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          <td class="bodytext"><br>
            <blockquote> 
              <p><b>Cast Your Magazine Upon the Waters<br>
                </b>February 22, 1998 </p>
              <p> Recently we took our literary magazine, <i>Open City</i>, to 
                the streets. <br>
                Setting up a table at the corner of Prince and Wooster Streets, 
                next to the 
                Korean sunglasses salesman, the illicit tarot card reader and 
                the 
                elderly black woman selling her handmade handbags in pastel shades, 
                we 
                flogged our journal -- judged ''ambitiously highbrow'' by The 
                New York Times 
                and one of ''the 10 best magazines of the year'' by Library Journal 
                -- 
                to anyone we could get to stop and pay attention to us. To the 
                SoHo 
                procession of tourist families, art gallery interns, fashion stylists, 
                
                photographers and local laborers, we must have presented an anomalous 
                and 
                perhaps desperate sight. But that didn't prevent the vast majority 
                from 
                ignoring us. 
              </p>
              <p>My co-editor, Thomas Beller, a fiction writer, and I were casting 
                out 
                lines, fishing to expand our audience base. We began Open City 
                seven or 
                so years ago, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm. At the time, 
                we worked 
                for new, brassy, celebrity-oriented magazines seeking a mainstream 
                
                market. (Both eventually went belly up.) The concept of starting 
                an 
                uncommercial journal of literature and the arts somehow blossomed 
                from our day-to-day exposure to end-of-the-1980's venality and 
                glitz. We were 
                presumptuous and idealistic enough to think that we could find 
                work to 
                publish that was not just polished or professional but important 
                and 
                groundbreaking. To finance the first issue, Tom and I each put 
                up a precious $1,000. Slowly and haltingly, the journal picked 
                up its own momentum. Grants and art gallery advertising paid for 
                the next issues, and new editors got involved, including Elizabeth 
                Schmidt, a former assistant 
                editor at The New Yorker, and Adrian Dannatt, a British critic. 
                Eventually, 
                we found a publisher to cover our printing costs -- Robert Bingham, 
                
                author of a recent short-story collection, ''Pure Slaughter Value'' 
                -- and 
                through him, some downtown office space. 
              </p>
              <p>Tom and I both grew up on the Upper West Side -- the antediluvian 
                
                literary Upper West Side of independent bookstores like the New 
                Yorker, 
                Endicott and Shakespeare &amp; Company. The bookshelves of my 
                mother's 
                apartment contained stashes of publications from the 1950's and 
                60's, such as Evergreen Review, The New American Review, Big Table, 
                the 
                mimeographed-and-stapled-together Floating Bear, edited by the 
                poet LeRoi Jones, and others far more obscure. I knew about the 
                importance of cultural journals for sustaining the Beat Generation, 
                the French Oulipo movement, the Surrealists and the circle surrounding 
                Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis's Blast.</p>
              <p> I believed in the historical necessity of new literary magazines 
                
                -- unaffiliated with academia or the mainstream publishing world 
                -- to 
                foster a scene, to help define and nurture a creative community, 
                like 
                the Vorticists, the Beats or Bloomsbury. But life in 1990's New 
                York allows little time, or space, for creative nurturing and 
                self-definition. The conditions that helped a bohemian counterculture 
                to flourish at midcentury have evaporated, a casualty of skyrocketing 
                rents, an oppressive ambience of capitalist anxiety and the pressures 
                of the media hype that descends like a vampire's kiss of death 
                on any new cultural phenomenon. 
              </p>
              <p>We had our first inkling of this a few years into our venture, 
                when we 
                found that the parties we gave for the journal were greeted with 
                far 
                more excitement and analyzed much more carefully than the contents 
                of the journal itself. Wanting to reconnect the art world with 
                the literary 
                world, we served cocktails and organized readings in galleries, 
                downtown 
                clubs and art spaces, and it was these events that led to Open 
                City's 
                being written up in various glossy magazines, such as Harper's 
                Bazaar, 
                Vogue and Manhattan File, along with a few other new journals. 
                Although 
                gratifying in a way, the articles had an oddly devitalizing effect 
                on 
                us as editors; they seemed to trivialize the enterprise. The vaguely 
                
                patronizing tone of the trend stories insinuated that we were 
                somehow 
                doing the journal as a marketing strategy or ''Gen X'' ploy, and 
                added our 
                venture to the culture's endless roster of cheap, stimulating, 
                
                instantly forgettable brain candy. 
              </p>
              <p>Our low-level notoriety led to an incredible deluge in submissions, 
                
