tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38887618650071606202024-02-19T18:14:59.391-08:00Luna ParkThe Carnival World of Little and Literary MagazinesEditor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.comBlogger45125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-61505586883466087072008-02-07T17:34:00.000-08:002020-09-17T12:28:35.097-07:00What Was Left Over<a href="http://boklist.blogspot.com/2005/09/luna-park-magazine.html" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5164700629851664402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi48DAXtO_ZCjyIRNRDGR2qQ0ntYcDJ1v4Jdpu4UqoND4Saks9ourVJmkoBNup9pWviOQ0kNTw2-MzvVujbA-dOprqy-xZpt5b4YlVMu3aSC9QSrCg2qhYT17tmlbzF71XCLHmPdUzUHdI/s200/Luna+Park+4.jpg" style="cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">A<span style="font-size: 85%;">RCHIVES</span> <span style="font-size: 85%;">OF THE </span>L<span style="font-size: 85%;">UNA</span> P<span style="font-size: 85%;">ARK</span> B<span style="font-size: 85%;">LOG</span></span>
<span style="font-size: 180%;">T</span>he updating of the Luna Park blog has been transferred (and, we feel, in a much better format) to the Luna Park website: www.lunaparkreview.org. We will no longer add to these pages here, but will maintain their contents where they are located for archival purposes. If you have any questions, please email our editors at lunaparkreview@gmail.com.
<span style="font-size: 85%;">[At right is a page from <a href="http://boklist.blogspot.com/2005/09/luna-park-magazine.html">the original Belgian literary magazine</a> from which our name derives. Novelist and poet, Roberto Bolano mentions the issue that this page is taken from in his story "Vagabond in France and Belgium."]</span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-80714756579412521622008-01-14T09:05:00.000-08:002008-01-22T14:57:26.176-08:00Luna Park's Brooklyn Launch Event: Jan. 31, 2008<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxuxbsWCL_8ORUsAjwqLFOuFMQ48lud4mMEK6FOLJKwIDyQe9ydEE2M-bmSS4wAzuNi1Wgaf8DD1zK8OEUx7yuYMb4NC2jVpp7sCnms1ka9L6Mnjk4iAyhVmDB2sSjybb6XJcGm9hIUgM/s1600-h/NooNa.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5155385102145648290" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxuxbsWCL_8ORUsAjwqLFOuFMQ48lud4mMEK6FOLJKwIDyQe9ydEE2M-bmSS4wAzuNi1Wgaf8DD1zK8OEUx7yuYMb4NC2jVpp7sCnms1ka9L6Mnjk4iAyhVmDB2sSjybb6XJcGm9hIUgM/s320/NooNa.jpg" border="0" /></a>The premiere issue party is soon. Guest hosts: <a href="http://www.mississippireview.com/">Mississippi Review</a> and <a href="http://www.juked.com/">Juked.com</a>. Special readings by: <a href="http://centerforwriters.com/faculty.html">Angela Ball</a> (AWP award winner), <a href="http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_05_011092.php">Tao Lin</a>, <a href="http://www.mississippireview.com/2007MRPrizeWinners.html">Marie-Helene Bertino</a>, and <a href="http://www.claudiaweb.net/">Claudia Smith</a>. Music by <a href="http://www.tinpanbluesband.com/">Tin Pan Blues Band</a>. Art by Steven Summer, <a href="http://www.kenweathersby.com/">Ken Weathersby</a>, and TBA.<br /><br />When: January 31st, 2008. Begins at 9:00pm.<br /><br />Where: <a href="http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/Noo-Na/">Noo Na</a> (pictured at left), 565 Vanderbilt Ave (corner of Pacific St.), Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, NY. Just a 10-15 minute subway ride from Manhattan--specifically, from the AWP Hilton.<br /><br />Getting there from AWP Hilton: Walk north on 6th Ave. to 57th. Turn left and walk to the 57th St & 7th Ave. Q stop. Head to Brooklyn. Exit Train at 7th Ave and leave terminal at right. Head down Park Place to Vanderbilt Ave. Turn left and walk 4 1/2 blocks...you’re there.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.lunaparkreview.com/">http://www.lunaparkreview.com/</a>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-45953561097327106642008-01-10T08:49:00.000-08:002008-01-11T11:31:03.985-08:00We're Coming...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/01/dayintech_0104"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx8o6QtKmkzm66G6X5NoBvvw-Y_SKyYtuyFJ8M9FFWBjkFD39VOwv_3Fdi87qxeH48bZaezWOJ24y9qeIpOshnNv1LMUJfyUbyWmCF4pl15ktev-WaG3LkveQSMQ5XYwGM-6rXEgh5rxM/s320/LunaParkElephant.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5153899060641101458" border="0" /></a>P<span style="font-size:85%;">REMIERE</span> I<span style="font-size:85%;">SSUE OF</span> <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.lunaparkreview.com/">L<span style="font-size:85%;">UNA</span> P<span style="font-size:85%;">ARK</span></a>: J<span style="font-size:85%;">ANUARY</span> 31<span style="font-size:85%;">ST</span>, 2008<br /><br />Some (possibly) final notes before the first issue release:<br /><ul><li><span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> blog's upcoming review of <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.hobartpulp.com/">Hobart</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>will be moved to our first issue, as we recently received a review copy of their latest issue...along with <a href="http://www.hobartpulp.com/print/calendarbig.jpg">a special gift</a>. All we will say for the moment is the entire package from <span style="font-style: italic;">Hobart</span> was so good we were compelled to give it more attention;</li><li>As our<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>first issue launch will coincide with the <a href="http://www.awpwriter.org/conference/2008awpconf.php">AWP conference</a>, we are publishing a special essay by Thomas Washington, looking at the conference through a writer's quizzical (and often baffled) eyes;</li><li>We have pushed our submission deadline for the first issue back to <span style="font-weight: bold;">January 15th</span>, giving reviewers a little more time to pore over their favorite (or most reviled) literary magazines;</li><li>And, for literary magazine editors, we are still accepting lit mag ads and excerpts of current issues. Please send these to lunaparkreview@gmail.com;<br /></li><li>Finally: we are now accepting submissions of reviews, interviews, essays, and excerpts for our second issue. Submissions are due April 10th to lunaparkreview@gmail.com.</li></ul>Oh--and this has <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing </span>to do with our upcoming issue, but it is one of the coolest things we have seen in a while: <a href="http://www.ninthletter.com/featured_artist/">a Kelly Link story/art video on <span style="font-style: italic;">Ninth Letter</span></a>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-57269736146132400862007-12-26T08:53:00.001-08:002007-12-26T09:00:29.807-08:00Luna Park Spreads the Word in Chicago<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?cdn:2:./temp/%7Eammem_eyy6::"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8_QlU9-f4RrHaS-c9FA4BX5_gbW7QXv5djw4V73ZffEL3vJKVjJaRa2-zxZ8AVe1JgNU7VHQYdwHjEBHBhFO7rtbgLnetaIOuYwewRL7AKrpWJpcd8nUA1zLL38oK4YWJ6YxrjsiGMKU/s320/univerofchicago.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5148327401244653474" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:180%;">U</span>ntil 2008, the editors will be in Chicago telling the industrial capital (and everyone at the MLA conference) about <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span>. One of our editors will be presenting at the conference as part of a panel on journals run by students within university graduate departments (some examples of acclaimed literary magazines in this capacity are <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.ninthletter.com/">Ninth Letter</a>, <a href="http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/">Willow Springs</a>, </span>and <a href="http://www.webdelsol.com/bwr/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Black Warrior Review</span></a>).<br /><br />Remember: submissions for issue one deadline is January 10th. Issue will be put online January 31st.<br /><br />(Photo: University of Chicago in 1906.)Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-46988908513054109882007-12-20T11:25:00.000-08:002007-12-20T15:55:39.173-08:00Preparing for the Park<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/789"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4rmZdnFGuPNz_dLktWkyAU4_eTDXnesMhERZmboqe7Rr5YjsPmkjIyoRNcF442qwnHaK0lg8wcHYpDTRZmeohpkF28lxOClatiMRsjEXq_G6iscAT-EqEwp12MEECjKHKqzdIJgJRlVI/s320/DarkCircus1913.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5146091243701860146" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><span style="font-size:180%;">T</span>he launch is almost upon us, and all of our efforts are being directed to the production of our first issue and our approaching launch event. The issue has had a great response and is filling up with reviews, interviews, and excerpts. H</span>ere are a few updates on the production of the <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> website, our coming January 31st launch party/fiasco in Brooklyn, NY, and some extraneous comments on and reviews of the lit mag world that we couldn't fit in on the regular blog posts here over the past month:<br /><ul><li>Website production is running according to schedule. Submissions of reviews, essays, interviews, or excerpts (from editors) for <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> issue one are due January 10th. The first issue will be released January 31st at <a href="http://www.lunaparkreview.com/">lunaparkreview.com</a>. (This will be roughly the same ongoing quarterly schedule: pieces due the 10th of Jan./Apr./Jul./Oct, and issues will come out at the end of these same months.)<br /></li><li>Tao Lin has been added to the list of readers for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> website launch party this coming January 31st at Noo Na in Brooklyn, NY. Tao Lin is the author of the books <a href="http://eeeee-eee-eeee-bed.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Eeeee Eee Eeee</span></a> and <a href="http://eeeee-eee-eeee-bed.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Bed</span></a>, and also has a book of poems to be published in early 2008. Tao also has the blog, <a href="http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogspot.com/">Reader of Depressing Books</a>. We are excited to have him on board. (We are under the assumption that he will be reading from his upcoming book of poetry, but are prepared to be surprised.)</li><li><a href="http://www.juked.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Juked</span></a> magazine has also come on board for the launch event. (Also look for <span style="font-style: italic;">Juked</span> editor John Wang at the AWP book fair; he will be sharing a table with <a href="http://www.hobartpulp.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Hobart</span></a>.)</li><li>As most know, the <a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Review</span></a> has published in their recent issue (vol. 53 no. 2/3) <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQFM-kdSkLRilSyD2nO0SDGXy-KW4jfm5kW2FfIsyV_YKeimLMkssxzwGJcSuzeq3OIo2pl9-rHlgwMB3DCEbRXhx0-lAGAbHHavb_mIxM1kmWLaAgVgei1MRKG3eoeM8kL5GS_mtsGfw/s200/ChicagoReviewcover_53_2_3_full.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5146107139375822674" border="0" /></a>one of the more controversial pieces in the literary magazine world in recent years, Juliana Saphr and Stephanie Young's "<a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/CR_532_Spahr_Young.pdf">Numbers Trouble</a>," an essay on the amount of female poetry published in United States' magazines and anthologies. The essay is in response to Jennifer Ashton's article "Our Bodies, Our Poems," from a recent issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">American </span><span style="font-style: italic;">Literary History</span> [<a href="http://poetics.uchicago.edu/CCPapers/JenniferAshton.pdf">here</a> is an early draft of the piece]. Ashton responds in the issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Review</span> to Saphr and Young's rebuttal with her essay "<a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/CR_532_Ashton.pdf">The Numbers Trouble with 'Numbers Trouble</a>.'" And at the end of the issue, the magazine's editors, Robert Baird and Joshua Kotin, provide <a href="http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/CR_532_Kotin_Baird.pdf">two charts</a> illuminating the ratio of male versus female poetry recently published in literary magazines. Because of the attention these pieces attracted <a href="http://www.digitalemunction.com/wordpress/2007/11/04/poetry-and-gender-following-numbers-trouble/">in the blogosphere</a> and elsewhere, <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Review</span> has made all the previously mentioned pieces available in full for free on their website. In November and early December, Poetry Foundation published numerous posts in response to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Chicago Review</span> pieces on their blog, <a href="http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2007/11/numbers_trouble_via_the_chicag.html">harriet</a>.</li><li>A refreshingly new literary anthology, <a href="http://bestamericanfantasy.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Best American Fantasy</span></a> 2007, released their first <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bestamericanfantasy.com/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlI4oCkp9ATLDeCmRGEyQzyRqqZwL5TQhZ7L7-SPc5DoihxsduksRBOTyDp2RaZsXc7igwO5cqzO7C_nTIDbyPvYbnZVhc_NfGF-dhCBRh_IfTy7seYyMcxL12UvCebpivykyS-G7OWnc/s200/bestamericanfantasy2007.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5146107259634906978" border="0" /></a>book in mid 2007. Michael Chabon is quoted as calling this first book in the series, "A cabinet of dark wonders, and an important--no, a crucial--map of the richness and strangeness and startling range of the modern American short story." Rather than merely a science fiction or fantasy compilation, the anthology instead includes some of the best and most magically mysterious stories published in magazines online and off, such as from <span style="font-style: italic;">A Public Space</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Oxford American</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">ParaSpheres</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Pindelyboz</span>--even <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span>. The overall series is edited by fiction writer Matthew Cheney (<a href="http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/">here</a>'s his blog), and guest editors are <a href="http://scififantasyfiction.suite101.com/blog.cfm/weird_tales_changes">Ann</a> and <a href="http://bestamericanfantasy.com/">Jeff VanderMeer</a>--both highly acclaimed fantasy authors. The 2007 volume includes exciting stories from writers working on the frontiers of the imagination: Kelly Link, Peter LaSalle, Daniel Alarcon, Brian Evenson, Kevin Brockmeier, Chris Adrian, and many others. Quite easily the most electric best of anthology to come out since Eggers' <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/authorpages/eggers/eggers2.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Best Nonrequired</span></a> series was launched in 2002. Cheney's <span style="font-style: italic;">Best American Fantasy</span> is a more than welcome addition to an often safe and conservative Best of series from Houghton Mifflin (Cheney's series is published by <a href="http://www.primebooks.net/">Prime Books</a>). Cheney and editors are looking for submissions from magazines for their 2008 volume--click <a href="http://bestamericanfantasy.com/">here</a> for details.<br /></li></ul>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-87031217667622889502007-12-06T10:56:00.000-08:002007-12-20T09:28:54.548-08:00Literature in the Americas<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.vqronline.org/south-america/"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5123878047213264930" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgma88UVwF3AM776FCEGbmtXgjvk5fWGIEegp2SSa5UqRJsWoEPvKfXhpzVKY7a5NZ_2XxAIg95wr4rjBHU_XJ9sVps5ZzHSeKxeuMWxNcfpLde89scXWtpyWhjMaPj4qsgJrkcuWbMvh8/s320/vqrvol83no4coverimage.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">N<span style="font-size:85%;">EW</span> I<span style="font-size:85%;">SSUE</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span>: V<span style="font-size:85%;">IRGINIA</span> Q<span style="font-size:85%;">UARTERLY</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span> V<span style="font-size:85%;">OL</span>. 83 N<span style="font-size:85%;">O</span>. 4, "S<span style="font-size:85%;">OUTH</span> A<span style="font-size:85%;">MERICA</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">IN THE</span> 21<span style="font-size:85%;">ST</span> C<span style="font-size:85%;">ENTURY</span>"</span><br /><div><span style="font-size:180%;">L</span>iterary magazines are often referred to as little magazines not as an insult, but to reflect the usual size of these magazine's readership and circulation. (<span style="font-style: italic;">Paris Review</span>'s George Plimpton famously detested the label.) It is a niche audience American publishers of literature must cater to, and this is even more true in the world of literary periodicals. Sure, many people read literary magazines, such as <a href="http://www.parisreview.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Paris Review</span></a> or <a href="http://www.uga.edu/garev/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Georgia Review</span></a>. Literary magazines, such as those mentioned, are even nominated for and win national magazine awards, plus they obtain attention from national newspapers. But compared to bigger commercial magazines, such as <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_%28magazine%29">Time</a></span><span style="font-style: italic;">, <a href="http://www.esquire.com/cover-archive">Esquire</a></span>, or <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span></a>, literary magazines are a very small affair.<br /><br />Yet it is existence in this smaller world which allows them to not only get away with their expected diversity of literary content and general emphasis on less well-known authors--but these magazines' greater anonymity and slower publishing schedule also allow them to publish compilations of critical, in depth, and exploratory work, many times resulting in more lasting writing than other, larger, non-literary magazines. There is less pressure, monetarily, at least, in the literary production and editorial world. Some literary magazines take advantage of this fact. They use their medium to engage an issue along a broad array of information, views, and artistic forms. They spend months researching and probing into a topic, isolating particular works from the past and present that best address the issue. And many times the results are more than satisfying; they can even be illuminating.<br /><br />And then there is Ted Genoways's <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/south-america/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Virginia Quarterly Review</span></a> (I say "Genoways's" because under his editorship the <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> is a different, more engaging, and seductive publication than it was previously). <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> doesn't just offer you a literary magazine in the general sense. Genoways's concoction of <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> is like a happy tri-marriage of <span style="font-style: italic;">The National Georgraphic</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Granta</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span>; a wide-reaching literary-political reflection of the world.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.apublicspace.org/back_issues/issue_3/to_burn_the_city_by_julio_dura.html"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh26rdgb3kXo8hBlC-Nm3AoTmRltyQZre4viHcWxpNBm2FwTkaoTYtEAJrArG9hxeFc69wKwNEA4O7BPGi4YxzhLnsRDCDk6ykFCOr7F9SCJKhgUX6iJ6KOhqqBV2sVK4wIPbogWH3eVg0/s200/APublicSpaceImageto_burn_the_city_by_julio_dura_mainpicture.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5128372478612494130" border="0" /></a>The latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span>, vol. 83 no. 4, focuses on South America. <span>The United States</span> has (to say the least) a complicated political relationship with South America, from Teddy Roosevelt's big stick policy for relations between the Americas to our prolonged enmeshment in Colombia's drug war to American Presidents' less than amiable relationships with many South American leaders. But it is not an exaggeration to say that most U.S. citizens are unaware of the goings on within our sister continent. As Daniel Alarcon described U.S. knowledge of Peru during the early eighties in the winter 2007 issue of <a href="http://www.apublicspace.org/back_issues/issue_3/focus_peru_battlegrounds_real.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">A Public Space</span></a>, "Peru existed...as a rumor, more or less." (Image at right by Simon Diaz is from that issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">A Public Space</span>.) Much of the job of this issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> seems to be to unpack rumors of South America in the way only literature can, which is with the subtle registering and questioning of a subject through both precise and figurative language.<br /><br />It is "the literary journalism I guess we are getting to be known for," Genoways has said, describing the editorial direction of the magazine. This type of journalism is not new for the newly restructured <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span>. Past issues have included in-depth features on AIDS in Africa, the United States/Mexican border, and the current Iraq war. What is different--and altogether impressive--about this issue is that the entire issue, from page 1 to 322, is focused on South America. In <a href="http://www.cvillepodcast.com/2007/10/16/vqr-south-america-in-the-21st-century/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">a radio interview</span></a> available online, Genoways explains that the project of putting together the current issue began nearly two years ago, when <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> managing editor Kevin Morrisey noticed that, every time he opened the newspaper, South America was on the front page. Morrisey and Genoways got in touch then with Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcon, a regular contributor to <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span>, to co-edit the magazine. Alarcon and <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR </span>worked together with <a href="http://www.etiquetanegra.com.pe/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Etiqueta Negra</span></a> (a high-quality Peruvian magazine where Alarcon is on staff) to get the best South American writers and photographers for the issue. And, eighteen months later: a thick, full-color issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span>, filled with 17 pieces, each highlighting a separate, important, and fascinating section of this large southern continent.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2007/fall/goh-islands-of-titicaca/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEFrClxGJNY3aD-4FJXDtcNuv4skPTWxaiMbP6Y8CQBUGDp4fYKA6ZwSNEu4y_gKCXu_RcAQ7Fin2XSDsV6wsRwnVjHAe2-ToSAbHRJFv9MUGm4ADZY_4ni7WzUo3_VlR8kFncHFwZVi8/s200/VQRTiticaca.