MyFacebook

In my relentless pursuit of communication excellence, I have set up an account on Facebook, which has recently opened up to adults and businesses, as well as sexual predators.

So far, I have three friends: two relatives who live in North Dakota and one guy who came to dinner Saturday and showed off his iPhone, a pretty cool device, which I will have to wait several years before acquiring.

The best thing about Facebook so far is that I could wish a person I know who'll be 16 next week Happy Birthday without having to send a card (or a present, which I had actually stopped doing when it became apparent that what I thought would be fun for him actually wasn't).

Also, I gave my two relatives in North Dakota "gifts," which are sort of like decals you e-stick on their "walls." I gave one a horse, since she's studying to be a vet, and I gave the other a birthday cake, since it was his birthday a couple days ago.

Even better was getting in touch with a nephew, whose parents and I aren't in touch anymore, and learning that he's starting at the University of Delaware in late August and can't wait.

So it's all good. I'm hoping that my daughter won't think I'm spying on her. She has like a million friends, which anybody, including me, can see, but her profile, etc. is closed.

That's how I could find my two relatives in North Dakota, and my nephew in Delaware (who didn't seem to want to be a friend), and how I knew how to message them in such a cool way in the first place.

If you want to be my friend, there's still room on my list.

Day

I made a cameo appearance in Caveh Zahedi's much-acclaimed I Am a Sex Addict, playing a doctor examing a ho.

In Caveh's new film, working title "Day," I play a suave but obnoxious editor of a literary magazine.

The film re-enacts a day in the life of Caveh and his wife, Amanda, who has been the managing editor of ZYZZYVA for the past six years.

Caveh had two cameras follow him and Amanda through a day, then had the "script" transcribed.

Yesterday, we finished up my part: driving to lunch, having lunch....

le fontane di Julius Kahn

Embedded Poetry

It's all very well for a developer to have the name of a Cavalier poet inscribed on an I-beam.
But a "Poetry/Sculpture Garden" (2000), words by Robert Hass, sculptural concept by Paul Kos, seems totally bogus, and a waste of money. It's in back of the popular restaurant Town Hall, 342 Howard (official address: 199 Fremont). Nature is already taking its toll.

Texting

In theory, in as much as texting is English as a second language, it's kind of cute. In practice, when kids whale away with their thumbs, it's awesome.

As today's version of Writing 24/7, well, let's not go there.

On June 26, texting may have led to the auto-accident death of five young women; so reports this week's People.

The story is pegged, however, on a 19-year-old Colorado dude who once texted 7,000 in one month and, once, when he was texting-and-driving, killed a 63-year-old bicyclist.

He was sentenced to ten days in jail, a $3,000 fine, three months' house arrest, no cell phone or driving for an indeterminate time, and 300 hours of community service. He's now something of a spokesperson for "If you must text, don't drive," which is why People, always trying to be positive, if possible, made him the focus of its story.

Only the state of Washington has a law against texting while driving.

Apres Proust

Can it be ten years now that we all read Proust as a summer self-help project?

Does anyone anymore?

It's already late this summer, I know, but I've finally found a project: Greek drama—all the tragedies that have survived (34) and I don't know how many of the comedies (15) will hold my interest.

So far I've done Aeschylus (7).

The Ted Hughes minimalist Oresteia is tremendous, but The Persians knocked me out: told from their point of view, set in their hometown; a messenger brings news about the terrible defeat at Salamis...

What an extraordinary leap of the imagination.

Actually, I'm now into Sophocles. I'll just mention that Ajax strikes me as an extraordinary study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Pick the Cover

You haven't even read the Fall issue yet, which is understandable since it hasn't rolled out of the printer's yet, while we've already picked our Winter cover.

It's an image by Deborah Oropallo, who designed our Winter '92 cover.

The new image is from a series of portraits called "Guise," which she did at Gallery 16 (click on "Editions"), working with printer Griff Williams. The series is on view at the de Young until Sept. 16.

You are invited to guess (not vote, since this is not a democracy) which one we've chosen.

My Bad, Part II: Perspective

continued from yesterday's post

In response to Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, Ruskin wrote some nasty things, including that he had “...never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face."

Whistler took him to court and... won damages of a farthing.

Of course, Ruskin was wrong about the painting and about Whistler's place in the history of art, but wasn't he entitled to his opinion, no matter how he expressed it?