                much more than our small, unpaid staff was equipped to handle, 
                and almost all of it depressingly unsuitable. It was clear that 
                most of our 
                would-be contributors never bought or read the journal -- if they 
                did, our 
                financial outlook would be far brighter. We chose the title Open 
                City for 
                its connotation of, well, ''openness.'' We wanted the magazine 
                to let 
                in a range of styles and voices, both raw and cooked -- ranging 
                from 
                highly slick and intellectual to twisted and experimental. In 
                a 
                celebratory way, we wanted to publish our friends, and make friends 
                with new writers we published -- a roster, too long to list here, 
                that has included 
                young novelists like Martha McPhee, avant-garde playwrights such 
                as 
                Reza Abdoh, and the Dutch post-modernist Hilarius Hofstede. But 
                we hadn't realized that most of a journal editor's energy goes 
                into the tedious 
                process of rejecting manuscripts. </p>
              <p>Our journal quickly became a more closed city than we had intended. 
                
                It is an irony of our time that while more people seem to be writing 
                
                than ever before, the literary culture has gone into steep decline. 
                These 
                days, magazines and newspapers keep announcing the demise of the 
                
                old-fashioned, outmoded world of letters in which we staked our 
                journal. A 
                few years ago -- after reading the hundredth elegy for the death 
                of the 
                humanist literary tradition, the thousandth report on the fall 
                of the 
                independent bookstore and the rise of the faceless chain, the 
                millionth 
                commentary on the new, emergent culture defined entirely by marketing 
                
                and public relations -- we began to get testy. Anger motivated 
                us through 
                a few more issues of Open City -- one of them featuring cover 
                
                photographs of perverse Englishmen who get their kicks by imitating 
                horses, or pretending to be infants. Responding to the suffocating 
                cultural 
                climate, we published neurotic stories with themes of sexual and 
                professional degradation. We printed long, manifestolike poems, 
                filled with cadenced rage. These poems struggled with many of 
                the same issues that obsessed us -- as in these lines from George 
                Bradley's ''Frug Macabre'': 
              </p>
              <blockquote>
                <p>we poets have a license 
                  to speak our minds, because 
                  we poets barely exist. 
                  Working a medium au courant 
                  as smoke signals, resigned 
                  to book deals as lucrative 
                  as lemonade stands, stuck 
                  teaching creating writing 
                  (all the perks of babysitting 
                  and none of the fan harassment), 
                  ignored, isolated, irritable, 
                  of course a poet will ruin 
                  the party. </p>
              </blockquote>
              <p>Along with stories and poems by unknown writers, we unearthed 
                what we 
                felt were lost masterpieces -- an essay by the poet and novelist 
                Denis 
                Johnson about traveling through Somalia in the midst of a civil 
                war; 
                works by Mary Gaitskill, Hubert Selby and Terry Southern; the 
                mad literary 
                critic Alfred Chester's letters to Paul Bowles from the 1960's; 
                a 
                handwritten story buried in a notebook by the melancholic English 
                book 
                reviewer and memoirist Cyril Connolly. That story, incidentally, 
                
                fictionalized Connolly's life as the editor of the literary journal 
                Horizon. 
                ''Helping young writers?'' the protagonist muses at one point. 
                ''But to what 
                did he help them? To jog on for a year or two in the vain hope 
                that 
                they were going to make an income by their writing while the opportunity 
                
                for earning any other kind of living was inexorably withdrawn 
                from 
                them.'' 
              </p>
              <p>I sometimes ask myself whether the process of putting out Open 
                City 
                isn't akin to one of those tribal ceremonies, described by 
                anthropologists, in which all of the excess goods of a tribe -- 
                in our case, the editors' time, the advertisers' money, the artists' 
                work -- are combined and destroyed in one huge bonfire and bacchanalia. 
                Our situation was 
                satirized with vengeance by Martin Amis in ''The Information.'' 
                The novel's 
                protagonist, Richard Tuttle, edits an Open City-like venture called 
                The 
                Little Magazine. ''The Little Magazine really did stand for something,'' 
                Amis writes. ''It really did stand for something, in this briskly 
                materialistic age. It stood for not paying people.''</p>
              <p> I have resolved my ambivalence by factoring in the enjoyment 
                that comes from creating the thing itself, in collaboration with 
                my friends and fellow editors. As a policy, the editors of Open 
                City have decided to respond to the stated decline of the literary 
                culture with intractable stubbornness: we will continue to publish 
                long, convoluted poems, correspondences from literary critics 
                of the past, avant-garde missives and various rants. We may not 
                be as enthusiastic or as young as we once were, but if anything 
                our ambition has grown sharper because of that. We are currently 
                planning to publish our first Open City book -- a debut collection 
                of poems by David Berman -- along with another issue of the journal. 
                And one day soon, we will again set up on a SoHo street corner 
                -- building our readership one reader at a time.
              </p>
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