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140904046032706482" border="0" /></a>J. Malcolm Garcia writes in "The White Train" about a train in Buenos Aires, which transports the imporverished as they lug paper and copper across town to sell. A new translation by Chris Andrews of a novel from <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/03/26/070326crat_atlarge_zalewski">Roberto Bolano</a>, "Nazi Literature in the Americas"--a fictional portrait of literature and fascism in South America--is excerpted at length. In "Soy in the Amazon," Pat Joseph covers one of the Amazon's most destructive crops. And much, much more is included in the issue--fearful albinos, transsexual prostitution, blind mayors, and portraits of Incan descendants on the islands of Lake Titicaca (pictured at left). This is the sort of magazine which not only sets a high bar for literary magazines--and for magazines in general--but makes one reconsider the distinction between magazines and books.<br /><br />[Special note: For the first time in the history of <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span>, the magazine has put <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/south-america/">the entire content of the issue online</a>. "I just really wanted people to see this material," said Genoways. "I think it's a really important gathering of material and I just wanted people to find it." The content is available in the form of an interactive map, featuring current and past <span style="font-style: italic;">VQR</span> pieces on South America and its people. Also included in the map are pieces that didn't make it into the issue. The site is well worth the time, if only to see a new step in connecting print literary magazines to the digital age.]<br /></div>Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08691910260584650559noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-66215233814962492752007-12-05T09:07:00.000-08:002007-12-07T10:57:17.247-08:00A Lost Ideal<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/obituaries/04cnd-hardwick.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjbu7x-Gw5fpuiqnD-h8ujaFP6U0xFxDrHWd4EtGWdXR1ZBrCeWPgz_BWOCy3QQxUwCVa33D67C95irFi_-pNsXk-EKuzpfyE-05RT-Sb4IO9uVPDbiWKFxZ-KtUSK1A4YTEvDVCvBh5CQ/s320/04hardwick-190.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5140543479233239954" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/obituaries/04cnd-hardwick.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin"><span style="font-size:180%;">E</span>lizabeth Hardwick</a> (1916-2007) died last Sunday evening, December 2, 2007, in Manhattan. A frequent contributor to <a href="http://www.bu.edu/partisanreview/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Partisan Review</span></a>, Hardwick was well known as an essayist, novelist, and reviewing. Along with her husband, Robert Lowell, Hardwick was one of the founders of <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/authors/67"><span style="font-style: italic;">The New York Review of Books</span></a> in 1963, after an 114-day newspaper strike in New York City. An acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Hardwick is most well known for her insightful, passionate essays. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described her as, "credited for expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her intimate tone and her dramatic deployment of forceful logic." Hardwick was also a frequent contributor to <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Yorker</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span>, where she published one of her most mentioned essays, "The Decline of Book Reviewing." Published in 1959, this essay criticized what Hardwick saw as a lack of criticism in book reviewing--everyone instead all too eager to pass around praise for even the most minor achievement. (Photo at right is of Hardwick in 1983; image from the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>.)<br /><br />Here is a long excerpt of the essay (copied from the <a href="http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001859"><span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span> website</a>): "In America, now, oblivion, literary failure, obscurity, neglect—all the great moments of artistic tragedy and neglect—still occur, but the natural conditions for the occurrence are in a state of camouflage, like those decorating ideas in which wood is painted to look like paper and paper to look like wood. A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet, bland condemnations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory. Everyone is found to have 'filled a need' and is to be 'thanked' for something and to be excused for 'minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.' 'A thoroughly mature artist' appears many times a week and often daily; many are the bringers of those 'messages the Free World will ignore at its peril.'"<br /><br />[<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/2893">Here</a> is Hardwick in a 1985 Art of Fiction interview in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Paris Review</span>.]Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-57302343345013426782007-11-20T08:29:00.000-08:002007-11-27T07:47:20.617-08:00Degenerate Art<span style="font-weight: bold;">F</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >OUND IN</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">N<span style="font-size:85%;">EW</span> E<span style="font-size:85%;">NGLAND</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >VOL</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">. 28 </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >NO</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">. 3: M</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >ICHAEL</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> H</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >ELLER </span><span style="font-weight: bold;">E</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >SSAY</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >ON THE</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> P</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >AINTER</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> M</span><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:85%;" >AX</span> B<span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">ECKMANN</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCVtes9q1bfUzRaOQimUcbrCbqO_r_4fkYQXIX9g8ieZzPvPGguPX-jdncZSeyp7OkxM7Z4UY37T2R5P_cVV5LiTqlFmM5YaYE_dGtQv6TkVJaAW8VyPrf6AhP9ClJhY9bdErf7Dy5Wig/s200/NER28-3cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5134961515302031922" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:180%;">"E</span>ssays, like butterflies, jazz (and God), move irregularly, not linearly," wrote <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Hoagland">Edward Hoagland</a> in his diaries (originally published in <a href="http://www.theparisreview.com/viewissue.php/prmIID/162"><span style="font-style: italic;">Paris Review</span> no. 162</a>). The best experimental essays--those that, like jazz, do not conform, that are in many ways defined by their resistance--seem to vibrate with a hidden knowledge. Or not knowledge perhaps, but perspective.<br /><br /><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Heller">Michael Heller's</a> free-form essay "Beckmann Variations" on the G</span><span style="font-size:85%;">erman painter <a href="http://www.tate.org.uk/magazine/issue3/maxbeckman.htm">Max Beckmann</a> (1884-1950) published in the fall 2007 issue of <a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/"><span style="font-style: italic;">New England Review</span></a> (vol. 28 no. 3) is a cogent example of Heller's own ruminations on the function of art. Heller writes, "But then, what does any work of art do but intensify perception by limiting it?" The essay is about Heller and his wife seeing a retrospective of Beckmann's paintings at London's Tate Modern museum, and, like the best essays since <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne">Montaigne</a>, it is a perceptive look not only at the subject of the paintings, but also into the slippery mind of Heller viewing the work. Heller's piece seems to argue that one of the most intriguing things about essays is that they allow a reader to watch the mind think. In the essay, he quotes Yeats on this issue: "In <span style="font-style: italic;">Per Amica</span>, Yeats cites approvingly a critic who insists that, 'learning to know one's own mind, gradually getting the disorder of one's mind in order, led to the real impulse to create.'" Reading the essay one realizes that this reviewer's comment could as easily be applied to the painter Beckmann as it could to the essayist Heller.<br /><br />Mostly widely recognized as a poet, Heller is also well-known as an essayist and memoirist; his 2000 memoir <a href="http://www.bigbridge.org/issue8/miamimheller.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">Living Root</span></a> charts connections between Heller's Brooklyn and Miami boyhood with Poland and WW II. It is hard not to think that in his essay on Beckmann Heller's essayist talents are at their peak. Even in the company of this issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">NER</span>'s usual powerfully erudite and imaginative writings, "Beckmann Variations" stands out, not only because of Heller's own provocative rhizomatic interweaving of diverse subjects and themes in order to more effectively approach Beckmann's paintings with language, but also because of the essay's architectural ingenuity, an organic hybridity of poetry and prose--each section of the essay pivots around alternating poetic and prose riffs on the larger subject of Beckmann's paintings (or the even larger subject of our responses to works of art).<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/collective/A974649"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtL8s4Koeuxg_n-cvZ7IwqgvAqKAtAziMc7R0NykIPJc95G52zf2a_7Uz-Lor1dkvKqCfK_H1v0ZV5k9H-GkIW8ZpJH0yEJ03mEAZpnlowxJFPBAsdl0WJ9xnpiapm6ttkxqYB-3QtuCA/s200/beckmann1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5137532109063262786" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;">One major theme of "Beckmann Variations" is the idea of degenerate art. Heller writes, "Beckmann's work, along with that of most of Germany's modernist masters, was included in the Nazi's display of 'degenerate art,' the 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition held in Munich in July of 1937....Hitler made a speech to the nation about this un-German art. Beckmann heard the broadcast, packed his belongings, and with his wife fled Germany the next morning, never to return." And, eventually, they came to America, where in 1950 he would die of a heart attack on his way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see his painting <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9503E4DB1338F931A15755C0A9659C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print">"'Self Portrait in Blue Jacket,' which was hanging there in an exhibition."</a> Would this painting have been considered degenerate by Hitler's standards? One can only hope so. As Heller shows us, much of Beckmann's work was devoted to artistic rebirth, which included a refashioning of modes and genres of painting. As usual, Heller explains in his continually quotable style: "Most serious and important art changes prevailing conceptions in such a way that it only nominally belongs to the species it came from. Beckmann's work <span style="font-style: italic;">was</span> 'entartete,' belonging only to the flora or fauna of pictures then existing; it was already a rebuke to the art culture in which it had been created."<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">(Pictured above: "Falling Man" (1950) , 141 x 88.9 cm., National Gallery of Art, Washington.)</span><br /></span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-49661618985903522062007-11-13T06:33:00.000-08:002007-11-13T09:01:46.438-08:00On Burnside<span style="font-weight: bold;">N<span style="font-size:85%;">EW</span> I<span style="font-size:85%;">SSUE</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span>: <span style="font-style: italic;">B<span style="font-size:85%;">URNSIDE</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span></span> <span style="font-size:85%;">VOL</span>. 3 <span style="font-size:85%;">NO</span>. 2</span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.burnsidereview.org/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihJCQWutCaHXVmoqhFKdHscS0rmKksZPzZm1h6Ps8rL5s2Wk6Gzy2tRhraStgM-Bp_7Pz-7mhk37PO0louz3w3OvvSYaPP6s17UUQylYFhgOHMAhlFBCsowkkOlYmSqliLW4homhJPHQ8/s320/BurnsideReviewvol3.2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5132335211456786946" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:180%;">C</span><span style="font-size:100%;">onnections between form and content seem to carry more prominence in the art magazine worl</span>d than in other literary productions. When we shop instead for books, we mostly look for the spine bearing an author's name or an intriguing title. Though books, too, are very often intricately and carefully designed (see <a href="http://www.alvinlustig.org/bp_nd/bp_nd.asp">Alvin Lustig's</a> gorgeous covers for New Directions books or nearly anything by <a href="http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.list/object_id/896f4810-ced1-4455-84df-aa311d1e29ce/Books.cfm"><span style="font-style: italic;">McSweeney's</span> press</a>). But in the magazine world, design is a greater portion of the product. Not that content <span style="font-style: italic;">relies </span>on form--good writing can and does come in ugly packages--but it is the care and detail taken with the design and production of a literary magazine which carries a great amount of the (at least initial) attraction when perusing the literary newsstand.<br /><br />The latest issue of <a href="http://www.burnsidereview.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Burnside Review</span></a> (vol. 3 no. 2), a small literary magazine from Portland, Oregon, is approximately the shape of a CD case, with cover artwork resembling a Beatles or Doors record (see image of the magazine's back cover above). The cover has an antique look, faded and sepia-tinted, giving the impression the magazine wasn't found in the new bookstore down the street, but in the dusty bin of a secondhand store, shoved between books without covers and a pair of pleather boots. The production is simply done and beautiful throughout, something both intriguing to look at and easy to handle, satisfyingly combining art for the wall with the literary container of a magazine. And the small size of the issue makes it easy for carrying on the subway or bus, as well as a nice portable shape for the movable readers of the world, those who see bumping into things as hardly an obstacle for the opportunity to read while walking.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://wikitravel.org/en/Portland_%28Oregon%29"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEitNFdknrFQgc_RE6Zuu2w7A2ZKwXwxvEGiNspgLVBQBlXdRyMlDM_dZW8MiyNOBh8GJAQmLj-gXnBH0ArpNUHlXraY_Sm-7-vNoSYdmER5i-z9Su4OAQ7uxmq6R4pGA43VcatFMaInMVU/s200/Portlandorgon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5132352180872573474" border="0" /></a>And the writing inside this issue is, again like the overall design, a subtle, simple-seeming surprise. Overall, the magazine has a somber tone, like a rock song you listen to alone in the car at two in the morning after dropping all your friends off at their houses, you sitting outside your own dark house, the car running, the song playing on the radio, and it seems you are the only person awake in the world, and though you know the song will end, somehow it seems like it won't, like it'll go on forever. There are powerful new pieces in here by the always fascinating writers <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/50">Alberto Rios</a> and <a href="http://jacketmagazine.com/26/john-lern.html">Ben Lerner</a>, moving work by newer authors such as James Capozzi and Anne Heide, and some alluring prose by young writer-to-keep-an-eye-on Leslie Jamison, who had one of her stories released by <span style="font-style: italic;">Burnside Review</span> as the chapbook <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wintering Barn</span> earlier this year. Though like most literary magazines some of the work in this issue is considerably more powerful than the rest, due to the smallness of <span style="font-style: italic;">Burnside Review</span>'s project for this publication--only 74 pages in all, hardly any pieces over two pages long, most of it poetry--there is not really the urge to skip forward. Nothing is rushed.<br /><br />Instead of quoting at length from many pieces, here is an excerpt of Ben Lerner's stunning prose poem "Ars Poetica" from the issue, a poem strong enough to keep you in the car till the song is over, even in an Oregon January, stuck in the snow in a 1976 VW Rabbit with a busted heater, even then: "A famous novel, difficult to avoid. Its author, now very old, has for many years sequestered himself in a French village, refused all visitors, returned all letters. All my life I have seen people reading this novel. On subways and airplanes, in hotels and hospitals. My wife recently read it in our bed. At first, when people asked what I thought of the novel, I admitted I hadn't read it. Nobody believed me..."<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >[Click <a href="http://www.burnsidereview.org/current.html">here</a> to see the table of contents and read excerpts of vol. 3 no. 2 on the </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Burnside Review</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > website.]</span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-82250528589431112572007-11-12T09:43:00.000-08:002007-11-12T10:39:51.270-08:00A Lion Passes<strong>R.I.P. N<span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">ORMAN</span></span> M<span style="font-size:85%;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">AILER</span></span>, 1923-2007</strong><br /><div><div><div><div><br /><div><a href="http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/story/"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5132020295864709570" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0px 0px 10px 10px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvIPJ6T3o37VNHeOQuBpXPSxPkYPzQKwMYFd1zCKW1-vt6ijxwxt__3AcTglDFz5PigOxktQWNlnQDtbZeGvy3gWWfPuaxa-2EKT2Si5kFzQHvfCL7Kx8VX3hVJejYtLzbnKePsaj8TQs/s200/storymag.jpg" border="0" /></a><a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0746,bruinius,78302,2.html"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5132020536382878178" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrGFtwmqWOpJz0SjonL3A15m7ublCqSVKrwaF996TsJPAkCA9WYbARt3csWDwFr0bXoGFgD1gERoiP9ZfbS1Gn4ai4tjv4IxnC3U4Bbl7HUBsfqYGsrk5t9qNEkG8rDQHhx20f9cwiDbU/s200/mailer.jpg" border="0" /></a>Norman Mailer <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0746,bruinius,78302,2.html">died</a> early last Saturday November 10, 2007, at 84 years old. With him passed one of the twentieth century's most prolific, important, and controversial writers. Among his many other achievements, Mailer wrote for literary and political magazines from a very early age. Mailer wrote for his high school literary magazine and had a story accepted by <em><a href="http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/story/">Story</a></em> magazine when he was only 16 years old. As a sophomore at Harvard, Mailer was elected to the <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjN2RQrn7-BtpywrkKC-DUAYfVSyUjCXh3JfZQNxCEg_yJQ1Nh4oYUwZhBZESkNg1sEihj6slJA5sn2Bp7ypTAI992oETNF57SmKEZ1mRc1mEN9BwTDOa4iJVVLr5XAqL2xVp_utvD2Czs/s1600-h/mailer.jpg"></a>board of the <em><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Advocate">Harvard Advocate</a></em>, the college literary magazine. In 1941 he won <em>Story</em>'s annual college writing contest, and the $100 prize money helped convince his family that he had a viable career as a writer. Since then Mailer has published work in (to name a few) <a href="http://dissentmagazine.org/"><em>Dissent</em>,</a> the <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">inaugural</span> issue of <em><a href="http://www.nybooks.com/">New York Review of Books</a></em>, <em>The Paris Review</em>, was one of the founders of <em><a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/">The Village Voice</a></em>, and is the subject of <em><a href="http://mailerreview.org/">The Mailer Review</a></em>, which printed its <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">first</span> issue in fall 2007. <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/page.php/prmID/64">Click here to read two interviews with Mailer from <em>The Paris Review</em>.</a> The world of magazines and writing will certainly be a less diverse and rich place without him.</div></div></div></div></div>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-62366038273848432892007-11-06T20:48:00.001-08:002007-11-06T21:28:15.689-08:00Begin the BeguineThough the experiment continues at an astounding rate, we will pause for these several announcements and appreciations:<br /><br />-The <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> launch party this coming January in Brooklyn, NY will feature poetry read by Angela Ball, who will be reading from her newly released AWP award winning book of poetry, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Night-Clerk-Hotel-Worlds-Poetry/dp/0822959755"><span style="font-style: italic;">Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds</span></a>. Other poets and fiction writers will join her in celebrating our launch.<br /><br />-We are also excited that the party will be co-hosted by <a href="http://www.mississippireview.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Mississippi Review</span></a> and <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://sundress.net/stirring/">Stirring</a> </span>literary magazine's <a href="http://www.sundress.net/bestof/">Best of the Net</a> series, with possibly more magazines to join the event. There will also be a small gallery of paintings and a jazz quartet. More information on the party in the forms of posters, postcards, and invitations soon to come. We are, as you can see, very excited.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.tuesdayjournal.org/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_IyBZl8kS3C6rdTTPNfW7iQbHwWxIWiRs1ra_jeadMw0RH5AN4xKmWl3QC220QODwuUhUtcvaaULdiOoWAU28bWnzi8SQ3_c4O7OcwSMkGPA6ihjuiyuxpodR4pbHE18ZHSPtrkbRZzA/s320/Tuesday12cover_large.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5129963218534815698" border="0" /></a>-We are also excited to announce the addition of poet Raymond Wachter to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> masthead. Ray has been working his tail off soliciting writers for <span style="font-style: italic;">Luna Park</span> and getting the word out about the site. For a day job, Ray teachers at University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Recently he has been quite ecstatic about his recent nomination for a Pushcart.<br /><br />-In the next few days we will have a review of the new issue of <a href="http://www.vqronline.org/south-america/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Virginia Quarterly Review</span></a>, "South America in the 21st Century.<br /><br />-Soon to follow will be pieces on recent issues of: <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.burnsidereview.org/">Burnside Review</a>, <a href="http://firewheel-editions.org/">Sentence</a>, <a href="http://www.hobartpulp.com/">Hobart</a>, <a href="http://www.oxfordamericanmag.com/">Oxford American</a></span>, and many more.<br /><br />-Yesterday the editors received a copy of <a href="http://www.tuesdayjournal.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tuesday: An Art Project</span></a> (pictured at right) in the mailbox. We have been so enraptured by the thing, we nearly forgot to vote in today's elections. We haven't eaten or slept since it arrived, just keep opening it, closing it. If you are a fan of books, magazines, literature, art, or origami (you'll see), pick up a copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">Tuesday</span>.Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-31072589062377733542007-10-23T07:29:00.001-07:002007-10-30T17:28:09.449-07:00Espresso and Absinthe in Modern Russia<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/index.html"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5124542408006049538" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjMOOD-gRhgqYeB9X0EDsV-NeSVskLOsSTs6JVRJvzv8NGaarFPf_f436vCEh-3md9FvG-a-ermKxGqXo0SZaPrH1fmZPac1q9vQnwVBa6frZmdMQqkHrQxXxXSIyJDmG9ZEaTS6xG3sc/s200/TroL17coverimage.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">F<span style="font-size:85%;">ROM</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">THE</span> N<span style="font-size:85%;">EWSSTANDS:</span> E<span style="font-size:85%;">SSAY BY</span> J<span style="font-size:85%;">OSIP</span> N<span style="font-size:85%;">OVAKOVICH FROM</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">T<span style="font-size:85%;">HE</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EPUBLIC OF</span> L<span style="font-size:85%;">ETTERS</span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"> NO</span>. 17</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">The following is an excerpt of Josip Novakovich's piece from the latest issue of </span>The Republic of Letters<span style="font-style: italic;">--which, along with other excerpts from the issue, can be found on the </span><a href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/index.html">TroL </a><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/index.html">website</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> (excerpts which </span><span>Luna Park</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ></span><span style="font-style: italic;">is happy to disseminate because the </span><span style="font-size:0;">TroL</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> editors so kindly wrote <a href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/archives.html">this</a>). </span>TroL<span style="font-style: italic;"> is the third literary magazine co-founded and edited by <a href="http://www.bu.edu/com/jo/faculty_kbotsford.html">Keith Botsford</a> and the late <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-bio.html">Saul Bellow</a>. Begun in 1997 in broadsheet and in bound format in 2003, </span>TroL<span style="font-style: italic;"> has released just 17 issues in the past decade, because, according to the editors, the magazine is published "at irregular intervals--that is, when sufficient material of quality is available." Like their earlier collaborative publication, </span><a href="http://www.pennilesspress.co.uk/prose/noble_savage.htm">The Noble Savage</a><span style="font-style: italic;">, Bellow and Botsford have financed </span>TroL<span style="font-style: italic;"> themselves in order to allow them editorial freedom and the generosity they see as a necessary part of the literary magazine endeavor. In 1999, Bellow wrote </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/101199bellow-writing.html">a </a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/101199bellow-writing.html">New York Times</a><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/101199bellow-writing.html"> piece</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> explaining his reasons for beginning </span>TroL<span style="font-style: italic;">. Issues of </span>TroL <span style="font-style: italic;">can be ordered from your local bookseller or purchased directly from </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/citizenship.html">Toby Press</a><span style="font-style: italic;">.</span></span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />Five Easy Pieces</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">By Josip Novakovich</span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">M</span>ost Russians don’t get up early. The shops in St. Petersburg open at ten in the morning, and that holds true even of coffee shops. Perhaps the notion of coffee as wake-up drug in Russia hasn’t filtered through the haze of the inimical climates and histories. Sometimes when the coffee shop opens, you can see jaded-looking men and women, literally jaded, a little green and sallow, drinking absinthe. Now that is a way to start the day—(no wonder there is a secretion of the liver contributing to the skin color). You may ask for coffee at 10 AM and the counter clerk, most likely, will look astonished, and ask, Espressa? They tend to turn their o’s into ‘ah’ sounds. Now it may take them half an hour to get the machine working, and in the finest St. Petersburg shop, the espresso machine didn’t work for two weeks during my stay there. But this is not the story of St. Petersburg but Moscow, which though more business-oriented and energetic, still has that late-to-bed, late-to-rise rhythm, and the train schedule seems to reflect that. The express trains from Moscow to St. Petersburg were scheduled to depart between one AM and two. I got the tickets for the two AM, and since I was indoctrinated by the American airport schedules, which in this era of security, demand that the passengers be early and planes late, I wanted to get to the station an hour before departure—to give ourselves margin in case we didn’t get a large cab easily. We were four, the whole family, with an additional member, the cello, with its huge case. We went out with our luggage and stood on the curb, next to an all-night kiosk. A few drunks leaned against the kiosk and drank from cans of beer. A small Zhiguli police car was parked nearby, bestowing the air of security on the block. I don’t know where the name Zhiguli comes from, whether it’s a play on the Italian gigolo, and whether the car is a copy of a Fiat, but there is definitely a second-hand air even in a new Zhiguli, and the cops looked a little second-hand and disinterested. In fact, they drove off. First a small car stopped, and a mustachioed man stepped out and insisted that all of us, luggage and passengers, could fit, and was mightily offended when I said we could not fit. He would not charge much, only one hundred and fifty rubles to the train station. Maybe our luggage would fit sans us. Maybe that was the plan, load up the car and drive off. After a decent amount of shouting, the man left.<br /><br /></span></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dostoevsky_museum_Saint-Petersburg.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5124555829778849554" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3BHj2HddiuQqRPKMMwUECyx95f1eSAucrGHqXsKLxHFyjel_eV3fHfAkKhG0Y13WVsk0c7e18_pIA7KO0-Bb7eXMrApadwG2JQNXBXgZuJC2CyaD4PDvFaIKF4NtcjqITZFNYux6Zh1A/s200/250px-Dostoevsky_museum_Saint-Petersburg.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">Now another mustachioed man stopped with a larger car, a Lada coupe. We all fit, although it was not easy. He had some metal pipes and boxes in the trunk which he took a few minutes to rearrange.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;">I knew the direct way to the train station, having walked it. Down Koltze, turn left, up a huge boulevard, and that is that, a simple L trip, but apparently, for this man there was no such thing as a simple line. He drove us up Chapin, and there turned right, into a dark and bumpy street. His gas gauge kept beeping. Nice, he’s driving on empty. Maybe there’s a gas station here? Maybe he knows how to time everything? That might be a good scenario, to be out of gas, or to pretend to be, and to stop in an alley where his assistants could take our luggage and work us over. No doubt, such things have happened.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />The cobbles of the street made the tires purr in their loud way.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />At the traffic light, the man turned off the car, until the green light came back on, and then he cranked on the ignition. “Oh no,” Jeanette said. But the ignition caught. Maybe the corner was not dark enough. On the other side of the corner, diagonally, there was another Zhiguli with policemen. At the next corner there was another police car and a couple of policemen standing outside of it.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />“All this police!” shouted our driver. “On every street corner. That is too much.”</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />And true, wherever we looked there were police cars. For what, I wondered? I hadn’t seen so many police even in NYC after 9/11, and this may have been related, a terror pre-emptive measure.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />Our driver was getting more and more incensed at the sight of the police. Why should the police bother him? His being terrified of the police made him suspect. On the other hand, I was never particularly fond of them either, in any country, so his displeasure with the arbitrary executors of the law didn’t incriminate him in my eyes.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />Anyhow, he made it to the train station, and I gave him two hundred rubles, as much as he had asked, and it wasn’t that much, six dollars, and he opened up the trunk but didn’t help me unload.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />At the curb, a young man with a flatbed wooden pushcart offered to take the luggage for one hundred rubles.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />“That’s a lot,” said Jeanette. “If the cab is only two hundred, this should be less.”</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />“That’s all right,” I said. “He probably needs the money.”</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />We loaded a large suitcase, and four smaller ones, and Jeanette carried Joseph’s cello.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />The porter wasn’t officially attired. He didn’t have the cap. He was a young, somewhat Asiatic-looking man, perhaps from southern Siberia, if there is such a thing. Such a huge region should have a south as well, not only an east. He had a black blazer as though he were a waiter at a fancy hotel and black thin-soled leather shoes which didn’t give him much traction, so as he pushed he slid backward, but he progressed. He didn’t go to the side, where he could avoid the stairs, but directly forward. He couldn’t lift the pushcart over the stairs, and he needed my help. I got the lower, heavier end, but I didn’t mind. It entertained me to see him at work. He huffed and puffed as though his job were horrifyingly hard.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />“He’s putting on a show of labor for us,” I said.</span></span><span style="font-family:Times New Roman,serif;"><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /><br />“Why, it must be hard work,” Jeanette retorted.</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[To read the rest of "Five Easy Pieces" <a href="http://www.bu.edu/trl/citizenship.html">purchase</a> or pick up issue 17 of </span>TroL<span style="font-style: italic;">.]</span></span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-80882901133036887432007-10-19T08:56:00.001-07:002007-10-21T13:10:06.227-07:00These Young People Today<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Lqr9OB9DTAf0PX2zfTArgrOVcfCWVRdTQf3tMyfe-vVhQhAi2HMh-KBQccz7Heqfckbuo0q65dy4GVOnwDRRPs6cNLbFQO9uoBBO_5kqR2bAwj3Z45PPFI8Ud-chOv9Dk5mcgiyrt6M/s1600-h/circle.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Lqr9OB9DTAf0PX2zfTArgrOVcfCWVRdTQf3tMyfe-vVhQhAi2HMh-KBQccz7Heqfckbuo0q65dy4GVOnwDRRPs6cNLbFQO9uoBBO_5kqR2bAwj3Z45PPFI8Ud-chOv9Dk5mcgiyrt6M/s320/circle.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121381157457370818" border="0" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA9lfRLu4HxvPO3IoCDDEdZbbbv5YZGjehBxFML-COYU4pz-AWFzE8RqfOkj-QiPbFQnhxbLFCjmMby4yp7z797lWM-ntl-MpRKozZtYohyphenhyphenLygcRsoI-Mtm2RMJnulVKbNNvp3bS8tutc/s1600-h/refresh+refresh+book+cover.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA9lfRLu4HxvPO3IoCDDEdZbbbv5YZGjehBxFML-COYU4pz-AWFzE8RqfOkj-QiPbFQnhxbLFCjmMby4yp7z797lWM-ntl-MpRKozZtYohyphenhyphenLygcRsoI-Mtm2RMJnulVKbNNvp3bS8tutc/s200/refresh+refresh+book+cover.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5121380951298940594" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;">F<span style="font-size:85%;">OUND X </span>2: T<span style="font-size:85%;">HE</span> U<span style="font-size:85%;">P AND </span>C<span style="font-size:85%;">OMERS,</span> B<span style="font-size:85%;">ENJAMIN</span> P<span style="font-size:85%;">ERCY AND </span>V<span style="font-size:85%;">ICTORIA</span> C<span style="font-size:85%;">HANG</span><br /><br /></span><span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Journals where these writers' works can be found:<br /></span><a href="http://www.glimmertrain.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">Glimmer Train</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > no. 64<br /></span><a href="http://www.pshares.org/"><span style="font-size:85%;">Ploughshares</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > vol. 32 no. 1<br /></span></span><span><a href="http://review.antioch.edu/"><span style="font-size:85%;">The Antioch Review</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > vol. 65 no. 3</span></span><br /><span><a href="http://www.missourireview.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">The Missouri Review</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > vol. 30 no. 2<br /></span><a href="http://www.parisreview.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">The Paris Review</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > no. 180<br /></span><a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">Tin House</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > no. 31<br /></span><a href="http://www.salthilljournal.com/"><span style="font-size:85%;">Salt Hill</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > no. 19<br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><span><span style="font-size:180%;">O</span>ne of the most recognized roles of literary magazines is as publishing venues for new writers. This has been true since at least the beginning of the 20th century, when magazines like <a href="http://www.poetrymagazine.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Poetry</span></a> and <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07E0D91731EF33A25757C2A9619C946095D6CF"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Double Dealer</span></a> were dedicated to locating new talent--which they did in spades, publishing the early writing of such then unknowns as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thonrton Wilder, T.S. Eliot, Jean Toomer, H. D., and numerous more. Their position as discoverers of new writers is a portion of their job that literary magazines take much pride in; it is one of the main editorial distinctions separating them from the better circulated and more financially lucrative glossy magazines, who most often cannot risk print space on writers or forms of writing that have not yet proven their audience appeal. Still the literary magazine world's role in the careers of American writers seems a little publicly realized fact (though one much mentioned in these pages). One might wonder, for instance, what number of the many readers of Jeffrey Eugenides Pulitzer Prize winning and best-selling novel <a href="http://dir.salon.com/story/books/review/2002/09/05/eugenides/index.html"><span style="font-style: italic;">Middlesex</span></a> have even heard of <a href="http://public.gettysburg.edu/academics/gettysburg_review/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Gettysburg Review</span></a>, where Eugenides published his first story. The same question could be posed about the first publications of such authors as Claire Messud, Sara Gruen, Junot Diaz, or Philip Roth. Certainly the literary magazine publishing complex doesn't have the cultural power it had during the height of modernism, with such things as television, the internet, and the general glut of contemporary publishing to compete with, but there are still, in the thousand plus literary magazines out there, much wonderful and powerful writing constantly being discovered and published.<br /><br />Like in nearly everything, some works stand out above others. There are, at various times, writers whose works are being almost universally acknowledged by editors across the spectrum, everyone seemingly at once becoming aware of a new and exciting artistic talent. Recently, the writing of two stunning and amazingly talented writers appears in just about every literary magazine a reader might pick up (and even some wider ranging, glossier publications): 28-year-old short story writer <a href="http://www.benjaminpercy.com/">Benjamin Percy</a> and 36-year-old poet <a href="http://www.victoriamchang.com/">Victoria Chang</a>.<br /><br />1. The Short Story Writer.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >"The blood in his ears buzzes, like a wasp loose in his skull. The rifle kicks against his shoulder. The gunshot fills the world." -from "Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This," originally published in </span><span style="font-size:85%;">The Paris Review</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > no. 180</span></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_SONTA7DWDmNDWuG_8tvaw49vun4b0TUOFnd0hlloFsOgW39aYfrCbx8sDQMr8pQykV3oJaiojqTFGJNU8oFHJaROPJly0OUnEclXjWDdRmVKKYMzvV_px20RgXDoe3X3yCehEhrImlg/s1600-h/percy.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_SONTA7DWDmNDWuG_8tvaw49vun4b0TUOFnd0hlloFsOgW39aYfrCbx8sDQMr8pQykV3oJaiojqTFGJNU8oFHJaROPJly0OUnEclXjWDdRmVKKYMzvV_px20RgXDoe3X3yCehEhrImlg/s200/percy.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5122745823186132690" border="0" /></a>Benjamin Percy is undeniably the real thing. His stories are some of the most emotionally charged and gorgeously understated pieces found in print today; they seem filled with a barely controlled passion vibrating below the surface of each sentence, like the desperate shaking of a tornado shelter door as the twister passes directly overhead. Like a good <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver">Raymond Carver</a> story (whose influence runs through Percy's writing), the emotional climaxes of Percy's stories are never sentimentalized or brooded upon, they simply happen, like things do in this world, and we move on beyond them changed, but as yet uncertain as to how. And aside from Percy's talent for moving character and plot, his language is as nuanced and delicate as the many interlocking gears of an enormous clock, each piece perfectly balancing against another. And his eye for detail is seductive in its selectivity. Here is a brief description of a couple spelunking in an opening beneath their house in Percy's story "The Caves in Oregon" from <span style="font-style: italic;">Glimmer Train</span> no. 64: "Sometimes the ceiling would come loose with a click of stone, a hiss of dirt, nearly noiseless in its descent, but when it impacted, when it slammed to the cave floor, it roared and displaced a big block of air that made them cry out and clutch each other in a happy sort of terror." A silent falling piece of rock nearly crushes them and they cry out <span style="font-style: italic;">in a happy sort of terror</span>, as we all do when we are scared and in love.<br /><br />Nearly all of Percy's stories are an inspection of working class Oregon, a fertile ground for fiction, covered most memorably in the short stories of Carver and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_D%27Ambrosio">Charles D'Ambrosio</a>. But it isn't only the frontier wilderness of Oregon that Percy depicts in his stories; the enduring theme of all his stories is what repressed pain does to someone, how in keeping our hurts and fears from others in an effort to protect ourselves from further injury, we are also changing ourselves, distorting, sometimes even crippling, our behaviors, perceptions, and desires. Not that Percy seems to argue that this isn't the way we should behave; he simply shows us that, in today's war-torn landscape where the gap between the rich and poor is widening every moment, this is how we live: in a forced repression of violence and fear, seeking (sometimes finding) some love and companionship to remind us we can be happy.<br /><br />In each of Percy's stories there are elements of violence, either directly acted or only haunting the scenery. In some even, violence is the world's main form of currency, such as in Percy's Plimpton Prize winning story, "Refresh, Refresh," where two boys beat each other bloody every day in order to toughen themselves and make their fathers proud. Even in "The Caves of Oregon," arguably one of Percy's least violent stories, focusing around a couple dealing with a recent miscarriage, Percy begins the piece with a grotesque scene of a couple opening a meat-stocked freezer after a power outage earlier that day: "The sight of it reminds Kevin of the time he had his wisdom teeth removed. His dentist had given him an irrigator, a plastic syringe. Twice a day he filled it with salt water and placed its needle into the craters at the back of his mouth--and from them, in a pink rush, came scabs, bits of food. That is what the freezer looks like when its door opens and the blood surges from it--all down the front of the fridge, dampening their photos, glossing over their magnets, until the front of the fridge has more red on it than white." After seeing this, Kevin's wife, "makes a noise like a wounded bird....A tremble races through her body and then she goes perfectly still."<br /><br />But, amidst all the violence and hurt in Percy's fiction, there is a constant desire by the characters for some undefined connection with others and an understanding of the self. This is not a conscious need, but instead it is a need the characters haven't conceptualized but just know they want, like an itch. And it is this need for others which drives the stories, this constant struggle of human needs against a violent world. The endings are usually unhappy. Sometimes the characters are allowed to see the calm surface of the world, such as in "In the Rough" from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Antioch Review</span> vol. 65 no. 3: "He imagines he is sitting at the bottom of a pond, his pockets weighed down by golf balls, his words escaping his mouth, buoyant and drifting to the surface where everything is blue and full of sunlight." Other times, the characters aren't even than lucky, and the calm world does not even exist in the life of the imagination. In Percy's enthralling mystery tale "Dial Tone" from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Missouri Review</span> vol. 30 no. 2, we are left only with the stark image of, "The hissing of radio frequencies, the voices of so many others coming together into one voice that coursed through you in dark conversations."<br /><br />2. The Poetess.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"I wake the next morning, pretending</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">nothing happened. Pretending this life, this era,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">with its cheap housing projects, music that makes</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">cars vibrate, men pouring concrete and snipping</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">hedges into shapes of animals, pretending."</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">-from "The Dislocated Theater," originally published in </span>Salt Hill <span style="font-style: italic;">no. 19</span></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFUDn13IanwZEyOR_4A5JRf8BEmdTSm81Cg9xQX6yp8dShQRLWqYSp1oyy5hspE7gL1sJlv1PZoT7yQ5B_a-ENZa2aUFQWPXqrb3ZpKcAIg-H-AAcnXurHaKcqhviFVuydQ0jHjGtMCg/s1600-h/chang_v.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLFUDn13IanwZEyOR_4A5JRf8BEmdTSm81Cg9xQX6yp8dShQRLWqYSp1oyy5hspE7gL1sJlv1PZoT7yQ5B_a-ENZa2aUFQWPXqrb3ZpKcAIg-H-AAcnXurHaKcqhviFVuydQ0jHjGtMCg/s200/chang_v.