print is dead?

This morning, while looking around the few favourite sites to which this is my england has links, I noticed that a very well-established literary journal has bitten the dust.

It seems that Michael Hathaway, founder and editor of Chiron Review has decided not to produce further issues of the journal.

Issue 1. was produced way back in February 1982. I was just about to turn twelve and had no idea then that I'd spend much of my adult life exploring the kind of writing that Hathaway went on to showcase for the better part of thirty years. I think at twelve I had yet to be handed the book that was to set me off on the trail of looking for reading material that I would find appealing. Appealing to my hardwired sense of always try to be 'different', 'interesting', 'transgressive', 'rebellious' (a pain in the arse) etc. etc. That book which was the catalyst for the search that followed, I'd say, was Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. So I was only one of about a hundred zillion wannabe misfits that found inspiration there, right? What was my dad thinking when he passed me his copy and said "I think you should read this"?

It was in 1987 that Hathaway's Chiron Review first featured the work of dear old Charles Bukowski. Plenty of references to the Dirty Old Man of San Pedro here. I make no secret of Bukowski being among my very favourite writers. Probably, if I were being lightly grilled on Desert Island Discs, Buk's Post Office would be the one book I'd ask to have with me during a life of shipwrecked solitude. It's one novel I can reread almost endlessly. I can select any page at random and find some mad, hard lines that make me laugh and think "yeah, that's true." If any work of (near) fiction has ever captured the shrill, dull madness of repetitive work more effectively than Bukowski's first novel, then I've not heard of it.

A copy of Post Office was sent to me some time during the winter of 1993-1994. Fleeing a terrible job and limited prospects of my own, I'd washed up in an apartment on the fringes of one of Poland's more obscure cities - a place I'd never head of before being offered a job there.

At that time, there was nowhere to buy anything written in English in that town. I'd packed as many books as I could manage when heading over there in the autumn of 1993. I finished them in a matter of days.

While I did enjoy the work and did find it interesting to be in a country that was changing so rapidly, the city had very limited entertainment possibilities on offer. Dark, cold Sunday afternoons, especially, needed filling with words. No internet in those days, remember. So no instant access either to writing online or to an online store from which books could be ordered. I even had a devil of a job keeping up with events back in England. My apartment had no TV - and I wouldn't have understood much of the news in Polish in that first year, anyway. None of the kiosks sold an English newspaper. To keep track of my beloved QPR's exploits, I relied on happening to be in the flat when my dad called (no mobile phones, remember) or, more usually, buying Gazeta Wyborcza on a Monday morning and finding the English football scores buried somewhere inside.

So I remain grateful to the friend back in London who took it upon himself to send me a selection of books he thought I'd enjoy. I don't remember what the others were. But I do remember very well opening up Bukowski's novel and reading it in one sitting. If the apartment block was swaying as it sometimes did in the fierce winds that knifed across from Russia, then I wouldn't have noticed that time. I was hooked. The book spoke so directly to me, saying so much about my own recent experiences of low-paid drudgery and of reporting to people who were very obviously crazy as well as boring and unintelligent.

All these years later, I can look at my shelves and cast my eye over what I believe to be at least a 90% complete set of the many books by (or about) Charles Bukowski. Elsewhere in the same bookcase, I can see writers to whom I was turned on by Bukowski having mentioned or recommended them - and many more besides that I doubt I'd have investigated were it not for the tastes that a reading Bukowski first aroused in me.

I daresay some wiseass could look at some of the short stories I've written (some here) and accuse me of being highly derivative, with Bukowski being the main source from which it seems I lift stuff. Well, it's not deliberate. Though I would say that, wouldn't I?

Anyway, seeing the closure of Chiron Review somehow pushes the late Bukowski further into the past. It's like a link breaking.

Hathaway cites the costs and practicalities of printing these days as being the reasons for closing his journal:

"Due to financial and technical problems, the journal will no longer be published quarterly in tabloid form. Times are tough and people are spending less and less on luxuries and fun stuff. But there are other factors. People are looking more to the Internet for entertainment and culture. I realize this is “The Wonderful Future.” It does have endless potential and advantages, not the least of which is its eco-friendliness, so I really can’t criticize it."

Is print dying? Well, I never buy a newspaper anymore. But I do read all my novels in the traditional format. I've yet to buy a Kindle or to start using my iPad as a window onto the world of fiction. I still like the look and feel of a book. I still like the smell of the paper.

So, farewell then, Chiron Review. I do hope that the loss of this and other printed materials does not detract too much from the arrival of that "Wonderful Future" for those addicted to reading.