That's a wrap

This blog is on vacation and resumes 4 September. Until then, my act can be glimpsed on YouTube; I am available for weddings and bar mitzvahs, like I said, after Labor Day.

Meanwhile, Caveh Zahedi has finished shooting "Day" (in the life of the managing editor of a litmag). On the walls, left to right: Ben Shahn's "We French workers warn you...defeat means slavery, starvation, death" (1942); under the golden Z, a photo of a real zyzzyva, from the Smithsonian and under that a "proclamation" honoring ZYZZYVA's 20th anniversay; green poster by Eric (no relation) Junker; photo by E.O. Goldbeck; drawing by Madison Junker; SPD poster of California poets; photo by Judy Dater; Billy Collins poem printed by Kathi George; drawing by Naomie Kremer.

BTW, this wraps up ZYZZYVASPEAKS Year One.

Homes

Double Jeopardy

Our new managing editor, Kristin Kearns, has a terrific story in the new issue of Calyx. It's her second in print. It was also her first in print, when it appeared this spring in Faultline, UC-Irvine's annual.

This bonanza is the result of a legit case of simultaneous submission. When Kristin told Calyx that Faultline had accepted the story, Calyx replied, that's O.K., we like it and we'll publish it anyway and give them credit.

So there is justice in this world, although not in this shop, where we don't read simultaneous submissions (when we can help it), because we don't sit on manuscripts, we have an "audited" three-week turnaround.

Our sympathies go out to all writers who must use simultaneous submission to keep their careers moving.

But we would suggest that time, in literary terms, is not of the essense. In the e-world, of course, everything is instant (and constant).

But print is necessarily slow (and discontinuous). That's its strength.

Writing allows reflection, second guessing, many "drafts." And it is (usually) slow.

The submission process is slow. The editorial process is slow. Production is slow. Distribution is slow. Building a rep is slow.

Even reading is slow, esp. compared to looking.

It sounds as if I need a vacation. I do. I'll post some photos over the weekend and then this blog will go blank until after Labor Day. Thanks for going this far with me; see you then.

Elder Statesman

In the early days, ZYZZYVA was often referred to as "my baby," meaning not that our DNA matched, but that if I wanted to do the 2 a.m. feeding, and the diapering, and the strolling...and the worrying about getting into the right pre-school...good luck.

That was fine by me, because I didn't yet have a real baby of my own.

After a while, after I had learned what caring for a real infant and toddler and little girl were really like, the designation began to annoy me.

In due course, I would joke about ZYZZYVA being more of "my teenager"—unruly, going through changes, often, fortunately, doing the right thing, but certainly not because I had suggested it.

The years flowed by. ZYZZYVA still hasn't moved out and set up as a freestanding, self-supporting, mature grown-up.

So my only hope, I think, is to make the transition myself from being a precocious brat to being an elder statesman.

My hope, then, is to transmute from regime to regime, like Talleyrand and Molotov and Dean Acheson, surviving on my looks and wiles and sagacity.

I assume I'll be able to manufacture some sagacity.

Plant you now, dig you later

Our investigation of malfeasance in the Presidio continues from yesterday: Required to do everything possible to make its operations self-supporting, the Presidio Trust, under the guise of beautification, has clearcut part of its eastern forest in order to plant ten tea trees, tea being slang for marijuana, said plantation to be camouflaged by various exotic and native trees and shrubs.

SFMOMA Strikes Out

How sad that the SFMOMA was unable to land the thousand-piece, billion-dollar Fisher collection, which instead will be set up sui generis in the Presidio, where the bowling alley now flourishes.
The whole redemptive idea of a new SFMOMA was that some day the local nouveaux collectors would pile up their riches and salvage the museum's pathetic permanent collection, which does not have a single iconic Destination Work.

What it does have, besides a room full of Clyfford Still and another of Paul Klee and a couple of "design," is a monstrous, unshowable Sam Francis, an unsigned & undated Barnett Newman, a Magritte that his dealer returned and was never offered for sale again in the artist's lifetime, etc.

