Reading at the Friends

Andrew Sean Greer schmoozed with Tom Dolby last night, before reading their works in progress (along with K.M. Soehnlein) at the Friends of the SF Public Library's office-loft, above Citizen Cake.


I had rejected several of Dolby's early attempts at short fiction—his name caught my eye because of Dolby Sound and that is indeed his family; he never responded to my inquiries as to whether he might be interested in the support of literary magazines.

Out of guilt, I bought his new novel, Sixth Form, which was conveniently on sale. Anyway, I'll read anything preppy.

I asked him what famous writers had gone to Hotchkiss, his school:

John Hersey.

Lewis Lapham (grandson of a mayor of San Francisco).

Archibald MacLeish.

[And of course Henry Luce, who referred to himself as the Editor.]

I read Sixth Form on the bus home.

Onward!

Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque, the venerable literary center in Venice, is under threat and needs your help.

There is apparently nothing anyone can do to save the beloved and essential Dutton's Brentwood, which will close at the end of April.

Gods in Color

I once asked a scholar of Shang bronzes if anyone had ever tried to restore one, taking off the corrosion to see what the patina might once have looked like.

No.

I've always had the same kind of curiosity about Greek and Roman statues and buildings (like the Parthenon): What did they look like originally, when they were painted?

A recent show at Harvard's Sackler Museum offered some guesstimates—and an extraordinary catalog: Gods in Color: Painted Sculpture of Classical Antiquity.

If you're not in the habit of clicking on the links I provide, please treat yourself this time. Don't miss the second page of the article, either.

On Sunday, I went to the Legion to see if there were traces of polychrome on any of the antique figures (on the ground floor, near the rest rooms).

Reader, there are.

AutoBioDiversity

Imagine my surprise when a Google Web Alert for "Howard Junker" turned up the full text of AutoBioDiversity, the collection of personal narratives from our pages, published by Heyday Books in 2005.

Nice seeing this wonderful book online for free, but I didn't authorize it.

Perhaps the unscrupulous publisher of Heyday Malcolm Margolin did.

He has never sent me a royalty report for the book, and I assume he has retained all its meager earnings. He refuses to respond to my request for a report.

I'm not sure why he has treated me so shabbily—and illegally. You might ask him. He's glib and I'm sure he'll give you a good story: heyday@heydaybooks.com.

He was quite enthusiastic about the book at first and even invited me to come over to see if we might work together on another project. His entire, small staff sat in on the meeting.

Malcolm suggested...I might function as a "senior editor."

I had thought we would be partners, and I asked...if all the expenses and all the work was coming from my end, what, exactly, would he be contributing....

He began to fume and to yell at me and to shout at me abusively.

I walked out.

77 Geary

On Saturday, I did a gallery hop. I thought of doing a portrait of each dealer with a favorite work, but realized I am snapshooter, not a portrait photographer. In any case, many of the dealers weren't in on that cold and rainy day.

I thought about doing an SFArtBlog, complete with critical apparatus. Too much work. I thought of at least mentioning the names of the artists. Ditto.

I settled on just a peek at each gallery I visited at 77 Geary [Blogspot.com allows only five images per post, so my hop requires five posts]:

Togonon
Heather Marx
George Krevsky
Rena Bransten
Patricia Sweetow

49 Geary, Part One

I continued my gallery hop on Saturday at 49 Geary, taking the elevator to the second floor and working my way up to the fifth.

I visited these galleries:

871 Fine Art
Mark Wolfe
Steven Wolf
Stephen Wirtz
Fraenkel

49 Geary, Part Two

My gallery hop continued with these galleries at 49 Geary:

Jack Fischer
Art Exchange
Haines
Gregory Lind
Elins Eagles-Smith

14 Geary, etc.

Continuing my gallery hop, across Geary, I visited these galleries:

Paule Anglim
MODERNISM
Hackett-Freedman
John Berggruen
Dolby Chadwick

Post & post-Post

Continuing up Post, I concluded my gallery hop with these galleries:

Meyerovich
Newmark
and, altho I actually visited on Friday, I here append the drawings show at John Pence.

And throw in a billboard I saw at the edge of Chinatown—everyone was gearing up for the parade. I was not encouraged to switch to Sprint.
And, as long as we're talking about fading icons, here's the pyramid, which I passed on the way to see the Romanian abortion movie at the Embarcadero. The redwood forest seems to be doing well.

Outsider Art

Instead of trekking home from the Farmers' Market yesterday—Rozanne's visiting family in NoDak—I did a midday gallery hop.

Not much walking, actually, since the downtown galleries are intensely concentrated, altho not as much as at Bergamot Station or Culver City.

I'll post my intra-gallery findings during the week; here's what I saw outside the art world.

In the lobby of the Monadnock Bldg., Harvey Milk in red. [click on images to enlarge]
A zip.
An Old Master.
A kosher restaurant in Chinatown, closed, needless to say.
I-heart-SF T-shirts marked down to $1.99, although next store: $.88.

