Accept No Substitute

This blog is on vacation and will resume 3 January 2007. Meanwhile, please accept no substitute:

http://www.zyzzyva.com

http://wow-schools.net/Zyzzyva/

http://zyzzyva.net/

http://lambertmyth8.livejournal.com/108200.html

http://www.myspace.com/zyzzyva

And if you'd like the real thing, in paperback, just send me your address and ask for Winter. This offer good in domestic U.S. only, while supplies last.

The Portents

I woke up from my evening nap and went into the kitchen: the stove read 11:11, the time of the Armistice, one of which we now so desperately need.

I woke again...at 1:11, a transcendence of 9/11, a reset to unity. It is time for peace, good will to all.

The Poet Laureate

I saw the poet laureate of San Francisco the other night, seated in the back of an outbound 38L, the Geary Limited. It wasn't late, maybe 9:30.

I felt like saying, Yo, Laureate, whassup? But we have never met, and I feared that accosting the laureate on public transport might constitute lese majesty.

http://www.speakersforanewamerica.com./jack.html

In any case, he seemed to have fallen asleep. His head drooped forward, his chin on his chest. Amazingly enough, he was still holding the book he'd been reading in front of his nose.

But then he lowered the book and turned the page. He had been reading all along. Why doesn't he wear glasses?

Meanwhile, our holiday offer still stands: a free copy of the chillin' Winter issue; just tell us where to send it, using the e-mail link on the right. Offer good only in domestic U.S., while supplies last.

The Decline of Poets

Our holiday offer still stands: a free copy of the allegedly all-sex Winter issue; just tell us where to send it. (Offer good only in domestic U.S., while supplies last.)

Meanwhile, Edward R. Tufte's "Envisioning Information" (1990) is another classic I've finally caught up with. This fascinating book "celebrates escape from flatland, rendering several hundred superb displays of complex data." My favs:

1: Galileo showing what he saw through his telescope: "stars" in a line with Jupiter.

On the first night:

. . o .

the next night:

o . . .

and then:

.. o

2. A chart of all the debris in space—7,000 pieces back then, doubling every five years, including "operating and dead satelites, explosion fragments from rocket engines, garbage bags and frozen sewage dumped by astronauts, shrapnel fron antisatellite weapons tests, 34 nuclear reactors and their fuel cores, an escaped wrench and a toothbrush," each of which the military tracks in order "to differentiate between debris and missile attacks."

3. Maps showing the birthplace of 10,086 (!) Chinese poets, starting with the Tang. From the Ming to the Ching, the total number of poets declined 30% .

The End of Innocence

We won't be joining a certain "holiday literacy initiative" called Books for Botox, which rewards the donation of five "new (or nearly new) books...appropriate for K-8th grade" with "a stocking... of skin-care products...and, of course, Botox treatments!"

But we're still eager to give you a free copy of the allegedly all-sex Winter issue of ZYZZYVA, if you send in your address using the button on the right (offer good only in domestic U.S., while supplies last).

Meanwhile:

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=14914267&blogID=205183833&indicate=1

Overage

How can we offer you a free copy of ZYZZYVA, no charge, no obligation, if you just e-mail me your address, using the button at the right? (This offer good in domestic U.S. only, while supplies last.)

The technical answer is "overage": our printer reserves the right to print 10% over or under our order. Taking no chances, they always produce a few more, usually 5-7% more, than we order. And since we can't take the chance of shorting our subscribers or distributors, we always order 10% more than we actually need.

This "overage" gives us copies to play with. During the summer, we send freebies to the writers' workshops that advertise. During the holiday season, we like to give presents.

Of couse, we hope to inspire a few subscriptions, but in any case we have to free up our warehouse.

Top Ten Literary Advances since 1985

10. creative-writing classes encouraged en masse to get the experience of submitting

9. chain store magazine racks where ZYZZYVA can be displayed spine-out in the very lowest right-hand corner

8. website disclosure of guidelines enables writers to submit without risk of intimacy

7. glamour of being a litmag publisher lures rich people into starting ones of their own (Glimmer Train, Zoetrope, Tin House)

6. hypertext fades, e-zines fade, slams fade, blogs rule

5. digital printing makes four-color covers affordable even for poor litmags

4. desktop publishing makes sending galleys to writers a cinch

3. spell-check saves editors from letting so many typose slip by

2. if you've read this far and want a free copy of zyzzyva, just e-mail me your address, using the button to the right of this post. no charge, no obligation. this offer good in domestic U.S. while supplies last

1. no-lick envelopes (because tongue-sealing the slush pile of non-clasp return envelopes is over the long haul a bit icky)

Insatiability

Last week I bought a poem from a distinguished writer I had not published before. By return mail he sent back his signed contract and his text on a CD. Yesterday he submitted three more poems.

I returned them, explaining that we have to let other poets have a chance, too.

I mention this not because this writer is particularly pathetic in his insatiability (he's not), but because we all want the perfect editor, the editor who accepts everything, who can never get enough of our work.

