As such, the audience was drawn from the unpublished masses—I know that sounds perjorative, but everyone there really did seem to want to know the answers to the most basic lit mag questions: what info should my cover letter include, what about simultaneous submissions, etc.

It also served as an impromptu visual reunion for my Emerson College classmates—none of us had the chance to talk, as Brookline Booksmith is an incredibly cramped, face-forward-or-die kind of venue, nothing like the friendly environment of the Enormous Room during the most recent Four Stories reading.

To have a “small press night” and not have any actual presses says a lot about the Boston literary scene. The scene is very writer-centric, first of all. The ratio of magazines submitted to to magazines subscribed to is probably 10-to-1. And second of all, writers here don’t think in terms of books. Boston writers want to publish poems, stories, and collections. Are we lazy? Are our sights set too low? Whatever it is, it means writers here a) ignore small book publishers, even though it’s easier to turn a small profit in your spare time with a small book press than a small literary magazine and b) forget their role as reader and financial supporter of other writers.

Tomorrow night I’m heading to the Somerville BBQ joint Red Bones (which will be hell during the fast) with Bill to celebrate the paperback release of The Legends of Winter Hill. I don’t know if I’ll know anyone but Bill there, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy the more down-to-earth audience. If you’re a local reader of Fungible Convictions, be sure to make your way to Red Bones at 7:00pm.

A literary festival in Newburyport, Mass., has been announced. Set aside April 28 and 29 for what will be a cathartic couple of days—the Boston area has long been ripe for a literary festival, but no one had put one together until now.

One of the attendees for the Newburyport Literary Festival is friend and poet Bill Coyle, who just won The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Congratulations, Bill. His manuscript The God of This World to His Prophet will be published this fall.

I just discovered The Institute for the Future of the Book. Should be a good fellow traveler.

The full research paper on the Sony DRM debacle was published. It deserves time to be digested but will certainly be a key reference for the digital rights debate in the coming months.

Yahoo has created a developer network, giving anyone quick access to code Yahoo employs every day. This will be unbelievably valuable to green-horned and experienced developers alike.

BoingBoing continues to argue that Google Book Search is good for publishers. I continue to agree. A quote:

[Publishers] argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back — but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn’t get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn’t enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you’re improving.

Rick Moody in A Public Space: “But one can’t excuse inflating three hours in jail into 87 days in jail. Such license is too much. When I wrote my own memoir, I worked my ass off to make sure that everything I included was true to the best of my knowledge.”

How to write good e-mails. While some of the tips are now well known bits of e-mail etiquette—like avoiding all caps—tips like #8 (Don’t Fabricate Unanswerable Questions) are new, valuable, and right-on.

AGNI: The Waterwheel. AGNI again publishes a great piece of translated, near-forgotten poetry.

N+1: Review of Bernard Herni-Levi’s do-over of Tocqueville’s travels. It’s not a positive review of American Vertigo, and, in fact, I haven’t seen a positive review of it yet. If indeed it’s so bad, my guess is because a Frenchman nowadays doesn’t have an interesting perspective for looking at America, not like Tocqueville did. To replicate his trip, you’d need to send an aristocratic American to travel India or China. Can we resurrect George Plimpton already?

Ploughshares, “The Heiress from Horn Lake” by Katherine Taylor: “I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi.”