Street logic

What they teach you in school about the relationship of figure to ground—do you see faces or vases?—doesn't necessarily hold true on the street. [click on images to enlarge]
Yes, the little red school house is red.
But should green really be on the left? Or should blue? Or brown?
And what ever happened to the great Duck Ellington?
And to the Bear of Very Little Brain?

Texting Chinese

My Iowa cousin's son, Andy, and his wife, Rebecca, came by for a visit the other evening and made shrimp fettucine with the ingredients they'd brought.

Andy is off to his first posting with the Foreign Service: stamping visas in Beijing.

He's eager to get tickets to China v. Japan in table tennis, if you can help. I suggested he approach our ambassador, who was at Yale a few years before Andy, and sing a verse or two of the ambassador's fraternity song:

A Band of Brothers in DKE
We march along tonight
Two by Two
With arms locked firm and tight.

Meanwhile, Andy told me how a hip Chinese would text thank you:

QQQ

The word for "three" being (something like) tsan, therefore: tsan cue.

Also, how to do good-bye:

88

The word for "eight" being (something like) ba, therefore: ba ba.

With apologies to all. Ciao tutti.

Michael Martone

Michael Martone seems to like having each book take a different form.

His last outing, Michael Martone, was a collection of Contributor's Notes, bio blurbs (about Michael Martone) that he had contributed to a panoply of litmags.

His new one, Racing in Place, is subtitled Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins. [University of Georgia Press, 168 pages, $17.95]

In the intro, he calls it "a book of smaller messes."

And it is, but rather conventionally so; it's a bunch of essays.

I love it, nonetheless, as I love everything he writes.

As clever as he tries to be, Martone is also, usually, because he's from Indiana, fundamentally sincere. That's so refreshing in an experimental writer. I always trust him even when he's spoofing.

In Racing...I love learning how his mother the high school administrator invented a new school's iconography, choosing the mascot, the song, the school colors....

I love his account of a case of harassment, for which, he found, there is no adequate form of discourse.

Please don't start with this book. Start with the basics, Martone in Indiana: The Flatness and Other Landscapes and Blue Guide to Indiana and....

For coastals, like you and me, these visions of central America are crucial and exotic and thoroughly lovable.

If you like early Donald Barthelme, you'll love Michael Martone.

New, Used, Used 2 B

Chronicle Books has opened its first free-standing store—it has a stall in the Metreon (14 reviews on Yelp)—on Union St.,
down the block from where there used to be a truly underground bookstore, now a boutique offering fashions from Israel,
and a bookstore that once, under a different name and different management, used to send out thieves to other bookstores to bring back big-ticket items like coffee-table books to (re)sell,
and around the corner from where Blair Fuller, once president of our Board, co-owned a bookstore, Minerva's Owl, which later moved to Levi's Plaza before folding....

Running Mate

BHO, first of all, should act presidential and insist that headline writers refer to him by his full initials—anything less would be lese-majeste.

Also, he should choose a running mate.

Pro forma, we have

• the Speaker of the House, altho apparently her husband's connections will not withstand scrutiny
• the senior senator from California, but she is such a prune
• the junior senator—she lacks gravitas
• Chair of the NEA—I would like to see Dana Gioia fired, but in a nice way; kicking him upstairs would accomplish this and, in addition, further BHO's efforts at bipartisanship. But Gioia is such a lame poet.
• the man BHO has declared he would most like to meet: Bruce Springsteen. He may be middle-aged, white and a man, but he rocks. However, he would offend those who supported Yoko Ono in the primaries.
  

Therefore, if BHO really wants to make history, he will go with the woman I consider the Jackie O of this century—his marital mate, Michelle O.

She has more than enough moxie to handle the Senate as President pro tem.

Editors who write read

On Tuesday, local litmag editors who write fiction will give a reading at SF Brewing Company, 155 Columbus Ave., 8 p.m.

Namely, Elizabeth Bernstein of Big Ugly Review, Gravity Goldberg of Instant City, and our own managing editor, Kristin Kearns.

SF Brewing Company, The City's oldest brewpub, is currently disguised with a postmodern shroud.

Meanwhile, speaking of local litmags, just across Columbus, lies the HQ of Zoetrope: All Story, the green-domed building on the left (click on image to enlarge).
And speaking of readings, here's the original venue of Intersection, where I once heard such emerging voices (and later contributors) as Opal Palmer Adisa, Lucia Berlin, Gloria Frym...
And at Juicy News, on Fillmore, our humble journal is relegated to the far distance (click on image to enlarge), whereas Paris Review has two face-out slots. When I expressed my outrage to the manager, he said that, actually, he does very well with ZYZZYVA, this is the last copy, eleven have been sold...and the new one is due soon. I apologized and thanked him.

A Day's Work

Yesterday morning, I auditioned for a slot as a broccoli vendor at the Ferry Bldg. farmers' market. [photo: Rozanne Junker]
Then I walked home, stopping by Sarah Stocking's wonderful vintage poster shop, 368 Jackson St.
Farther west on Jackson, they were shooting a commercial. I asked Security if I could walk through. Sure, he said, just stay on this side of the street. In an alley, I saw these mystery cars.
Then I took a picture of the "car" and the "pursuit car" with its fancy remote camera on the end of a fancy boom. Security was not pleased.