It was hoped, way back when, that there would soon be major gifts—entire collections—from the Andersons, the Bowes, the Logans...and Don and Doris Fisher (of the Gap). But collectors are fickle egomaniacs, among other things...
I wonder what kind of architectural statement the Fishers will be allowed to make within the bowling alley's footprint. Something in keeping with the prevailing neo-Spanish Boring Colonial? Something as banal as the George Lucas Complex?

Meanwhile, there is only one other bowling alley in The City, in the Yerba Buena Center; the Presidio's, so it is now promised, will be relocated. Better it should be declared a Historical Monument and the Fishers enjoined to do the right thing, but be grateful for small favors.

The real question, of course, is whether the Fisher collection has institutional quality, like the Frick, the Barnes, the Hirshhorn, the Phillips, the Mellon (the National Gallery)...or whether it will be merely a beau geste like the The Hess Collection (in Napa) or a dreadful provinciality like the di Rosa Preserve (also in Napa).

My sense, from the images released to the press, is that the Fishers bought a bunch of Names, never quite at an iconic moment.

ZYZZYVA: The New Black

Imagine my delight yesterday when the NY Times revealed that black is back (for August). They might have gone on to say that ZYZZYVA is the new black.

We've always been proud to be among U.S. News & World Report's Top 50 Litmags West of the Monongahela.

And that readers of the Bay Guardian voted us "the best local litmag nobody ever reads."

There was a moment, to be perfectly honest, when I fantasized about ZYZZYVA being the new gray, but never the new black.

To mark the occasion, we have laid in a stock of our classic black T-shirts with white letters; you could order one online, if you're all about trendy.

Deconstructing the Academy

Work is progressing on the Academy of Science,


yielding some found sculpture,






and resulting in the deification of the great Irish scientist Robert Emmet.





Meanwhile, the pathetically retained classical facade of the old Academy is now fronted by nonnative palms.






And Goethe & Schiller, formerly stationed in a depression east of the Academy, have now been given a shady grove festooned with traffic signs and utility boxes.

The Deluxe

There's a guy in my hood who has two dozen cars from the fifties and early sixties. He doesn't restore them, he just stashes them—two in his driveway, the rest on the street, depending on where there's room made by Street Cleaning.


Last week, a '49 Chevy Deluxe showed up.



There had been no cars built during the War—we had traded in a mousey '39 Plymouth, with running boards, same color as the Deluxe, for a regular '49 Chevy, in the color Henry Ford had prescribed: black. My father took me with him when he picked it up at the showroom.

Note the two-pane windshield.

The "skirt" or fill-in panel for the rear fender.

The chrome mud guard.

The generous swoop of the definitely pre-fin fender.

The white walls, which were standard for anyone with aspirations.

The modest brake lights.

Postwar exuberance was yet to be expressed by Detroit.

MyCover: Satisfaction

During my brief career as a documentary filmmaker, I worked a week as a soundman. We were staked out at St. Vincent's Hospital in NYC, trying to catch a Code Blue. After a week of nothing, my midnight crew handed over the equipment at dawn, and then there was one.

But it turned out that, beyond the frantic rush to get the Code team assembled, the procedure itself was just like any other...and the dead man didn't rise and walk about on a cloud.

I had another chance as a soundman five years later. I had contributed a chapter to a book on the Maysles' film Showman and, since they knew I had moved to California they asked if I could help them out on a film about the Stones, who were giving a concert at Altamont. I had skipped Woodstock and wasn't about to get swamped in a California crowd, so I said I couldn't.

It turned out that the Hell's Angels killed a man in the audience who was brandishing a knife—the moment was caught on film. I saw Gimme Shelter again, on TV in the middle of the night a couple weeks ago. I was struck by how young Mick Jagger seemed, how innocent, how sexually ambivalent.

I found myself humming his greatest song at various times during the new few days, including one moment when Caveh Zahedi's film crew was in the office.

At my request, although it may not be my finest moment, Caveh put the re-enactment of my Mick moment up on YouTube.

