Sober Ambition & Unglamorous Posture

An introduction to my new publishing project, Keep Planning.

If you follow me on the various short-form posting sites, you are hopefully already aware that I launched a new project recently, at the beginning of this month. It’s called Keep Planning, and it currently takes the form, more or less, of an “online litmag”, although I’m rather tortuously trying to avoid using that term to describe it, for reasons I’ll discuss later. I suspect that, at this point, there are actually a fair amount of people that read Garden Scenery but are not following me on, say, X: The Everything App, so I wanted to take the time to talk a little here about what Keep Planning is, some of the motivations behind it, what I aim to do with it, etc.

At the most basic level, the purpose of Keep Planning is to publish material (primarily written material) that I think is worth publishing. It is especially interested in material that is dense, cryptic, impersonal, obscure, politically radical, or otherwise out of step with prevailing cultural norms. It exists because I do not believe there are enough publishing venues of this description around right now. Certainly there’s no shortage of venues in general, eager for submissions from anyone capable of double-spacing a Word document – the glut of options available to those interested in placing a block of text somewhere, anywhere nominally under another’s editorial oversight has never been greater; it is one of the defining features of literary culture today. The problem, for me at least, is that a great deal of these venues seem to exist for no reason in particular. This is something I’ve complained about before on the short-form sites (and these complaints were part of the impetus for Keep Planning), but it is astonishing to me how many “litmags” I come across that seem to have put little or no thought into what they actually want to do, and how to accomplish it. You will routinely find, for example, venues that talk about wanting to “foster a literary community” on their About page, but won’t accept more than one submission from a given author in a year – the contradiction here seems self-evident to me, but somehow it goes unnoticed by them. Similarly, you’ll find numerous sites trying to make this or that blogging platform work for very not-blog-like release structures, resulting in cumbersome sites full of vestigial directories and awkward PDF links, medium operating at unmistakable cross-purposes with intent. It’s not that any particular platform is inherently wrong for publishing a litmag, but that, too often, no consideration seems to have been given to the question of if this platform, in particular is actually a good fit for what the mag is doing. It should not seem as though the form is fighting the content, and yet this is routinely the case – I only understand the bare minimum of how to do webdev, but I still coded Keep Planning from the ground up, because I needed to ensure it would look and behave exactly how I wanted it to. It feels patronizing to even talk about this stuff, it’s so basic and obvious, but spend some time exploring the online literary ecosystem and you will see, unmistakably, it is full of venues run by people who are not thinking about any of this. And if they’re not really thinking about stuff like this, it begs the question, how much are they thinking about what they’re publishing, and why?

I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious where this phenomenon comes from. If it’s trivially easy to “start a litmag”, as it is today, people will start litmags for trivial reasons. They will start them because, for whatever reason, they see themselves as a person who should start a litmag. Their submission guidelines will contradict the ethos of their About pages because neither part was developed out of a specific orientation towards literature or culture – they are just things they’ve seen other, more established litmags do, so they do them, too. The question of if it makes sense for what they want to do is never asked, because they don’t really want to do anything in particular. First comes the decision to start a litmag, then its theme, mission, whatever, is grafted on afterwards; the cart proceeds the horse. In a certain sense this is fine, because online litmags don’t matter that much – but in another sense it’s not okay at all, because everything in the world actually matters an enormous amount. I’m a strong believer in taking matters of cultural production seriously, and as such I find it frustrating and depressing that half the litmags I come across seem to be operating on autopilot, traveling an arbitrary trajectory from nowhere to nowhere, guided by a few half-assed parameters that don’t really mean anything, sputtering along until whoever’s behind it gets sick of eating the Submittable fees. And to be clear, the complaint here is not really about “lack of editorial standards” or whatever – some of the best and most important “little magazines” of the 20th century were born out of little more than someone’s desire to publish the stuff their friends were doing. But this is clearly not the motivation behind a publication that only accepts one submission per author per year, or that’s constantly promoting their open calls on X or Insta. No, in such a case, there is something else going on. What characterizes these litmags, I think, what it is that I find so objectionable about them – and again, I want to stress my conviction that this is a common phenomenon, among publications both large and small – is that they are something like the editorial equivalent of talking to hear yourself talk, entities publishing no one in particular to no particular ends, other than to be publishing. In practice, they serve no real function other than occupy slots in writers’ CVs, and if they find success it is because some of those writers sometimes find success, or are already successful, and the litmag’s presence in these successful CVs lends it clout and legitimacy, makes it look as though perhaps it has its finger on the pulse, perhaps it is a place for an aspiring writer to be noticed – with the dirty little secret being, of course, that no one is reading anything in these litmags that isn’t from a name they already recognize. If this sounds too cynical, I will grant that I don’t think this is something the people behind these mags generally set out to do. But like how there is a “default dog” which canines tend towards becoming in the absence of intentional breeding, there is clearly a “default litmag” which publications tend towards becoming in the absence of an actual raison d'être, and this is the form it takes. That it takes this particular form and not another is, I think, a strong indicator of the unhealthiness of literary culture’s present situation. It is the regression towards this mean against which Keep Planning sets itself.