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5122746437366456050" border="0" /></a>Victoria Chang is making a great success as one of the most prodigious and continually intriguing poets around. But it is not mere ubiquity that makes readers and editors pay special attention to her work. The oeuvre of Chang's poetry asserts its importance through each individual poem's presence--like a loud fingerprint from another planet you can't help but recognize as one of your own. And, like all fingerprints, it is the zeitgeist, the roaming camera, the caffeinated, sound-bite-addled monologue in our heads.<br /><br />Many of Chang's poems are unbelievably expedient in their delivery, coming at you with the speed of the contemporary, like an email made of sparkling quartz. "Each morning," her recent poem "How Much" from P<span style="font-style: italic;">aris Review</span> no 180 begins, "I put on those shoes, legs,/ nylons, sex, black briefs with texts. Each/ dusk, there were martinis, drinks that said/ Cocktail! No choice." We are thrust immediately into the high sensual moment at Autobahn speeds.<br /><br />In a recent review on <a href="http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n2/nonfiction/williams_ss/chang.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">Blackbird</span></a>, Susan Settlemyre Williams nicely describes Chang's poetry as that which "thinks big, that harbors the best sort of ambitions, not to be acclaimed, but to stretch itself." Chang's poems are not meditations on an abandoned lover or ruminations of a single orchid on a battle-torn embankment; they seem to strive against these singular notions of the contemporary. Chang's poems resemble a sort of string theory of the poetic world, burning with a fever of multiple desires and personalities, with their hands in a variety of ages. In "How Much," the speaker of the poem is not only the victim of a lightning quick mind, absorbing a thousand sensory experiences in a New York minute, but, like ill-fated Cassandra, she can also see into the future. The narration in the poem shifts from place to place (apartments, cars, dinners) and voice to voice (answering machines, excited voices, chilling proclamations), moving from one worm hole to the next until we finally arrive at a less chaotic, taxi-cab- and cell-phone-free future, where "Somewhere in a kitchen, a mother will watch/ the last piece of beef fall off a bone." Beneath the demanding shimmering chaos forever remains the world of meat.<br /><br />In her two poems from <span style="font-style: italic;">Tin House</span> vol. 8 no. 3, "Seven Infidelities" and "Dear Professor," we again see Chang's amazing ability as a writer to leap about in a myriad of locations/events/voices/ideas in her poems, much as one would flip television channels or surf the net. Yet, just as websites and television channels are all part of one large, complex system, we never feel Chang is not weaving some intricate and important pattern with her imaginative bursts. "Seven Infidelities" discourses on a number of seemingly isolated instances of occasional want and deviance, but in the end everything converges into a thrusting violence as "houses fall into the ocean with all the people/ bumping into sofas" and "the snow falls in the shape of men and women,/ and they collide randomly in the dark." In a nearly opposite poetic representation of isolation in chaos, the landscape of Chang's poem "Dear Professor" is not the world, but the narrator's frictive mind, within which we roam between jolts of memory and ironic assertion: "<span style="font-style: italic;">Drugs are like running</span>, someone said, when I didn't get it./ Never got it. You mean raining. Ruining. Like,/ like, like, not quite. Williams hated similes." Finally, our Chinese Emeritus narrator seems through being the conception of another's desire (the professors?) and<br />wants "to be Emeritus only,/ so the bullet in another chest does not hurt. So I can sink/ my mouth in, come out with it between my teeth./ So I win. So good enough."<br /><br />But not all of Chang's poems have this same quality of order in randomness. One of her most powerful poems is also her quietest. "Proof," originally published in <span style="font-style: italic;">Ploughshares</span> vol. 32 no. 1, is a subtle evocation of the almost mathematically precise weave of connections that makes up human civilization, and which seems to be a very common notion of our communal fate: now that the communication and travel have been simplified, we can no longer ignore our relations, no matter how distant, historical, or unexplained. But, if this is the case, that all our fates are linked, what happens to our individuality? Where, in this miasma of unity, is the I to be unified with? "Proof" explores the resemblances between a great-uncle who was killed in China and the narrator who is "standing in the dirt in La Jolla." Though this idea of worldwide interconnectedness is not new, Chang is able to make it intensely unique with a subtle shift from the idea connection to one of parallelity, our lives not as one, but running in pace alongside one another. And so "Our angles are equal, therefore we are parallel./ Then there must be two birds, two shores, two deaths."Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-35990494727965817872007-10-12T18:21:00.000-07:002007-10-16T12:43:25.672-07:00The Job<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.nyquarterly.org/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4UHTZE_0EHMEDd-g525J_n1usnbSWElrUPEZDd6hyhQ9tEn723agQ8LmgfqUzvUSy_e1bsQW6dak8O4hCPC01t0DYxC0O_lI3SG6rZCTTuhw9gQ3A7ZS_DIXIPNmfXi6qjfmDn_aQyN8/s320/nyq-63.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5120626669142417026" border="0" /></a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:100%;">F</span><span style="font-size:85%;">OUND</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">IN</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">N<span style="font-size:85%;">EW</span> Y<span style="font-size:85%;">ORK</span> Q<span style="font-size:85%;">UARTERLY</span></span> <span style="font-size:85%;">NO. 63:</span> E<span style="font-size:85%;">DITOR</span> I<span style="font-size:85%;">NTRODUCTION</span> <span style="font-size:85%;">FROM</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">AYMOND</span> H<span style="font-size:85%;">AMMOND</span><br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >"He could imagine us rushing around Manhattan in our suits and attache cases."<br />-from Hammond's introduction for </span><a href="http://www.nyquarterly.org/"><span style="font-size:85%;">NYQ</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><a href="http://www.nyquarterly.org/"> </a>63</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">F</span>rom the outside, the world of literary publishing can seem rakish and cruel: a world of delays, unending rejection slips, and minuscule monetary rewards, if any at all. On the other hand--usually after reading a magical story or mind-altering book of poems--the same world can seem mysterious and wonderful, the sort of place where you would love to hang out if only you knew the right people, talked the right way, understood how they made such amazing things, how you could maybe get them to let you help.<br /><br />The world of the literary object is a mysterious place for the uninitiated, which we all were at one time (excepting the occasional Waugh or Amis, of course). In many ways, this uninitiated world is inescapable even for the most seasoned publishing veteran. The power of fiction and poetry, though to some extent comprehensible, always slips just beyond our rational grasp. Language moves us, we know, and the language we call literature (from comics to Shakespeare to slam poetry) is that which moves us to the greatest extent; it is that which moves us inexplicably. There is a type of secular magic at work in literature (for more on secular magic, see <a href="http://lunaparkreview.blogspot.com/2007/10/real-illusion_06.html">our previous review of <em>Cabinet</em> magazine</a>), and it can almost seem like the people who publish literature are, like people who work at Apple or on Hollywood films, living a life surrounded by this magic. That they are allowed the privilege. That they have a power the rest of us do not, one filled with music filled parties, lunches with artists, and an unending flow of cappuccinos. And that it is the duty of those with such privilege to share their glory, and that it is our right to censure them if they do not.<br /><br />But, of course, anyone who has worked a real job or takes a few minutes to consider the world, will realize that no such publishing world exists--unless you replace parties with nights alone at the computer, lunches with tuna fish sandwiches at a desk (again alone), and cappuccinos with Folgers. The real world of publishing is filled with papercuts, deadlines, and the same uncertainty and apprehension as anywhere else. <span style="font-size:100%;">And still those who work in it are lucky, though their days be overloaded with work, bills, and more work.<br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivjlSrAipCjodgPrv7Z4LO-yAk-n9mKajLM8WKgoaWlkG-JXr-i6uhK9MrOGs0AM8HC4_htF3ZEYGl3PcxDmvZFhbpupaJGZpNrjecfmikE_WJZjv_ssCatjA8RWSJz__y-jOjDanze9k/s1600-h/nyqposter.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivjlSrAipCjodgPrv7Z4LO-yAk-n9mKajLM8WKgoaWlkG-JXr-i6uhK9MrOGs0AM8HC4_htF3ZEYGl3PcxDmvZFhbpupaJGZpNrjecfmikE_WJZjv_ssCatjA8RWSJz__y-jOjDanze9k/s200/nyqposter.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5120627416466726546" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">Editor Raymond Hammond discusses this constant relationship between the unending work and</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> the rewards of literary magazine publishing in a refreshingly sincere and engaging introduction to <a href="http://www.nyquarterly.org/"><em>New York Quarterly's</em> </a>most recent issue, number 63. As self-congratulating as such a piece could easily be, Hammond's piece comes off as an immensely readable and unpretentious view of what goes on behind the masthead of one of the nation's top poetry journals.<br /><br />Hammond wrote his introduction in response to a letter <span style="font-style: italic;">NYQ </span>received from an author whose poems their editors had rejected: "In the letter, the writer was upset that we had not accepted any of his work and added that he was further insulted by the fact that he could imagine us rushing around Manhattan in our suits and ties with attache cases making arbitrary decisions about who gets in the magazine and who doesn't." The great "umbrage" Hammond takes with the letter is not that the writer was upset because his work was not accepted. Instead, what bugged Hammond and drove him to dedicate five pages to illuminating the world of what his job as editor consists of was that the man imagined Hammond and his staff "rushing around Manhattan" in suits making off-the-cuff decisions about <span style="font-style: italic;">NYQ </span><span>content </span>and, one might infer, having a simply gay old time doing it.<br /><br />The reality, as one might assume, is quite the opposite. Hammond is hardly the corduroy jacketed literary aesthete one might imagine sitting behind the editor's desk of a literary magazine, but he is most likely closer to the norm than many readers might expect. </span><span style="font-size:100%;">In his "other life," Hammond is a Federal Law Enforcement Park Ranger at the Statue of Liberty (<a href="http://www.nyquarterly.org/downtown.pdf">here</a> is a link to a picture of Hammond "on the job," as it were). Not the job one would expect for a lit mag editor? As Hammond himself puts it, "All of your editors have regular jobs, most of which do not pay very well and most, if not all, of which have nothing to do with magazines, academia, or the arts." Well, maybe he is painting the lit mag world in too broad a blue-collar tone, as some editors jobs are with the academy or the arts, and a few even work full-time as magazine editors, but his point is made. The majority of the work done on lit mags is from the heart and done for little or no pay--some even pay for the opportunity, shelling out money from their own checking accounts to keep the magazine going.</span><span style="font-size:100%;"> (True: some people working in publishing did go to Ivy League schools, were rich, and may have got their positions because they knew someone at the company--but one can rest assured that this is <span style="font-style: italic;">very rarely</span> the case for literary magazines, if ever. It is a more blue collar world down there, as Hammond's piece shows.)<br /><br /></span><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkg4Gp5Q5JUmdEjatRGY0gDMYWpaNsyLHlGC3viWC6S9M1GVlel_z1iFobnH0wL9sNi6Re2j49X34xRukAK5IALuXsu_zqZzbC48mNaYVPQJAGBZ4RIT9M9nnXNpGcB_0zLeaXiMF-kNc/s1600-h/packard.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkg4Gp5Q5JUmdEjatRGY0gDMYWpaNsyLHlGC3viWC6S9M1GVlel_z1iFobnH0wL9sNi6Re2j49X34xRukAK5IALuXsu_zqZzbC48mNaYVPQJAGBZ4RIT9M9nnXNpGcB_0zLeaXiMF-kNc/s200/packard.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5120627562495614626" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;">And the introduction to <span style="font-style: italic;">NYQ </span>63--where Hammond shows us his early poetic career and </span><span style="font-size:100%;">befriending <a href="http://lunaparkreview.blogspot.com/2007/08/from-back-issues-new-york-quarterly-no.html">former editor William Packard</a> (pictured at left)--is only the first section, as we are told that the story of Hammond's "becoming editor will continue in issue 64." If there are more sensitive descriptions of working class New York poets and portraits of the late Packard like the following, then the sequel will definitely be worth the wait: "Afterwards we met up with Bill who was elated that Anna had come. They had not seen each other in years. We walked towards the subway, Doug and I up front, Bill and Anna lagging behind lost in conversation about poetry. I have a vivid image of the night in my mind, the snow had begun to lightly fall through the light of the streetlights overhead and settle on their shoulders as they walked and talked behind us. At the end of the block, Doug and Anna parted and Bill and I decided to sit on the corner pizza parlor and have coffee. He said that he had lost a friend that day. It was January 19, 1997, and I had heard on the news that James Dickey had died. We talked for an hour probably even longer but the time always flew by, as Bill shared memories of James Dickey. When we parted, I ducked into the subway as Bill walked off into the lighted snow. Little did I know that this would be one of my last vivid memories of seeing Bill walk."</span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-21489851678165824342007-10-06T14:05:00.000-07:002007-10-08T08:52:58.471-07:00Real Illusion<span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">N<span style="font-size:85%;">EW</span> I<span style="font-size:85%;">SSUE</span> R<span style="font-size:85%;">EVIEW</span>: <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">C<span style="font-size:85%;">ABINET</span></span> <span style="font-size:85%;">NO</span>. 26, "M<span style="font-size:85%;">AGIC</span>"</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">"</span>Cabinet<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> is my kind of magazine; ferociously intelligent, ridiculously funny, absurdly innovative, rapaciously curious. </span>Cabinet<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">'s mission is to breathe life back into non-academic intellectual life. Compared to it, every other magazine is a walking zombie."<br />-Slavoj Zizek, philosopher</span></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"></span></a></span><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/"></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5118969947565957074" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5MDxTkvF1o1h9tzRk5zXijb4ECOD6KeOeK6LaGg_QvCmzRVOYFIFQyUhtyiRqpGMvhGME7tFqsx5j52nVRv3KQ7jruemnrD0UfnnkexaqQUOrMK8zckZJIZ9KYOg9CdjO3RUX3s5Q58A/s400/cabinet26_cover.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:180%;">O</span>ne possible regret regarding the vast number of literary and little magazines published today is that individual bright stars could be overlooked due to the overall luminescence, and so not get the attention they so obviously deserve. It would seem all editors need admit that there are a few little magazines out there on the newsstands that are a bit more fantastic, a bit more wow than all the rest (and, in the end, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">wow</span> is what everyone in the magazine world is going for, even if it is of the more conservative or ruminative kind). When such gems are stumbled across in the little magazine world, they are perhaps more precious than in other areas of publishing because of how few issues of these magazines are produced, how poorly most are distributed, and how short of a life span these magazines tend to have. When one is found that not only seems able to bring more attention and appreciation to itself but also to the general efforts of small artistic magazine production, a reviewer can't help but be a little ebullient.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span></a> magazine is one of the sharpest little magazines out there, captivating for the most part due to its stunning originality. An issue of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> is similar to a Basquiat or Twombly painting; like these painters who seemingly couldn't paint a boring line, the editors of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> seem unable to produce an issue that isn't unique as a fingerprint. They take great effort to work beyond what is expected of them as a small arts magazine, pushing past the barriers of the newsstand to success in other publishing and performative venues. As a publisher, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> is as diverse as its editorial content. Individual issues of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> are divided into three sections:--columns, main, and a themed section--each issue then structured like a museum, where a reader moves from room to room. Also, in order to reach the maximum amount of readers and bookstores, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> prints and distributes the same exact issues as both magazines and books (British lit mag <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Granta</span> is another publisher who has successfully done this). <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> also publishes actual books on a variety of subjects and they put on <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> sponsored events around the globe.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU_nqPogzPMAQZ_aGY6oPVvPi7l_6rcyVZyyekXAjUX5EIJ3pmoXq4KeDLOum_i3et9NQr_ihuJuybMNdJQPNolMUMq4OBH492Z9RH2WG7RsV5NrO9SrwtyOByyAC_X13HRyTwfC5twck/s1600-h/250px-Hieronymus_Bosch_051.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5118970351292882914" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiU_nqPogzPMAQZ_aGY6oPVvPi7l_6rcyVZyyekXAjUX5EIJ3pmoXq4KeDLOum_i3et9NQr_ihuJuybMNdJQPNolMUMq4OBH492Z9RH2WG7RsV5NrO9SrwtyOByyAC_X13HRyTwfC5twck/s320/250px-Hieronymus_Bosch_051.jpg" border="0" /></a>For anyone interested in, well, interesting things, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet </span>magazine is one not to miss--and the entire run is not to be missed (excerpts are available on <a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/">their website</a>), not just this issue. The first 25 issues of the magazine cover a range of frightfully interesting topics largely unique to the world of little magazines, such as invented languages, pharmacopia, doubles, laughter, and ruins. <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span>'s last issue (26, pictured above and reviewed here) is, among a myriad other things, an eclectic study of magic in our political and social lives. Like a novelist always trying to trump their last work, the editors of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> are not to be outdone by previous releases, but continue with each issue to impress with renewed creative vigor. (<a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/27/">The next issue</a> of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span>, which shipped to subscribers October 3, contains a themed section on, of all things, mountains--which, like everything else, the editors and writers at <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> have been able to make seem absolutely fascinating and original. They have taken Pound's maxim "make it new" more than to heart; they have made it their DNA. The coming issue contains the intriguingly titled articles "Mont Blanc Montage: Up the mountains, in fiction and fact" and "Making Sense at the Movies: Habit and memory by light of the silver screen.")<br /><br />The subject of the last issue, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_%28illusion%29">magic</a>, is a very popular one today on both sides of the Atlantic. True, most thanks goes to the billion-dollar industry of Harry Potter and his fictional magic, but there has also been a Hollywood resurgence in stage magic in the recent films "The Illusionist" and "The Prestige," both originally works of prose fiction. It is this type of magic which is the focus of the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span> issue--that is, the illusory magic of the sleight of hand, the levitating body, the woman sawed in half. This magic not of sorcery but of illusion is defined in the issue by Johns Hopkins professor Simon During as secular magic, or "magic that makes no claim to be in contact with the supernatural--it's not calling on hidden powers to act on the world." The same of course cannot be said of Rowling's Potter, whose magic comes from something Potter cannot fully understand or control, bringing about much of the amazement and drama of the story.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/oreilly_saville.php"></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/oreilly_saville.php"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5118970720660070402" style="FLOAT: right; MARGIN: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrcgI8HbPJnnWu7jTNmkwqpKL4HQO8kt5YWQQaTZNizljo0sebD1GiG7l6FN3988X86v94rAPsESfiOS1-j3uH9rP1EGYucqE_R_xvuIvFXi-pyQ6Qfagucaf8aWQtTh2GSrts4AB17tQ/s200/oreilly_saville1fromcabinet.jpg" border="0" /></a>The enchantment of stage or secular magic is that it is "dealing with known unknowns....And by displaying the trick honestly, the audience's consciousness of the changeability of the world is reinforced." This definition is excerpted from Ian Saville and Sally O' Reilly's faux interview exploration into the Marxist implications and uses of the secular magic world, <a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/oreilly_saville.php">"I Can See Your Ideology Moving"</a> (the picture of the ventriloquised Karl Marx is at right). Like many of the writings in the issues, "I Can See Your Ideology Moving" is very postmodern. It is a stylized play script which runs the gamut from a local British festival, to a ventriloquist acting as Brecht and Marx, to questioning the text as performance, to, finally, an argument for magic as a healthy defense against the persuasive ideologies of capitalism. It's a deft, nicely argued, and very humorous work, emblematic of the best pieces published in the issue--they all walk the line between funny and serious, expressive and representational. Form equals content for works published in <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span>, resulting very often in strikingly illuminating views on previously less complex subjects.