Nellie King Solomon

Nellie King Solomon was on the cover of Spring '05 , which also contained a memoir by her mother.

On Friday, Nellie e-mailed an update :

You were mentioned Wednesday in my world. Your ears must have been burning: A co-teacher recognized me from the cover of ZYZZYVA in our shared faculty office at Stanford, where I am now teaching experimental painting, as a fall-out/ or fall-up/ from you. David Hannah asked me to propose this course last year as a workshop; now Enrique Chagoya has requested that it be a full-quarter course, maybe more next year.

All this is a result of David seeing my Brian Gross show, which came after Brian asked me to be part of his stable as he sat with a copy of ZYZZYVA on his desk, reading about my mom and seeing the pic of me and my painting on the cover. bla bla...but you get it. You did your part as a key link in that chain reaction to now. Thank you!

Also huge hello from my mom! I seem to have I scored her a solo show at SFMOMA next year through Henry Urbach, a sweet guy I really think you'd like if you don't already know him, new curator of design .

[Editor's Note: Nellie's father, architect Daniel Solomon, appeared in ZYZZYVA Winter '86.]

Rosenblum's Alternatives

The Times obituary late last year of art historian and curator Robert Rosenblum prompted me to check out his revisionist views.

He had a knack for pointing to startling images by artists who have not remained in the canonical mix:
Vasily Vereshchagin
James Ward
Thomas Jones
Antoine Wiertz
Karl Briullov
Philipp Jakob de Loutherbourg.

And for offering an alternative, non-Parisian route from Caspar David Friedrich to Mark Rothko.

And he's terrific on Ingres.

Reader's Report

We were ten strangers, heading home, all the way in the back on the 38L, Geary Limited:

three sleeping (one holding two big paperback textbooks)

one texting

five reading--four of them wearing iPods, including one reading something about Africa and one reading Welcome to the Monkey House.

Rest in peace, Kurt Vonnegut.

Pubwiki

The redoubtable Tom Christensen is constructing a wiki about book publishing.

It is still in the pre-contribution stage, but among his first entries is a take on single-sentence paragraphs.

Then there is the single-sentence CHAPTER! in As I Lay Dying.

And the one-word telegram sent home by General Napier to announce his capture of Sind: "Peccavi," which, in Latin, means: I have sinned.

(Apparently, "Peccavi" was actually a cartoon caption in Punch, although many of us, including William Safire, have always believed it really was a telegram. And if it wasn't, it should have been.)

YouTube litmags

YouTube currently offers 665 items under "literary magazine," although after a couple dozen the definition gets a bit vague. My favs:

the old school (Everygreen Review)

the new generation (After literary magazine club...)

A ZYZZYVA video--the editor prancing around the office doing "Satisfaction" at Altamont--is forthcoming.

The Rome Prize

Caveh Zahedi, husband of ZYZZYVA managing editor Amanda Field, has won a Rome Prize for next year; his project: to develop a screenplay based on James Joyce's Ulysses. Caveh and Mandy will be in residence at the American Academy starting in September.

In all fairness, it should be mentioned that ZYZZYVA editor Howard Junker made a cameo appearance in Zahedi's most recent film, I am a Sex Addict.

Neo-Nigerian

From: "Pankaj Kurulkar" (who it turns out can be googled, scroll down: pankaj kurulkar)
To: editor@zyzzyva.org
Subject: looking for magazine

Hi,
This is Pankaj Kurulkar from Mumbai (India). I am looking for a Publisher who can publish my writing work in the magazine. I am very well known writer in Marathi and a businessman. For more details please visit my personal website www.pankajkurulkar.com From my English short stories I have uploaded two stories on my website. You can go thru these stories to know more about my writing work. Also attaching a brief synopsis for your reference.

I have 5 short story books to my credit, one novel is published and now started writing in English too. The published books are
1) RAT RACE
2) DIARY
3) SAKI BAR & RESTAURANT
4) TAMASO MA
5) ANADI ANANT
6) JUNGLE - (Novel)

The books have won five various critics awards.
1) 'DIARY' : Maharashtra Shasan award, best short story writer for the year 1996 in Marathi.
2) 'DIARY' : S.D. Panwalkar award from Sangli in the year 1997.
3) 'SAKI BAR & RESTAURANT' : S.D. Panwalkar award from Sangli in the year 2000.
4) 'SAKI BAR & RESTAURANT' : Rajendra Banhatt award by Pune Marathi Granthalaya in the year 2001.
5) Nashik Sarvajanik Vachanalaya award in the year 2003.

Looking for a favourable reply from your side.

Regards,
Pankaj Kurulkar

Inventory

So, what kind of reading material does a prominent litblogger have on his shelves, desk, and floor: K. Silem Mohammad, a poet who teaches at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, reveals his current inventory.

We don't regret having added to his clutter.

In fact, we still have a few extras of Spring 2007; if you'd like a comp copy of your own--or know someone else who would--just let us know.

Great Litmag Editors, continued

Andre Gide helped found La Nouvelle Revue Francaise in 1909, and three years later turned down what would prove to be part of Marcel Proust's extraordinary new novel.

Gide hadn't had any contact with Proust since 1892, and remembered the young man as a flibbertigibbet.

Gide later admitted his grievous mistake, and parts of A la recherche did appear in the NRF.

Atwitter

Language poetry has come to seem so oldtech; if you are not adverse to found poetry, you may enjoy the more savy, though pinko-inspired Twitterverse.

