LAS VEGAS -- A city where culture has historically meant showgirls, white tigers, and Engelbert Humperdinck hardly seems like fertile terrain for writers and poets. Nevertheless, the city has spawned a webzine celebrating something that sounds like an oxymoron: Las Vegas literary culture.
Launched in late September, Chance features only locally manufactured poems, essays, and fiction on topics from decrepit mobsters to imploding hotels to Japanese tourists. It's the first such project to emerge from the city, but it has a surprising amount of company on the cultural landscape. Las Vegas has almost doubled in size in the last decade -- the population is near 1 million -- creating a critical mass that has spawned an incipient local arts scene. There is a flock of young artists, musicians, and writers trying hard to be noticed over the ringing of slot machines and the glare of neon. Other cultural firsts this year include three independent film festivals and a three-day street arts festival.
Chance is the brainchild of Gregory Crosby, 31, a journalist with the Las Vegas Sun's online division and veteran local poet. "Vegas needed a literary magazine," says Crosby, crisply attired in a three-piece suit, goatee, beret, and black lycra gloves to ward off carpal tunnel syndrome. "The problem was that literary magazines are marginal everywhere -- and they're triply marginal in a place like this."
The solution: Publish for free on the Web. Crosby talked his editor into giving him a site connected to the Sun's entertainment section, and now puts the magazine together in his spare time in the newspaper's crowded city room. The response hasn't exactly been overwhelming so far: only 35 to 40 hits per day at most. It's just as well that most contributors have day jobs.
Some of the material in Chance has no connection to the city beyond the residency of its authors. And even the Vegas-oriented stuff isn't necessarily what you'd expect.
Take Dayvid Figler's poems, which look at this glittering city built for tourists from a lifelong resident's perspective. Figler is as local as they get, the grandson of a chip runner and son of a card dealer who literally grew up in the shadow of the Strip, in an apartment block behind the Riviera hotel-casino. By day, Figler is an attorney with the public defender's office. By night, he's a vinyl-panted performance artist.
"It's the mundane in the context of Vegas that's so interesting to me," says Figler. "It's about trying to make every day as normal as possible in what is obviously not a normal place."
Can Chance stand out from the hundreds of other literary webzines already competing for eyeballs? "The Las Vegas focus as criteria for contributors seems both endearingly partisan and provincial," says Stefanie Syman, an editor at Feed. "Still, given the marketing possibilities of finding some new talent in the city of glitz, it might be an asset."
"Las Vegas intrigues everyone," says Figler. "Chance is an opportunity for us to put in a counterpoint to all the attention the city gets, so that people can see what Vegas has to offer beyond the obvious."
