In Best American Short Stories 2011, six stories were published by a little publication called The New Yorker. Granta, Tin House, and McSweeney’s each had two stories in the anthology. These magazines are undoubtedly publishing excellent writing but their dominance also tells us that beyond the elite tier of magazines, it is more challenging for excellence to be recognized or acknowledged.
The three most interesting parts of BASS 2011 were the foreword by Heidi Pittlor, the introduction by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, and the list of Notable Stories at the back of the collection, a list that does include stories from a broader range of literary magazines while also listing a mind boggling nineteen (by my unofficial count) stories from The New Yorker and several stories for each of a number of other elite magazines like Ploughshares, Tin House, Ecotone, and Granta.
And so Roxanne Gay identifies the literary equivalent of the ruling class. As things stand now, the peasants are unlikely to appear in those pubs, that pub, or any pub those pubs & that pub will deign to acknowledge.
Which wouldn't matter two hoots if there weren't further commissions and royalties at the end of the procedure. Advances and royalties are money, and money is time.
Oh, and respect. Respect for breakfast can set you up for the day.
(At the same time this is not a new situation. The NY Times Book Review was founded to showcase the products of the paper's major advertisers. [See The end of intelligent writing: literary politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz.] Institutional log-rolling is as old as mass publishing.)
However, in addition to its ability to pickle you in annoyance, this situation cripples the creation of culture. We need to see these books, these stories, these poems; we need them as readers and as writers; we need to interact with the most true and resonant things that are being pointed at and exclaimed at and WTF'd at and wondered at and written about, the inner worlds and the outer –
And we need to be able to do it now.
Not being able to readily read the material that is not included, not alluded to, rendered invisible; not being able to hear about it and thereby find it is killing our ability to make and remake our understanding of ourselves and everything else.
This situation – the ruling class and the invisible ruled – closes down our possibilities at the moment we need them most.
Globally, André Schiffrin has it nailed.
And, as Schiffrin points out, implicitly, the issue isn't power; it's control. Ownership gives control. Over what is said, what is permissible to say – not under my roof – what is effective speech, what not.
Yes, there is the internet. That marvellous device which removes your distribution problem and replaces it with a publicity problem. We can do it without the mass organs of yesteryear – we can network and link and post and comment and create and… But we have to keep at least the net free. We, collectively, have to control something. We have to occupy our voices and our contacts and our contacts' contacts – or our future will not be ours to occupy, at all.
