks to, say, Punxsutawney, PA so that you can learn whether Marmota Monax considers itself more of a traditional or cutting-edge type o’ publication.

So you end up with: a bunch of poor-ish grad student and profesorly types shelling out all their money on publications that other poor-ish grad student and professorly types read in order to find out if said-publication would ever go for their kind of work.

Okay, so that’s kind of asshole-y.
The writing in the good journals is pretty damn compelling, after all. I mean, the emphasis on quality over mass appeal is so front and center that you really find yourself blown away by the short stories, essays and poems in best ones. As any of the 75-or-so subscribers to any of them will tell you. And there’s something refreshing about that. Just jumping on into this fray and sending your eight pages, your cover letter and SASE to The luNAR mOTH Review is one way of kinda sticking it to the man, of shouting, “Screw recognition by large or medium-sized audiences! It’s all about my art!”

You know: like sticking it to him…with a teeny, tiny needle that he’ll never, ever feel.

But I’m going to do it. I’ll learn myself some literary goodness this weekend if it kills me. It kind of feels like active training to be a record store geek: This weekend, I will crack this insular world-! And I both hate insular worlds, and - like all of us to some extent - am irresistibly, helplessly, drawn to them. And then I just want to make fun of them.

Oh, dear, dear lord.

Wish me luck.