I once had one, Robert Hatch, the gruff old managing editor of The Nation. For about a year, when I was just starting out, about once a month, I would drop off a new piece, in person, at the reception desk, because I didn't trust the mails (and I liked getting out of my lonely railroad flat and going to an office). He bought them all, for $35 each, if I remember correctly. He never did anything to them, just ran them. And, after a few months, he even suggested subjects I might tackle.

I was very lucky. We should all have a Hatch through which to enter our careers, someone to speak to who hears us.

Dey, izadey, izasloa dey

[30 blogs now link here; please add yours.]

In the interest of public service, here's a pitch I received last week:

Howard,

I'm enjoying your blog. How in the world do you find the time?!

I have an item for you.

For about a year we've been publishing a weekly e-mail blast called the San Francisco Bay Area Literary Arts Newsletter. It's probably the most comprehensive guide to Bay Area Literary Events.

Subscription is free. Listing events is free.

Well, it's really taken off. There are now thousands of subscribers. I suspect most of them are hardcore book enthusiasts, and we're getting lots of nice notes about how people met their favorite authors because they found out about the event in the newsletter.

I bet your readers would find the newsletter useful. Anyone can sign up for free via our web site:

http://www.somalit.com/

Perhaps it's worth mentioning on your blog when you have a slow day. ;-)

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Kemble Scott
Editor
SF Bay Area Literary Arts Newsletter
SoMa Literary Review
www.somalit.com
San Francisco
Author of the new novel SoMa, coming in February 2007 from Kensington Books

Literary Gift Suggestions

Looking for something more imaginative than a litmag subscription to give that certain someone? We have something for every pocketbook and credit card:

something to wear:

http://www.zyzzyva.org/zshirt.htm

something to hang on the wall:

http://www.zyzzyva.org/fineart.htm

something really really inexpensive:

http://www.zyzzyva.org/freesamplelatest.htm

something socially beneficial:

http://www.zyzzyva.org/contribution.htm

Pay per Blog

Speaking of the allegedly all-sex Winter issue, the highlight, per usual, is the Editor's Note, which contains the point zero known as My First Blog, written a few weeks before I realized I could actually start a real one and when I thought what you were supposed to do in a literary blog was show off how many books you'd read:

My blog, which is what you're now reading, has many of the virtues of convenience-it's easy to hold, relatively infrequent. It contains no pixels, no punditry. It's linked to my most recent finds, and to some advertisers, whose pitches you can scroll past, though I hope you patronize them.

Of course, I let you know what I've been reading, trying hard not to be oppressive, but babbling on, nonetheless: Chernow's Rockefeller (what a philanthropist!!!); Thomas Babington Macaulay (another treasure come upon at long last; I'm reminded of the great Harvard classicist who had never been to Greece-when he retired, his grateful students gave him a trip to Athens; he arrived at the base of the Acropolis, turned around, and went home: "What if it were not as beautiful as I had imagined." Actually, there's never been any danger of that. I wept when I walked through the Propylae-of course that was long ago, in a January, before the tourist-hordes had been invented); Churchill's History of the English-Speaking People (to rev up for Macaulay's From the Accession of James the Second);

Nathan Englander (whatever happened to him?); Amos Oz (his recent memoir, very moving, a capsule history of Israel); Yeats's Autobiography (mucho autoerotico); Freud (that dude could write); Barbarians at the Gate-ancient tale of the leveraged buyout of a cookie&cigarette company now reads like a noir thriller; F.X. Toole's posthumous novel, Pound for Pound, a TKO; Tony Judt's Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (the geopolitical story of my life-I didn't get to China until last year); Andrew Holleran's Grief (the sixth stage: surviving); Helen Vendler's Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery; Lisa Randall's Warped Passages (I'm short string theory); Virgil Thomson's The Art of Music (should be required in every M.F.A. program); and so on.

And I mention what's been shaking domestically: Over the summer, Rozanne took her father to see his grandfather's farm in Norway; Madison volunteered at an orphanage in Nairobi; I stayed home to feed the bunny and read books (see above). For a complete list of books read, skimmed, or glimpsed, click here.

I also make several pleas for philanthropic support. Yadda yadda.

And an entreaty for word of mouth, by which I mean: If you can't send a few bucks, at least, please, plug ZYZZYVA in your own blog.

[If you've read this far, I'll renew the deal offered in yesterday's post.]

Winer is icumen

The new, allegedly all-sex Winter issue has just arrived in the mail, both at the ZYZZYVA PO Box and at the editor's home, something that has never happened simultaneously before, our home delivery being so notoriously slow.

To mark this festive occasion I will send a free copy to anyone who e-mails me an address before the close of business today (you can get one for yourself, or give one to a friend).

This offer void where prohibited by law and good only while supplies last.

