Yeah, Maggie?
I just want to follow up.
It's kind of tricky.
I feel like I, too--
I owned a bookstore and gallery and performance space
here in town that went out of business.
And I'm interested in--
we're really comfortable talking about certain identity
diversity and this stuff.
And it seems to me that we're really also
pretty comfortable talking about multi-genre.
Like, get a band to play with.
McSweeney's model, right?
Have a house band, and then they'll listen to your poetry.
And I think that what we're not saying is cultural class.
I think that's what we're dancing around
with this, if you want tenure, and we are the public.
We're dancing around cultural class.
And my experience has been a lot of times age helps,
like you have a youth group or seniors,
you begin to expand that definition.
What's interesting to me is that it's
a fallacy to imagine that difficult poetry won't go over
with--
like, that's tricky, right?
And it's kind of gross and not true.
And that was my experience programming
for that kind of a space.
It was being really surprised that if you put the refugee
writers with Eleanor Wilmer on a bill,
then all of a sudden something that's impenetrable--
if you don't know Homer, how can you read Eleanor Wilmer?
Well, they could-- or Ovid or whatever.
Doesn't matter anymore.
I think we're coming to this with a degree not
of socioeconomic class bias, but cultural bias that I think we
can't avoid.
Yeah.
I wonder, to kind of pull that comment back
to the internet in a way, I think
it was on the diagram site you mentioned,
the off roads and byways of literature and people
who are interested in that kind of stuff.
And I started thinking about, is there a--
the internet is not set up, or is it,
in terms of neighborhoods and class structure
and stuff like that.
There's not a fancy part of the internet.
[LAUGHTER]
It's not so much [? GeoCities, ?]
but I'll give you Facebook is a closed community.
They don't allow Google to search it.
So everything that happens in Facebook
is not available to people who are not on Facebook
by any other means.
You can't accidentally come across something
that's on Facebook unless you are within that Facebook
community.
In other parts of the world there are equivalent services.
Like Orkut is huge in other parts of the world,
and it's relatively small here.
So the internet is absolutely totally broken up
into different neighborhoods.
And some of those neighborhoods are based on bandwidth,
and some of those neighborhoods are based on geography,
and some of those neighborhoods are
based on language, which transcends national boundary
or geographical boundary.
But no, absolutely.
And too, there are, from a publishing standpoint,
there are places where your work can be published online
where it counts more than if it was published somewhere else.
And I would say two things to that.
My friend Jim Andrews has said that good design imparts
credibility.
If you go to a website, you don't
know if there's 500 people on staff working on that thing
or if it's one guy who is a kick-ass graphic designer
and coder.
Because you get there, and you're looking, and you go,
this is very nice.
I can find I'm looking for.
I see a couple of names that I know.
Chicka pow!
This is it.
I want to be here.
But you have no idea what's behind them.
And the other is something that Catherine Daly
said in a conversation about what it really
means to be published, like where
the rubber meets the road.
And she said it's when somebody else's money got spent.
That's when you got published.
Because if no money got spent or your money got spent,
that doesn't count.
And I'm not saying I agree with that,
but I think that's a pretty significant point that
cuts through a lot of it.
I know when I first started publishing and publishing
on the web, you could not list web credits
as having been previously published.
You were not.
If it was published on the web, it was not published.
And then gradually that has sort of changed.
And now you will see, if you go through,
like Writers Market or Poet's Market--
I haven't done this recently, so the numbers may
have changed-- but the last time I checked, it was like 30%.
And you can say that 30% of your previously published credits
were online.
Now the reality is, it kind of depends where it was online.
It used to be one of these places that has somehow
accrued to itself credibility.
And that's a whole other story how people get that.
But I think it's probably growing at this point.
My guess is that today it could be half
if they're all quote unquote "good,"
and you could say where are your credits?
Maybe not in the NEA because their restrictions
are different.
Again, it's all very specific.
I think you can do half in the NEA.
Is it half?
Really?
Yeah.
I think it's half.
And it does also still depend on what your medium is.
Like, a lot of your visual poetic stuff,
and yours too, the interactive stuff,
really can only be published online.
[LAUGHTER]
I can tell you a funny story about that.
[LAUGHTER]
Pennsylvania for a long time had really a lot of arts funding.
They were second only to California in arts funding.
And the first year they were PCA fellowships,
they called them, Pennsylvania Council
of the Arts fellowships.
Now these were awards that were made not for a planned project.
You didn't put forth a proposal, I'm
going to do this with this money.
It was just, they looked at what you did and they said,
here's some money.
Take a year off and do whatever you want kind of thing.
So, big deal, a cool thing.
And the first year that they had a-- they
had a category for new media, digital media, hyper media
stuff.
My wife says to me, you got to apply for this.
Look at this.
They got it.
It's on the thing.
You can just do it.
I'm like, well, I don't know, you know, I never--
It was actually the first time I ever
put together the list of all of this stuff that I'd done.
And I was like, I look pretty good on paper.
This is all right.
Let's do this!
Let's send this application in.
So I send the application in, and then you
wait, like, forever.
And then when I got the letter back--
this is so great.
When I got the letter back, not only did
I not get the fellowship, they did not award the fellowship
that year to anybody.
And the next year, it wasn't even possible.
[LAUGHTER]
So, how's that for rejection?
It's like, well not only did we not give it to you,
we didn't give it to anybody, and we got rid
of that entire category.
[LAUGHTER]
Now, after talking to some of the people involved--
that's the one nice thing about PCA
is they do have this feedback process.
They will actually tell you why you didn't get it.
It turns out they didn't feel that they
had judges that could properly evaluate the material that they
got.
So they kind of scrapped the program until they could--
[INAUDIBLE] check.