Henry James, troubled by the trial, wrote at length about it and confessed "to thinking it hard to decide what Mr. Whistler ought properly to have done, while—putting aside the degree of one's appreciation of his works—I quite understand his resentment. Mr. Ruskin's language quite transgresses the decencies of criticism, and he has been laying about him for some years past with such promiscuous violence that it gratifies one's sense of justice to see him brought up as a disorderly character. On the other hand, he is a chartered libertine—he has possessed himself by prescription of the function of a general scold. His literary bad manners are recognized, and many of his contemporaries have suffered from them without complaining. It would very possibly, therefore, have been much wiser on Mr. Whistler's part to feign indifference. Unfortunately, Mr. Whistler's productions are so very eccentric and imperfect [. . .] that his critic's denunciation could by no means fall to the ground of itself." [Painter's Eye, 173-74]

Then again, Mark Antony had Cicero beheaded and his "writing hand" cut off and exhibited at the Rostra (the speaker's forum). There Antony's wife pulled Cicero's tongue out and stabbed it again and again with a knitting needle. Sic semper....

And today there are many writers and journalists and editors in prison, being tortured... disappeared... intimidated... assassinated. Please support Amnesty International.

My Bad, Part I: An Unfortunate Incident

It's bad enough to be called a "stodgy hermit" and a "cantankerous eccentric," esp. by people I've never met, as I was last week, although people who know me use even nastier terms.

It's worse to be drenched by a beer thrown by a writer of no literary merit.

It happened last week and was reported by the Chronicle's gossip columnist, to whom I have often said harsh things (in the privacy of e-mails); for example, that she is woefully miscast in her job, has an ungainly prose style and a knack for messing up perfectly delightful items I feed her, and so on. In other words, she was not a disinterested party in seeing me attacked. And she did her best to make it seem that the writer of no literary merit was justified in his assault upon my august personage.

It happened in a dive-bar, at a "competitive reading," provocatively called a Literary Death Match, organized by Opium, a fledgling litmag.

I had agreed to be one of three judges, although I routinely decline to judge "contests" because 1) I don't think art is a competition in which there are winners and losers, and 2) I get a chance to express my judgment at ZYZZYVA, let others take a shot. However, in June, the Opium people had asked me to interview Katherine Taylor at Cody's and, what the hell, I'm always eager to help out a fledgling litmag.

I was the judge assigned to assess "literary merit."

The first reader, Stephen Elliott, thought I said in my judge's comment that he was a "writer of no literary merit." Although this is true, I thought I said, in a single sentence, channeling Simon Callow, that the story he read made me laugh a couple of times, but had no literary merit. It was, I thought, a witty one-liner, starting toward praise, then reversing suddenly to absolute dismissal. The audience gasped. (Elliott did not leap up to denounce me.)

The other writer was declared the winner, and Elliott was declared the loser, which he is certainly is.

"Literary merit" is not a term I use on my own, and it is certainly not among the criteria I use to judge a man as a man. A man, I feel, should be able to hold his beer. Should be able to take his lumps. Should exhibit courage in the face of adversity. And so on.

Whether a man has literary merit or not doesn't matter.

Whether a writer has literary merit may not matter, either. In Elliott's case, it doesn't seem to matter much, since he has none, although he has published six books, most recently My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, which his website describes as "an almost all true sexual memoir." On his website, he poses wearing a "wifebeater," ha ha, get the joke (he's not a wifebeater, his girlfriend comes to The City and beats him up). The website also describes Elliott as "a former stripper."

Now 35, an aging Bad Boy, Elliott had a troubled early life: his mother died of MS when he was 13; his father was abusive (and in 2005, posted "bad reviews " of Elliott's books on Amazon... Elliott became a street kid...made six suicide attempts...became a ward of the court......and then, miraculously, got through college...got a master's...got a Stegner...covered the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination process...

Over the years, I have had the chance to reject a number of manuscripts he submitted to ZYZZYVA. And I have had the misfortune to hear him read on a couple of occasions.

He really has no literary merit. He has the merit of having lived, and we value him for the experience he is able to transcribe, but not for the beautiful way he uses language.

As a man, someone who thinks it's cool to throw a beer on a judge, he is also lacking in merit.

