Carver Uncarved

Of course, I agree with Raymond Carver's last editor, Gary Fisketjon, that Carver's early stories should not be reissued in their ur-form, that is, before they were transformed by the heavy hand of Gordon "Captain Fiction" Lish.

On principle: there is no "director's cut" in the writing biz.

In any case, what we mean when we talk about Carver is the Carver Lish created.

From what I've gathered, Lish was the sine qua non. He was so influential/instrumental--such a Svengali--it's no wonder Carver later had to break away. Other authors have done likewise, to insist they were divinely inspired....

I once went with Amy Hempel to sit in on one of Lish's "classes," in a Central Park West living room. It was intense.

I made the mistake, after Lish had been holding forth for hours, of taking a potty break. Everyone looked at me as if I had just spat in the Pope's face.

I got to publish two of Carver's poems--he was very proud of his poetry. And, over the years, two stories and three poems by his wife, Tess Gallagher, who is the one urging the re-publication. I am sympathetic to her yearning to bring Carver back to our attention, but I think she's chosen the wrong vehicle.

BTW, one of Fisketjon's panoply of stars, Haruki Murakami, had his first appearance in print in English in ZYZZYVA Spring '88.

Chronicle Car Wash

Not only is the Hearst Corporation so desperate that it's selling the Chronicle Building, it has also forced staffers to do a Saturday car wash to raise additional funds. [click to enlarge]

Pacific Standard

Our esteemed subscriber and Facebook Friend Robert Silva reports that his friends John Rauschenberg and Jon Stan have just opened Pacific Standard, a West Coast literary bar, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

The subway stop is Atlantic Ave.

It's-It ice cream is served. Anchor, Sierra Pacific, and Stone brews.

To make sure there are ZYZZYVAs in the bookshelves next to the dart board, we are sending a selection of recent issues posthaste.

We assume Ed Champion, a PBR addict and recent emigrant from The City, will discover Pacific Standard soon. It's only four blocks from where he picks up his mail.

Support our Troops

[click to enlarge]

Baja Doyle Drive

This "penthouse" beneath the Doyle Drive approach to the Golden Gate Bridge is intended as a prototype
for future beneath-bridge residential construction.

It is available now for build-out by your Richard Meier-inspired architect/designer/decorator team.
Nestled in the pines on one side, on the other, it has splendid views of the Bridge and the Marin Hills. It lies within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is close to transportation.

The Good Daughter

Publishers Weekly reports that "Grand Central's Caryn Karmatz Rudy bought North American rights to Jasmin Darznik's The Good Daughter with a six-figure offer to Kelly Sonnack at the Dijkstra Agency. The family memoir begins as the author discovers a wedding photograph of her mother with a stranger...."

Jasmin had been kind enough to e-mail me the news as soon as she heard: the first fragment of the manuscript to appear in print was in ZYZZYVA Fall '06.

Meanwhile, Rachel Howard, whose memoir, The Lost Night: A Daughter's Search for the Truth of her Father's Murder, came out in paperback in last year, and whose first fiction in print was in ZYZZYVA Spring '07, e-mails:

I've been having an amazing couple of months writing new stories. Real breakthroughs. I've written eight new ones in the last three months, all about that same couple from "Bolero," some from the man's POV, some from the woman's, others in omniscient....

The other piece of good news is that I've been interviewed by Ira Glass for "This American Life," and it's going to air on November 3! He talked with me about my dad's murder for a show on Murder in the Family.

Ciao, Roma

Former managing editor Amanda Field is now blogging from Rome, where her husband, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi, is in residence at the American Academy.

I was particularly delighted she managed to provide a color photo (taken by a fellow wife at the Academy) of the dyeing of the Trevi Fountain, committed last Friday as an art-provocation.

Be sure to click on her link to a newspaper story that provides a link to see video of the act.

Prop D: Library Preservation

Our editorial assistant, Garrett Morrison, Yale '06, is in favor of Prop D.

He is a signatory to the Paid Argument in Favor of Proposition D, "Renewing Library Preservation Fund," in the San Francisco's Voter Information Pamphlet & Sample Ballot.

Part of the argument (cue violins): "Writers from all walks of life tell a common story of days spent in libraries—of mornings researching, afternoons among stacks, evenings writing and writing some more..."

Other signatories include Catherine Brady, Ben Fong-Torres, Daniel Handler, Jack Hirschman, Rachel Howard, Peter M. Orner, Caroline Paul, Ethan Watters....