<br /><br />The issue is a salmagundi (also name of one of the original American lit mags) of ideas and art, a well organized grab bag of insight. One can flip open the issue at any page and be impressed, caught off guard. The first article, <a href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/dillon.php">"Talk to the Hand,"</a> is a revealing look at the history and scholarship of gesture, which once had, like composition, its own rules of rhetoric. Next is "A Minor History of Aquatic Ambulism," a timeline of human attempts of walking on water, with the occasional successes. In the middle of the issue is<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"> Cabinet</span>'s third installment of their collaboration with the London-based magazine, <a href="http://www.implicasphere.org.uk/"><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Implicasphere</span></a>, described as a "unique theme-based periodical." The theme of this installment is stripes (previously they have been nose and salt & pepper). The installment begins, "Stripes appear bold, strident even, wearing their intentions on their sleeve. And yet they are sly shape-shifters that trick the eye," and the issue then continues on to explicate and illuminate the world of stripes, ranging from looks into the New Orleans' red light district, the stories of Rudyard Kipling, skunk stripes, and many more striped exhibits, texts, and occurrences in the natural world.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/26/dillon.php"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5118970982653075474" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; CURSOR: pointer" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiysvtYi8B7asUjE-B0PkekPuPZr-dmD1PHzokOnPxjzoiV3DXuUornrRVULZohzozFl0yAD0hAkxGSGRYHeEnfscrzi7H9n05P42pXlU6QpcmSIzxiOKNBKhtBs2T4GQy_6m4A9X04Sso/s200/dillon1cabinetimage.jpg" border="0" /></a>Like the famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica_Eleventh_Edition">11th Edition of the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Encyclopedia Britannica</span></a> or seventeenth century <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities">cabinets of curiosities</a> (of which <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span>'s own name seems to derive), issue 26 is yet another of <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Cabinet</span>'s disarming exhibitions into the magic of the world's minutae--only this time, they rove not only into the magic of the world, but the world of magic. A world, we come to see, both under appreciated and a part of our everyday lives--from President Bush's photo ops to our television addictions. "At some time or other we have all decided that life is one long disillusionment," wrote magician <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Devant">David Devant</a> in a 1935 essay. "It is a platitude," he continues, "and like all platitudes it seems that each of us discovers it anew." Devant was one of the most popular magicians of his time, and, somewhat ironically, was also the first person to exhibit films in London, and so helped bring about the new dominant medium of the magician: the cinema.Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-71797274886516737862007-10-01T09:08:00.000-07:002007-10-01T09:22:50.183-07:00Voices from the Masthead: Editor Joseph Levens On Why He Began Summerset Review<a href="http://www.summersetreview.org/"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5116401565712883650" style="FLOAT: left; MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; CURSOR: hand" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2j_LL8YMs0kqVTqobw31tLVYaIteaPFK3PBGR7g7yekhCr3AsQ2WIfrDX_sL6dlMeIa7C_YoRr0fFySt7PmIviba2Fyd8cDsx6GTKl6VrIN7EZLP74wtlzbKUFKR1k1j5B6IgV2uvwko/s320/vol01_medium2.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://www.summersetreview.org/">The Summerset Review</a><em> is published online quarterly and in print form periodically. This fall, the literary journal is celebrating its fifth-year anniversary and has introduced features believed to be new to literary magazines: Readers are compensated based upon critical comments they contribute. The journal is hoping that this will increase the awareness and penetration of literary magazines in our world and culture.<br /><br />Joseph Levens is founder and editor of</em> The Summerset Review<em>. His fiction has appeared in</em> Florida Review<em> (Fall 2007),</em> New Orleans Review<em>, </em>AGNI<em>,</em> Other Voices<em>, </em>Sou’wester<em>, </em>Swink<em>, and elsewhere. We asked Joseph why he does what he does. This is what he said.</em><br /></span><br /><strong></strong><br /><strong>W<span style="font-size:85%;">HY</span> I D<span style="font-size:85%;">O</span> W<span style="font-size:85%;">HAT</span> I D<span style="font-size:85%;">O</span></strong><br /><br /><span style="font-size:180%;">F</span>or the past twenty years, it has happened all too often: I’d start reading a story in a literary magazine, and within a hundred words whisper to myself: This is going to be good. Three or five or eight thousand words later, after other whispers and gasps and sighs along the way – Wow, Damn, God – I’d be left with a tear in my eye, knocked dizzy with emotion. I’ve missed train stations, had meals run cold, and been late for a variety of engagements because of stories like these.<br /><br />A piece causing all this trouble won’t always be one that is terribly heart-wrenching. No, it could have been a happy story, and very often is. The prose is what usually gets me, the little things, those that make you stop dead, think, think of some aspect of life, lives like mine or very unlike mine, places I’ve been to, places I never knew existed, objects, an orange sapphire (weren’t all sapphires blue?), a piano in perfect tune and tone never played by its owner. It’s like ankles in ice skates; it’s like eating peas off a knife.<br /><br />There’s no anticipating how I am going to react, what I will like, what I won’t, when I open a literary magazine. Things just happen. I’m a sensitive reader and allow myself to be easily manipulated, suspending my disbelief as if it were a helium balloon, floating, hovering, teetering. Almost always, the stories that have the most impact on me are penned by writers I’ve never heard of. They magically appear in these journals for reasons traveling well beyond scientific analysis. How the story got on the page, how the book got into my hands, how the connection is made in my head, these are all things that cannot be explained.<br /><br />I do what I do because after this happens to you time and time again, you begin to conceive ways of getting more of these stories out there. I’m left thinking that, for every piece having a great effect on a reader, chances are likely another five, ten, twenty stories are waiting, waiting, waiting, never to be set on a page and exposed on a global stage. Why not? That, I suppose, is for another essay, likely to be a bit ugly.<br /><br />In addition to my role as editor of <em><a href="http://www.summersetreview.org/">The Summerset Review</a></em>, I am a writer myself. My objective, in my writing, is to reach out and provoke that tear I myself have experienced, in as little as one or two readers who may have innocently stumbled across my work, persons I do not know. To the chagrin of some I am sure, the matter is not at all about money. I am assuming I may not be the only writer out there with this sentiment, and so I thought to do my part and create a vehicle others may use to meet similar desires.<br /><br />This vehicle comes at a cost. The journal receives an average of five submissions a day and we do not solicit. We run no marketing or advertising campaigns because our humble staff of two (including myself) barely have time to give each story a fair shake (sometimes two or three shakes), edit, correspond, copy-edit, and do everything else, all so that we can put out what we believe are five quality pieces each quarter, chosen from the heart. We pay contributors a nominal fee and never look at the magazine as a revenue-generating source; the focus is elsewhere. (It would be remiss of me to not mention the <a href="http://www.clmp.org/">CLMP</a>, an organization I believe truly cares about literary magazines, and does their best to support them.)<br /><br />I don’t know exactly how well it is working. It’s not the kind of thing you can read all about the next morning in the newspapers. Once in a while I will come across that shining submission, though, a story that would be like one I read in another magazine, ankles in ice skates, peas on a knife, and realize that, no, wait a minute, hold on; I am not reading another magazine. The writer is sending the story to me, understands what I am talking about, has had similar things happen on the train, gotten in trouble just as deeply and as often.<br /><br />The real reason I do what I do, if you’ve stuck with me this far, is revenge, actually. I’m tired of cold meals, tired of missing my station, once again late for an evening of whatever else. It’s about time this happen to more people. I’m doing my best to see to that.Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08691910260584650559noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-2768409164397784562007-09-26T07:29:00.000-07:002007-09-27T08:08:09.006-07:00New Issue Review: Creative Nonfiction no. 31, "Imagining the Future"<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.creativenonfiction.org/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4MBmvzUkAN8XGnOyOkKOFFctcPA4QaYe9wbCDW17d4QGi5gcew3SdKvoRC0QTuy6gKQFmYnBMIFyX6Lrq-Je8UBLINCqpaeO3ciLttJm8toanrLV7lXLVyhxyAi4sdIYkYOWeH_g_O-g/s320/creativenonfiction31Cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5113877742217076082" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"It requires neither imagination nor acumen to predict that our current conglomerating, lowest-common-denominator, demographically targeted publishing industry will soon achieve its streamlined apotheosis--a single, worldwide, Exxon Mobil-owned literary empire offering a list of seven books twice a year."</span> <span style="font-style: italic;"><br />-from "<a href="http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/current/31julavits.htm">The Writers in the Silos</a>" by Heidi Julavitis, editor of </span><span><a href="http://www.believermag.com/">The Believer</a></span></span><br /><br />It is hardly an opinion to say that the future of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book">book publishing</a> is uncertain, what with Apple's recent iPhone release, Google's continual digitization of American libraries, and talk from more and more publishers about serious consideration of print-on-demand technology. Certainly books themselves will be around for some time, but their locations and the amount of use they receive is in question. It seems possible for them to disappear from our everyday lives, to be replaced by electronic paper, or to have their value negated by the next phase of Google's information empire takeover, the physical texts then relegated permanently to some Library of Congress vault forty feet below street level. That this hypothesising increasingly goes on today asserts what we all intuitively or consciously realize: our relationship with printed matter is changing rapidly.<br /><br />This is the subject <a href="http://www.creativenonfiction.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Creative Nonfiction</span></a> tackles in their latest issue, number 31, which became available this past summer (see cover image above). Looking at the issue's unassuming cover and graphic-lite content, a reader may not readily assume the issue contains a wealth of intellectually dexterous and engaging writing about the future of book publishing by some of the most interesting minds in the business, including Heidi Julavitis (<span style="font-style: italic;">The Uses of Enchantment</span>; co-editor of <a href="http://www.believermag.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Believer</span></a>), C. Michael Curtis (fiction editor for <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Atlantic Monthly</span></a>), Amy Stolls (literature specialist for the <a href="http://www.nea.gov/">National Endowment for the Arts</a>), <a href="http://www.philliplopate.com/books.html">Philip Lopate</a> (<span style="font-style: italic;">Art of the Personal Essay</span>), Dinty W. Moore (editor of <a href="http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Brevity</span></a>), and many more. If, say, <a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tin House</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>or <a href="http://www.all-story.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Zoetrope: All Story</span></a> did an issue on the same theme, the cover would have a futuristic image adorning it, the text, a heavy techo-typography (possibly even embossed), and the inside would be laden with graphics depicting the wild and exuberant world of the near future of books. Something attention getting, to say the least. <span style="font-style: italic;">Creative Nonfiction</span>, on the other hand, has always been more reserved in their public image (and less well funded, obviously, than Mr. Coppola's or Mr. McCormack's magazines). The only thematically revealing aspects of <span style="font-style: italic;">Creative Nonfiction</span>'s cover are the two subtitles: "Writing and Publishing in 2025 and Beyond" and "Imagining the Future," which are hopefully enough for readers to locate this find among the mass of newsstand possibilities.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://littlekelpie.com/prints/creative-nf.html"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9hCRYuOTtfBIUlzWv47ZnItSdZ3jhXvOAlRaI-pgETKt_oYtYJ1UhGzaL_I-yxXOzpvGXoxHsO4QenxMvAh3Zp5Wo1BCbV_zICsZMf8S47kZKjiIlossunkYQCHI3w2H-06KFMpf81Wo/s320/CNF-Bookslittlekelpieimage.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5114714599414832514" border="0" /></a>Lee Gutkind, editor of <span style="font-style: italic;">Creative Nonfiction</span>, asked the issue's contributors to imagine the future of book publishing in the year 2025. Though the writers each at least refer to the year at least once in their essays, the content and predictions of the essays are refreshingly all over the map (something always nice to discover in themed issues). The essays could easily have all discussed the usual suspects of book future--the fear of literary digitization, downloadable e-books replacing print books, the distractions of new media eliminating new readers or "real" books, etcetera--but the writers in this issue are able to push down different tracks and explore new possibilities to seek out publishing's future. (Image at left was done by creative studio <a href="http://littlekelpie.com/">Little Kelpie</a>; it is one of the many graphics about the future of books the studio created for this issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Creative Nonfiction</span>.)<br /><br />Take Heidi Julavitis's essay, "<a href="http://www.creativenonfiction.org/thejournal/current/31julavits.htm">The Writers in the Silos</a>" (recently republished in <a href="http://www.harpers.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's</span></a> readings section). In a subtle high-irony, Julavitis takes us from an Exxon Mobil (yes, the oil company) global takeover of literature, through an elimination of all the world's books, to a final resurgence of literature in an Adam-and-Eve-grassroots like rebirth of reading at--of all things--your local farmers market. "Soon a slogan will attach itself to the phenomenon--'Read Locally,'" Julavitis writes, "and the new AgriCultural movement will begin." In less than three pages Julavitis takes literature from its pessimistic free market destruction to a warm recreation within local communities--a future which, though obviously somewhat comic, contains a nice element of hope.<br /><br />The rest of the issue ranges from explorations of the possible necessity of gatekeepers in the literary world to cities where digital books are accessible from anywhere 24/7. And the complete issue feels not like an off-the-cuff prediction of an unknown future, but instead like glimpses into publishing's crystal ball explained by the sort of people you think might know a thing or two about the field. The result is both an eye-opening look at the many diverse possible futures of the book world as well as a reaffirming assertion that, no matter where the future takes us, writing is something we will have to deal with--even if, as Lopate amusingly imagines, its "a book-lozenge which dissolved novella-sized works on the tongue, or the book-shot, devised for cultivated diabetics who requested a literary dose with their daily injections."Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-8852944565305004892007-09-20T06:35:00.000-07:002007-09-21T12:44:12.552-07:00Found in Boston Review vol. 32 no. 4: Fiction by Patricia Engel<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bostonreview.net/"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdi0LOe6sBo0eqhbeySXcv6RSNfY45fCJV8cmdEfcMAsnI1Niyh0wuo9QMBZ5FW-WLnOxjxLCHkcJcQkXRcWfPBhLiR0abk26Q1PePqyCYm646vZgGo2cJ1myfZIKoCcKn9bKKiByalD0/s320/br_cover_jul_aug_07.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5109726152587414962" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >"You know how it is when you're a teenager. Just when things start getting good your mom calls you in for some urgent bullshit reason like your aunt is on the phone and wants to ask if you liked the crap she sent you for your birthday."<br />-from <a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_engel.php">"Lucho"</a> by Patricia Engel<br /><br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >"Our intellectual range distinguishes us from any political journal or literary quarterly, while our seriousness of purpose sets us apart from other general-interest magazines....</span><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">We give due weight both to public reason and the independent life of the cultural and literary imagination.</span></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >"<br />-from the Boston Review mission statement</span><br /><br />Since its founding in 1975, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Boston Review</span></a> has never been known to publish mediocre fiction. On the contrary, they have since the beginning published fiction from the likes of Stephen Dixon, Alan Lightman, and Harry Matthews, along with many more stunning stories from known and unknown authors. As well, <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span> has supplied readers with exceptional offerings of interviews (with Sontag, Paley, Appelfeld), nonfiction (on Elizabeth Bishop, pornography, and getting out of Iraq), and poetry (by Ashberry, Weir, Brock-Broido). Taken as a whole, <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span> has had a surprisingly fabulous literary track record for a magazine that--due to their primary and continual engagement with contemporary political issues--could easily be assumed to be a political forum that just happens to publish the occasional poem or story now and again. One need only look more closely at BR to see this isn't the case--to see that their progressive political bent is founded on humanism and literature; the cover of <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span>'s most recent issue is backgrounded by a wash of Nabokov's butterflies.<br /><br />Yet since <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2000/12/25/2000_12_25_098_TNY_LIBRY_000022398">Junot Diaz</a> became Fiction Editor of the magazine a few years back, the quality and power of the fiction published in <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span> has moved up a notch on the scale of good American fiction--has gone from good to nuclear. Here is Diaz's own idea of what<span style="font-style: italic;"> BR</span> fiction should be, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/about/writers_guidelines/">quoted from the <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span> website</a>: "<span style="font-family:Georgia,Times New Roman,Times,serif;">I’m looking for fiction that resembles the Thirty-Mile Woman from Toni Morrison’s <i>Beloved</i>: ‘She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.’ Or as Takashi Murakami puts it: ‘We want to see the newest things. That is because we want to see the future, even if only momentarily. It is the moment in which, even if we don’t completely understand what we have glimpsed, we are nonetheless touched by it. This is what we have come to call art.’ I’m looking for fiction in which a heart struggles against itself, in which the messy unmanageable complexity of the world is revealed. Sentences that are so sharp they cut the eye." Diaz is very specific in what he wants: writing so sharps it cuts the eye to read it.</span> His publishing track record so far--electric, pop-off-the-page stories by exciting writers like Vivian Chin, the amazing Ivelisse Rodriguez, Ibarionex Perello, D. S. Sulaitis, and Padma Viswanathan--has been one of the best of any fiction editor in the nation. (<span style="font-style: italic;">BR </span>fiction has also since Diaz came on board taken on a noticeable and refreshing aesthetic of diversity, an aesthetic in many ways representative of the contemporary moment around the global community, certainly in major cities like Boston. Many writers published by Diaz seem to have a decidedly rich and intriguing bi- or tri-national flavor to their work.)<br /><br />Patricia Engel's first published story, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/BR32.4/article_engel.php">"Lucho,"</a> flies off from the <span style="font-style: italic;">BR</span> newsprint and into the reader's own consciousness. Like the best stories, Engel's sad tale of a fourteen year old girl named Sabina's friendship with a sixteen year old boy named Lucho is so richly told and filled with compelling characters that the story is remembered not as words on a page, but rather as an indie film the reader watched or an event heard of in youth. The simplicity of Engel's writing is reminiscent of the American dirty realist authors (as <a href="http://www.granta.com/back-issues/8">Granta named them</a>) such as Richard Ford, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips--but Engel's prose is also suffused with the charm and intelligence of today's best young inner-city authors, a style also found in the writing of Nell Freudenberger, Daniel Alarcon, and Diaz himself. It is a clear, sharp prose at the same time nostalgic and cynical, sentimental and coarse. Engel's narrative seems to accurately capture the hunger and possibility of a youth at once becoming conscious of both injustice and desire.<br /><br />"It was the year my uncle got arrested for killing his wife," Engel's story begins, "and our family was the subject of all the town gossip. My dad and uncle were business partners, so my parents were practically on trial themselves, which meant that most of the parents didn't want their kids to hang around me anymore, and I lost the few friends I had." The young Sabina--estranged doubly for her uncle's murder charge and her family's ethnicity ("We were foreigners, spics, in a town of <span style="font-style: italic;">blancos</span>")--is soon befriended by Lucho, a new boy in town. Lucho smokes cigarettes "like an old pro," curses constantly, hardly seems to bathe, and is much more sexually aware then Sabina. As Sabina's mother comes to determine, this isn't usually the sort of young man a woman wants her only daughter hanging around with.<br /><br />But hang around with Lucho Sabina does. And it is this relationship seen through the viewpoint of Sabina (a shy, introverted, extremely bright young girl) that creates the stories emotional impact. We see the enigma of Lucho, the town's gossip, the strangeness of school and parents, and the story's eventual tragedy all through Sabina's eager, confused eyes--which is how we all see everything, though we are accustomed through work, relationships, and social relations to not acknowledge this, to keep our ignorance and joy hidden. To hide our hurt, just as Sabina does. We don't wear out hearts on our sleeves, and much of the work of youth is the taking of our hearts off our sleeves and putting them far away below the chest plate where they will be (we think) protected.