When I was walking out of the bar during intermission to catch a breath of fresh air, Elliott felt compelled to toss his beer at me. He did not confront me and say, "Junker, let's you and me settle this out in the alley." He ambushed me. In fact, his feckless aim also drenched one of the new owners of The Booksmith, as well as two (other) innocent bystanders, Marisa and Kaya.

If Elliott had been man enough to throw a punch, I would have been forced to beat him up. I'm glad he didn't, of course.

I was able to restrain myself at the moment, because I was completely taken by surprise. At first, I didn't know why my shirt had become drenched; I wondered if the heavens had opened up. I kept on walking for a couple of steps and then turned around and saw Elliott, transfigured, with a shit-eating grin on his face, his beer-glass hand at his side.

I had already decided that I had to leave, what with a drenched shirt, but that first I ought to tell the organizers—so I walked right past him, told the organizers, and left.

I haven't knocked anyone out since senior year in college, which was 46 years ago, and if I had pummeled Elliott, I might well have hurt my hands on his abs of steel. Apparently, he enjoys getting beaten up, which may have been the fundamental point of his assault on me, and for that reason alone I'm glad I ignored him.

Or maybe he conflated me with his father, who posted abusive reviews of his books on Amazon.

continued tomorrow

Not Forgotten

My favorite workout is to catch a ride with my wife on the way to her office in the Presidio and then walk Crissy Field, surely the most beautiful urban passeggiata in the world, and then up through the military cemetery toward home. The graves are mostly simple slabs stating name, rank, and date of death. Some include home state and date of birth. (This section is being re-aligned.) A very few are more elaborate, polished marble slabs, or "trees" (for the Woodsmen of America), and there's a mini-portrait of a private killed in the Spanish-American War. The most moving: the black flag for the POW/MIAs: YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

Speaking of Reviews

The current issue of ZYZZYVA is reviewed on newpages.com. You have to scroll down a long way to get there, but that's the price we pay for being the last word, and I hope you don't get distracted by the competition.

May I make one correction: I did not tell Pynchon's agent to call him a bad name, I told David Foster Wallace's agent to tell him to get off his ass and stop writing half-baked magazine journalism and start writing decent fiction again. As is so often the case, my diktat went unheeded.

Also, I don't get "Junker’s reaction to foreign incursion, after several infamous softball skirmishes, has been exceptionally Southern...." If the reviewer means that our team clobbered teams fielded by such local rags as Threepenny and McSweeney's, well, that is certainly true.

Happy Endings

Legit book reviewers take a solemn oath not to plug books by their friends, but I feel no compunction in urging you to read Leslie Garis's memoir, House of Happy Endings, reviewed in yesterday's NY Times.

The facts are there in the Times, and I would only add that, however harrowing it might be for you to read the story of her crazy literary family, it was doubly harrowing for me—I've known her for so long and so casually, I knew very few of the gory details.

We met when she was still in high school and Miss (town of) Amherst and sort of hanging out with an Amherst classmate of mine. We caught up with each other next not long after she came down the pike from Vassar (her graduation picture is included)....

The last time we saw each other, a few years ago now, we had an after-theater drink with my wife and daughter and her husband, Arthur Kopit, when a musical he'd written the book for was having a tryout in San Francisco.

If ever an author has earned the right to say, "Look! we have come through!"

A measured, moving, beautiful book that in itself is a happy ending.

Ghetto Fiction, Part Three: Now

continued from posts on Monday and Tuesday:

Ghetto Fiction is essentially Postmodern, that is, ironic and even playful and faux, that is, synthetic, that is, made up.

This deliberate artificiality is obvious when the ghetto becomes a theme park: Michael Martone's "Whistler's Father" (Shenandoah, Summer '83) posits a "Fort Wayne living history reenactment" as a (serious, but funny to us) attempt to replicate the past under the rubric of edification.

Indiana itself, for Martone, is an overlooked (overflown) enclave, flat not dimensional, studded with famous obscurities....

[Martone, in an e-mail comment on an early draft of Ghetto Fiction, suggested that The Zone in Gravity's Rainbow might be considered a precursor; also, Barthelme's "I Bought a Little City." "And did I mention," Martone continued, "Max Apple and Vonnegut." And he adds, "What about Louise Erdrich and/or Sherman Alexie and/or the"rez" in general?"]

