Our Rejection

For a facsimile of our rejection letter sent to Shaun Usher in March 2007 and recently posted on Letters of Note, click here.

jimmyjosh deemed it worth reposting.

Meanwhile, magazines4Magazines picked up our Spring '05 cover, under the rubric of "art"; the artist is Nellie King Solomon.

Kipling at the Front

Kipling visited the Western Front in 1915, when war still seemed to be an extension of the parade ground; the subtitle of his short account, France at War, is "On the Frontier of Civilization."

The 13,000 words first appeared as a series of newspaper articles. It is readily available from fullbooks.com., readbookonline.net, Project Gutenberg, etc.

In facsimile from Google books.

Or buy an e-book at fictionwise.com for $.49.

For notes to the text, click here.

Trench warfare was only just taking form—the infantry helmet was not yet standard equipment, gas had not yet been used, no man's land had yet not been coined, the tank was still in development,

and it was not obscene for Kipling to lead off with a rah-rah poem, "France," he'd written in 1913 when the President of France visited England.

Or to refer to bivouacking soldiers as "the cheery brotherhood in the woods."

Or to describe a bombarded villa as being "smashed as a bonnet-box is smashed by an umbrella."

But Kipling was soon given his full measure of horror.

He had pulled strings so that his 17-year-old son, who had been rejected by the British Army, could get a commission in the Irish Guards.

Ten days after the last of Kipling's articles appeared, John Kipling was killed in the first great battle of the war, one that cost the British 50,000 casualties, the French 48,000, and the Boches 24,000.

@JCC

It was fun last night at the JCC with first-time-in-print writers Chris Mittelstaedt, Simone Spear, Christine Lee Zilka, JCC moderator Barbara Lane, Samantha Schoech, Robin Ekiss, Drew Cushing, and Kirsten Lee Soares.

Not included in the picture: Dale Freeman. [click on image to enlarge and see name of writer on the wall; also note Chris's T shirt]

(Former managing editor) Robin Ekiss, who's expecting, revealed that she met her husband at a celebration for her first time in print at Toronado in the summer of '93; he spilled three beers, but....

Her first book, The Mansion of Happiness, is just out from U of Georgia Press. She had entered some 64 manuscript-contests [!], but Ted Genoways solicited her after she appeared in VQR.

The audience included our first art editor Tom Myer, former assistant April Goldman, staunch supporter Ann Hatch, Board member Jonathan Schmidt, contributing writers Alvin Duskin, Bob Judd, and Keetje Kuipers (currently a Stegner Fellow), filmmaker Bill Farley, Green Apple's Pete Mulvihill, Pia Hinckle....

Dress Code

Yesterday's report in the NY Times about high school kids oppressed by dress code issues, esp. anti-cross-dressing strictures, brought back memories.

As a Third Former (9th grader) at Canterbury, the Connecticut prep school where Hemingway's sons and Fitzgerald's grandson had gone, my wardrobe was censored.

The first day of school, the headmaster looked at my beautiful plaid sports jacket and said, in his quite imitable drawl, "Oh, Howard, that just won't do."

If my wardrobe had just been decimated, I wouldn't have minded, but I had only one other jacket, and a blazer, and a dark suit (we changed for evening chapel).

I had been so excited when my mother and I found that wonderful jacket in the second-hand store in Mt. Kisco.

It was basically green, with very thin red and yellow lines. It fit perfectly.

From De Pinna, a Fifth Ave. store associated more with men's-wear styles for women than with de rigueur stuff for men, which could be obtained at Brooks Brothers, J. Press, or Rogers Peet, the store that, in the 19th century, had introduced price tags and the money-back guarantee.

It took a while to recover from this assault on my taste, but Sixth Form (senior) year, I discovered a dark brown herringbone jacket with a Chesterfield (velvet) collar on the bare-bones racks at Robert Hall in White Plains.

(When the values go up, up, up/And the prices go down, down, down./Robert Hall this season/Will show you the reason/low overhead.....)

Nobody had ever seen anything like it.

Kids asked where I got it and wouldn't believe me when I said Robert Hall. I had to show them the label.

After a post-graduate tour of Europe, I went back to teach a year at Canterbury. That spring of 1963, I found a white suit in a church rummage store on the village green in New Milford.

I wore it to dinner a couple of times. Nobody had ever seen anything like that, either.

Nike Deal

Celebrating ZYZZYVA's 25th tomorrow night at the JCC, should be fun.

Meanwhile, the editor ventures further into the storm. [click on image to enlarge]

He is willing to try anything short of compromising the ZYZZYVA brand to get through the rainy day of the Great Recession.

How about a Nike deal?

A promotion with Aquascutum?

NB: He's wearing allegedly waterproof (paint-stained) New Balance walkers in a style that has unfortunately been discontinued.

Halloween Narrative

Last Saturday afternoon, in the Pet Cemetery underneath the approach [click on images to enlarge]
to the Golden Gate Bridge, some young people had gathered as if to party. But
they had a larger purpose: dividing themselves into groups they strove to devise narratives
to tell each other in the gloaming.

It was a delightful interlude—who would have thought that storytelling would be such a fun party game—as I headed up the hill toward home through the militarily precise cemetery in the Presidio.

Now They Tell Me

It's easy to publish a litmag, just click here.

I especially like the "rewards" available to litmag publishers "and editors," especially the "inadvertent" ones:

Publishing literary journals is an art. As publishers and editors, they have the potential to change peoples way of thinking, bring interesting viewpoints to their audience, inadvertently launch new writers, meet fascinating people in the literary world, and so much more.