gary lawrence murphy
sept '03

re: the Advice Edition

thanks for the kind invitation to submit an article; over and beyond the question of why me, a first most obvious question that any amateur pundital journalist might ask had to be

why?

it's an innocent question and I'm open to reasonable answers.

please understand that, through no fault of my own, I get approached at several times each month for freebie articles on topics from open-source to web-services architecture to Morita therapy. Every one of them really seeks to build up their traffic with my creative content, promising in return only something nebulous called exposure

in 10 years of freebie writings, I've seen, at best, maybe a temporary sub-5% traffic increase for the moment of the article release ... and that's for big things like Mother Jones, OfB, osOpinion or smallbusiness.com.

And I can't eat traffic.

Back in the good old days, back before conferences required speakers to pay to speak, even the Ladies Auxiliary would offer some small token, something even only symbolic to say "Your venerable time is worth something to us" an offering of maybe a meal and small honorarium, even it if was a donation in your name to a local shelter.

People used to smile and say 'hello' too. It seems the world doesn't work that way any more. These days, it's "you scratch my back first" while simultaneously turning it around to guilt-trip the rube with "If I have to scratch your back first, you're not being very friendly" ...

The phrase "plays well with others" wasn't big on my report cards, but that's another issue -- it's like the William Burroughs' fatherly advice:

"Never go to church, son, and for god's sake, never wear a badge"

For better or worse, and if you ask me it's for the better, long gone are the days when writers needed the kind and loving nurturing of a publisher like the way Valerie Solanis was cared for and nurtured by the kind of love doled out by the likes of Maurice Girodias -- gone too are the days with Crad Kilney would stand on the corner near Yonge and Wellesley hawking his book of original poetry.

Today, you don't need permission, you don't need an invitation, you don't even need any money, you just publish.

The classical 'opportunity' of a 'zine is a return diminished to the vanishing point. Today, the tables are turned and the enterprising 'zine, rather than publishing collections of author/artist grovelled literary S&M submissions, today the publishers are combing the web, picking up on the nanopublished bloggers, and then it's the publishers who do the bending to beg for re-publishing rights, hoping to build their traffic not by breaking new art, but by jumping on board an already moving train.

Maurice may have bled his artists dry with Faustian contracts, but at least he delivered on the promise of print and fame, and I suppose there are those places today where there's some value in getting drawn into the name-droppings of some a-lister, from the prestige of a First Monday selection to the certain death of the slashdot, and that latter shows how fame alone can be as much a punishment as a payment.

"I know you're set on fightin'
but what're you fightin' for?" (Phil Ochs)

Assuming a given answer for "why?" the next question becomes "for who?" -- I've been through the current issue and I'm not clear on the target VO demographic. There's no social feedback or community discussion in the magazine so it's not clear what this audience might expect.

According to the sources in the Google buzz (http://tinyurl.com/mmdz) fans of the duck seem already very well versed in blog culture and web design; I don't know that I would have much practical advice I could give to them. Looking down the list of these Google reviews the Virtual Occoquan appears to be a Salon-blogger thing ... promoted most by those with content in it ;)

the advice

That then there is the what, why, who and how of it, and herein perhaps some advice which we all know is best for a dispensing ...

With blogger Dave Pollard as one of the two publishers, I'm also prompted to ponder about how the Occoquan is done, how it's executed and what it collects: Given the technical, economic and intellectual collapse of central-publisher control valves over literary supply lines, I'm curious why VO would, in these modern times, choose an archaic, obsolete and print-static 'zine format.

And with no elements of social software! It's just there, plunk, you get what you get as it is. One would think there'd be value in a mutual rating system, a commentary and reader review process from within the community to rank and order the files by how the community perceived them. If art is the painting of the picture of ourselves, I would think this an excellent opportunity to paint the image of our own makings.

shake what yer mama gave ya

Being that Google betrays VO as at least believed to be a Salon-blogger thing, often described as "the best content from the Salon bloggers" why wouldn't VO do exactly that? Given the footprints of Salonials who know these bits, why not use their community spirit and expertise to sift them? Given the rich field of what that is the monthly output of the Salon blogs, and given the easy how of RSS or just HTML cut-and-paste, instead of editing submissions invited or otherwise, why wouldn't the VO position itself as the Salon Review, simply aggregating community blogs into a submissions queue where editors select and extract what they believe to be the very best and set these for scale point-scoring before a community peer review?

Susan Sontag described the process of review-by-complaint as misguided and meaningless -- we all know those sad movie critics who must, day after freaking day, attend movies they detest, and it's sadder still that those same critics seem unable to muster the finances to make their own so-much-better film to finally prove their superiority -- therein Sontag's reasons: A review need not say what is good or bad but it can simply describe what it is and let the readers decide themselves, now armed as more informed consumers of the art.

There's value in that, but there's also value in the fickle metrics of popularity -- as the song about Phil Ochs goes, "Fifty fans can't be wrong ... or can they?" -- and perhaps, using social software there's a crossing point, a meeting of the methods where the unquestioning egalitarian submission queues of the RSS aggregations can be mined, cleaned, polished and refined by an editorial control that is then judged and rated, in open and immediate ranking spaces, by the realtime stream of VO readers.

Now that might be a post-critical lit review 'zine worth reading ...