For a while, George Saunders made Ghetto Fiction his signature mode, starting with "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" (Kenyon Review, Fall '92) and continuing through the supposed-to-be-pretending-to-be cave dwellers in "Pastoralia" (The New Yorker, April 3, 2000), in which the discrepancy between true and faux pretending was supposed to be monitored by a "Verisimilitude Inspector."

I've got a Ghetto Fiction in the Fall issue: Cory Garfin's first time in print, "The Carousel," which begins:

My parents install an old-fashioned carousel in their house once I move out. “We thought it would be fun,” Dad says. “Something for us to do together now that you kids are gone.” “Come by and visit some time,” Mom says. “Bring a date. We’re having a special: two tickets for the price of one when you bring a can of soup.”

I feel strange about the house I grew up in becoming an amusement ride, but I decide to see what it’s like. I bring a date. There’s a line when I show up, mostly neighbors and their kids. Grandma works the ticket booth, located where my bedroom used to be. “How many,” she asks, “two?” “Grandma, it’s me,” I say. “Oh, hello, dear. Wonderful to see you. That will be $5.”

A genre can be considered mature when a rookie can hit the ball with such authority.

Ghetto Fiction, Part Two: Precursors

continued from yesterday's post:

Some precursors of Ghetto Fiction include:

Kafka, who did not live in a ghetto, because he was an assimilated Jew; the Castle is not somewhere else, it's just up the hill.

Proust, in his three-walled bed in a cork-lined room: after many years of absence, he returns to (re-enters) society, only to find he has stumbled upon a fancy-dress ball where everyone has powdered their wigs and donned masks; finally, he realizes that time has, for them, marched on.

Marat/Sade, although hors de combat, since it's a play, is a precursor, at least for its subtitle: "The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade." [If you take nothing else from this post, at least you've been pointed to the video of Peter Brook's production.]

Roth's The Counterlife: "The construction of a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation..."

Magic Realism would be a precursor, except there is no inner/outer there: the entire humdrum world is enchanted.

Metafiction, on the other hand, flounders in the abyss between author and narrator, who are not to be conflated; in any case, there is no real world out there within which another might be located, there are only modes of discourse.

In the online update of Sim City, Second Life, you can do everything you can do here in the regular world. Reality and Virtual Reality are congruent, as in the tautotopia for which Borges imagines a map on the scale of one to one. Another tautotopia is the "microcosm," a miniversion of the big world. As with Realistic Fiction, which offers a parallel universe, there is no possibility of within/without.

It used to be common to feel that, at any given moment, life was like being in a novel or a Godard. (On the Sundance Channel on Saturday, I caught the last few minutes of Breathless (1960); when Belmondo and a friend say ciao—from the Venetian: "I am your servant"—they give each other high fives. Vive le Ghetto!)

Now it's more common to feel that life is like being on a reality-TV show: stranded/trapped in a totally real faux situation/environment; compelled to perform ridiculous/dangerous tasks; at the mercy of peers/teammates who judge us on our performance/popularity, primarily to enhance their own personal chances of winning.

Actually, being in/within/on is not essential to the contemporary paradigm, which has more to do with time than space, with being mutually, totally connected, 24/7. It is the network that matters, not the content (or the location) of the twitterer. MySpace has no center, no outside; it is infinitely expandable, a universe unto itself, without hierarchy (your space can't possibly be better than mine; it's just yours). In other words, we're all global villagers now, something McLuhan once thought would happen when "Telstar [the first communications satellite] became environmental."

The locus classicus of precursors might seem to be the institution--the school, the prison, the ship (esp. a submarine), or the cult. But these isolation chambers are essentially cut off from society, that's their charm. And they are far away: David is sent away to school, Jimmy is sent up the river, the Pequod lits out for the Pacific.

The ivory tower is the preeminent writers' ghetto these days (not Greenwich Village). But this asylum is an opting out (at least I can make a living by teaching, even if I can't by my pen), which is why the output of creative-writing professors often leaves something to be desired.

In the concentration camp, the outside world was voided and replaced by death. Nonetheless, Primo Levi reminds us, in The Periodic Table, the elements that make up the concentration camp are the same that make up our familiar world.

I was surprised to discover in a review of Levi's A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories (New York Review of Books, July 19), that Levi had written a story in 1971, "In the Park," which is populated by famous fictional characters living in famous literary houses. In short, a ghetto that's a theme park, about which more later.