Morrison was approached in the office of the tutoring agency where he works. Why he (and a colleague who also signed) were approached, he doesn't know.

The Pamphlet discloses that the "true source of funds for the printing fee" of the argument was the Committee to Renew the Library Preservation Fund, one of whose consultants, BergDavis, received $8,854, while another, Whitehurst Campaigns, received $22,500.

The Pamphlet does not disclose who penned the grandiloquent lines, "Writers from all walks of life...."

Thiebaud/de Kooning

Wayne Thiebaud, a courtly, sonorous 87, was interviewed at the JCC last week by Adam Gopnik.

Thiebaud spoke with fondness of Willem de Kooning—and deftly imitated de Kooning's Dutch-English.

He spoke of the pleasure he still gets making the gestures of de Kooning, and he stroked the air canvas with a few dabs and a swipe and then a swoop.

Of course, that's what Thiebaud never does: make expressive gestures.

He was a very bad abstract expressionist starting out. His colors were murky; he couldn't find any structure. He resembled the New Yorkers only in the advanced age at which he made his breakthrough.

Thiebaud was 36 when he met de Kooning et al. And he floundered for another four years or so, until he picked up on the new ideas that were in the air and realized he could fall back on his "naive" strength as a cartoonist/illustrator/animator and fill in simple forms with thick, bright, luscious color.

Gopnik, always eager to be more intellectual than thou, let the artist natter on about Cezanne.

Thiebaud's classic brushstroke lays down a terrific impasto, a la de Kooning, dragging pigment as if with a finely serrated trowel...but with no modulation, no gesture, just a thick, straight, plowed line.

Thick paint became and remained a Northern California fetish.

Jay DeFeo's 1958-65, 11 x 8 ft, "The Rose" contains so much paint it weighs a ton.

Thiebaud's paint is commonly likened to frosting. You can't get much farther from de Kooning.

Were is Sean Scully when we need him?

Robin Ekiss

Robin Ekiss has just won a Rona Jaffe award of $25,000. She and her husband, Keith Ekiss, will read at Notre Dame de Namur University, in Belmont, this Wednesday at 7:30.

Robin's first poem in print was in ZYZZYVA Summer '93; later that year she became managing editor.

She left to get her M.F.A. at Davis. In 2002-4, she was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford—Keith was a Stegner in 2005-7.

Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Atlantic Monthly, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, VQR....

Her "collection" has been a finalist in several first-book contests, which is how poets find publishers these days.

So far, Robin has worked mostly outside the academy, often as an advertising copywriter. You may have seen her TV commercials for Old Navy.

The Painted City

The city of St. Francis in California
has always been a painter's town.
The classic style is muted harmonies, details picked out in gold; the postmodern is crisp, disjunct, and, surprisingly, also harmonious.
But there is a new palette abroad. It may be non-European.
It may defy all known charts. You can imagine the hideous pinks and oranges.

Pure Photography

One does tire of constantly photographing celebrities. (Click on image to enlarge.)

Poetics of the familiar

"Hyper-ordinary: the poetics of the familiar," curated by Francesca Pastine, opened last night at Y2Y Gallery @ Jeff King and Company, 251 Balboa. Jeff is an advertiser.
Seth Koen is an artist.
Charlie Milgrim is an artist.
Mung Lar Lam is also an artist in the show, but I neglected to take her picture.

David F. Phillips is an attorney I met at the JCC that afternoon, after the Wayne Thiebaud conversation with Adam Gopnik. Please note the "serious listeners" Phillips is wearing behind his ears to capture sound more efficiently.
They were made for him by a shoemaker, to specs he had copied from a pair made by a company that has since disappeared.

Orhan Pamuk

Byron Spooner, which is his real name, is director of book operations at the SF Public Library. The Big Book Sale he organizes just raised a quarter million for the Library.

He and his wife, Judy, were at the Jewish Community Center before the Orhan Pamuk discussion with Adam Hochschild last night.
After holding forth on modernity/tradition, Europe/Asia, wood houses/concrete apartments, Pamuk negotiated the third path by taking a digital photo of the audience. (Click on this picture to blow it up, I mean, enlarge it.)
Then, the Breugelesque lobby crowd
indulged in delicious morsels
and asked the author to sign a book provided for sale by The Booksmith.

