blog EgoPHobia

Are We Important ?

Written by Revista EgoPHobia

[EgoPHobia #16, editorial]
We sometimes receive messages like „I like your magazine, but when do you print it on paper?”. My standard answer is „we thought about something like this but, for the moment, we can’t do it because we hardly have the time and resources for the on-line edition”. Usually, readers accept this answer but, one of them, a gentleman who is reading our magazine from its very first issue is very insistent and offered me several arguments, confessing himself that even he is older than us he is reading ardently EgoPHobia and valuable contemporary Romanian literature published in various sizes on the internet. I’ll quote a few excerpts from his messages: „you have to come to light, to make a magazine printed on paper in which you tell almost the same things for the stupefaction of the coward Romanian literary world, fed on varied coloured talks”, „there is only one type of culture: the one written on light, the one which is sold(!) and bought, the one which adresses to the reader from Roman but also to the one from Focşani or Copşa Mică. What are you doing here is a kind of underground literature- taking all the risks of such kind of  culture. In this country you have to come to light if you want that your voice mean actually something”, „you are not a threatening for the feeble Romanian literature for the moment so, everybody is tolerating you. Your landing will be different only when you will make a magazine and it won’t be just an online edition. Everybody will show their enmity against you for the simple fact that they will see what you actually are: some greater writers than them”, „the struggle will be obvious -everybody will see it- and consists in constructing a new order, a new literature, a new approach. To write some books there -no matter how good they are-, to issue a magazine on the net, is a thing. But to enter empty handed in the literary world – this is something else… you will have, probably, other problems -like others had- because the Romanian society and culture has a rejecting inclination”.

As far as I know, nowadays the printed independent cultural press is not very well, being subordinated to the amount of their salings especially to their subsidies and sponsors. The situation on the net is different. The expenditure decreases, tending to zero, but also the incomes are almost missing. If the majority of the printed cultural magazines are trying to have a regular publishing, eventually using the trick dodge of double or multiple editions having employed editors and paying, eventhough cheaply, their contributors, the online ones are depending on the authors’ spare time. These don’t afford to pay the contributions, have an irregular publishing and are often confused with literary clubs sites and they don’t get to the ones who don’t have an internet conection. It is not necessarily very important this last problem of the online magazines, nor the previous one, but the others are very important to compare the two mentioned types of magazines. On the other hand, the online zines can publish as much as they like, not being constrained to reject texts because of their limited space nor to fill their pages with useless materials. The inherent typing errors can be simply eliminated, and the web pages can contain also multimedia files. This debate could also be stressed on other arguments, but I’ll stop here. For a cultural magazine, and not only, I believe that the ideal solution is to be both printed and online available. The model chosen by the „Suplimentul de cultură” is quite good. Having an excelent number of printed copies, the weekly publication is sold both independent and free supplement of some local newspapers. But they are supported by Polirom Publishing House, while the others support themselves how they can.

In spite of the readers’ support, EgoPHobia is available only online and we don’t know when or if it will be ever printed. Cultural magazines published after the year 2000, like „tiuk!”, „Sisif”, „Prăvălia culturală”, „Argos” or”Respiro” are confronting similar problems. Others like „Ca şi cum”, „Versus/m” or „pana_mea” ventured printing to atack the autochthonous literary world. For two years,  „Ca şi cum” didn’t print any edition and the other two printed magazines have given their periodicity up: „pana_mea” announced that a new edition will be published only after half amount of the precedent one would be sold. I don’t know if the ones who tried by these three magazines to change the feeble Romanian literature incured enemies, nor if they succeded in selling them to Roman or Copşa Mică. The real question is if the free independent published magazines during the last few years succeded in establishing themselves in the Romanian literary life. Are they important indeed? Are important only the ones edited on paper? How important is the combination of circumstances under which they appear? What is your opinion about this? About EgoPHobia I can’t give a clear answer. When we receive texts from well-known Romanian writers or when contacting our future guests we receive answers of the kind that they read us and we honour them by inviting in our e-zine, we feel like EgoPHobia means already something. The same feeling – when we discover that the texts published in EgoPHobia are quoted in different articles or even scientific works. On the other hand, we bear reactions of the kind „on the internet anyone can publish anything”. Because of this, in our country, EgoPHobia is not minded by the ones who make the so popular reviews of the cultural magazines. Because not even the other online cultural publications are not having a better chance as far as the mainstream of the local literary society reactions’ concern, and some of the cultural magazines edited by young people prefered to appear only on paper printed editions, you could believe like the above quoted reader, that in spite of some isolated favourable results the online Romanian cultural press is not really important. For more and more people the internet reveals its benefits and now it is extending even in Romania and becomes more accessible and indispensable. The fact that EgoPHobia continues its online editions only, spares us from the trouble to ilustrate by words our opinion about the importance of the e-magazines in the future and contemporary Romanian literature. And we don’t say we do not keep the faith that in a short period of  time the headline question get a positive answer.
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Text by Sorin-Mihai Grad, translated by Aida Mihai.

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