YouTube – Piano stairs – Rolighetsteorin.se – The fun theory.

More things in the world should be designed to delight.

How am I just now discovering this? In an essay published two years ago, Dave Bonta spells out in writing the argument I’ve been making in bars for years: that most online literary magazines are conceptually shackled by their slavish imitation of print publications:

Again, the shape and style of online magazines seems to be hampered by the editors’ slavish imitation of print models with a postal delivery system. And what about those virtual covers I mentioned? They’re often very well designed, but let’s face it: online attention spans are short. Why should I have to click through two, three, or even four pages of front-matter and hunt around for navigation cues just to sample a magazine’s latest content?

More specifically, he argues that online journals could learn a lot by adopting the best practices of blogs.

To fully understand this argument, you must first understand the word “blog” as a term that defines a publishing system rather than a content type. What Dave is really arguing for here (although he might not say it in so many words) is the adoption of blogging platforms, those ready-made publishing systems that provide all the fixings of native web publications (RSS feeds, incremental updating, etc), rather than the adoption of silly memes or the abandonment of editing.

Crafting a literary magazine from a blog platform requires some technical know how and imagination, of course. The default page designs that ship with most blog software are completely unsuited for literary magazines, and nothing says hack job like throwing the words “online journal” over a stock Blogger template. A quality online journal can be crafted from off-the-shelf blogging software, though. Linebreak runs on blogging software, but it looks nothing like the average blog because we spent several months kicking around design ideas before coding an original template that fit our concept.

Although Dave wrote his essay two years ago, very little has changed. One thing I discovered when launching Swindle is how few online poetry journals offer RSS feeds, which have been a staple of web publications for six or seven years. (No Tell Motel does, as do 42 Opus and Poetry, but that’s about it). RSS feeds sprang from a publishing model that emphasizes incremental updates and the supremacy of the individual post, whereas most online lit mags are still following a model from the last century, when the cost of paper and distribution dictated a model that emphasized the issue, a cost efficient bundle of content wrapped in cover art.

The nut graph: Too many online literary magazines seem to be unhappily waiting for the day when they can afford a print run, and ignoring most of the benefits of being a web publication in the meantime.

Publishing any kind of literary journal is hard work, of course, and unpaid, and the people who give up their time to do so deserve thanks. But I think a lot of the lingering prejudice against online magazines in the literary world has to do with how poorly designed and conceived many of them are. And it’s time for that to change.

An Amazon customer reviews a gallon of Tuscan Whole Milk in the style of Edgar Allan Poe.

Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door -
Only this, and nothing more.’

News to me: Bookswim is a subscription service that delivers hardcovers through the mail, a Netflix for readers.

Listen to an interview with the company’s director of customer service.

William Giraldi, a prose writer and fiction editor of AGNI, provides this lovely bit about the transformative power of reading in an interview by Jessica Pitchford at The Southeast Review:

Literature helps salve the wound, the wound every one of us has, the original sin Augustine stuck us with. Of course the Augustinian notion of original sin is a metaphor for how imperfect and damaged our species is, how much work we need to do in order to live honest and productive lives. Emotional truths are waiting for you in literature, and I honestly don’t know how people travel through this world without Wordsworth. I would have hanged myself years ago if I couldn’t have sought refuge in him and others. Reading is transformative—I love that word—because it forces a reckoning, a confrontation with truth in a way that few other art forms can do. Run the other way if you find yourself on a date and the person says that he doesn’t have time to read, because what he really means is that he doesn’t have time to think or feel.

The rest of the interview is well worth the time. Now I have to go and search out all of Giraldi’s short stories and essays. At least the review offers this sample essay to help get me started.

Random trivia: I went to high school with Jessica. No lie.

At the Best American Poetry blog, Daniel Nester takes readers on a brief tour through the online archives of Painted Bride Quarterly:

I think I realized just how small I was in PBQ’s history until I worked on the PBQ Archive, where we scanned each and every issue, made PDF files of them, and posted them all online.

With Richard Eoin Nash, later my publisher at Soft Skull Press, consulting us, and Thomas Israel Hopkins, a superfab fiction writer, manning the HTML wheels of steel, the Archive project was a modest attempt to share the history of PBQ with the world.

Rumor is that Daniel will be showing up around these parts next week.

The Stolen Child – WB Yeats (Poem No. 1) on Vimeo

This animated interpretation of W.B. Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” was created and filmed in the virtual world of Second Life.