DD-Day

I hope it's not too late to blog on George Eliot's last novel, Daniel Deronda, which I just read. Yesterday morning, as it happened, I watched the 1930 film, with George Arliss's Oscar-winning performance, on TCM. In the evening, I began watching the admirable 2002 BBC miniseries on DVD.

(Last week, The Third Eve included Dan D in her top ten bloglist of "snoggable literary characters.")

DD is longish, but filled with brilliance. I esp. like the high-spirited heroine, Gwendolyn, altho I wouldn't call her snoggable.

Eliot writes like Austen on steroids—it's all there: the pursuit of marriage, bien entendu, but also gambling, archery, suicide, railroads, coal mines, a gofer named Lush...and Jews.

Deronda is a terrifically decent, though somewhat mysterious, chap, who has always been accepted for what he appears to be, an English gentleman. After his long-lost mother reveals his heritage to him and he declares himself to be a Jew, he is exposed to much off-handed anti-Jewish sentiment, for example, "You don't act like a Jew."

He had already been studying with a Zionist mystic, and he now resolves to work toward establishing a Jewish homeland in The East.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the year DD was published, 1876, Prime Minister Disraeli was raised to the peerage; he had bought Egypt's share of the Suez Canal to secure a route to India and, in the process, he had created the British "Empire."

Disraeli's first claim to fame had been as a novelist. When he entered Parliament, Jews were not admitted—he was, because he had been baptized at 13; to this day, no Jew has ever been Prime Minister .

Winter is off

Winter went off to the printer yesterday.

Let the euphoria begin.

Actually, it began Friday, when it became clear that there would, in fact, be enough to fill the issue.

If, of course, a couple of promised ads came through over the weekend—they don't always.

This time they did.

Even more amazing: Winter has six writers who have appeared in ZYZZYVA before.

I don't know how that happened.

Actually, I do know: Paul Flores, whose first story in print appeared in Fall '98, while he was still working for his MFA at SF State, , and whose first novel, Along the Border Lies, was one of the four we did in 2002 (it won a PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award), did a play, which I thought we should publish...

...one writer had changed her name after a divorce, so I didn't recognize it on her submission...a poet I've published a lot (and rejected a lot as well) sent in a poem I really liked...etc.

Still, my policy is to avoid maintaining a Stable of Writers. I am committed to New Voices.

For Winter, however, it seems that all bets are off.

Maybe in Spring, I'll start including writers who live in Idaho and Arizona.

New Mexico would be a stretch.

Grand Reunion

Lisa Bornstein, who proofread the first issue and later joined the Board, gave a party yesterday to honor the eleven presidents of the Board to date.

Seven attended, along with eight other Board members of various vintages. (Assorted significant others and well-wishers are not pictured.) The first president, Tom Woodhouse, is at the far right; Lisa is in the second row, far left.

ALIVE!

At the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market yesterday, I ate a cheeseless pumpkin cheesecake: so good. No, that is not me in the gray hat, thank you very much.
I continued up Market. Are the homeless being forced by Late Market Capitalism to become entrepreneurial tourist attractions by giving readings?
I arrived just after the fact of a totally totalled accident.
I did some antiquing: (FREE! cabinet with shelves GRATAS)
BENDER is still on MySpace: how pathetic.

Bird & Beckett

Please welcome Bird & Beckett Books and Records, advertising for the first time in ZYZZYVA in the Winter issue.
Eric Whittington, proprietor since 1999, has just moved the shop to 653 Chenery, near the new Public Library, in Glen Park, San Francisco, whose grand opening is today.

Our Board member Debbie Yee read at Bird & Beckett Thursday with other contributors to a new anthology of work by Asian American women writers, Cheers to Muses.

Editor's Nite Out

With LitQuake in town this week, I've been keeping a low profile, but last nite we had a reading of writers in the Fall issue at the Main Library's Book Bay.

While I was slurping hot chocolate in the cafe beforehand, a surprisingly thin Gavin Newsom came by on his way to a Mayoral Debate in the Koret Auditorium.

Our reading went well.

Then, as I rounded the corner of the Library on my way home, I stumbled into a zombie mob.

Helpful Books about Writing

The estimable Tom Christensen is offering a list of books "for writers that can be recommended in good conscience." He solicited additions to his list from friends, and I was among those who responded.

He means his list of primers and manuals and inspirational texts to take its place alongside the most popular offering on his website: How to Get Published. He would like to be noble and helpful and to satisfy a public need.

