Ex Occidente Press

[Evans]

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

A possible source of difficulty in these discussions is that we are using a pre-digital era literary vocabulary – rightfully so, but what we're talking about is the Internet. It's important to remember that a blog or a forum posting is not a review. A review has been submitted to the editor of a journal, accepted and published. It exists in a context that is not the world of the Internet. What we're talking about on this thread is not reviews: it's something actually much closer to a phone call or a conversation over a table than a published review.

Respectfully I disagree. These days we will be seeing more and "proper" reviews (by named critics and writers) on websites and online fanzines.A well thought out review published on the internet is as much a review as a well thought out review published in a literary journal.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

Finally, let's keep in mind the fact that one good book is worth more than all the Internet postings ever shot into cyberspace.

True but I would aply that maxim to opinions in print as well.

[Joel]

Evens – if the review has been submitted to a creditable editor, accepted and published online, yes. If it has simply been posted without mediation, then NO.

[Joel]

Julian, our postings crossed. I take no major issue with your comments.

Evans, apologies for mistyping your name. I'm too tired to go on posting.

Goodnight, folks.

[Evans]

Quote Originally Posted by Nemonymous

Quote Originally Posted by Evans In theory it should be able to go on as long as there is something constructive to be gained from evaluation. A ratcheting review with many hands... An intriguing concept.

It acures to me that it would soon evolve from a review of a story into discourse on criticism itself.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

Evans, apologies for mistyping your name. I'm too tired to go on posting.

No problem

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

Evens – if the review has been submitted to a creditable editor, accepted and published online, yes. If it has simply been posted without mediation, then NO.

Then surely the nature of reviews would boil down to the taste and agenda of of the editors who support them? I'm sorry to sound so combative (I really am) but that does rather encourage a degree of literary pomposity in the nature of reviewing.

Quote Originally Posted by Julian Karswell

I take on board your comments re Aickman and Marsh (which could also apply to RO and Stella Gibbons), but the influential multi-millionaire Mr King Snr is very much alive and well and writing, and review praisers may have one eye on this important difference. JK

While I agree with that to some extent it must prove as much a curse as well as blessing for Hill. I can't imagine someone so closely related to a famous writer could go about the same carrier with out a certain degree of paranoia. If it were me I couldn't stop myself wondering whether people were praising my work for what it was or for who wrote it.

Quote Originally Posted by Julian Karswell

As a consequence the only books I buy are those based upon word-of-mouth recommendations from trusted, shrewd friends. JK

I'm very much in accord with that statement.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Evans

Respectfully I disagree. These days we will be seeing more and "proper" reviews (by named critics and writers) on websites and online fanzines.A well thought out review published on the internet is as much a review as a well thought out review published in a literary journal.

Yes, that's true. The internet supplements and complements hard print in a way that is fluid, edgy, sometimes dangerous - but that's what life is like. There can be as much erudition in some internet reviews as printed ones. It comes back to who judges the judges? An editor of a magazine choosing to run a particular review can be just as specious (or not) as an individual posting his own review of a book on his own blog. We should not be hidebound by traditions, even though we still respect traditions.
des

[Joel]

Ligotti is a good example of a writer who has maintained a strong presence in magazines and anthologies over the years. I started reading his work in the small press magzines of the early 1980s – most notably Nyctalops and the BFS journal Dark Horizons. More recently, a run of brilliant stories in Weird Tales alerted me to his continued development as a writer – without that, I might have assumed that he was still writing the Noctuary kind of stories, which I liked rather less.

I have to admit I don't value Internet presence or online reputation, or read fiction online. I blame the Internet for the destruction of the bookselling and book publishing trades, and regard its impact on the quality of our literary culture and our lives as a catastrophe. The fact that I regularly visit forums like this is a contradiction that reflects my lack of conflict resolution skills, but I'll spare you introspection on that theme.

If we no longer have magazines and anthologies to give writers a means of building and renewing their reputation, we will no longer have a weird fiction genre. I'm not wholly averse to the concept of online publication, but I have to keep reminding people that BLOGGING IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, PUBLICATION. If I read something down the phone to a friend, that is not publication. It may or may not be an enjoyable phone call for them, but that's another question.

[Nemonymous]

Doesn't 'publication' mean making it 'public'?'

[Evans]

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

I have to admit I don't value Internet presence or online reputation, or read fiction online. I blame the Internet for the destruction of the bookselling and book publishing trades, and regard its impact on the quality of our literary culture and our lives as a catastrophe. The fact that I regularly visit forums like this is a contradiction that reflects my lack of conflict resolution skills, but I'll spare you introspection on that theme.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

If we no longer have magazines and anthologies to give writers a means of building and renewing their reputation, we will no longer have a weird fiction genre.

No offence meant but how are people who don't have a hugely literary circle of friends supposed to find about any of these writers or publications? Even with the internet it is hard enough to tract things down. I understand your complaint about the internet reducing the productivity of things like small scale magazines but without it a huge number simply will not have heard of many of these things.

Without the internet how would many people hear of publishers such as Ex Occidente Press and the like?

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

If we no longer have magazines and anthologies to give writers a means of building and renewing their reputation, we will no longer have a weird fiction genre.

While that may be true the internet has massively increased the sheer number of books easily available to the public. People have a far wider variety to chose from these days. Without the internet I would never have been able to read Thomas Ligotti or Mark Samuels simply beacuse I don't think I would have been able to get the books otherwise.

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

I'm not wholly averse to the concept of online publication, but I have to keep reminding people that BLOGGING IS NOT, REPEAT NOT, PUBLICATION. If I read something down the phone to a friend, that is not publication. It may or may not be an enjoyable phone call for them, but that's another question.

Very well but that will have to cut across the board. If S.T Joshi (I'm just using Joshi because he is the critic I know most about) releases a review online then it should be as much discounted from being a review beacuse of its medium as anyone elses. It might be more read and taken seriusly but the no reviews on the internet rule would have to apply to it as well.

[Joel]

Hi Evans.

I've never actually relied on friends to recommend books to me. I rely on finding good stories by new or established writers in magazines and anthologies, which I buy because they serve that purpose. Both Ligotti and Samuels came to my attention by that route.

Also, I'm not saying publication on the Internet is not publication. I'm just saying that blogging is not publication of any kind. If I phoned you up to say something, that would not be a published statement. There are indeed valid Internet publications, but they are not blogs. They are edited online journals. It's not the same thing.

My sense of fandom (or connoisseurship, to be a little more poncey about it) is rooted in the experience of going to a specialist bookshop every week or two and buying new magazines and anthologies, then collections and novels of those writers who look good. I read reviews only to see what the current level of opinion is regarding books I have read. I try not to read reviews of books I haven't read. The eclipse of specialist bookshops and bookshops in general, along with literary magazines, can be blamed on the Internet. And I do blame it thus. With bitterness and rage.

None of this, needless to say, is directed against you or Des or anyone else who finds the benefits of the Internet to outweigh the harm it does.

[Nemonymous]

Quote Originally Posted by Joel

None of this, needless to say, is directed against you or Des or anyone else who finds the benefits of the Internet to outweigh the harm it does.

I don't think I would claim that. I'm just accepting the inevitable and making the best of it.
It's like Television. I hate most of it. But I do try to wring meaning from even the worst of it.

I think a blog is a publication just as much as, for example, Terry Lamsley's early books were publications. Some blogs will be good. Others bad. But they all are publications, ie making universally public and accessible some material (that a private phone call doesn't do).