In Schindler's List, Thomas Keneally shifted focus from those inside (the victims) to those outside (a "good" German). [BookRags: "When Schindler's Ark won Britain's Booker Prize in 1982, it stirred up controversy, with some critics complaining that the "documentary novel" did not deserve a prize normally reserved for fiction."]

Tomorrow—Ghetto Fiction, Part Three: Now

Ghetto Fiction, Part One: History

If the gangstas permit, I would like to describe "ghetto fiction."

Because it's a little tricky to get past the current usages of the term ghetto, I'm going to spread my findings over tomorrow and Wednesday. Thanks for your patience.

Let's assume that "ghetto" describes a world within a world, whether it's tragic, pathetic, cool, or not. The point is that the ghetto is within, not outside.

Not long after the New World was discovered (to be far away), the Venetians let the Jews come in from the hinterlands and (forced them to) live in the ghetto (1516).

This incorporation of the outsider within the community was presumably a practical matter, useful for businessmen to have some Jews close at hand. (There were plenty of Jews looking for a place to stay after being expelled from Spain in, oh the irony, 1492, the year of the ultimate conquest of the Moors.)

The ghetto was a radical transformation of the structure of society. Hadrian and the Chinese, for example, had built walls to keep the bad guys on the far side. Castles and, at the extreme, The Forbidden City, defined and occupied the center and excluded everyone but the elite.

But the ghetto was a self-contained world within the everyday world.

The rub comes from the fact that one is never quite sure where the boundaries of this embedded alt.reality really are. The traditional ghetto had walls, and the gates were shut at night, and the perimeter patrolled, but denizens of both worlds intermingled during the day, existed in the same spacetime.

Napoleon, a realist or a modernist or an egalitarian, whatever you want to call him, abolished the ghetto, and the Jews began to assimilate (again, for a while). Meanwhile, the Jews of the western parts of the Russian Empire had been confined to an infinitely larger ghetto, the Pale of Settlement, which lasted until WWI.

(The Pale in Ireland was the opposite of a ghetto; it was a beachhead established in the 13th century by the English to secure their invasion, not unlike the Green Zone in Baghdad.)

In the great literary tradition of other worlds--mostly dystopias--the other world is alien, set far beyond our normal orbit: Lilliput, Wonderland, Erewhon, Flatland...

(Or a strange visitor from afar visits us and finds us strange.)

The ghetto, for all its encapsulization within society, is a way of excluding, a way of cleansing, a way of being monochromatic without having to kill or expel The Other.

I would say something about the Suppression of the Jesuits (an elitist ghetto), but I don't want to digress.

Tomorrow—Ghetto Fiction, Part Two: Precursors

Sunday Supplement

Early brunch crowd, Pier 23 Cafe, an advertiser

Weekend Rotogravure

Barry Tells All

There has, apparently, been some speculation about how a certain coterie of Language Poets came to produce a collective autobiography.

The third of the proposed ten volumes has just been released, godforbid we not be kept on tenterhooks as the serialization unfolds. (Ten volumes because there are ten poets involved, and, shuffling the matrix, a different one leads off each volume.)

I bought the first, traded a ZYZZYVA with Kit Robinson for the second, and would have thought a comp copy of the latest would have been in my mailbox by now. No luck.

You may not have noticed any speculation, but, in mid-May, chief collectivist Barrett Watten (ZYZZYVA 7, 24) ranted against the dark forces arrayed against him and the collective effort.

Also fun, in somewhat the same vein, was a mid-May symposium on langpo and the body.

And yesterday (you don't think all I had was old news), Ron Silliman (one of the Grand Piano Ten) recalled, in some detail, poetry readings he had gone to and others he had curated (a term he points out was not is use at the time).

If I assigned my posts to various categories, I would put today's under Ranting & Raving.

Writing/Editing

Tuesday's post, "Self-Editing," inspired some readers to rise to the defense of writers who edit themselves. Thus, once more into the fray:

Writing is sacred; editing is secular.

Writing proceeds from divine inspiration; editing aims at mundane publication.

The writer takes words out of the void and arranges them on the blank page. The editor takes a manuscript (Word document) and prepares it for the printer (or Internet).

A writer can write, rewrite, and revise; an editor cannot write, but can rewrite and revise, but, then it's called "editing" not "writing."

A writer can bypass the editor and go directly to the printer (or Internet); this is called self-publishing, not self-editing.