PS: I wish to acknowledge that Robert Peake blogged on Twitter on April 11 under the rubric of "Poetry 2.0"; but I do not think he was aware of Twitterverse itself; I came upon it by a devious route: checking out Blogspot's one-thousandth Blogs of Note for September 2006 (to see if we had made it) and then coming upon the Twitter Blog and then...and why don't we let Helen Vendler do the heavy lifting on this one.

PPS: What I like most about Twitterverse is that it's eternally morphing as our language courses through the Blogospot. Endlessly rocking, I meant to say: check out line 16.

Top Ten Posts

To facilitate an internal review of this six-month-old blog, we printed out each post. Although we lacked the heart to read many of them, we did pick our Top Ten Posts:

10. October 20, 2006

9. December 13, 2006

8. December 19, 2006

7. January 22, 2007

6. November 28, 2006

5. February 14, 2007

4. March 28, 2007

3. February 19, 2007

2. September 27, 2006

1. January 23, 2007

Drabble

I just bought a drabble.

It's part of an omnibus of less than long stories that includes a nanofiction, a microfiction, a flash fiction, and a sudden fiction.

A drabble has exactly one hundred words.

I counted them using Check Spelling.

The others have specific lengths of their own--55, 250, 250-750, und so weiter.

I think Harold Brodkey would have been not amused by drabbles. I've been reading this largely forgotten eccentric lately. See also his very very long 1973 short story "Innocence," which has not worn well, but is still a tour de force regarding a Harvard boy's relentless effort to make, that is, to enable, an incredible Radcliffe girl to come.

In his 1990 Afterword to a collection of Stanley Elkin's stories, Brodkey dilates on "meaning and length" in short fiction: "The matter of length is probably the most important element in the genre technically, and in such important other ways as the length of time it takes to read it and the length of time it takes to write it and then the amount of actual time it purports to represent."

And then: "Veni, vidi, vici is showy fun that has stayed amusing for two thousand years in its concision, but it is not of the same order of meaning as ripeness is all, although it uses the same number of words."

One final quickie from Brodkey, who noticed in reassessing O'Hara that The New Yorker had published him when he was 23, had published Cheever when he was 22, and Updike when he was also 22.

E.A.

Hi, my name is Howard, and I'm an editor.

I started the way everybody starts: noticing tipos. I didn't like do it every day. I didn't think it would lead anywhere.

Before long...I was into the subjunctive.

Now I reject stuff every day.

Even manuscripts I buy I mess with.

For a while, I thought joining the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses might help, but they're enablers, feeble, but nonetheless.

When I fell into a cereal comma, I knew I'd reached the end of line.

Now I am ready to accept the higher power of Web 2.0. I sincerely believe we are all editors, there are no editors.

I vow to to post on this blog all the stories, poems, and essays I have turned down over the years.

I ask for your help and your prayers.

One word at a time.

Editor's Note

My wife was kind enough to notice that the Spring issue lacks an Editor's Note.

I asked if she had read the table of contents, and she said, not yet; it explains that the Editor's Note has transmigrated to the blogosphere.

We needed more room on the masthead to acknowledge our donors (thank you).

Anyway, it's much more fun to turn out a daily "note, " eighty during the life span of each issue, not just one.

I wish blogging were still state-of-the-art, but, like Zeno's Paradox in Reverse, technology keeps moving on, just a little beyond my grasp.

available online

The Spring issue is now available online. All the texts, some complete, some truncated.

I mean, why not?

Those who value the real deal, the heft and feel of the object itself, replete with b&w works on paper, in a certain mysterious, yet significant sequence, with a veritable community bulletin board's worth of ads, and a masthead listing all our donors...have what they have, know what they know.

At least I hope our subscribers and single-copy purchasers don't feel shortchanged.

Maybe a gawker or two will subscribe.

Meanwhile, if you'd like me to send someone a freebie, just mention their address. We have a few extras. (If you need one, mention yours.)

Spring break

This blog is on vacation until Tuesday, 10 April.

BFD

Big f.....g deal?

No, no, no, I would never be so vulgar: Best Front Design is my favorite newsite, altho, personally, I don't think that design, big or not, is going to save newspapers.

I don't want a visual thrill when I pick up a newspaper. I want to read some interesting texts (backgrounders, human interest, trends) and, in my almost totally worthless local rag, work the chess puzzle, which is usually so easy even I can get it.

Also, I need someplace to write a Letter to the Editor.

But, seriously, I like to see someone mashup all those front pages trying so hard to...do what? communicate? sell papers? make a splash? get picked by BFD???

Fooled

Yesterday, Technorati revealed that ZYZZYVA had been mentioned in a blog called WhimsyLand: "Howard Junker sent me a letter soliciting work for ZYZZYVA , even though I don't live on the West Coast."

I don't know where Whimsyland's author "jbahr" lives, I don't think I know his or her stuff, and, in any case, I never solicit work from poets.

Fortunately, as I examined this extraordinary statement more closely, I realized that it had been posted on Sunday, April 1.

Lorem Ipsum

Last week, Jessalyn Wakefield submitted a manuscript with a cover letter in what seemed to be Latin, although I couldn't make much sense out of it.

(I had two years of Latin in high school--a requirement then for any decent college, the equivalent of today's community service.)

Her text went: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit...."

I e-mailed her, asking for a translation, and she replied: "Lorem Ipsum is a traditional dummy text used by printers. I read that you don't read cover letters, and I am a printer. I thought it would probably work itself out."