Kenneth Burke, Little Magazines, and Blogging
Listening: Poe, Haunting
Reading: Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, by Jack Selzer; Counterstatement, by Kenneth Burke
I‘m still not sure what the difference is between a blog and a journal. But these are my thoughts on the subject:
I recently ran into Mimi Nguyen’s Slander page and she has a section of blogs. Surfing off of her page onto the pages of her friends, I saw they also had blogs. It took me a while to figure out what a blog was exactly, probably because I was caffeine deprived. But ‘blog, which is short for weblog, is basically a surfing journal. Blogs have become pretty popular, it seems, especially since there are whole webrings devoted to blogging. Blogs, I think, have become an integral part of web culture just like zines. Now, Mimi’s Slander page has an interesting journal entry that talks about whether or not she has “copycats” out there on the net. Intellectual property is a huge issue these days, and it seems that a friend of Mimi’s is concerned with protecting Slander. Well, let’s just get this straight–*I* am a Mimi copy-cat. She puts what she’s reading in her journals, so I put what I’m reading. She puts what she’s listening to, so I put what I’m listening to. I’ve copied her form. So, the questions that the internet raises about zines and blogs and intellectual property and, in particular, the nature of form lead me to Kenneth Burke. Of course.
Coincidentally, I grabbed _Counterstatement_ off my shelf a couple of weeks ago and started reading it. Now, it’s been a while since I’ve -read- anything by Kenneth Burke. I’ve thumbed through looking for quotes, especially in my favorite sections. But I’ve wanted to sit down and -read- Burke again for some time now. I’ve read the introduction twice. The first time was a turgid read. I eyeballed old margin notes. I looked for meaning in every word. I read like a good student of rhetoric should read. Then I surfed my way into Jack Selzer’s Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village (which I am reading through LSU’s access to netLibrary). Now this is a gem of a book so far, talking about the early Burke and his cafe and Little Magazine days. And this fascinates me.
It fascinates me for purely tangential reasons. First of all, I just moved into a 1920s Hollywood-style bungalow in “The Garden District” (ok, the Garden District of Baton Rouge, big whoop). And I keep finding myself drawn to Modernist iconography and culture. Now, I admit that, as a dilettante, I will probably let this interest fade when I surf on to something else that gets my attention. But thinking about Burke sitting in a Greenwich Village cafe and writing essays for _The Dial_ makes me want to drink coffee and just -talk- about stuff. Talk about it and read about it.
That’s when it struck me that I was reading Burke wrong. Counterstatement should be a cafe companion, not a seminal text. And the whole thing changed before my eyes. Now I drink Burke with my coffee in the morning.
So, what’s the connection to blogs? Well, when I was trolling through my bookmarks to revamp my website, I ran into a very cool page which I now have on my link-o-rama (shameless plug), the Cyber_lit e-zines page. The text on this page has stuck with me for a few weeks now. The site claims a number of points about e-zines. First, e-zines are derived from Little Magazine culture. I suppose the connection is patently obvious, but I had never thought of it before. Perhaps because my Grandfather owned a large collection of Little Magazines and in fact published his own Little Magazine, called _Earth_, but this was something that never impressed me until it was too late. He’s dead and the magazines are at the Smithsonian.
Second, the Cyber_lit e-zine site says that academic journals are really just zines. What a riot! That completely demystifies tenure, doesn’t it. Zines address discrete audiences who share distinct idiolects and particular interests, says the website. Wait, though, before we push the analogy too far and give academic journals too much credit. Zines are cutting edge, academic journals are typically overly-disciplined.
Anyway, what I really wanted to do was to read some Little Magazines on the web, but no one has digitized those yet. My surfing quest did turn up some interesting sites, however. Of course, Encarta Encyclopedia always comes up on searches like this. Their entry was useless, but it was nice to see Little Magazines recognized by them: “Little Magazine–a periodical devoted to publishing specialized, avant-garde writing and criticism. Because of limited circulation and marginal financial backing, the so-called little magazines are generally short-lived.” This from an electronic publication owned by Microsoft. The ironies here are many and painful.
Then I ran into the Directory of Little Magazines, a UK site that made me want to visit England again. Unless you want to buy the mags via snail mail, the site was not very helpful, unfortunately. There is a Little Magazine Project at Nottingham Trent University. For a while there, all the sites I was running into were from the Brits. This site said that Little Magazines published boundary-pushing works with no regard for commercial gain. It also said that Little Magazines were *fundamental* to many modern literary and aesthetic movements. And it made a very appropriate point: Contributors to Little Mags were impossible to categorize. Indeed, this is true for Burke. Rhetoricians of every paradigm and ideology try to claim him for their own. See Kenneth Burke and the 21st Century by Bernard L. Brock (which I am also reading from the netLibrary at LSU).
I struck gold with a great site by Dr. Mary Ann Gillies at Simon Fraser University. She teaches a class on Little Mags and her students have put together some websites that detail various Mags, including a history of editors, contributors, and so forth. Of particular interest is the page on Kenneth Burke’s Little Mag, The Dial, which talks about its relationship to Transcendentalism, the history of its various editors, including Margaret Fuller, among other things.
I also found two directory links, one for on-line zines and one for Little Magazine publishers.
These various links somehow led me to a curious site by a student earning a master’s degree in publishing. I didn’t know you could do that. Anyway, he wrote a paper about the history of publishing in the beat generation that’s worth a look if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s called Unspeakable Visions: The Beat Generation and the Bohemian Dialect. And since the paper was, of course, completely absent of women, I was very happy to run into the book, Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines & Literary History by Jayne Marek.
The final site worth mentioning was Juniper Press, who is a contemporary publisher of Little Magazines. This site had an inspiring quote by Felix Pollak, who is former Curator of Rare Books at UW-Madison and, they claim, a world authority on little magazines:
“Practically speaking, it is littleness that guarantees the littles their independence and unbeholdenness without which they cease to be what they are. A true little mag is one that would not be big if it could, that is kept little not by need but by choice. . . .A true little mag would rather address itself to a select group of kindred spirits than a faceless void of anonyms. To edit a little magazine, in short, means to maintain a thou to thou relationship with the contributors, with the readers, and with that whole microcosm that encompasses the macro world-at least ideally so……..”
So what’s the connection between Kenneth Burke, Little Magazines, and Blogs? Heh….meet me at Community Coffee and I will tell you.