I am delighted he included Mimesis and The Chicago Manual.

But, first of all, Getting Published is the least of it. There are a zillion places to get published, and so what.

The best way to get published, in any case, is to write something worth publishing. It's as simple as that.

I admire Richard Ford's resolution when, in the early days, he found his stories constantly being rejected—he decided to stop writing stories. Instead, he would concentrate on writing a novel and work on it until it was good enough.

Similarly, the best way to learn to write is to read. This is precisely what doesn't happen much these days, esp. not when you take an M.F.A. in creative writing.

I stand with Flannery O'Connor: the trouble with creative writing programs is not that they discourage too many writers, but that they don't discourage enough.

They don't even do much of a job teaching the tricks of the trade. How few M.F.A. students are taught how to mark up galleys. For example.

The Decline of the Daily Paper

The delivery guy used to fling it up to the doormat at the top of the stoop.

Sometimes, he'd be weak and it would land in the hedge. And be lost.

Or he'd be strong and hit the door, BOINK.

Or errant and hit the handrail, BOING.

Now he just drops it on the sidewalk.

O O O O O

My review of King Lear, seen Sunday at the California Shakespeare Festival, Orinda:

The storm scene's thunder was provided by shaking a metal sheet, suspended from scaffolding stage right; the rain was indicated stage left by pouring buckets of water into oil drums—it was raining and POURING, get it?

The production was set in the Twenties, which means the costumes are flapperish—altho some hobos from the Thirties snuck in as stage hands/crowd fillers.

In keeping with the period chic, Regan and Edmund shared a cigarette.

Fortunately, the audience had been warned beforehand that there would be "smoking," as well as partial nudity (Edgar's muddy backside). I almost turned around and went right back home.

The cast included two African Americans, one Indian American, and one Asian American who doubled some roles.

Oswald was played as a flaming effeminate fellow—I think that was what they called them in the Twenties. He wore a swishy black plastic trenchcoat that I rather fancied. I did not notice any Ls, Bs, or Ts.

The climactic (offstage) battle was enhanced by the sound of aircraft (the Condor Legion?).

The weapons were not Tommy guns, but daggers and rapiers; the pre-show lecture urged us not to get caught up in such minutiae (given the English Latinate pronunciation of the plural).

Edgar made a Darth Vader entrance for his showdown with Edmund—all in black, wearing a fencing mask.

Gloster (I think that's how they spelled it in the Twenties) had his eyes defenestrated by an industrial-sized corkscrew. It was a bit messy. Esp. when one orb squished out and got squashed.

Lear was played, somewhat prematurely, by a 60-year-old actor whose last Shakespearean role was Bottom in a 1982 production in Central Park.

He played the mad scene not in his birthday suit, but in his union suit.

I guess I should have gone to see Ian McKellen, but I had a good enough time. Lear carrying out the dead Cordelia was, for an instant, very moving.

Editors rock

I 'm inclined to be overly sensitive about Editors, so I've asked Editorial Assistant Garrett Morrison to comment on their latest, An End Has a Start:

The well-named Editors make Kaavya Viswanathan look innovative.

Their lead singer has clearly spent a lot of time in a dark room listening to Interpol and Echo & The Bunnymen. He has that rich, limited-range baritone that front-Bunnyman Ian McCulloch used to such great effect, but his glowering comes off as a pose.

And it doesn't help that his bandmates play like rejects from The Killers, spiky guitar lines and jumpy rhythms and all.

Editors sound like an unwieldy pastiche of bands that are currently hip in the U.K., and unless one of them starts dating Lily Allen, they're not going to make a ripple on this side.

And the lyrics? They call themselves Editors, but they trade in cliches:

When you fall and you
Can't find your way
Push your hand up to the sky
I will just run to
To be by your side

—and faux rhetorical questions:

If a plane were to fall from the sky
How big a hole would it leave
In the surface of the earth?

Well, it would leave a big hole. About as big as the plane itself. Occasionally, however, Editors throw off a powerful image or two:

My dirty hands
Have I been in the wars?
the saddest thing I've ever seen
Were smokers outside the hospital doors.

Yes, there is a subject-verb agreement issue in that last sentence. But only lower-case editors care about that sort of thing.

Monochrome Painting

Nature abhors monochrome painting

Litterati: The Next Generation

Or is it Latterati?

Cast & Crew

As part of my recent Greek tragedy/Shakespeare reading project...