Corporate Autobiography

I've known Richard Kostelanetz since the late sixties in New York, when he was just beginning his extraordinary career as anthologist and interpreter of what it still made sense to call the avant-garde. I recently saw his memoir, Soho: The Rise and Fall of an Artists' Colony, on the USF Library's new-books shelf and read it with great pleasure. I e-mailed him to say how much I enjoyed it.

I also wrote a Letter to the Editor of Small Press Review about Richard's review of a couple of memoirs; I thought he talked more about himself than about the books he was supposed to be reviewing. My letter appears in the current issue.

Richard registered his displeasure by e-mail: "Why do you knock my review of autobiograpies in the same publication in which my favorable review of yours appeared? Why don't you have more respect for people respectful of you?"

It is true, he had said some kind things about the Corporate Autobiography:

A MODERATELY EXEMPLARY LIFE

Howard Junker: ZYZZYVA 59/60: The Corporate Autobiography, 208 pp., $11.00
by Richard Kostelanetz

For those of us who care about literary magazines, Howard Junker’s “Corporate Autobiography,” ostensibly about his magazine ZYZZYVA, essentially about himself, can stand as a classic memoir about running a nonacademic literary journal mostly by oneself. The value of the book is his insistence upon talking about everything—hustling private donors, selecting a board of directors, picking manuscripts, mailing issues, getting grants, satisfying one’s wife and family, etc. He reprints remarks by former junior editors (one of whom correctly characterizes his boss’s personality as combining modesty with arrogance), as well as his angry letters to others, including a request to the University of Iowa writing program for payments for material photocopied from his pages. Elsewhere: “Nobody in the Bay Area, except [Dana] Gioia, still yearns for the smoky, boozy, dicta-spouting huddles of the Partisan Review crowd.” If only for its thoroughness (what will Junker talk about next?), I found it compelling reading. Though Junker repeatedly laments his magazine’s limited presence in contemporary writing, he never examines the results of his self-imposed West Coast limitation. Sympathetic though most of us are to the claims of previously “under-represented” literary constituencies, our respect for publications that needlessly limit themselves are limited....

http://www.zyzzyva.org/fw00.htm

Top Ten, Nob Hill, early Dec.

Saturday morning, my wife and I drove down to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Then I walked back home (an urban hike) via California St.:

1o. The big, shapely black rock nestled in luxurious greensward, in front of the BofA Building; it looks better and better to me, esp. as the component chunks show begin to show cracks and fissures.

9. A dozen flimsy folding beds being stored beside the dumpsters in the basement garage of the Ritz-Carlton.

8. A bronze Mercury, seated, on a mini-terrace outside the University Club's squash courts (surprisingly empty for a Saturday morning)—each hand grasping (real) faded roses.

7. A sign announcing the Red Door Cafe's first "Pajama Day" (sorry, it was held yesterday).

6. On the sidewalk, a discarded label for Pemmican brand Teriyaki Beef Jerky; pemmican used to be a major trade item in the early days of the fur trade in the Red River Valley, where I spent Thanksgiving.

5. On another sidewalk, a copy of Armi Maupin's Further Tales of the City, for sale on a sidewalk blankey, asking price $.50 (available on Amazon for $.01, plus shipping, of course).

4. The "jungle in the city" of the Plant Warehouse, where you can meander along narrow passageways among giant ferns and and fronds and a 12-foot, $899 palm.

3. A woman walking her bike who admitted that the real reason she was wearing one red sock and one green sock was that laundry day was overdue, but that she hoped some observers might feel the look was festive.

2. The Pacific-Union Club's real, live, seasonally appropriate, permanently-in-the-ground holly bush with sparkling red berries, just inside its gate.

1. At Grace Cathedral, the procession of 20 about-to-ordained deacons and priests (and their entourages carrying their parish banners), among them a portly, white-bearded Horace (a distant relative) Greeley, of St. Bede's in Palo Alto, by day a systems engineer at Stanford.

http://www.moonwalkinc.com/news/2006/03/20/index.html

Get me Rewrite

Lately, I've been encouraging Kristin and Mattie, our editorial assistants, to compare accepted manuscripts with their final "edited" versions to get a sense of the possibilities.

This week, I sustained my own dose of editorial intervention at the hands of SF Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik, who gets a lot of her material from her readers, who send in their quips, observations, celebrity sightings....

Here's what I e-mailed her on Tuesday:

a post office poster titled "Create Memories With Mail" offers stamps for a variety of holy days, including Christmas, Eid, Hannukah [sic], Kwanzaa, and, for the truly secular, a stamp with snowflakes, as well as stamps for "Breast Cancer Research" and "Stop Family Violence." i'm planning to celebrate all of them, with the possible exception of the snowflakes.

Here's what she printed in yesterday's column:

Meanwhile, Howard Junker noticed a post office "Create Memories With Mail" poster, offering stamps for Christmas, Eid, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, snowflakes and also "Breast Cancer Research" and "Stop Family Violence." Oh look, Uncle and Auntie have sent a memories card about the time she beaned him with a rolling pin. Those were the days.