A few masterpieces have been self-published, but almost all the self-publications I've ever seen are utter dreck. The "vanity press" is well named.

To be fair, an awful lot, maybe most not-self-published stuff is also dreck. All is vanity, saith the preacher. Or Lord Byron.

PS: Since vanity is human and, in the case of self-publishing, relatively harmless, I am in favor of it. I urge all writer to become publishers, to start a litmag, to publish their own books. If, along the way, they are overwhelmed by the desire to call themselves "editors," godspeed.

The ZYZZYVA Archive

Yesterday, the Bancroft Library of UC-Berkeley picked up six cartons of our correspondence, manuscripts, and miscellany.

We are sad to see it all go, but delighted to have some file drawers freed up, and honored that such a distinguished institution will preserve that mess of paper.

We wish we had been more alert to the possibility of maintaining the record, but in the beginning who knew? And then the digital revolution struck, and the paper trail began to seem like a quaint byway.

In any case, scholars are urged to restrain themselves, because the Bancroft is still in temporary quarters downtown while its homesite is being renovated, and it will be some time before our stuff is fit to be delved.

Self-Editing

The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself will be published in August by Norton, unless cooler heads prevail.

There is no such thing as self-editing. Full stop.

There is rewriting, which all too few writers do very much of, but the editor is, by definition and by necessity, An Other.

The worst thing a writer can do is to launch an internal editor during the writing process. Nothing could be more stifling.

Rewriting can certainly address every issue, from structure to spelling, but that is not editing. Editing is the next step, submission to the taste and judgment of somebody else, a step on the way toward offering the work to the public.

The idea offered in this book of using a different font to give yourself "fresh eyes" is an idea so cockeyed that only a demento like DeLillo would try it: I've heard he blows up his work, line by line, to headline size. What nonsense.

Ditto: hanging pages on a clothesline. (To do what, see if they're dry yet?)

The author of this atrocious self-helper, according to PW's preview, claims that Fitzgerald was "the consummate self-editor." I wonder what Maxwell Perkins would have had to say about that.

It's the difference between thinking and brain surgery: it's good to think for yourself; it's tempting fate to cut open your own skull and poke around.

All-Star Lineup

Our nine, this week: Diane di Prima, Glenn Kurtz, Dixon Long, Paul Madonna, Michael McClure, Elizabeth McKenzie, Tim Maleeny (designated hitter), Samantha Schoech, Steve Yarbrough, and Debbie Yee:

Diane di Prima (ZYZZYVA Winter '06) and Michael McClure (ZYZZYVA Fall '86, Summer '88, Fall '89) read at Moe's, 2476 Telegraph, Berkeley, tonight, 7:30 p.m.

Glenn Kurtz (ZYZZYVA Fall '01) reads his memoir, Practicing, at BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal, tomorrow, 7 p.m. And at Mrs. Dalloway's, 2904 College, Berkeley, Thursday, 7:30 p.m.

Dixon Long (ZYZZYVA Spring '06) discusses Markets of Paris, at the Mechanics Institute, 57 Post St., Thursday, July 12, at 6 p.m.

Paul Madonna (ZYZZYVA Spring '07) presents All Over Coffee at Depot Bookstore & Cafe, 87 Throckmorton, Mill Valley, Wednesday, July 11, 7:30 p.m.

Elizabeth McKenzie (ZYZZYVA Winter '01) reads from her novel, MacGregor Tells the World, at A Great Good Place for Books, 6120 LaSalle, Oakland, Wednesday, July 11, at 7 p.m. And at Books Inc., 3515 California St., Tuesday, July 17, 7 p.m.

Tim Maleeny (current ZYZZYVA board member) will be at ThrillerFest in NYC, Thursday through Sunday. And Thursday, July 19, at Alexander Book Co., 50 Second St., 12:30 p.m.

Samantha Schoech (first time in print, ZYZZYVA Fall '97) reads at The Rockit Room, 406 Clement St., tomorrow 7-9 pm, with Beth Lisick, Laura Fraser, Kim Wong Keltner, and Lisa Taggart, contributors to The Bigger the Better, the Tighter the Sweater: 21 Funny Women on Beauty, Body Image and Other Hazards of Being Female. And at Borders, 456 University, Palo Alto, Thursday, July 12, 7 p.m. And at Diesel, 5433 College, Oakland, Wednesday, July 18, 7:30 p.m.

