Weekend Edition

They don't pay me enough to blog on the weekend, but I had to come in to the office anyway to do the rough ad layout, so I might as well post something.

Esp. since I'm enjoying the yoga of blogging, the daily practice, as the poets would have it.

It reminds me of my first answering machine.

Before there was a machine, in the early seventies, there was your "service." This was a real person who answered when you didn't pick up and whom you could call at any time to collect your messages. It was extremely humiliating to call in at the end of the day and be told, "You're all clear, Mr. Junker," the implication being that nobody would ever want to call you anyway.

So the machine was esteem-boosting, or, at least, it wasn't so esteem-destroying.

I used to change my message every day. I would try to be clever, of course. When I launched a particularly good one, friends would tell friends. Whole offices would call in.

And hang up without leaving a message.

Sometimes I'd come home at the end of the day and hear nothing but the click of their hang-ups.

At the time, I was teaching at a sleazy prep school and going to USF to get my master's in private school administration. (I wanted to be a headmaster.) There was an on-campus litmag running a fiction contest. Reader, I entered and won, with a story modeled on Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." Mine was called "The Answering Machine Artist."

[Here's a zyzzyva for Technorati to find; hopefully this time without my having to ping them.]

Islamo-correctness

The Winter issue, for which we'll try a rough layout today, does not really deserve the buzz that it's all-sex-all-the-time.

For example, one story, a first-time-in-print, concerns a hapless young man, a naif in the tradition of Candide, who discovers he can memorize books just by touching them. Among the books he memorizes is the Koran. I will not give away any more than that, but I will say that this story, albeit essentially comic, is deeply respectful of Islam and of what it means to be a Hafiz, that is, someone who has memorized the Koran. It is also a metaphor of America's innocent ignorance, and of its hapless attempts to interact with a complex and very different culture.

There are days when I would be proud to be hit by a fatwah, but this is not one of them.

The Rat

We close for ads next week. Most of our advertisers are regulars—faithful supporters—but I'm always on the lookout for new prospects.

Yesterday, on my way back to the office from Green Apple Books & Music, a loyal advertiser, I checked out a nearby French bistro. A sandwich board on the sidewalk touted their burger and their grilled chicken sandwich.

I took a table on the patio, which was otherwise empty, because, I thought, 1) it was early and 2) it was a bit chilly.

I knew I should order the grilled chicken entree (not just the sandwich) to really test the kitchen, but since the menu warned that grilling takes 15 minutes, I went with the burger.

It came out immediately, the interior still refrigerated. But it wasn’t bad. The frites were bad, which was good, because I shouldn’t eat them. The salad languished.

The owner came out to ask how things were going, and, reassured, went back inside. I looked over at the lovely, tiled fountain-pool in the corner, and saw a large, dead rat.

I finished my lunch, mentioned the rat to the owner, accepted his apology, and decided to look elsewhere for advertising support.

Post-transgressive Sex

Our proofreader, Kathi, noticed that there’s a lot of sex in the Winter issue, which we’ll send to the printer Oct. 9th.

I’m glad she noticed. I’ve felt for a while that there hasn’t been enough whatever-it-is-that-constitutes-sexual-stuff in recent issues. I don’t know why.

Ten or twenty years ago, “transgressive” was the rage. There were tremendous prejudices and taboos to be broken down. But the great days of Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait with a bullwhip up his ass, for example, seem long gone. (An outraged NEA subsequently required that applicants promise not to publish anything “obscene.” I had no problem with that, because I felt that whatever I published was, by definition, not obscene, but art.)

So what’s up with the new issue, which is, apparently, all about sex?

First of all, I don’t do theme issues. I don’t put out a call for specific material, primarily because it’s simply too hard to get good stuff on command, my honorarium, my prestige, and my circulation all being so modest. ("Themes" always beg to be interpreted loosely; if you were an editor, wouldn't you include a piece that was interesting, even if it only tangentially touched on the theme? What is a "theme," anyway?)

As a litmag editor, blessed with a copious slush pile, I feel I should be a neutral observer and respond to whatever I’m sent. I also feel that writers seldom do well “on commission.” The Muse is always capricious. Which is why topical poetry is usually so lame; it takes time for current events to be creatively assimilated.

Wendy Lesser once admitted that “secret” themes had a way of creeping into her journal—an editor makes choices for conscious and for unconscious reasons. Maybe I’m getting nostalgic for the old days. Maybe I’m getting desperate for cheap thrills in my old age.

Maybe love (and death) is all there is.