I wanted to look again at the Dennis Ledbetter photos of classic actors playing Macbeth (in the Spring '90 issue. Actually, Ledbetter himself plays the role, nude, holding a dagger, in some vineyard.)

I also checked out the writers in the issue, a motley crew: Etel Adnan, Don Asher, Bill Barich, Steve Benson, Marilyn Chin, Anthony Clarvoe, Guy Davenport, Brenda Hillman, Barry Lopez, Jack Marshall, Sandra McPherson, Gilbert Sorrentino, John Witte. (Davenport, a Kentucky resident, qualified as an excerpt from a book forthcoming from a West Coast publisher.)

I don't miss filling the book with the Usual Suspects—these days, I rely on what's sent me in the slush pile—but then again I've just added Ron Silliman and Antonin Artaud as Friends on Facebook. And Barak Obama as well.

Ron is the real deal, but Barak may be a masquerading, wise-ass Jersey fratboy. Who knows about M. Artaud?

Anyway, in the Winter issue: an essay by Stanford's great Shakespeare scholar Stephen Orgel, ostensibly on two different interpretations—Judith Anderson's, Judi Dench's—of Lady Macbeth, but actually, for my purposes, a memoir...

and the keystone that is plugged in at the last minute and holds the arch together.

The Editorial Train

A dude in Toronto has proposed a litmag on Facebook called The Facebook Review.

It will be the usual, except it will appear monthly on Facebook.

And it will be edited by an Editorial Train.

Managing editor Jacob McArthur Mooney explains:

"All issues of TFR after #1 will be edited by the contributing authors from the previous edition of the review. For example, lets say issue #1 features work by 15 pink fluffy bunny rabbits. Once issue #1 goes live, our managing editor will forward the contents of his inbox to each fluffy bunny. The bunnies will read through the pile of would-be contributors and decide if they like any of them. Each bunny will then send the managing editor a "vouch" list of work they liked from the submitted pile, and the, say, 15 or so submissions with the most vouches will make up the content for issue #2.

"Then those writers in issue #2 (say, a bunch of hissing cockroaches) will make up the editorial staff for issue #3, and so on."

I don't know any writers who are hissing cockroaches, but I'm sure by issue #2 some will come out of the woodwork.

Meanwhile, I'm tempted to Friend one of TFR's charter members, Moribund Facekvetch.

Silliman @ Mills

Stephen Ratcliffe introduced the reading of Ron Silliman at Mills yesterday.
Attending were: Stephanie Young
Juliana Spahr and Sasha
Amy and Michael McClure and Laura Moriarty
Alan Bernheimer, Jean Day, and Lyn Hejinian.
I took a picture of Bob Grenier and Leslie Scalapino,but, unfortunately, it didn't turn out. Bob asked Ron if he ever edited comments on his blog (answer: for David Shapiro, that's about all),

Near me sat a young blind woman who was vastly amused when Ron told of how he had once had a gig reading to blind students, who, esp. at exam time, would want him to read for extended periods, 8-10 hours; good preparation, Ron said, for his later marathon public readings of his own work, including one that lasted so long (four hours) that he lacerated his throat, drops of blood spitting out onto the page as he continued to read.

We, by the numbers

I was astonished to see that I could click on the job title in my Blogprofile and it would lead me to 3,700 other editors who blog.

And to 35,900 bloggers in my industry, publishing.

And to 11,500 bloggers in my hood, San Francisco.

However, in San Francisco, a city and county of 744,000, there are 113,000 people of various persuasions and callings, including the mayor's girlfriend and a writer I know who lacks literary merit, on Facebook.

A much smaller number of copies of the Fall issue were mailed to addresses in San Francisco: 341.

The Z Monologues

The Winter issue is shaping up with monologues: two that have actually been performed, one that was written as if it were the script for a performance, a memoir that could well be presented on stage, and an essay adapted from a scholarly paper that was presented.

Coincidence?

Also: Winter has four writers I've published before, in violation of my policy of sharing the wealth, that is, giving new writers (and editors) a chance.

Coincidence?

Also, all the artists were invited to submit by Marian Wintersteen Parmenter, co-founder and current director of the SFMOMA Artists Gallery (an advertiser) in Fort Mason, which is about to celebrate its 30th year of serving artists and collectors.

Not a coincidence.

Plus: three writers in print for the first time.

A regular feature.