This is, in part, why I shy away from calling Keep Planning an “online litmag” – I don’t know about you, but there’s a certain sort of thing that pops into my head when I hear that term, and it’s not the type of thing I’m trying to do. The one sentence description I’ve been running with for Keep Planning is, quote, “a cultural apparatus of sober ambition and unglamorous posture”, which sounds cumbersome and intellectual and is supposed to sound cumbersome and intellectual. Put bluntly, I want to make sure no one thinks Keep Planning is a place to have fun. This sort of posture is easy to ridicule, and I will acknowledge there is something ridiculous in it, something unearned, I’m definitely not as deep as I think I am – but the alternative, to concede all this from the outset, to retreat into a register of easy-going self-deprecation which will shield me from criticism by denying the existence of any real stakes for what I am doing, seems infinitely worse, in some sense indefensible. In case you haven’t noticed, things are not particularly good in the world right now. The oceans are rising, and Moloch hungers for ever more innocent blood. The great Western democracies and their wealthy advisors have decided the best course of action is to pull up the drawbridge, let the dispossessed drown – and if they can undo what mass literacy wrought in the process, all the better. How exactly all this will shake out is impossible to say – we will have to wait for History’s verdict – but the point is this: in this situation, with meaningful life and meaningful culture under existential threat, how can anyone who claims to care about these things possibly justify anything less than absolute seriousness? It’s not that the outcome of this struggle can be meaningfully affected by publishing literature online – obviously it cannot, a poem is not an effective weapon, an effective weapon is a gun or a blade or an explosive device, applied in a calculated way – but the enclosure and pacification of the cultural field, its slow suffocation, is a part of this struggle. To maintain and develop an archive of material which means something, which remains unreconciled, which refuses passivity, is to resist this procedure, to help stave off its total victory long enough that, hopefully, reinforcements can arrive. This is something I can do – and if I can do it, I believe I have a responsibility to do it. Keep Planning is named after a Regis track (specifically the second one off Gymnastics, which was the album that made Techno “click” for me as a teenager, and therefore had an enormous impact on the development of my taste, and of my beliefs about art), but it’s also meant in the most literal sense possible: they haven’t won yet, the future is always approaching, so don’t give up, don’t get complacent, keep fucking planning. What I hope, more than anything, is that Keep Planning can aid in this planning, that it can serve as source of intellectual nourishment, and help us all stay fit through these lean years, and the leaner years that are likely still to come. There’s a phrase I’ve taken as a sort of motto for Keep Planning: “Es hilft nur Gewalt wo Gewalt herrscht.” The line is from Brecht. It is no doubt already familiar to many of you. In the translation I’m most fond of, it’s rendered as “Only violence helps where violence rules.”

I’ll close by saying that if any of this is resonating with you, if you’re picking up what I’m putting down, I encourage you to send some work in – even and especially if you’ve never tried to get anything published before. I’m lucky enough to know some extremely talented writers, a few of them you could even call “established”, to a certain extent, who have been kind enough to entrust me with their work, but I would never have gotten to this point were it not for my discovery, years ago, of publications which prioritized their distinct editorial vision over name recognition, and made it a point of pride to publish the work of pseudonymous internet unknowns alongside that of “real” authors (surfaces.cx is a sterling example), and I hope that Keep Planning can continue in that tradition. I want work that is not fun, that is not pleasant, that is too dry or militant or grotesque for the sensibilities of those without particular sensibilities. It doesn’t even have to be writing, necessarily – it just has to be worthwhile. Another reason I prefer to call Keep Planning a “cultural apparatus”, rather than a “litmag”: someday, it might be something more than a list of short pieces online. That’s the plan, anyway.