<br /><br />Luckily we have story writers like Engel who reproduce that time in our lives when our hearts are being put away for good, when confusion and desire are so real they can be touched, tasted. Engel tells of this strange injustice we all do to ourselves called becoming civilized, called acting right, which Sabina knows isn't the point. "And I thought of Lucho," Sabina thinks in the end, "and how he'd say that was fucked."Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-80941443107834497432007-09-14T09:53:00.000-07:002007-09-27T08:02:31.060-07:00From the Newsstands: Essay on Literary Magazines from Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://review.antioch.edu/bidetail.php?id=55"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFKueHNtKNaIp6we7QB4Ppnk8Xe6IgDgYl14ZVnZ2rHao9rlilcE7Xe2Enu2NvxZEB8f7_JvBHM85Wbz9qDf-Ks1XzWBuoMP4YInrC_bW2eE-YodjBPdteyrqwVXMUMrfDjFnzH88jCAk/s320/AR+cover+W+07.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5111906546559432306" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:100%;"><em>The following is an essay on literary magazines by Thomas Washington from a recent issue of</em> <a href="http://review.antioch.edu/">Antioch Review</a><em>, vol. 65 no. 1 (</em></span><span style="font-size:100%;">Antioch</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><em> has already released newer issues, vol. 65 nos. 2 and 3.) We are putting this piece up out of order--cutting in line before previously slated lit mag reviews and commentaries--because essays such as Mr. Washington's are scarce in the publishing landscape, so much that we leap at the opportunity to publish one (interested writers, please take note). Mr. Washington's opinions are, of course, his own, and not identical to ours. Yet we agree one hundred percent with him that literary magazines need to be discussed, as they are as much a form of literature as a book of Chekhov stories or Baudelaire's </em>Flowers of Evil<em> and therefore should be dealt with by reviewers and critics in an equal manner.<br /></em></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-size:100%;">Antioch Review<em> is published quarterly from Antioch College--and though the college is on a temporary hiatus, </em>Antioch Review<em> editor <a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/57594">Robert S. Fogarty assures us that the review will continue printing as usual.</a> They have been publishing literature for 65 years, and show no sign of tapering off. Issues are $9.50 and can be purchased online at the </em><a href="http://review.antioch.edu/">Antioch Review</a><em><a href="http://review.antioch.edu/"> website</a> or from your local bookseller.</em></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size:100%;">A Quarterly Reader (And Writer)</span></span><span style="font-size:100%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br />By Thomas Washington<o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The first thing I look for when venturing into one of my quarterly subscriptions—I rotate a dozen or more journals annually and decide to retain or eliminate based on numerous factors, which I need not get into just yet—is the editor’s note. Most of the time I don’t find one. This is a sly move. Editors must think the art speaks for itself; they needn’t stand between the artist and the reader like some clingy real estate broker. Except when an editor kicks off a spring issue with an obscure poem or an essay on bee habits, I don’t know about other subscribers, but my seating is sometimes lost within the first few pages, and often I never really manage to get back in the saddle until I arrive in the book review section. I, for one, would like to have my hand held for a moment, at least at the outset, to see where the editor is leading me. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Perhaps this is one of those situations where if I don’t get it, then I don’t belong. I shouldn’t be subscribing. For example, before I knew anything about wine, I used to frequent a wine shop on <st1:city st="on">Chicago</st1:city>’s <st1:place st="on"><st1:placename st="on">North</st1:placename> <st1:placetype st="on">Shore</st1:placetype></st1:place>. The owner probably didn’t realize it, but I had money to burn back in those days. I had a circle of associates whom I needed to impress and would have gladly walked out of the store with anything the merchant recommended, no matter the price. As things stood back then—I had a circle of associates whom I needed to impress and presenting fine wine at the business and dinner table seemed the best way to go about doing it—I needed guidance from the shop owner. He never bothered with me, however. He either assumed I knew my wines well enough and thought I was beyond the coddling stage, or he was sending me a subtle message to stay away from his shop and go for the grocery store selections instead. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />So, if this is the sort of message editors are trying to send dim-witted readers by not including a note on the opening pages, I can understand their position. The quarterly is not about chumminess, after all. A certain standard of intellectual rigor is at stake with each issue. Maybe this seasonal greeting practice is better left to the monthlies or a corporate newsletter. Omitting the introduction note might also be a way of keeping the Yahoos out. Its absence maintains a high mystique. It creates a kind of Skull and Bones quality where those who should know do know. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />But pretend for a moment that the literary quarterly reader represents a certain tourist class, not a member of the mindless hordes we see jumping off the coach and scampering up the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, but someone with a more urbane air—museum, lecture, and concert goers, for instance, the sort whose minds are always hungry for another bite of <i style="">haut culture. </i>And imagine the editor here as a riverboat tour captain. His crew, a coterie of writers and readers, retirees, librarians, the merely curious, or the intellectual hangers on, has boarded ship. They mingle in the stern with a glass of chardonnay in one hand and a tiny plate of cheese squares in the other. (I’m picturing a sunny Thursday afternoon in May, somewhere in the Midwest, home of the eager and unassuming, on the Fox or the <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Mississippi</st1:place></st1:state>.) The crew trusts that the captain will navigate the river’s bends, snags, and sandbars without ado and at the same time regale them with the storyteller’s knack for anecdotal river lore. It’s a voice of tender familiarity this tourist class secretly hopes for at launching point, a seafaring authority who can help turn the inevitable shifty current and rocky crag toward gentler shores, toward a place that feels like home. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Yet as soon as the deckhand uncoils the dock line and the paddlewheel churns downstream, the crew is greeted only by silence. The guests split and fend for themselves along starboard and stern. The trip progresses downriver smoothly enough without the captain’s observations. This is not the type of audience who demands a fussing over, after all. But still a fog settles in. Like arriving at a cocktail party without a proper greeting from the host and hostess, without one of them putting a martini in your hand and introducing you to Mr. and Mrs. Miller from across town, the absence of the editor’s note in winter, spring, summer, and fall leaves readers awash in a room of unfamiliar voices. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Whether as a loyal subscriber (The word “subscriber” assumes a charming twist here, the quarterly reader as a kind of invested deputy author, a sub writer.) or a newcomer to the journal, I want to know what the view is like from <st1:state st="on">Florida</st1:state> or <st1:state st="on"><st1:place st="on">Missouri</st1:place></st1:state>. How many manuscripts floated over the transom this past season? How are we all faring with the apparent imminent demise of readers? Any funny anecdotes from editorial headquarters? Any predictions on what we’re going to see around the next bend in the river? It is not necessarily words of wisdom I’m looking for here, although an aside about our political or spiritual state is always welcome, as it is something that reminds me why I subscribed to <i style="">your</i> journal and not the dozen or so others that clamor for my attention on the end pages of each issue. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Just about anything goes in the editor’s note, so long as the editor takes the time to welcome the reader into the fold. Consider the editor’s note as a kind of “What’s My Line?” game show where the reader has a boat load of questions for the mystery guest. (And wouldn’t we agree that in this trade, the editors and their team of readers really do work behind a baffling veil of secrecy…all those returned envelopes boomeranging back to the mailbox over and over without so much as a scribble in return, a kind of twisted pen pal correspondence where the writer might be better served penning notes to himself. . . the occasional three or four month lapse between subscribing and the subsequent phone calls that go unanswered until the first issue finally arrives. . . ) The more readers (very often the writer in sheep’s clothing) learn about the editorial mission season after season, the better clue and sense of belonging we have. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />If this <i style="">Love Boat</i> motif outlined above appears silly, then consider one last point about the crucial opening note before I move on. Think of the your opening address as an analogy for leading a group of backpackers (your loyal readers) up the side of a mountain. On the way up, everyone is wheezing, huffing and puffing, wondering why the hell they chose you to lead them. When you arrive at the peak, however, their world transforms. An hour earlier the pack toiled and trekked with their eyes glued to their feet, and now you’re presenting them with a breathtaking panorama, literally a view of your own making and design. In other words, your opening address is where you get out from behind those five-foot stacks of slush piles and take credit where credit is due. This is where you show us, your readers, the artistry behind the issue, how you happened upon such and such a writer among all the other competitors. Just how does the eventual published poem or short story make its way to the top, anyway? Surely, the quarterly is ultimately about the writers’ work, but the reader’s failure to recognize the arrangement behind the final product is like seating oneself at the Thanksgiving dinner table without giving thanks to the powers of creation in the kitchen. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Another mystery in my seasonal reading is the question of why many quarterlies are in fact not quarterlies at all any longer. More and more, they fall under the unofficial name of annuals or bi-annuals. I admire the courageous publications who are staying with the original spirit of the seasonal calendar, even though a handful each year are undraping their spring 2005 issue in summer 2006. The reader can just imagine the chaos here. (Actually, the reader cannot imagine the chaos behind a publishing schedule. If many writers, hell bent on sending another manuscript, were readers, then they would ease up on their submissions.) Under this modern day, shrink-wrapped time schedule that traps everyone in a pinch, we can only conclude the quarterly’s headquarters must operate in perpetual disarray, the same as any other industry operating under a production timetable. Perhaps a team of readers called it quits under the onslaught of submissions. Maybe the guy who works the midnight shift at the printing press tips the bottle at night and confuses the orders. Financing, or the lack thereof, is also a likely culprit. These pitfalls are understandable. Yet editors should remember that what sets the quarterly apart from the commercial pack of weeklies and monthlies is its seasonal ties. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >***</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></div><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br />While some critics treat the quarterly as some sort of endangered species, perpetually on the verge of falling out of favor unless it learns to strike new ground, I would argue just the opposite. However staid, slack, or retro the quarterly may sometimes come across to others, however much it appears to suffer a decline against the mountains of hypermedia vying for a minute of our attention, the quarterly can hold its own as a model of eclecticism. It is a cultural bulwark in its own right. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The challenge here for the quarterly editor, it seems, has little to do with keeping ahead of the reader with new fangled design, e.g. an online edition, eye popping graphics, or inventing a new literary genre (quiction anyone?) It’s all about defining the tempo. Each season the quarterly reader hopes to find a literary work that illuminates the world’s changing landscape, some poem or short story that is finely attuned to the tempo of our varied experience. In this sense the quarterly editor is a pacesetter of sorts, not necessarily a maverick standing beyond a knoll waving us forth as the prophet leads his flock. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />Think of harness racing. The thoroughbreds race under a specified gait, pulling those sulkies around the track. The driver / editor carries the whip and signals the horse (the writer?) by striking the sulky shaft to establish the two-beat gait. Defining the tempo and significance of these changing times (the race) is the editor’s great talent and privilege, not only as an allegiance to the reading community but also to the writers whom they publish. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >***</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></div><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br />The more I searched for state of the art models, essays on which I could base my own writing aspirations, the more I hoped to identify and feel with the writer in that church pew, the more I encountered sad, isolated voices traversing the fringe. Even when a writer does invite me to witness the exotic, say a trip to <st1:city st="on">La Paz</st1:city> or the <st1:place st="on">Silk Road</st1:place>, I’m unmoved. It sounds as though the writer picked up the psycho detritus from one end of the room—a drug habit, or suburban boredom exported to a street corner in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Tijuana</st1:place></st1:city>—and shoveled it to another. The writer never comes across as more interesting than the story itself.<o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />I was bothered enough by my cold reactions to draft letters to various editors, asking why, as a loyal patron of the journal, I wasn’t coming across more reporting, more stories that kept the narrator out of the picture. I understand this is the beauty behind the craft, the narrator’s insistence on being in on the story’s action (if, in fact, we find a story), except I couldn’t help thinking the reader would be better served if the narrator stayed out of the picture altogether. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />The only response I received came from an editor who scolded me with an email message: “Don’t read, don’t subscribe, and don’t bother submitting. This publication is not for everybody. And if I had any further doubts about the quality of the work,” the editor advised, “have a look at the <i style="">Best Essays</i> series, where you’ll find numerous entries from our publication.” <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >***</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></div><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br />Clearly, quarterly membership is a lonely hobby. This is the idea, I suppose, to be alone with something one enjoys doing. But sooner or later it might be good to exchange stories. In trying to gather a feel for what works, for what editors are looking for among the mountains of incoming submissions, I feel left out, as though I missed out on the first day of creative writing class when the instructor handed out the course objectives and syllabi. Since the acceptance rates in these journals run between one and two percent, I presume the work that does succeed to publication represents a model of excellence. I’ve either got a tin ear for the extraordinary, e.g. realizing that a trip to <st1:city st="on">La Paz</st1:city> or the <st1:place st="on">Silk Road</st1:place> is the essence of exoticism, or these global avenues are so over traveled that the only place for the essayist to retreat is back to that kitchen table, for continued reflection on Cezanne’s table of fruit. </span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" >***</span><span style="font-size:100%;"><br /></span></div><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br />I am happy to stay on board with the quarterlies, indefinitely. Sometimes it feels masochistic, all this silence between submissions and between readings, no discernable quarterly club members in my neighborhood, the sometimes cheerless design format, the covers as unassuming as a high school theater program passed out by a student usher. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />For all the quarterly’s supposed refinement, its place as a cultural cornerstone, it appears pleased enough to inhabit society’s fringe. Weeks ago, however, I noticed a recent issue of <i style="">Ploughshares </i>in my high school library. One of our library paraprofessionals assumed it was a circulating paperback instead of a periodical. (The English department normally claims these issues.) She catalogued the issue and slapped a barcode on it, just as we do our fiction and nonfiction shelf items. Then she wrapped it in a shiny book jacket and placed it on the new arrivals shelf, face out on a tiny book stand, alongside Capote’s <i style="">In Cold Blood</i> and Kunkel’s <i style="">Indecision</i>. <o:p></o:p></span><span style=";font-family:Times;font-size:100%;" ><br /><br />A student has yet to check out <i style="">Ploughshares</i>. Perhaps it’s just as well that it remains on display<br /><br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">[To read the rest of Mr. Washington's essay, pick up a copy of <a href="http://review.antioch.edu/">Antioch Review vol. 65 no. 1</a>]</span></span><br /></span> </div>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-11456391841219884332007-09-11T06:08:00.000-07:002007-09-29T06:15:05.862-07:00From the Back Issues: DoubleTake, Special Edition 2001<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXZhgBb0Gls4cYx69A8mbPRCwJTHyFyzA4AbblrtqYUP42S8SUNAWbjjS7lgs77qv1zFpyrocRCFRapGRTZT1zClTmZbG7q9gbwiUNVLXIqVJqI-PfUvPfmBUngzPcFVU7bl373_WGKHw/s1600-h/9.11.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5108941858435641426" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXZhgBb0Gls4cYx69A8mbPRCwJTHyFyzA4AbblrtqYUP42S8SUNAWbjjS7lgs77qv1zFpyrocRCFRapGRTZT1zClTmZbG7q9gbwiUNVLXIqVJqI-PfUvPfmBUngzPcFVU7bl373_WGKHw/s200/9.11.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:78%;" >"The reality of 9/11, or the surreality of 9/11, was devouring my invented reality. It wasn't that the city was destroyed; it was the consequences, which I misread. I actually thought it would send the country's efforts not outward, but inward."<br />-Junot Diaz from the Sept/Oct issue of </span><span style="font-size:78%;">Poets and Writers</span><br /><br />As nearly everyone in the world is aware of, today marks six years since the horrendous New York World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. The days' attacks had such sudden and violent repercussions worldwide in the shapes of the American Iraq and Afghanistan wars that--though they were certainly suffered through and memorialized--it could be argued that the events of 9/11 were not allowed enough time to be sufficiently digested by the American nation. The images were flashed repeatedly on televisions and newspapers. Talking heads worked from behind podiums. Wars were begun.<br /><br />Literary journals are largely a medium of and for reflection. They traffic in reflexive thought, thought that doubles back on itself, makes statements and reconsiders them. They are not generally the mouthpieces of individual taste (though some certainly have been), but they tend to function more in the vein of F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of genius: one who can hold two opposing views in their mind at once. Flash and pizazz is not typical of literary magazines, either. Nor are they known for bold or dramatic statements about subjects. And it is much due to this reflexive nature that such magazines are often months, even years, behind the flow of current political events and social discussion. In this sense, they are the opposite of the majority of newspapers and glossy magazines who make it their job to break news--or to at least cover the same stories at the same time everyone else is.<br /><br />Though such a distance from the "hot moment" can make literary magazines seem culturally behind the times, there is much to be appreciated from such editorial patience, as it is usually only with such patience that publishing venues (and the artists within) are able to get a broader and more complex view of events. When events are covered in the literary magazine world--like <a href="http://www.atlantareview.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Atlanta Review</span></a>'s recent issue on the Iraq War or <a href="http://www.loyno.edu/%7Enoreview/achives/2000-present/v31n2.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">New Orleans Review</span>'s Katrina issue</a>--the result can be a publication rich in considered historical and contemporary detail.<br /><br />In Decemeber of 2001, just months after the attacks, Robert Coles's photography and literature magazine <a href="http://designarchives.aiga.org/entry.cfm/eid_2427"><span style="font-style: italic;">DoubleTake</span></a> <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQYlI0hByO4JRiCouDq2nTuccUzRqqhjDrTrLYu4Qg60AupUmzLEjIcXZqaAVspLz70RByp_VnonM2QgXFW629yKzHaZWdmg6alnOJ60JpLJqpApf6jC5UA-3TYBJE4uCREnoGARwCO4/s1600-h/doubletake.JPG"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5109038911811629170" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQYlI0hByO4JRiCouDq2nTuccUzRqqhjDrTrLYu4Qg60AupUmzLEjIcXZqaAVspLz70RByp_VnonM2QgXFW629yKzHaZWdmg6alnOJ60JpLJqpApf6jC5UA-3TYBJE4uCREnoGARwCO4/s200/doubletake.JPG" border="0" /></a>(which <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2003/10/29/money_problems_shelve_doubletake/">ceased publishing</a> in 2003, but has been recently relaunched as <a href="http://doubletakecommunity.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">DoubleTake/Points of Entry</span></a>) did a special edition on the 9/11 disaster that, like every other issue of the magazine up to that point, included succinct and powerful writing from some of the best around. Some writers in the 9/11 issue are Seamus Heaney, Francine Prose, Bill McKibben, Stuart Dybek, and Billy Collins, their writing laid out alongside photography capturing what Coles wanted the magazine to capture overall: "the voices and visions of ordinary folk." Which, in the end, is everybody.