Steve Yarbrough (ZYZZYVA 47/48 ) reads from The End of California, at Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, Saturday, July 14, 7 p.m.

Debbie Yee (current ZYZZYVA board member) reads at Kearny St. Workshop, 180 Capp Street, Wednesday, July 11, 7 -9 pm, with Maile Arvin, Oscar Bermeo, Nicole Bohn, Jennifer Chien, Jasmin Darznik (ZYZZYVA Fall '06), Rebecca Foust, Nirmala Nataraj, Lata Padmini Nott, Ramekon O'Arwisters, Carlo Sciammas, Jaime Omar, and Yassin, contributors to 12 ways:an anthology of the 2007 intergenerational writers lab.

My Summer Vacation, II

The day after the Fourth, I drove down to Pescadero, about 45 miles south of The City,
to historic Duarte's restaurant to have some olallieberry and strawberry/rhubarb pie.
There was a bit of public sculpture to be seen, but mostly it was just an excuse
to have lunch with my friend Bob and have a couple of slices of pie, only one a la moded.

Slo News

Yesterday was a midweek holiday preceded by a getaway day (or maybe this whole week is getaway), so the NY Times treated it as a slo news day, larding the front page with the kind of stories I read newspapers to find:

• sturgeon in Florida leaping out of the water and injuring folks in boats and on Jet Skis
• Mauritanian men urged to stop insisting that their women be superheavy
• the Prius as statement: I care about the environment
• the devastating drought in the Southeast (that's slo news to provincial New York journalists)

America, America

Much as I love America, I am often ashamed of what our great country has done--and does.

How could we have failed to have come to the defense of Britain (and Europe) until after Pearl Harbor?

How could we have let Japan rampage through China?

How could we have refused to admit the Jews fleeing Hitler?

How could we have interned our citizens of Japanese descent?

And so on.

Recently, during a lull in the action, I found myself traipsing around in the Virtual Museum of The City of San Francisco--who knew there was such an amenity in this town--and this time line of the run-up to WWII.

It's long and you may not have the patience to read every entry, but I call your attention to December 13 and December 20, 1941.

Get a load of this

Fitzgerald considered his Princeton classmate Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) the conscience of their generation. Wilson was also emblematic of that generation, as he makes clear in The Twenties, the collage of his notebooks he was preparing at the end of his life and which I sailed through over the weekend.

Wilson drank a lot, he hustled for journalistic work, he drank a lot. He kept in touch with the Harvard crowd (Cummings, Dos Pasos), and the Algonquins, and Broadway (when the lyrics refused to stop rattling his brain, he realized he was having a nervous breakdown).

He fell in love, to no avail, with Edna Millay. He married an actress and, after their divorce, had his mother bring up their daughter. He rented O'Neill's cottage in Provincetown. He became infatuated with a Ukrainian girl, a waitress at a cheap restaurant, whose husband was doing time in Sing Sing. She thought men's pensises were always erect, because, in her experience, they always were. Wilson found her stimulating; their activities together were furtive, but comprehensive. Eventually, she gave him crabs.

Always, Wilson kept his ears open. In late August 1929, he jotted down some "slang and songs":

O.K. (K.O.)--All right?
to get a break
to crack wise
doesn't make sense
doesn't know what it's all about
It's a howl.
Get a load of this!

Etymologists have traced "O.K." back to a Boston newspaper in 1839. But the expression must have struck Wilson as something fresh in August 1929, etymologists be damned.

Tom Eliot

Rozanne and I had dinner last night with our old friend Dixon Long (ZYZZYVA Fall '06).

He was a few years ahead of me at Amherst, and I had first looked him up because, upon graduation, he became a Fellow at Amherst House, a dorm/missionary outpost (that looked like a frat house) and was maintained by Amherst at Doshisha University in Kyoto--I wanted to be an Amherst Fellow, too, but was not accepted.

At dinner, we were rumbling around in Amherst memories, when Dixon asked if I remembered the distinguished English professor G. Armour Craig, whose wife, I had heard, had had a fling with Dylan Thomas, when he passed through town.

It turned out that, circa 1955, Dixon and his friend (and mine) Jack Hagstrom had driven Professor Craig to Harvard to hear T.S. Eliot read.

Wow, I said, what was Eliot like?

I don't remember, Dixon said, I can see the room he read in, the high ceiling, but that's all.