HTMLGIANT asks its readers what topics they’d like to see addressed in a comprehensive resource for anyone looking to start a literary magazine.

A worthy endeavor, though the wording of the post seems to imply that any new lit magazine would include a print edition, which baffles me.

Update: See the comment from HTMLGIANT’s Roxane. The project is meant to include online-only journals as well. Sometimes I’m punchy in the mornings.

It all comes down to this.

(And thank you to the fine people at Linebreak for letting me have my say this week.)

Confronting nonsense can sharpen the intellect and increase the brain’s ability to identify patterns and make creative connections, according to a recent study described in the New York Times. Psychologists found that students who read an absurd short story based on work by Kafka were then twice as accurate at identifying subtle patterns than students who read a coherent story.

The brain evolved to predict, and it does so by identifying patterns.

When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense.

TYPO 13 has been released unto the Interwebs, with new poems by Carolyn Guinzio, Stephen Sturgeon, and Anthony Robinson, to name just a few. Typo is edited by Matthew Henriksen and Adam Clay, the latter of whom, you may remember, contributed a poem to Linebreak last year.

Carol Rumens recognized National Poetry Day in the U.K. by asking readers to name their favorite poem, and collected more than 100 responses in the comments.

I hope you’re feeling better. I really do.

I have a bad of habit of sitting at the keyboard long after any meaningful writing or coding is going to happen. Caterina smacks down working for the sake of working.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

I imagine myself, when I’m writing a poem, blind almost, feeling my way through the work with other senses, listening, pulling myself along, trying to say what I hear. My other art is all eye. When I’m taking a photograph I have the opposite sensation, one of being mute and having to gesture other-ward in order to say what I see.

Susan Sontag says, in her marvelous book, On Photography,

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

Other than the slightly derogatory tone of “souvenir,” it seems to me much of the same could be said for poetry—we keep the aperture open and ready to catch, contain, and present the image, idea, feeling crossing before us—passing through us—ready to be urged into being as another thing, a new state. And poems, like photographs, I would argue, are also a backward-facing mirror, revealing as much about their maker as they express the made.

Sontag says later, and so beautifully,

“Photography is an elegiac art…All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

How about that idea of making something as a way of refusing or limiting experience? I’d love to hear what you think about this—or about anything I’ve written here this week.

At the Guardian, Stuart Evers describes his return to reading poetry after many years away, and touches on most of contemporary poetry’s problems (insularity, difficulty, etc) in the process:

Dave Eggers – according to Nick Hornby’s 31 Songs – has a theory that we listen to certain songs over and over again to “solve” them. Once solved, they are pushed out in favour of new tracks to work through. This is fine for a three-minute pop ditty you can listen to while jogging or washing the car, but if you’re going to do the same for a poem, you’re going to need a lot more time and attention. Which means it’s very easy not to bother in the first place.

He also talks up Adam Foulds’s The Broken Word as a superb novel about poets and poetry. The  novel hasn’t been released in the states yet, but you can get used copies of the U.K. release on Amazon.

-lines from cummings’ poem “all ignorance toboggans into know”

I go to e. e. cummings like I might go to a meringue bar were there such a place. There should be. A meringue bar with cummings behind the counter, white cloth tossed over his shoulder, a heavy china plate ready to slide your way, egg whites and sugar, spun, whipped and bound. The pink of it. White nearly iridescent. He might call you by your true name, light, airy, and sweet.

When only two people attended his reading at Copperfield Books last month, Tao Lin interviewed one of them.

Tao Lin at Copperfield’s Books on Vimeo on Vimeo (via Bookslut)

Daniel Nester calls out the more churlish elements of the professional poetry community in a long piece at The Morning News. Surprisingly, I’ve seen very little response to it. Maybe my Twitter peep gatewaygroupie was right when she said, “There is no way to talk about that essay without getting in trouble.”

“Homo Erectus Recalls the Better Days of Man” is a good example of a poem that makes its bones on the strength of its last line. I’m obsessed with last lines lately.

Paul Graham, one of the most consistent essayists working today, explains the popularity of the list post, and follows with a cogent explanation of why the typical college essay isn’t an essay at all. Very few lit types of my acquaintance read Graham. This should be corrected. Immediately.

A new blog for your feed reader: Brian Turner, the poet-soldier who authored Here, Bullet, is traveling the world for one year as the 2010 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar. (via TR Hummer’s Facebook)