[Erlist] This is Wet Asphalt

[Eric]

So myself and Jason Quackenbush, the people who brought you 
YankTheChain.com, have launched our new website, Wet Asphalt. Wet Asphalt 
is a web magazine published like a blog, focused on literature and 
publishing.

This is what it's all about:

What is Wet Asphalt?

  Stop blaming the reader.

Read any article in any magazine about the state of fiction in America: 
most often the first thing mentioned will be the competition for time that 
contemporary fiction is engaged in with television, movies and video 
games. The reader, we are told, has been lured away by flashy new media. 
The reader is silly and impressionable and easily distracted by shiny 
objects held before her gaze. The reader is tired of made-up stories told 
in prose--this having to do, apparently, with the post-9/11 world, or the 
post-twentieth century world, or the post-contemporary condition or 
something like that. No, instead she only wants non-fiction, preferably 
memoir. Some critics have even derided fiction authors who pursue 
popularity as trying to be "celebrities." It seems there is some crime in 
wanting to be read widely, wanting to be culturally relevant, wanting more 
than to be read only by other writers. "What's the point?" these 
defeatists say with a shrug. "People don't like to read fiction anymore. 
Its not our fault."

And while people complain about people complaining about fiction's 
irrelevance, the publishing industry remodels itself along the Hollywood 
blueprint and books on writing come out that refer to a writer's name as 
his "brand" without irony. "This is the age of the blockbuster," they seem 
to be saying. "You're either the Next Big Thing, or you're nothing. Dont 
feel bad, readers are meek and zombie-like chattel. They're only 
interested in a book if everyone else is reading it. Didn't you see our 
demographic statistics? Look, I've got this chart I can show you. It 
explains everything."

Stop blaming the reader. Say what you will about Oprahs Book Club, if 
there's one thing that phenomenon illustrates it is that ordinary people 
(i.e. non-writers, non-publishers, non-agents, non-creative writing 
instructors, non-literature professors) still read good fiction if they're 
exposed to it. People like good fiction. They even love good fiction. If 
people aren't reading good fiction, it's just because they're not finding 
out about it. Why is that?

Consider for a moment the greatest American novel: a long, rambling book 
in dense, heavily-stylized prose about a lunatic, one-legged sea captain 
obsessed with vengeance and hell-bent on killing an albino sperm whale. 
Sounds like a good book, doesnt it? The problem is that, were Moby Dick 
published today, rather than competing with the latest Horatio Hornblower, 
it would be up against a mediocre morass of novels about dysfunctional 
families and lousy childhoods--or worse, memoirs about coming from a 
dysfunctional family or having a lousy childhood. Moby Dick would be lost 
in the rising tide of the banal. We're sick of your boring novels. It's 
not just the staleness of contemporary plots, it's the absence of 
anything--anything at all--that could possibly grab our interest long 
enough to tear us away from the latest episode of "Lost." After all, 
"Lost" is better than all of 2004's much-talked-about National Book Award 
finalists combined, to use one less-than-arbitrary example. Note: this is 
not a remark about craft; the MFA Industry has stamped out legions of 
writers who can polish a sentence to a fine, gem-quality luster but who 
still think that short stories should be about someone dealing with a 
dying relative. You want to know why The DaVinci Code sold better than Our 
Kind? It certainly wasn't because Dan Brown is a more skilled writer than 
Kate Walbert. And it wasn't because people like "crap." It was because The 
DaVinci Code, for all its many, many problems, was interesting. We need 
books with the technical refinement of Our Kind and the entertainment 
value of The DaVinci Code. Which isn't as preposterous as it may sound; we 
only need look to the past for examples. Look at Moby Dick, look at 
Huckleberry Finn, look at The Turn of the Screw; more recently Catch-22, 
The Universal Baseball Association, or American Psycho. As much flak as 
Rick Moody and company caught for that year's NBA's, it's telling that 
2005's committee responded by selecting writers like William Vollmann and 
Mary Gaitskill who are maybe less touchy-feely New York insiders  la Moody 
and co., but whose books are equally soporific.