<br /><br />It is commonly thought that horrific events such as 9/11 are historically difficult for art to represent very quickly, as artists require a certain undefined period of gestation before they can produce anything worthwhile. The same might hold true for literary magazines, as they are by definition devoted to aesthetic concerns above political and capital ones. It is understandable then why nearly all the writing <span style="font-style: italic;">DoubleTake</span> chose for their special issue on 9/11 was written <span style="font-style: italic;">before</span> the WTC attacks. Even given this fact, at no time does the issue feel dated or discontiguous. On the contrary, the entire issue reads as though it could have been written the day after the attacks, or many years later, as the amount of exposed emotion and careful reflection--of direct declaration and skillful explication--are evenly balanced throughout.<br /><br />The issue opens with an excerpt of Seamus Heaney's translation of Sophocles <span style="font-style: italic;">Philoctetes</span>, retitled by Heaney as <span style="font-style: italic;">The Cure at Troy</span>. "Human beings suffer/" Heaney's translation begins, "They torture one another,/ They get hurt and hard./ No poem or play or song/ Can fully right a wrong/ Inflicted or endured." The poem, written by Sophocles over 2,000 years ago and translated by Heaney in 1991, feels as though it could have been written just moments after the attack, in a direct response to the bloodshed and violence brought onto the people of New York City. Such, Heaney shows us, is the power of literature.<br /><br />The rest of the issue continues in this manner, with very few mistakes or overstepping of editorial bounds (which near everyone writing was worried about in the immediate wake of 9/11). There is an essay on what we remember about traumatic events by Francine Prose; a handful of eerily fascinating photographs of airports and the people in them by Adam Shemper, a both surprisingly gentle and painful poem about the WTC attacks by James Hart, a piece about Ghandi's peaceful revolution by Bill McKibben, and a spread of evocative photographs taken of Northern Afghanistan from 1999 and 2000 by Robert Sanchez.<br /><br />One of the most surprising and disturbing pieces in the issue was written in October 1958 by William Carlos Williams, about a child from Paterson, New Jersey playing with building blocks. W.C.W. tells how the child built a tower with the blocks meant to suggest "those huge buildings in New York City where a cousin of his dad's worked." As W.C.W. watched, the child knocked the building down. "What happened?" Williams asked the young boy. "Someone real mean came," the boy says, "and he got his way."Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-42931231557530978702007-09-08T08:50:00.000-07:002007-09-08T12:52:52.300-07:00From the Newsstands: Fiction from New England Review vol. 28 no. 3<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTmO03vmPM16xcBb_tvL_ppPlI1eLWVkYAeCc7cGJz3WDOakyAAwyzB3t4-RIV5b8ByzODZ5189ovCzujv8_FFRKM0lmIo_ECRjySY4r6xYo2W9trhYAuBq075U1QMEww5TDwvnD2anOc/s320/NER28-3cover.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5107866016372633666" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >The following is a lengthy excerpt of Rob Ehle's heartbreaking story "Not the Ocean" from the new issue of </span><span style="font-size:85%;"><a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/">New England Review</a></span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >, vol. 28 no. 3. The journal--one of the crispest designed and consistently fascinating high-quality literary journals around (this issue even includes <a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/Tolstoy.html">a piece by Tolstoy</a>)--is edited by Stephen Donadio and published out of Middlebury College in Vermont. Single issues are 8 dollars and can be purchased in bookstores or from <a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/orderner.html">the </a></span><a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/orderner.html"><span style="font-size:85%;">NER</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" ><a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/orderner.html"> website</a>. </span><span style="font-size:85%;">NER</span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" > is distributed nationally by Ingram and Ubiquity.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Not the Ocean</span><br />by Rob Ehle<br /><br />The sun had not shown itself for twenty days, and only six of those had been dry. Today it was drizzling. Still, the boys were playing in the back as if it were mid-July. Dan heard their shrieky voices from the front of the house. The voices went from loud to extremely loud, then back to loud again. They had not played in the yard for three days. If he had let them play inside today, he might have hurt one of them. There was a lull, and he began to be able to think again. He looked back down at the checkbook register and then heard a boom—something very large and heavy had hit the back wall. Dan jumped from his chair, which crashed to the floor, but before he was at the back door the boys were already shouting, It’s okay. He’s okay. We’re okay. When he got outside, he saw the aluminum tool shed tipped off its concrete bed, leaning on the house. The boys were already at the opposite corner of the yard, as if it had been an act of God.<br /><br />Aaron crouched at the base of a rose bush. He was examining dirt. It didn’t look like he’d been doing anything else for at least an hour. His little brother stood in front of him facing the back door, his expression blank with guilt. He held his hands behind his back as if he were hiding something.<br /><br />“What’d you do, Aaron?”<br /><br />“We can fix it, Dad. Satch wanted to see the top.”<br /><br />He didn’t get the checkbook balanced. By the time Cheryl got home he’d barely finished getting the shed back on its foundation, bolted now into the concrete. He had tried for about ten minutes to make the boys pick up and reorganize all the spilled nails and screws, nuts and bolts, mollies and copper wire, until the sheer lunacy of effort was too much for him. Instead he had them clean their room.<br /><br />“That’s not a punishment,” Cheryl said.<br /><br />“Have you looked at that room?”<br /><br />“That’s what they were supposed to do today, anyway. I told them before I left.”<br /><br />They didn’t eat until seven. Dan had planned on having supper ready when Cheryl got home, but events had again found their own sluice. It was ten before the boys were in bed and as soon as she’d turned out their lights, Cheryl went straight to a bath. Dan thought he might have a drink. When he opened the cupboard above the refrigerator and remembered he was out of Scotch, his desolation surprised him.<br /><br />“Dan,” Cheryl said from the tub.<br /><br />He walked down the hall to the back room, out to the yard. The clouds were finally blowing off, and he could see some stars. They were pretty and new, and it had been so long since he’d seen them that it made him think of night in the mountains. He thought he might take a few days with a pack and a bag and just go up, all by himself. He had all the time he needed. It wasn’t the kind of thing he did, ever.<br /><br />Cheryl called him again. He couldn’t always hear from the back porch, not always, and he took a couple of steps further out. He smelled the wet under the clearing sky and he could feel the rarefied night on his skin. The smell of grass and dirt started to go musky, and he knew a skunk was out somewhere. The smell didn’t fade off. The neighbor’s dog started barking, and Dan went inside.<br /><br />“Where were you?” Cheryl said when he came into the bathroom. The water was so hot that steam still ribboned off it, and her skin glowed like Christmas.<br /><br />“A skunk’s outside.”<br /><br />“I wanted to talk to you about something.”<br /><br />“What?” Dan said.<br /><br />“Larry and I talked tonight.”<br /><br />He finally couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he smiled.<br /><br />“I think it’s the right time for something like this, Dan.” She looked at the ceiling as she spoke, as if she were practicing. “While you’re looking for something new. Larry’s got an idea—an opportunity. He says if I stay around any longer, I’ll just learn all he knows anyway and then there’s nothing stopping me from setting myself up and competing.”<br /><br />“Setting yourself up? With your own produce stand?”<br /><br />“It’s not a produce stand.”<br /><br />It was a booth in a gutted movie theater. There were about twenty other vendors, selling specialty olive oils, beeswax candles, kites—anything a person could think of to sell (though not necessarily to buy). But Larry’s instincts were good enough, and he’d finally been able to hire some help. Cheryl went in three days a week to relieve him. She hadn’t worked for nine years, and she was flush with purpose.<br /><br />“It’s a whole store, and business is doubling every two months. Organic is finally mainstream, Dan. People are really into local produce.” Now she looked at him, and he just let her, stared dumbly back. “Larry’s thinking butters and cheeses now.”<br /><br />“He’s thinking butters and cheeses?” Dan opened the medicine cabinet, took out the box of floss. “Plural?”<br /><br />“There’s a space opening next to us. The rent’s almost nothing.”<br /><br />They had just gotten twenty thousand dollars in inheritance from her grandfather. Before that, there had been only the checking account.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Dan slept badly. The smell was finally so rank he knew the skunk had to be under the house. He had the midnight certainty that one of the boys would surprise it early in the morning and get sprayed point blank. Blinded, maybe. The idea finally consumed him, and he had fitful, dreamy thoughts about hospitals and sunglasses. When he woke again, though, he couldn’t smell a thing, and he was so relieved that he got up, put on his robe, and went to check on the kids. To see them, he turned on the hall light. It half woke Cheryl, who sighed a question and rolled back to sleep. All he could see of Aaron was the rough grain of his hair at the edge of the blanket. Satchel lay sprawled and coverless as if he’d just dropped off the ceiling. His breathing sounded like waves. Dan had taken lately to watching his sons sleep the way he’d once sat on the beach gazing at the ocean—emptied, quiet. That his sons were not the ocean, were small and full of love for him, didn’t always soothe him. He bent to put a blanket over Satchel, felt the damp at his hairline and moved the cover down a little. He went back to his room, slipped into bed, and tried not to think about money.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />He heard Cheryl on the phone in the morning, talking to Larry. TV noises came from the back room. There was a sliver of sunlight at the baseboard, the first in weeks. It was a minute or two before he remembered what day it was, and when he did, he rolled on his side and put a pillow over his head. A minute later, Cheryl came in and said, “You’re still in bed?”<br /><br />“Time’s it?”<br /><br />“It’s nine, Baby. Larry’s picking me up and we’re going to the farmer’s market.”<br /><br />She had started calling him this after he was laid off. She’d never used the word<br />before, not even in sex. “Okay?”<br /><br />“You taking the kids?”<br /><br />“To the farmer’s market?”<br /><br />“They like it. Satch likes the . . . things.”<br /><br />“I’ll be back in a couple of hours. Then we can all do something fun.” She snatched up the blinds, and the room cracked open like an egg. “It’s gorgeous out.”<br /><br />A minute later she was in the back room saying goodbye to the kids and five minutes after that Satchel was on the bed. “I’m hungry.”<br /><br />Dan told him to get some Cheerios. “Have Aaron help you.”<br /><br />“Mom says you’re being a lazybones.”<br /><br />He pulled the pillow further down over his face.<br /><br />“Lazy Bones,” Satchel said.<br /><br />“Mom’s just a crazy bones.”<br /><br />Satchel laughed and stared. Dan’s eyes were shut, but he could feel Satchel crouching, his nose an inch away. “Lazy Bones,” Satchel said. Dan growled, low and wolfish. Satchel began a quiet squealing, almost inaudible. It got louder as Dan’s hand moved slowly toward him under the blanket. When Dan had him by the leg, he yodeled and thrashed in happy terror.<br /><br />“<span style="font-style: italic;">Who you callin’ lazy?</span>”<br /><br />Once Dan was up—that bulwark fallen—he resigned himself to French toast. He knew the boys were sated on television. Aaron broke the eggs and Satchel ground the coffee—something destructive for each of them.<br /><br />“Watch that griddle. Hospital’s closed Sunday morning.”<br /><br />“Is not,” Aaron said.<br /><br />The boys ate at the table while Dan stood at the counter with his coffee, frying his own toast. They argued about cartoons. He tried to tune them out with the morning paper, but gradually he realized it wasn’t the boys who were distracting him. He set the front page aside and picked up the classifieds. <span style="font-style: italic;">GRAPHIC ARTIST needed for 6-month assignment; GUI DESIGNER for dynamic new gaming and VR company; R U a SELF-STARTER?</span> He scanned the columns, circling nothing, until he smelled the burning toast. He picked it off the griddle and threw it in the trash, turned back to the paper.<br /><br />“Dad!” Satchel said. “You just threw away your French toast!”<br /><br />Dan was still in his robe when Cheryl came home. She was talking as she opened the front door, and he went to the bedroom to get some clothes on. He heard Larry’s voice, the low slight sway, and Cheryl’s laugh, and bags set on the kitchen table. She said, “Where is everybody?” Aaron and Satchel were playing in the back yard. Dan looked for some jeans.<br /><br />She had met him in her yoga class. Before the organic produce, he’d been an engineer. Engineering what, Dan wasn’t sure—flexible computer screens maybe, microphones the size of bacteria—things strange and wonderful enough to make him tidy money, which Dan didn’t begrudge him. Larry had paid his dues. Cancer had taken sixty pounds and a kidney off him, and in his eyes you saw the Lazarus wisdom. Dan hadn’t known him before he was sick, but he wondered if he’d looked as good—sallow and wiry, hands that reminded you of Lincoln. He had wrinkles that women would still be falling for twenty years from now. Either way, he now knew what was what. Larry said he hadn’t done the organic thing for his health—coming back from the grave, he just liked being around stuff that grew. He might have been married once, Dan could never remember.<br /><br />“Hey, farmers.”<br /><br />Cheryl smiled at him when he came into the kitchen. She held out a carrot: “Carrot?”<br /><br />Larry stood behind the bags with his hands in his back pockets, shy as a cowboy, and Cheryl took a chomp of the carrot herself and grinned with a full cheek.<br /><br />“Smells tasty in here,” Larry said.<br /><br />“Was. French toast with catsup—it’s a House Satchelty.”<br /><br />Cheryl came up to Dan, aimed the carrot at his mouth, and he opened up. He held it there like a cigar, half-grinning at Larry. Larry grinned back. He had the warmest smile Dan had ever seen—not a grinner, really. (Did that mean that you could trust him with your money, or that you couldn’t?) There was the sound of the door in the back room, and a moment later Aaron walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator as if he were the only one in the house.<br /><br />“Hello, kiddo,” Cheryl said. “What are you up to?”<br /><br />“Can I have a soda?”<br /><br />“No.”<br /><br />He closed the fridge. “Okay,” he said, and he walked back out of the kitchen.<br /><br />Larry laughed and looked out after him and said, “That’s me.”<br /><br />The carrot was as sweet as an apple in Dan’s mouth, and he almost mentioned it. Instead he said, “Didn’t look like you.” Cheryl looked over at him and he pretended not to notice.<br /><br />“That’s what I did all the time,” Larry said. “Asked for stuff I knew I couldn’t have. Then I’d go back out and play.”<br /><br />He really was a good man. Better than Dan, actually, which was a strange thing to think about.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">*<br /></div><br />Sometime in the soggy recent past a trip to Point Reyes had been promised to see the gray whales. Dan didn’t remember. After Larry left, Cheryl started packing some of the fruit and cheese she’d gotten at the market. Satchel had wanted to see whales ever since Aaron had gone with his class the year before and come home talking about flukes. Pretty much everything had been flukes now for about a year. They had a fluke poster in their room, and when he took a bath, Satchel turned on his stomach, lifted his fluke-flared feet and dowsed his head, trying in eight-inch water to make sounding. As Cheryl packed, Dan rummaged through a couple of closets for the binoculars. The closets yielded nothing, and Dan began to fear the binocs were impacted somewhere in a tent or sleeping bag down in the bowels of the house. Twenty minutes later he was rifling and muttering in the space under the basement stairs when Cheryl came down.<br /><br />“What are you doing, Dan?”<br /><br />“We have too much stuff, you know that?”<br /><br />“We’ll have a garage sale. But not right now.”<br /><br />He knelt on a plastic packing box, peering, the flashlight in his hand no brighter than a candle, when the lid gave way and he slipped. His fist went through the weave of an ancient lawn chair.<br /><br />“Goddamn it!”<br /><br />“What are you looking for?”<br /><br />“I’m looking for the damn binoculars. How are we going to see a damn whale without any binoculars, Cheryl?”<br /><br />She didn’t answer, and when he looked at her there wasn’t a trace of interest he could see. She sighed and finally said, “We’ll be in the car.” He dug and rummaged for another five minutes, until the boys started yelling. Cheryl pulled out of the driveway, and Dan marched down and got into the car. At the corner, she turned right instead of left and said, “I’m sure Larry has some binoculars.”<br /><br />“Sure,” he said. As she flipped opened her phone, he said, “You know, why don’t you just invite him? I’ll bet he’s—”<br /><br />“Really?”<br /><br />“No.”<br /><br />“Wait!” Satchel yelled. “I know where they are.”<br /><br />Back at the house, Satchel ran into the garage and came back in less than a minute.<br /><br />“We were reading with them last week. Frank and me.”<br /><br />“The hell?” Dan said under his breath, and Satchel said, “Dollar,” and no one asked any more questions.<br /><br />As Dan drove through the city, across the bridge, Cheryl and the boys took turns looking through the binoculars. Satchel said he saw a whale, and Aaron told him it was the Farallons. Cheryl kept saying it didn’t matter if they saw whales or not, it was a beautiful day. She was buoyant and chatty. She talked about Marin and free-range chickens and the fascists in Washington. She told Aaron there was definitely a God, no matter what his friend said. At the rainbow tunnel, Satchel and Aaron both sucked in their breath. Just before the other end, Aaron poked Satchel in the ribs, and Satchel laughed and then got mad.<br /><br />“Not fair!”<br /><br />“It’s bad for you to hold your breath that long when you’re only five.”<br /><br />“I can hold it a lot longer than that.”<br /><br />“You lose five million brain cells for every second you hold it.”<br /><br />“I do not.” Satchel was quiet a moment. Then he said, “Do I, Mom?”<br /><br />“Jeez.” Dan didn’t even have to look in the mirror to see his older son rolling his eyes. “You better hope not. You don’t have many left to lose.”<br /><br />He worried sometimes that Aaron was picking up his sarcasm a little quick. The boy wasn’t even ten. At this rate, how dry would he be by the time he was sixteen? Partly it was having a little brother—a walking bull’s eye for irony. Everything in Satchel that brought out tenderness and delight in his parents was, Dan knew, proof to Aaron that he was the stupidest human in America. Dan had had his own stupid little brother, a man who was now a school superintendent in Oregon. All he wished for Aaron, for a boy so frighteningly like himself, was that he not mistake for stupidity what was actually happiness.<br /><br />They drove along Bolinas Lagoon past dozens of egrets planted out on the water like pennants. Dan thought briefly what it would have been like if he’d been out by himself.<br /><br />“Ospreys!” Cheryl said suddenly. “Dan, stop! Look at them!”<br /><br />He pulled into a gravel turnout. They all got out of the car and followed two of the birds as they flew out over the water. When he got his own chance at the binoculars, Dan could make out the stark face markings and crests of the birds as they flew, their feathered legs.<br /><br />“They look like Mexican wrestlers,” he said. “Don’t they? Those faces.”<br /><br />“Strong-Bad!” Aaron said, in a Strong-Bad voice.<br /><br />The boys got their chances with the glasses, and then Cheryl said, “My turn.” Just as Satchel handed the binoculars up to her, one of the ospreys took a dive. Cheryl gasped. The osprey came up with a fish, turning it in its talons straight on to the wind as it flew off. “Look!” Cheryl whispered. “Look at that!”<br /><br />But Dan was looking at her, not at the bird. Her lips were just parted. She peered through the binoculars like a child peeking through a keyhole. As a wisp of her blond hair blew back and forth from her cheek to the top of the binoculars, desire hit him like a little gust of wind.<br /><br />“I am <span style="font-style: italic;">Strong-Bad!</span>” Satchel said, giggling. “And I like . . . <span style="font-style: italic;">fish!</span>”<br /><br />Larry was not the kind of person to take someone’s wife. Dan knew this. But as he looked at Cheryl now, all girlish and bursting, it wasn’t enough. She didn’t have to have a thought in her head of betrayal. Just the happiness alone felt like it. As weeks went by, then a month, then four months without a job, there was a meanness he couldn’t shed, that he felt doomed and hobbled by.<br /><br />“I thought they couldn’t fly,” Satchel said.<br /><br />“Ospreys?”<br /><br />“Yeah.”<br /><br />Aaron stared at his brother, and Cheryl smiled and furrowed her brows at Dan.<br /><br />“You thought ospreys couldn’t fly?”<br /><br />“Yeah.”<br /><br />Aaron looked up at the one remaining bird. They all watched a while longer as it kited above the lagoon.<br /><br />“Ospreys,” Aaron said finally. “Not ostriches.”<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">[To read the rest of Rob Ehle's touching story "Not the Ocean," purchase a copy of </span>New England Review<span style="font-style: italic;"> vol. 28 no. 3 from <a href="http://cat.middlebury.edu/%7Enereview/orderner.html">the NER website</a> or your local bookseller.]</span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-28275122932725796572007-09-03T16:27:00.000-07:002007-09-05T20:05:05.158-07:00New Issue Review: ZYZZYVA* vol. 23 no. 1<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.htm"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5106693735113961522" style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3unsf36ykZ9hjIK2equhDjan3ghQJp589lXLwJs9FOsHpaUCjLF0ZcFmVV22thZHysTjYFnEwpYC8SedbwFSR4m7TvpLsByelRV8WYoqUf-WEB5s7DLeSfBX-BZf1EVl04udu348tnOs/s320/zyzzyvaCover79.jpg" border="0" /></a><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">"For hours, off and on, he gave me kind of stares a child throws Christmas mornings, when he has torn the wrappings from every present and stands waiting for the gift that will never arrive."<br />-from the story "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.mcleod.htm">Exit Wounds</a>" by Charles McLeod<br /><br />"...For you she builds a body, a list<br />from hip to waist, a weight in breasts best set to anchor<br />the architecture of your mouth."