By Jeremy Adam Smith

LITERARY MAGAZINES: are you for or against them? I ask because there are those Harold Blooms – you know the type: hoar-browed, lofty, incontinent – who declare that desktop and Internet publishing has sired a grade school jamboree that's drowned out the prospect of Great Literature.

"All these literary journals are just exercises in narcissistic mediocrity," a poetry professor of mine sniffed, trapped, poor man, in a simpler time of lead type and New Criticism. "Literature doesn't need so many."

Gravity Goldberg disagrees. "There aren't really enough literary magazines," says Goldberg, a 34-year-old San Francisco State University graduate student. "As a writer, I don't feel like there's too many. I wasn't seeing a lot of journals that contain the kind of writing that I want."

Maybe Samuel Johnson felt that way too, but he didn't have access to a PC.

With Eric Zassenhaus, a 28-year-old City Lights Books employee, Goldberg launched the Bay Area's newest literary magazine, Instant City: A Literary Exploration of San Francisco. "We are trying to create an imperfect map of the city from a number of different, overlapping perspectives," Zassenhaus says. "What fascinates people about San Francisco? Why do they stay?" Writing about San Francisco, Goldberg adds, "is a way of creating intimacy with the city. Instant City is really founded on a voyeuristic impulse."

Driven by a similar impulse, I recently trolled our fair city's newsstands and found at least 13 print journals operating in San Francisco – 1.3 percent of the 1,000 journals estimated by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses to be published annually in the United States. I regret to say – because it would be nice, speaking as the amateur journalist I am, to package them all as a cultural movement along the lines of surrealism or reality TV – they have almost nothing in common. "There is a growing community of literary magazines, but the reason they're not coalescing into a movement is because of their hybridity," says Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, a senior editor at progressive Jewish magazine Tikkun. "Their diversity defines them but also prevents them from forming a group identity."

Indeed, my survey found that formats range, contents clash, and few see themselves as being part of any avant-garde. It must be said, however, that San Francisco literary magazines do share certain characteristics and social roles, in much the way stereotypical sitcom family members may crack the same one-liners without looking related in any way.

For one thing, many San Francisco literary magazines would like to see a world – a better world – that looks a lot more like San Francisco. (A laudable goal, to my mind.) "The New York scene is dystopian," Zassenhaus says. "San Francisco has a certain kind of idealism that sets it apart from other urban areas." For Zassenhaus and Goldberg, the psychogeographic map of literary San Francisco starts with the beats and continues through (but is not limited to) punk-inspired projects like V. Vale's Re/Search Publications in North Beach, the zine and spoken word movements, and contemporary writers like Peter Plate and Bay Guardian contributor Michelle Tea. It's a politically radical, aesthetically experimental, and sexually adventurous heritage that defines the city's publishing scene and shapes the magazines.

"Poetry brings sanity to an insane world," the editors of the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal say. "[We're] maybe the sort of utopia of an old Chinese poet writing poems and dropping them into the stream." According to the editors (who responded collectively to my questions), the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal chronicles the lives of "the denizens of the present-day Haight Ashbury – professors, homeless people living in the park, veterans releasing their rage, prisoners, first-time writers, lovers, and a good dose of the lunatic fringe."

You should know, dear reader, in case you don't get to Jesusland much, that outside of San Francisco this all sounds pretty suspect (my Aunt Jane might say "woo-woo"). If one looks beyond the pages to the events and ancillary projects they organize, San Francisco literary magazines often fuse politics, spirituality, and art in ways of which even the editors seem largely unaware. Like many San Franciscans, they take the politics for granted, as a set of propositions any sane person would embrace.

"We're more about process than ideology," says Eli Horowitz, managing editor of the redoubtable Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, flagship of the McSweeney's publishing empire. (Empire? I'm joking. Actually, their World Domination Headquarters on Valencia Street resembles a trashed college dorm room.) "I mean, does a baseball player need to be political to hit the ball? We don't have to be political to do what we do." Sure, but the not-at-all-political McSweeney's earnestly organized fundraisers for John Kerry's presidential campaign, runs writing programs for kids, and published a book, The Future Dictionary of America, intended to "raise money for progressive causes." (The dictionary, by the way, is a wonderful read. Buy it: progressive causes need you.)

"A literary magazine is a community, a curated literary gallery," Goldberg says. If the McSweeney's tribe strikes a baroque slacker pose that belies rock-bottom activist sincerity, others forge communities that are more intentional. Other magazine (edited by Bay Guardian contributor Annalee Newitz) declares itself to be for "people who defy categories." Two Lines, a journal of translation and one of the best forums for new writing in the Bay Area, creates "a community in the Bay Area of people who love poetry, love fiction, love works in translation, love travel, and love languages," managing editor Shevi Berlinger says. "We hold readings throughout the year featuring translators and community discussions on the creative art of translation to bring together this community. Building bridges is absolutely intrinsic in our mission."

There's another manifestation of Bay Area literary utopianism. Just as San Francisco is known for its genderbending, so do many (though not all) of its literary magazines freely blend genres without regard to the usual barriers maintained by a combination of bookstore shelving and academic snobbery. The fall 2004 issue of McSweeney's, for example, features science fiction by local writer Claire Light ("Pigs in Space"), historical fiction from Jim Shepard ("Hadrian's Wall"), and Robert Olen Butler's experimental series of vignettes written from the points of view of severed heads throughout history ("Three Pieces of Severance"). Zoetrope: All-Story (one of the top fiction markets in the country) routinely publishes fantastical literature of various types – the winter 2004 issue features a terrific fantasy story, by Audrey Niffenegger (author of The Time Traveler's Wife), called "The Night Bookmobile."

"We're not disposed toward or against any genres," Zoetrope senior editor Michael Ray says. "We're drawn only to good writing" – a sentiment echoed by many of the editors I interviewed. "Often I find genre writing to be the most hilarious and interesting of the submissions we receive," Liz Lisle, publisher of Watchword, says. "I see the modern genres emerge in the same way that authors in the old days would work their skill through the structure of a sonnet, a vignette, or a morality play."

"Every major port town [like San Francisco] is structured to absorb an almost daily influx of people, products, languages, diseases, cultural artifacts, and ideas," says Claire Light, science fiction writer and literary editor of Hyphen Magazine. "San Francisco has always been busy hybridizing: techniques, technologies, industries, languages, cultural practices, prejudices, politics. Hybridizing artistic genres is just a side effect."

Here's what I have discovered about San Francisco literary magazines: each one of them is a kind of mad scientist's laboratory, where hunchbacked Promethean figures cut themselves apart and piece together a Frankenstein larger than any single member. Are there too many such monsters? "As much as we produce the journal for a reader outside our immediate and insular literary community," says Evan McCalmon, editor in chief of SFSU's literary review Fourteen Hills, "also and perhaps more so, we produce it for ourselves." Narcissistic? Maybe. Let a thousand magazines bloom!

Jeremy Adam Smith is director of the Independent Press Development Fund. Of the magazines mentioned in this piece, his writing has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Other magazine, and Watchword.

Dave Eggers, founder of Might and McSweeney's, speaks on the travails of independent publishing Fri/28, 8-10 p.m., Argonaut Hotel, 495 Jefferson, S.F. A variety of Bay Area literary magazines are hosting "Indie Mag All-Stars: An Evening of Readings," Sat/29, 8-10 p.m., Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St., S.F. For more information on both events go to www.indypress.org.