This Same Flower

this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.

[click on image to enlarge]

Satisfaction, revisited

It's been a couple years since my debut on YouTube.

Which is closing in on its 1,000th view.

I myself haven't contributed many of those views lately, although I was an avid viewer early on, while trying to determine if I had hopelessly embarrassed myself and perhaps even jeopardized my future as a sportscaster.

Thus, I hadn't realized how valiant a defense of me my nephew Joseph, who's off to college in the fall, had mounted when nasty things were being said about me by a certain other viewer.

In any case, I am no longer Number One amongst zyzzyva videos and therefore will retire mine when it reaches 1,000; so act now.

Distinguished Fiction Writer

I've always wondered why the only people allowed to teach creative writing are writers.

I think programs would be well advised to hire an occasional editor.

An editor knows how to "work with" a writer; from what I gather, workshops focus on what doesn't work and don't help much in going forward with a script, with identifying what needs to be done. And how that might be accomplished.

So, when I saw that NYU was soliciting applications for a Distinguished Fiction Writer in Residence, I applied.

Unfortunately, I was beaten out by Jonathan Lethem.

Who, in the mid-eighties when he worked at Moe's Books in Berkeley, used to send me stories. I asked him to shorten one, which he did, but I failed to buy it.

Meanwhile, NYU has hired Zadie Smith as Professor of Creative Writing.

Tom Ingalls

In the beginning, our designer, Tom Ingalls, gave ZYZZYVA a classic look that, with minimal tweaking, has held up well.

His modular format made it easy to paste up (or plug in) texts and images. In fact, doing the layout is the fun moment of every issue.

It's a puzzle with rules you make up as you go along, the basic one being to fill up all the pages—it's amazing how some litmags leave a few blank pages because they can't seem to find enough stuff to "make it come out even."

Tom had worked for Rolling Stone in the day. He made his mark with a series of grill books and his (golf) Journal for the Shivas Irons Society. He teaches at CCA and has recently developed a niche creating identities for wineries.

Here at ZYZZYVA, I like to pretend that sequence and juxtaposition and variety and balance....matter, but I don't really think anyone ever reads a litmag in order, from front to back, the way most people read a book.

I read some magazines, like The Economist, back to front, because I'm more interested in the culture sections than I am in British politics.

I read The New Yorker (first time through) hopping from cartoon to cartoon.

Our next issue celebrates our 25th year with a selection of all-time favs. I wasn't sure how to arrange these texts.

Alphabetically seemed a reasonable option.

So, as it turns out, the first one deals with AIDS....and the last with a mythic L.A.

And there's a nice mix of long and short, tough and comic. And a crescendo and...

Everything seemed to fall into place.

Casting the I Ching couldn't have been more effective.

Roman readings

Lucian, in "The Way to Write History," circa 165 A.D., suggests that "...your own observations will show you just those [mistakes] which a constant attendance at authors' readings has impressed on me; you have only to keep your ears open at every opportunity."

A footnote [in Gateway to the Great Books] goes on about the readings Lucian might have had in mind:

These were very common in Roman Imperial times, for purposes of advertisement, of eliciting criticism, etc. "The audience at recitations may be compared with the modern literary reviews, discharging the functions of a preventive and emendatory, not merely of a correctional tribunal. Before publication a work might thus be known to more hearers than it would now find readers." Mayor, Juvenal, iii, 9.

Singing in Sign

Perhaps since the late Pina Bausch was a choreographer, her interpretatation of Gershwin's "The Man I love" should be considered as Dancing with ASL.

I encourage you to stick around for the second act of this video.

Tiziano Terzani

This lovely signage across the street from our favorite margarita & enchiladas place reminded me of Tiziano Terzani, the Italian journalist I met while he was studying at Columbia in 1969.

I would have liked to have seen more of him but I left for Stanford that August.

In 2003, I said hello when he gave a reading at Stacey's for his book against the Iraq war. He seemed to have entered what I took to be a Himalayan phase—long white hair and beard, white kurta....

I didn't realize he was battling cancer.

And would soon write, with his son, Folco, a huge bestseller about his acceptance of death, The End is My Beginning.

There's a good interview with Folco in English and a better one in Italian, which is slow but offers photos that give a good idea of how charismatic Tiziano was.

Having just come back from retirement, I, too, in my own uncharismatic way, feel I have learned to accept death. I feel like a soccer player going on after the 90th minute—the referee has allowed extra "stoppage" time (to make up for all the interruptions and delays), although he hasn't specified an exact amount.

So I will play on. I know who's going to win, but I haven't lost yet.