Quote:
Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling
You might also wish to look more closely at Pierre Bourdieu
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Janice,
I've always been fond of Bourdieu. His argument that judgments of taste are acts of social positioning is something we see demonstrated all the time, both here and elsewhere. And I agree with him that sometimes those expressions constitute a form of symbolic violence. He's arguing against the "I am I, and you should believe as I do" argument, and he has my sympathies.
That said, he looks much different in the hexagon than he does here:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_... _symboliques . I'm afraid I'm missing the connection you wished to draw, and it makes me feel I'm not reading your words in good faith.
Back on the actual subject, I think you and I view web marketing differently. I'm a big believer in
the long tail. It used to be that you'd go into a bookstore in Memphis or Minneapolis, and find the same few poetry books there. The big houses controlled the selection of authors, and the limited distribution chains made it easy for bookstores to just stock what was being offered. It was good for poets with connections to the big houses, but bad for everyone else.
Things are different now, small presses are blossoming all over, mainly because of the long tail. It's become economical to list thousands of titles, rather than just a few dozen. Do I miss bookstores? Of course. But I also remember a sincere young man, who had no money for books, who was limited to those very few things he could find in the local library. That young man today, armed with a cheap kindle, could get just about every classic book in the history of world literature for free, and books of contemporary poetry for not much more. There's something to be said for that, even if we wish a few of the details were treated differently.
So I think we're mostly in agreement. We both see small presses as a good thing. Some note the explosive growth of small presses over the last decade, others say they could grow even more if they were better treated. Who could argue with either point?
Best,
Bill