Hints from Zyzzyva

The other Zyzzyva, distinguishable largely because it is mostly lower case, was established at Hartford Union High School (Wisconsin) in 1977.

Over the years, I've corresponded occasionally with its faculty adviser, Lin Mooney Courchane, who hangs out in Room 86.

Her pitch for the first semester of creative writing could serve as a model for most M.F.A. programs, although obviously by that time students don't think they need to be taught anything. Even Ms. Courchane's Advanced Creative Writing students complain when they are given assignments.

Her list of suggestions for where to get help, esp. if you scroll way down, might be helpful, I should think, to many advanced writers.

Rare footage

I've been nonplussed by the elegies to Bergman and Antonioni. The writers of them, I suppose, were too young to understand.

At least the Times guy cited Lionel Trilling's 1961 observation that it's hard to read canonical texts as if they were fresh (and shocking).

The thing is, in the late fifties, art films were sacred texts. Profound moral statements in black & white.

To begin with, they were scarce. You might go to a lot of movies, but a film was different.

College film societies (at the hipper colleges) would show three or four a semester. O what a joy it was to live in New York and attend services at the Thalia and the New Yorker and...and the Museum of Modern Art, where the silent classics were accompanied on the piano, but otherwise.....

Although Bergman was six years younger than Antonioni, he was of an earlier generation, the one still devastated by The War (the plague in The Seventh Seal). For a few years, death had been everywhere.

Antonioni celebrated the possibility, at long last, of decadence, that is, the notion that the meaning of life might be elusive. What a luxury it was to be bored. To wear chic clothes and wander around a rocky island or a palace...or a spa like Marienbad (yes, I know I'm mixing directors) or Rome (once, not so long ago, like Brussels, Paris, Manila, Florence, and Athens, declared an "open city").

I was too young to see the first postwar generation—De Sica and Rossellini (and Ozu and Kurosawa)—when they were fresh. But I liked them better. They were raw. Bicycle Thief was shot on the streets using non-actors; Rashomon in the woods—it was also about the War: what happened? how did we go so wrong?

At least The Economist understood that when you left an early Bergman (forget all the later, operatic/historico nonsense)...you were devastated. You couldn't talk for hours. You had been shattered. Transfixed. Nonplussed.

Nobody leaves a movie feeling that way anymore. Now everybody wears a hoodie, not just the Angel of Death.

Garrett's Gamut

Editorial assistant Garrett Morrison has run the numbers on the 87 writers who appeared in the last five issues:

• 47% live in the Bay Area
• 29% appeared in print for the first time
• 26% were poets
• 16% were professors
• 15% were either from Portland or Seattle

Of the 88 artists—would you have guessed there were the same number of artists as writers?— 19% did not have gallery representation.

Taking a break, Boss

We went to a birthday dinner on Saturday; the main course was a pig, from snout to tail, laid out by some cook in Chinatown so it looked like a mosaic.

Over the strawberry rhubarb birthday pie, which had featured those candles that won't blow out, I got to talking with this dude about the difference between reading all of Shakespeare and all of Greek drama. I had overheard that he "teaches Shakespeare," but hadn't yet unearthed that he is a distinguished Shakespeare scholar.

He allowed as he had been tremendously moved by Judith Anderson's Medea, a 1959 television "Play of the Week," from the Robinson Jeffers translation, with Colleen Dewhurst, directed by Jose Quintero.

I wasn't sure whether I could trust his taste, so I asked if he had ever seen Marat/Sade: he'd seen it twice.

So Sunday, I went over to Le Video and got the Anderson Medea, and a Lysistrata (contains some nudity and strong language).

I passed on the Cacoyannis/Papas Iphigenia, which I had seen when it came out: I don't think the ancient Greeks had a word for "smoldering." I also passed on the Pasolini/Callas Medea—her only non-singing film—and his Oedipus Rex, and the Cacoyannis Trojan Women, which is supposed to be a disaster despite Hepburn, V. Redgrave, Bujold, and Patrick Magee.