<br />-from the poem "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.foster.htm">Husbandry</a>" by Jennifer Borges Foster<br /></span></span><br />For the past 150 years, American little and literary magazines have mainly existed to publish new and original writing yet unaccepted by mainstream publishing/reading venues, either because of the writing's form or content, or simply because the name of its author isn't well-known enough (such as the early<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherwood_Anderson"> Sherwood Anderson</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Roth">Philip Roth</a>, or <a href="http://mirandajuly.com/">Miranda July</a>). It was due to just such editorial vision that Emerson and Fuller's ever-copied mid-nineteenth century magazine, <a href="http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/dial/dialhist.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Dial</span></a>, never amassed more than 300 subscribers. And hardly has anywhere suffered to publish unrecognized quality writing as thoroughly as did Margaret Anderson's <a href="http://www.littlereview.com/mca/mca.htm"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Little Review</span></a>, its issues packed with experimental new work from Ezra Pound, Malcolm Cowley, T.S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay, Djuana Barnes, William Carlos Williams, and Jean Cocteau, its famous slogan printed across the later covers: "Making No Compromise with the Public Taste." (Further proof of its publishing temerity: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Little Review</span> was sued by the U.S. government after publishing 4 installments of Joyce's Ulysses; 3 of the 4 installments were burned by the Post Office.) Though West Coast literary magazine, <a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span></a><span style="font-style: italic;">,<span style="font-size:100%;"> </span></span><span style="font-size:100%;">is very different from both <span style="font-style: italic;">The Dial </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Little Review</span>, it is their cousin in its thankfully stubborn</span> insistence to find and publish fascinating new writing by under-recognized, sometimes unheard of, literary authors and artists.<br /><br />"The last word: West Coast writers and artists," say covers of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span>, a literary journal published thrice-yearly out of San Francisco by a staff led by the magazine's founder, Howard Junker. In photos, <a href="http://www.sanfranciscoreader.com/interviews/junker%20interview.html">Junker</a> looks eerily like <a href="http://www.midland.edu/foundation/news/davidson/updike.php">John Updike</a> (as Junker himself has often pointed out), and one might wonder if some higher power didn't create a renegade literary twin of Updike for the western seaboard, in a zen-like balancing of American letters. Such a thing, in metaphor, at least, is necessary. Though the United States is 3,000 miles wide, the wealth of good writing is considered to be found almost wholly in New York, because the largess of good publishing is found there. One need only look around (which, understandably, takes time and effort) at such literary destinations as <a href="http://www.citylights.com/">City Lights Books</a>, <a href="http://www.powells.com/">Powell's</a> bookstore, <a href="http://www.tinhouse.com/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Tin House</span></a>, <a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/"><span style="font-style: italic;">McSweeney's</span></a>, <a href="http://blackclock.org/"><span style="font-style: italic;">Black Clock</span></a>, and <a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.all-story.com/">Zoetrope</a> (just to name a few of the more prominent ones) to see that the western edge of the nation is publishing and selling a considerable amount of the most exciting writing around.<br /><br />All this to say that the latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span> is a good a place as any to read outstanding new writing--the kind of writing that will, as Francine Prose once described a good story, feel as though the top of your head has just been removed for a moment. That "ah-hah" feeling. The feeling a reader might get from Charles McLeod's haunting short story, "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.mcleod.htm">Exit Wounds</a>," from this issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span>. "When the buzzing rose up and reached me," the narrator of the story tells us upon seeing thousands of bees rise up from an overturned semi-trailer, "I was saddened; they had named themselves and we had to act accordingly. All around us were cornfields and farther off farmhouses, their porch lights like code on the flatland. The insects pushed on and I kept walking west. The sky was so wide it was startling."<br /><br />Like McLeod's story, much of the writing published in this and most issues of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>is<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipE-2ZpmVGlF7egKgEqz3xe8t94bFjRB-I0Tc6iaIOB8TQoGQwD6mVOJwZb5Xubkmn_Rn06ozr0vMS-nDySfYNUi0ru4inYVOYoXr4mFIlAfpb4c0Qa-kOW5lVCu9myIFqa1PQ7Hsxn8o/s1600-h/Cover79back.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5106447319955288098" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEipE-2ZpmVGlF7egKgEqz3xe8t94bFjRB-I0Tc6iaIOB8TQoGQwD6mVOJwZb5Xubkmn_Rn06ozr0vMS-nDySfYNUi0ru4inYVOYoXr4mFIlAfpb4c0Qa-kOW5lVCu9myIFqa1PQ7Hsxn8o/s320/Cover79back.jpg" border="0" /></a> somehow distinctly western, infused as it is with references to western landscapes, or tinged with aestheticisms reminiscent of the Beats, but mixed with modern doses of cynicism and post-Marquez wonder. Though somehow the magazine on the whole retains a non-regional feel, as though the writers could be from some pueblo in southern Mexico or writing at some coffee shop in Kansas City. While only publishing work by West Coast artists, Junker's ability to publish writing that resonates with all readers speaks highly of his editorial eye. The pieces in this latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span> are as diverse as they come, ranging from Native American memoir (Sarris, "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.sarris.htm">All this Family</a>") to humorous fantasy (Houser, "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.houser.htm">Piranha-Otter</a>") to the slippery ontology of sexual experience (Howard, "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.howard.htm">Bolero</a>") to celebrity photography (Fernandez, "Self Portrait with Charles Bukowski") to mixed media art (Mulvey, "Virtual Couch") to a different type of graphic novel (Madonna, "<a href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/sp07.madonna.htm">All Over Coffee</a>"). In the diversity of these pieces, Junker continues to map the literature of the West, expanding its borders. That this issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span> deserves readers is not the question--Madonna's graphic novel and McLeod's story alone are reason enough to drop the 11 dollars for an issue. Instead, the question this and the best issues of <span style="font-style: italic;">ZYZZYVA</span> brings to mind (along with the best issues of <span style="font-style: italic;">McSweeney's</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Zoetrope</span>) is to what the future holds for San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle as bright new cities in the literary geography. New York will not soon fade as the center of literary publishing. But with people like Junker, Ferlinghetti, Winthrop McCormack, and others continually finding a home for writing to equal that coming out of New York, it seems like the landscape is certainly flattening, if not yet shifting.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:78%;"><span style="font-style: italic;">*Our sincere apologies to everyone at </span><span>ZYZZYVA <span style="font-style: italic;">for our previous <a href="http://zyzzyvaspeaks.blogspot.com/">miscapitalization</a> (as </span>Zyzzyva<span style="font-style: italic;">) of the name of their fine mag.<br /><br /></span></span><span style="font-style: italic;">**This review regards the spring issue of</span> ZYZZYVA<span style="font-style: italic;">, while a newer issue has already been released, </span><a style="font-style: italic;" href="http://www.zyzzyva.org/">vol.23 no. 2.</a></span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-73448116812469104502007-08-29T06:38:00.000-07:002007-08-29T19:59:45.548-07:00From the Newsstands: Poetry and Fiction from Versal no. 5<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.wordsinhere.com"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgleyaJ3EevlLUKesdhpCxrNhyphenhyphenY-Ukr0BLBYKYjHbg6DUByIRd3e7fmKQsmWU-hV-PxrQSWatbRwwAWBdWGOiE78S9Fxq0GnG7mcuLSc46ROW0YP4XF5IYTXt-ZbGvU53_0EMawGakzssA/s320/Versal5Cover149x149.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104322792907485170" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;">Begun "in the winter months of 2002,...in the cafes of Amsterdam," </span><a href="http://wordsinhere.com/">Versal</a><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><span style="font-style: italic;">is the only English language literary magazine in the northern European country, and one of the few in Europe.</span><span style="font-style: italic;"> The magazine publishes an intriguing and highly literary blend of fiction and poetry, along with a good serving of modern art. According to its editors, </span><span>Versal</span><span style="font-style: italic;">'s name "comes from Shakespeare's cropping of 'universal' in a line from </span><span>Romeo and Juliet</span><span style="font-style: italic;">. At first signifying the universal, 'versal' later took on a connotation of the rare and unique." The following are excerpts of poetry and fiction from </span><span>Versal</span><span style="font-style: italic;">'</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">s fifth issue, which can be purchased at bookstores or directly through the magazine's website: <a href="http://www.wordsinhere.com/">www.wordsinhere.com</a>. (You can read an earlier </span></span><span>Luna Park</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> review of </span></span><span>Versal</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> 5 by Gregory Napp <a href="http://lunaparkreview.blogspot.com/2007/08/new-issue-review-versal-no-5.html">here</a>.)</span><br /></span><br />"Upon the death of his friend Halszka in 1986, Roman Opalka went back to Warsaw to find his work. After unbelievable complications with customs, the Polish administration only let him take out thirty paintings, thirty drawings, thirty books, thirty etc. His choice made, Roman Opalka destroyed whatever was left in a devilish and sensual rage.<br /><br />In 1979, Alain Villar threw a small stone sculpture from his balcony. Then he finished it off with a hammer.<br /><br />Raoul Hebreard carefully sawed up one of his sculptures in 1997. He then made shelves out of it.<br /><br />In his garden, Simon Hantai buried the gigantic paintings he had made for his exhibition at the CAPC in 1981. Fifteen years later, he dug them up and reused certain bits and pieces which he called <span style="font-style: italic;">The Leftovers</span>."<br /><br />-from a piece titled "An Inventory of Destruction" by Eric Watier, translated by Simone Manceau<br /><br />***<br /><br />"Every train goes to the whisper plain<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">.<br /></span></span><span>On the plain, the bells ring with ten fingers</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;">.<br /></span></span><span>Their flutey whispers can be heard in the queues.<br />The ringing of their wheels is the delicacy<br />that stitches the wind..."<br /><br />-excerpt from the poem "Carnival" by Theodore Worozbyt<br /><br />***<br /><br />"I.<br />On our march to the sea we carried bottles of the rarest green glass, each one filled with dreams, the kind of dreams only happy dogs have, with muffled barking under breath and fragile paws running. The streets were full of the ghosts of all our dog dreams. We stuffed them into bottles and marched to the sea to toss them into the waves.<br /><br />II.<br /><br />Once, three children sat in a circle, somewhere in the sand, dropping dreams into tin cans full of rusty rain. Speaking backwards to one another so no one else could understand, they took turns telling a story.<br /><br />III. <span style="font-style: italic;">The Backwards Children's Story of Glass and Dreams, and of Armies</span><br />Once, on an island, was another, a smaller island. The first island was Glass, and held the second, the Island of Dreams, within. The Island of Glass was walls and shining, glittering tubes and pipes sneaking their way between buildings holding giant slick machines. The people who lived on the Island of Glass and worked the machines were all eyes to the ground, and spoke only in mumbles and murmuring gasps, as their bodies desperately tried to remember air. And when they slept, which wasn't often, their dreams were caught by a tube which was built into their brains, just behind the eyes, so that no dreamer on the Island of Glass ever saw their dreams before they were whisked out of the dreamer's head, and away from their homes, and over the city, where each person's tube met a larger crystal pipe which sneaked and snaked up and through the walls and onto the Island of Dreams...."<br /><br />-excerpt from the story "The Backwards Children, and Their Dreams" by Charles Geoghegan-Clements<br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-18012386655002344002007-08-25T08:16:00.000-07:002007-08-29T20:23:10.905-07:00Writer Grace Paley Dies from Breast Cancer at 84 Years Old<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_BlxdLbHjyvkkaHg52XvjMLGjFJasMX-Dtw7bc5GwoSmlXjzC12-us4C0tEkNjjm09t4Y9B-THTVHQg237Q49H6uo4xn-gZChhIH_3IyV41BwKn4CgMqvRRAf5J5B3ztpXv-aVYCDSk/s1600-h/Paley_med.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5104244336739889122" style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; float: left;" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhG_BlxdLbHjyvkkaHg52XvjMLGjFJasMX-Dtw7bc5GwoSmlXjzC12-us4C0tEkNjjm09t4Y9B-THTVHQg237Q49H6uo4xn-gZChhIH_3IyV41BwKn4CgMqvRRAf5J5B3ztpXv-aVYCDSk/s320/Paley_med.jpg" border="0" /></a><em><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><span style="font-size:78%;">"This is a hard time for publishers, even the big ones, though every now and then one of them will find it possible to give one a one million dollar advance to a well-known money maker. It doesn't always work. The small and the not-so-small independent bookstores that civilized and improved our towns and cities have disappeared."</span></span></em><span style="font-family:Georgia;"><o:p></o:p></span><br /><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><em><span style=";font-family:Georgia;font-size:78%;" >-Paley in her introduction to CLMP's 2005/2006 little magazine and press directory</span></em></p></div><div></div><br />Grace Paley, renowned short story writer (and essayist, poet, and activist) died yesterday(<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/books/24paley.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin">see <span style="font-style: italic;">NY Times</span> obituary</a>) in her Vermont home at 84 years old. Paley published many of her stories in small literary magazines, such as <span style="font-style: italic;">Fiction</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Noble Savage</span>, and the <span style="font-style: italic;">New American Review</span>, just to name a few. She was a master of the craft. (Click <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/2028">here</a> for an insightful 1992 interview from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Paris Review</span>, and <a href="http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/98/prmID/515">here</a> for an interview from PEN America.)<br /><br /><div><span style="font-size:85%;">(Paley photo by Karl Bissinger; from book jacket for Paley's book of short stories, </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >Enormous Changes at the Last Minute</span><span style="font-size:85%;">)</span></div>Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3888761865007160620.post-28152830652263337042007-08-24T05:36:00.001-07:002007-08-24T17:16:34.910-07:00Found in Hanging Loose: Art by Zevi Blum / Poetry by Writers of High School Age<a href="http://www.hangingloosepress.com/current.html"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicQKD6gLqFdH8UDU9P10WCLL4hOZmYOy5oAv969O2XIRc4vuffSnjg8WtRIJ9zHlaWKCuQCu2ZCgJOSwJ7E0rF50KXQ5_b4I_IBbwEUdUPJB7CFdPQOTyx3gfWudhyphenhyphenfe0Jwojv6PW8qs0/s320/hlp90_lrg.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102245295751573378" border="0" /></a><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-size:78%;">"During the day<br />we have impromptu ice cream parties on the screen porch<br />to catch the sugar while it's frozen."<br />-from "Summer," by Clare Jones<br /></span></span><br />In a very general sense, what gets published in literary and little magazines (artistic publications with a vision apart from the <a href="http://www.simonsays.com/content/destination.cfm?tab=1&pid=352932">popular</a> or <a href="http://www.esquire.com/">commercial</a>) are literary and artistic works of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circus">the circus</a>--works on the outskirts of <a href="http://www.timewarner.com/corp/">the larger culture</a>, in tents along the side of the road, pulling carts full or trinkets and whistles, wearing scarfs and outlandish hats; wanting badly for their fanciful productions to be heard, seen, enjoyed (wanting, really, only to entertain), but content enough to go on performing either way, whether people stop to watch or simply continue on to other, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Business/FunMoney/story?id=2320519">more practical</a>, destinations. Where would we be without such distractions of the spirit, such waylays to the everyday, light fantastic adventures of the imagination?<br /><br />At least for now, such questions don't have to be answered, as there thankfully exist literary magazines, circuses, street artists, high-flyers, tightrope walkers, and the carnivalesque etchings of Zevi Blum. This month, Blum's work can be found in quality reproductions in <a href="http://www.hangingloosepress.com/current.html">the latest issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Hanging Loose</span></a> magazine, published in Brooklyn, NY. The issue contains a wealth of work by Blum, whose etchings fill the front and back covers, in addition to more etchings on eight color glossy pages inside.<br /><br />Blum's colorful etchings (each seemingly composed of a hundred pastel shades) revel in the unusual and unordinary, and in doing so they are satires of the<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvCBFt5rg-Ze680pU2cxfAKLjaGTkRi-cQg8JKHhn8wQoTQxL7iksbE96_ci5Kmtf0aA2uD_u-veSF6z2OsgxsYqJTjwJ2RP1sAib-TcKlcXDXI478ooN6-ZkVc_ccZWOfVPhMVuwnMuA/s1600-h/24_LrgalwysSmthng.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvCBFt5rg-Ze680pU2cxfAKLjaGTkRi-cQg8JKHhn8wQoTQxL7iksbE96_ci5Kmtf0aA2uD_u-veSF6z2OsgxsYqJTjwJ2RP1sAib-TcKlcXDXI478ooN6-ZkVc_ccZWOfVPhMVuwnMuA/s200/24_LrgalwysSmthng.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102261960224681890" border="0" /></a> modern world, where the unusual is so hidden that it's oddity is multiplied to an absurd level when it finally reveals itself. The theme of all Blum's etchings is, according to Oxford Gallery's James Hall, "that of human inventiveness gone awry," and so they are cousins to such works as <span style="font-style: italic;">Alice in Wonderland</span>, Rabelais's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_and_Pantagruel"><span style="font-style: italic;">Gargantua and Pantagruel</span></a>, and the paintings by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Brueghel_the_Elder">Brueghel the Elder</a> or <a href="http://www.boschuniverse.org/">Hieronymous Bosch</a>. They are the sort of works that excite language in the mind of the viewer--words such as fantastic, trippingly, arabesque, vaudeville-- but do not, in themselves, cry to be interpreted. Like the circus itself, the only desire of Blum's etchings is to entertain; to entrance the viewer through humor, mystery, and fantasy; to disorder the mind towards enjoyment. (But, if you still want a lucid and penetrating interpretation of Blum's work, see <a href="http://www.zeviblum.com/stEssy_jHall.html">James Hall's aforementioned essay</a> on <a href="http://www.zeviblum.com/">Blum's website</a>.)<br /><br />Blum is a proficient and practiced artist; born in 1933, he has taught at both Ithaca and Cornell and shown his artwork in many galleries. And such training in his craft is evident in the patience and skill it must take to create his intricate and imaginatively detailed artworks. Some artworks give us the opposite reaction; not one of admiring the studied ability of the artist, but instead causing us to marvel over <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1268">the raw inventiveness of youth</a>. Also in the recent issue of <span style="font-style: italic;">Hanging Loose</span>, is some unexpectedly powerful poetry from young artists in <span style="font-style: italic;">Hanging Loose</span>'s ongoing series, "Writers of High School Age." All of the poems featured in this section are moving works filled with touching and absorbing poetic language and unique images. Sure, they might not compare to a "Sailing to Byzantium," but they have their a distinctive flair of charisma and energy that one can only find in the young. The poems seem fresh and internal--internal in that studious unaware quality of monks and artists, a quality that come naturally to the majority of those without yet 30 years into the world.<br /><br />Above all, the poems of these young writers is memorable. Some, due to their subjects, publish themselves in readers mind more surely than others, such as Naomi Forman's lesbian-tinted prose poem, "Summer Lovin'" ("I shiver in the dry heat of our cruel Arizona July"), or Rosetta Young's poem of youthful compartmentalization, "When We Were Countries" ("The broken kind, with borders like horseshoes"). But none of the poems are as powerful as Clare Jones's piece about the aching humid heat of a Louisiana summer, "Summer."<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRvbj-1ePYubD4hWnfL3jujaFnjoL1lfLzYu7gEr0HaCFYdhiq4PVY3usXJ8A6M6vh63TVvEqR77EjHpNJQGOxLB5DhlnlRQ0d23kMF1w10qNa7TE0JidMdI3GfZYTCgG5E1wN2uR-e2A/s1600-h/new-orleans-10.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRvbj-1ePYubD4hWnfL3jujaFnjoL1lfLzYu7gEr0HaCFYdhiq4PVY3usXJ8A6M6vh63TVvEqR77EjHpNJQGOxLB5DhlnlRQ0d23kMF1w10qNa7TE0JidMdI3GfZYTCgG5E1wN2uR-e2A/s200/new-orleans-10.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5102308204137557938" border="0" /></a>"The AC shuddered, sighed, and passed out last week," Jones begins her poem, "curled up like a cat in the ducts and died." The writing continues to evoke suffocating feelings of entombment in the unrelenting hot. In her poem, Jones captures a truth about living in a humid southern climate: when the summer heat is at its peak, it saps not only people's strength, but it also dulls the edges of their thinking. Jones writes: "I can't remember--/ about the way you said.../ I've lost it now." There is a stifling quality to the entire poem, as though the voice is trying to make it through the subtle summer madness to the fresh air of autumn. The voice shifts constantly between "we" and "I," as though the narrator is struggling to be heard beneath the communal suffering of the weather. She calls a last time, "wake up," only for the unflinching heat to instantly reply, "dissolve," because, in end, the heat "leaves not a trace behind."Editor, Luna Parkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11991001936930679683noreply@blogger.com0