Even worse than the plight of the novel in American letters is the sad 
case of short fiction, which these days primarily appears in "literary 
magazines" with circulations that can be counted in three digits. Short 
fiction, once the great egalitarian form that supplied or supplemented the 
livelihoods of generations of writers, seems to be in danger of becoming a 
historical curiosity as relevant to literary culture as the saga, the 
broadside, or the epic. But whats wrong with these literary magazines? Why 
doesn't anybody read them? We suggest that the editors of these 
periodicals should withdraw their listings from "The Writers Market" and 
similar publications. For most literary magazines, more people submit work 
than read the magazine. Which is to say that the number of writers who 
want to be published in these magazines far outstrips the number of people 
who want to read them. Some magazines have even instituted an abhorrent 
policy of charging people to submit work. All of this because of the 
perception that literary magazines are not really publications to be read 
for enjoyment, but rather stepping-stones to representation by book agents 
and contracts with book publishers. This perception is fostered by "The 
Writer's Market" and "Poets and Writers Magazine" and "Writer's Digest" 
and ten thousand websites whose raison d'etre is to tell unpublished 
writers what they need to do in order to get their memoir of being abused 
as a child by a dying relative published by Harper Collins. Even sadder is 
the reality that most of the people who do read literary magazines are 
people who found out about them from "Writer's Market;" they are a 
percentage of the people who are submitting work. A pessimist might 
suspect that the majority of these readers are only reading to figure out 
how to market themselves to the publication.

This is ridiculous.

Perhaps the days of mass-market consumer fiction and poetry magazines are 
well behind us, but we think the problem with literary magazines can be 
summed up by the fact that you'll find nearly nothing about their content 
on their covers; most have merely a list of the authors published inside. 
Maybe that's because "Someone Deals with a Dying Relative" doesn't make 
for snappy cover copy. We're tired of your boring stories, and we're tired 
of your literary magazines without an audience. Withdraw your listings 
from "Writer's Market" and try making something that people actually want 
to buy. Then youll get submissions from people who actually like your 
magazine and want to be read in it. If nobody reads your magazine at that 
point, it's possible that the free market is trying to tell you something. 
Look at the example of McSweeney's, which, for whatever else one might say 
about it, has single-handedly proven that the literary magazine can be 
commercially viable and culturally relevant.

For poetry, the situation is all the direr. Poetry is so marginalized, so 
ill-read, so insular, incestuous and desperate that one wonders if there 
is any hope for it at all. And yet poetry still carries weight as a 
popular form--how many people can recite from memory lines from "The 
Raven" or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? Still, boringness eats 
away at poetry like Ebola Zaire. The contemporary poetry scene is a mess 
of quiet, maundering free verse that goes nowhere and does nothing. Rather 
than excite the reader with language and artful deployment of image and 
form, the present doyens of American poetry have inherited all the 
soul-baring honesty of the confessional poets with none of their style and 
sophistication. Poetry as practiced by these self-reflexive 
sycophants--who, as Ron Silliman, Foetry.com and others have observed, 
control what little money there is in verse--is a watered-down version of 
what was produced by previous generations. We hold that Shel Silverstein, 
who wrote humorous doggerel aimed at children under seven, was a better 
poet than Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky, or Ted Kooser and it is 
significant that he is more widely read and known than any of these U.S. 
Poet Laureates. Stop blaming the reader. We're tired of your boring poems.

We look around the literary world today and see on one side book 
publishers and so-called marketing gurus who seem to think you must write 
thrillers poorly or be picked by Oprah or get a movie deal or you just 
don't matter. "It's all about the blockbuster," they say. "After all, 
we're only giving the reader what he wants."
On the other side we see literati who write amazingly well crafted stories 
about nothing. "Appealing to readers at large is a pointless, shallow, 
lowest-common denominator affair," they seem to think. "Instead you must 
work your ass off to become part of the 'community of writers,'"--one 
assumes because theyre the only ones who'll ever bother to read your book. 
Maybe if you're lucky one of your friends or lovers or teachers will give 
you an award. And that's just the state of things--most people don't want 
to read good novels or good poetry, and you can only give the readers what 
they want.

This is the world as weve been sold it.

We disagree with this picture.

We propose that the audience already exists, waiting to be shown the good 
work.

We propose that the good work already exists and is merely mired in the 
endless bog of the dull and the mediocre.

We propose an engine to promote the good work, to publish the good work, 
to discuss the milieu in which we operate in light of the good work.

We propose a beachhead where readers can rely on a standard of quality, 
free for anyone with an Internet connection.

This is Wet Asphalt.
Eric Rosenfield and JF Quackenbush
March 28th, 2006
http://www.wetasphalt.com