Printing the Web
KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD
Printing the Web Why do online magazines want their work preserved in books? BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ Few publishing developments seem to offer as much opportunity as the Internet periodical. Easy...
...As a website, Nerve.com mixes come-hither ads with fiction—and since the ads are not meant for reprinting, the fiction has to stand on its own literary merits...
...But these books from Pif, Salon, Nerve, the Smoking Gun, and the Onion do not assuage much skepticism about web magazines...
...The secrets exposed here are less general than specific...
...For more considered kinds of writing, I'm not so sure...
...Few are genuinely "salacious," contrary to the book's subtitle...
...The major innovation in Full Frontal Fiction is running heads printed in the margins, its type perpendicular to the text, facing inwards on both sides...
...And loses...
...Instead of arriving in the mail like traditional magazines, the "webzines" are received on one's computer by e-mail or read by going through the Internet to their addresses—available to everyone...
...Homes, among them—indicating that its editors pay well and that revenue from somewhere else must be supporting such literary vanity...
...As a book author who appreciates the Internet, especially for allowing me to gather information quickly, I find it interesting that Internet publishers should want their contents preserved in the traditional medium...
...On second reading, I discovered a few marvelous texts, most of them short, and especially recommend from page thirty a self-obituary by a dog put to sleep for "digging in the plants...
...Easy to start and cheap to publish, web magazines such as Slate allow editors to update constantly their words and pictures...
...and where Stone wanted to expose politicians' cover-ups, the gun-smokers deflate mostly vulgar celebrities whom most of us already assumed to be discreditable...
...Ambassador to Bulungi Suspected of Making Country Up • Miracle of Birth Occurs for the 83 Billionth Time • I Lost 32 Pounds in 15 Days and Died...
...To judge from its self-retrospective, Pifis no better or worse than any of a hundred other nonacademic literary journals, mixing an undistinguished selection of creative writing with equally ordinary interviews of literary celebrities...
...Precisely because search engines can locate specific names so efficiently, the Internet is a rich reference library for contemporary subjects, as distinct from a repository for extended criticism of historical material...
...The result is no great shake, as Nerve.com's Full Frontal Fiction is no better or worse than many other anthologies of erotica appearing nowadays with conventional narratives portraying familiar experience...
...Then, too, a self-retrospective selected from any magazine—online or not—makes A poet and author of many books, Richard Kostelanetz offers more information about himself and his publications on richardkostelanetz.com...
...Fewer are mind-breaking...
...Expect to see that layout feature repeated elsewhere sooner than the fiction reprinted...
...But where Izzy Stone made house calls to repositories, William Batstone and his colleagues at the Smoking Gun exploit the Freedom of Information Act to get government flunkies to deliver embarrassing papers...
...Each page has as well at least one picture...
...The principal exception is a witty parody by Richard K. Weems of "The New New Yorker...
...The website accessible as TheSmok-ingGun.com was recommended in a recent Yahoo monthly for "Best Exposés," as it publishes previously hidden public documents much as I.F Stone used to do decades ago...
...Apparently to elevate their cultural status, several Internet periodicals have recently issued books— you remember, those bound things the computer was going to replace?—selected from their disseminations...
...As it happens, many of Nerve's writers are moderately famous—Jay McInerney, Mary Gait-skill, Elizabeth Wurtzel, A.M...
...The assumption appears to be that a book grants an Internet periodical credibility, as indeed it does...
...A sign of celebrity publishing is the absence of biographical notes for the authors, the editors assuming that their names must already be familiar...
...that publication seem more credible...
...The purpose behind The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors escapes me, as it prints short summaries mostly of commercial writers about whom much other introductory material can be found...
...The Onion, on the other hand, is an attractively irreverent, politically incorrect online journal that only recently moved from its birthplace in Madison, Wisconsin, to New York...
...Insofar as the book's title suggests something special, it is a misnomer...
...But these volumes demonstrate a truth not to be forgotten: Genuine books require more content than websites yet offer...
...Large in format—nine by twelve inches—Dispatches from the Tenth Circle is meant to look like a tabloid newspaper, with several items to a page, each preceded by a headline, some continued on succeeding pages...
...The result is continuously delightful to a degree that the actual Onion newspaper is not, repeatedly interrupted as it is by ads...
...The fact is, for immediate news as well as concise information, websites have quickly proved they are indispensable...
...The headlines tend to be funnier than the articles beneath them: • U.S...
...I found myself reading only the headlines the first time through the book (much as I do in pursuing Mad Magazine's many self-retrospectives, which this resembles...
...Though the book's cover claims it is "opinionated" and "irreverent," my impression was that most of the summaries were culled from publishers' publicity packets...
...So much content, even if purportedly selective, makes Dispatches from the Tenth Circle look more substantial than the website would suggest...
...Indeed, to my mind, this book is better...
...so that this Reader's Guide necessarily competes with other book directories but not with the Internet itself...
...ACLU Defends Nazis' Right to Burn Down ACLU Headquarters • Thousands Dead in Indonesia Again Consider them a measure of either tastelessness or cultural courage...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 22