And on my way back home, I stopped for a bite at a cafeteria on Irving called Pluto's—you can't let your entire life be denominated by the Greeks.

We have not forgotten

July 22 was the 65th anniversary of the evacuation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Foreground: George Segal, The Holocaust, 1985; background, Mark di Suvero, Pax Jerusalem, 1999

Under erasure

I find it hard to look at the GG Bridge in broad daylight, it's so iconic.

I don't want it obliterated, but smudged by fog seems to help.

The Center Cannot Hold

My summer project of reading a couple of Greek tragedies a day is a fairly Spartan regime, so when a nice book by a paranoid schizophrenic arrived from the folks at Hyperion, whose namesake was a son of Zeus, I thought I'd take a break:

The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks struck Oliver Sacks (no relation) as "the most lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia I have ever read."

That's exactly my problem with it. It's too lucid, too hopeful.

Now fiftyish, Saks is a law professor; she's married; she's a cancer-survivor. She has been through a lot, and her account is, understandably, justifiably, triumphal.

For years, she refused to admit that fate had dealt her a devastating and permanent defeat.

And her book somehow fails to conveys how sordid, desperate, and horrific her experience must have been during the bad times. Even during "meltdowns," as she cutely refers to them, Back to Normalcy seems only a paragraph or two away. Her indomitable will will prevail.

What struck me most about her harrowing account, which I read, spellbound, in a sitting and a half, was how inexorable she was in wanting to get off her meds, even and especially when they seemed to work for her and let her feel normal and productive and not loggy and not who she really was. One of her special fields of interest has been the legal right to refuse medication.

I still don't think she gets it. She insists that "my psychiatrists and therapists saved my life." At best, she is "enormously grateful to the psychiatrists who focused on the biological aspects of my illness," by which I assume she means those doctors who tried her on the new drugs when they became available.

It also annoys me that she says not a word about the terrible cost of treating her disease. In terms of dollars, of course, but also in terms of the anguish caused her family and friends.

She thanks her publisher for "coming up with a great title," although her book is about the opposite—managing to hold on to the center of her being.

I wonder if her publisher ever showed her the poem by Yeats, or simply let it appear that the inspiration was his own.

Name of the Game

The first U.S. litmag, in 1815, sported a name of demihemispheric aspiration: The North American Review.

Then came the classical, generic period: Poetry; The Little Review, transition...

Then the poLITical rags like Partisan Review, which was started by the Commies (as an organ of the John Reed Club) and then taken over by the anti-Stalinists.

Then locations: The Hudson , The Paris...

And regions: Southern, New England...

Along the way, many U's named journals: Kenyon, Sewanee (technically U of the South, which is in Sewanee, and referred to as such), Mass., Gettysburg....

In the Sixties, of course, non-U names were tried: FUCK YOU, A Magazine of the Arts...

In the Nineties there was branding: Zoetrope...

If I had it to do over, I would go for something like 1-Alpha, with the hopes of becoming first in the hearts of my countrypersons...

But since that's a bit Greekish, or do I mean geekish, and, anyway, since not everyone feels comfortable alphabetizing a numeral......I might try a simple Avyzzyz.

ZYZZYVA: The Game

As a lovely parting gesture as she ends her seven and a half-year stint as managing editor, Amanda Field gave me The ZYZZYVA Office Game, which she had made herself.

We played (with new managing editor Kristin Kearns) while waiting for the pasta at Bella, a wonderful trattoria on Geary and Second.

Many of the pieces might well be zyzzyvas; some are Scrabble letters.

Some of the cards, which determine your moves:

Subscriber wants T-shirt but we are all out: GO BACK ONE

Find a misspelling after sending the issue to the printer: GO BACK TWO

Get another statement from Ingram Periodicals and file it. STAY PUT

Rozanne makes homemade chocolate chip cookies and Howard offers you some: ADVANCE TWO

Replace your photo on the website with a better one: ADVANCE THREE

Check the dpi of a digital art file: ADVANCE FIVE

Forget to back up the computer: RETURN TO START