You can't take pictures, they yelled.

O.K., I said.

Then a very large Security came up and said, my boss will give you a hundred dollars if you delete the picture you just took.

I said, show me the money. He went away and came back with a hundred dollar bill.

I pushed various buttons on the camera eager to delete the picture and earn the money. There, I said, I deleted it. Security was reluctant to hand over the money, but finally did. A production assistant, who had joined the melee, said, that's a pretty sleazy way to earn a hundred dollars.

In fact, despite my good intentions, I had not deleted the photo. On the other hand, the photo I was supposed to delete does not reveal any trade secrets, I don't think.
Continuing on, quite pleased with my day's work, I eventually came up Fillmore to browser books (an advertiser) and noticed Brock Foxworthy Hanson, sitting in front of the next-door Peet's.

Are you working on your novel, I asked.

Yes, he said.

Shakespeare in Winter

The Shakespeare Garden in Golden Gate Park, founded in 1928, renovated in 1991, currently in a state of neglect, is my new cause. [click on images to enlarge]
The entry gate, donated by Steve Beach Blanket Babylon Silver in honor of Cyril Magnin, is missing a letter.
The six bronze plaques bearing spot quotes about plants are filthy and defaced.
The plantings are nondescript, at least by this layman, altho isn't that a California poppy lurking upper stage left?
And the bronze bust of Shakespeare himself, one of two copies of a portrait commissioned before 1623 by Shakespeare's son-in-law and given to us by Stratford-upon-Avon, lies hidden behind hideous doors to prevent it from being vandalized.

Sweet Inspiration

Anyway, always glad to inspire poets.

And here's an enigma within a...

and the least of this mystery is what means ekphrastic.

Vallotton's Day

Felix Valloton (1865-1925) was no saint, but he deserves a day's attention.

A buddy of Bonnard & Vuillard, Gertrude Stein called him "a Manet for the impecunious."

I love him because he's the only artist I know who ever depicted an editor in the act of editing a litmag.

The editor in question, Felix Feneon, "fit découvrir et publier, des auteurs tels que Jarry, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Rimbaud, etc. En peinture, il contribua à faire connaître Pissarro, Seurat, Signac, Van Dongen, Matisse, etc."

Last summer, New York Review Books published Luc Sante's translation of Feneon's Novels in Three Lines, flash fiction avant la parole.

Ngugi & Paul

Yesterday, I had a quick word with the great Kenyan writer and language activist Ngugi wa Thiong'o before he read at 111 Minna.
He was leading off the Lit & Lunch series presented by the Center for the art of Translation, president Olivia Sears standing at the left. Ngugi currently teaches at UC Irvine. The photo is by Tom Molanphy, who had brought his writing class from the Academy of Art to the reading.

Last night, I heard Paul McCarthy talk at CCA about his show there, which explores artists and objects that mattered to him early in his career.
I had forgotten my camera, but asked the woman sitting next to me, who turned out to be Kathryn Gritt, a lecturer in the CCA photo dept., if she would be kind enough to take a picture of Paul (with her fancy digital camera) and forward it to me. She was and she did.

The slide that Paul is projecting shows the catalog raisonne of Henry Moore, the closest the show could come to representing the first sculpture that Paul made, when he was about 14, a "Henry Moore."

Artist & Writer

Over the weekend, I discovered Caitlin Conlon, putting together a portfolio across the street from her apartment so she can apply to art school, [click on image to enlarge]
and Michael Esslinger, flogging his Alcatraz book on site, which he does about one weekend a month.

ZYZZYVA: The legacy

We are not unduly concerned with our legacy, having enough trouble staying afloat and getting the next issue out.

However, we call your attention to The Zyzzyva Legacy gen 2.0, which is playing a part in a Sims game on LiveJournal.

Since it takes forever to upload, however, we cannot urge you to check it out, altho its subtitle is "Where traumatic memories are made."

In any case, it ain't me, babe,

Lovers' Lane, Part II

Continuing yesterday's trek on Lovers' Lane, from the Presidio to Mission Dolores, I headed south on Fillmore and came upon Up from Darkness, Public Defenders Clean Start Transitional Houseing Programs [click on image to enlarge],
the parking lot gardens of the Uptown Church of Christ,
a gallery en plein air [click on image to enlarge],
and, across the street from the Mission itself, on the ground floor of a progressive Reform synagogue, the First Mennonite Church.
On the way home through the projects, a proud athlete shows the street his stuff.

Lovers' Lane, Part I

In the run-up to Valentine's, I decided to walk Lovers' Lane. [click on image to enlarge]
The first stretch of the Lane is part of a loop I do in the Presidio about once a week.
Then the Lane goes by the JCC and Ella's, both advertisers, and these delightful stairs,
and this monument to the Counter-Reformation, now denominated, in golden script, The Temple of Good Fortune & Wisdom [click on image to enlarge: Nervi's St. Mary's, 1971, in the distance],
and this former library.

Lapham's Quarterly

For his eponymous journal's first issue, Lewis Lapham, long-time editor of Harper's, assembled the greatest bunch of contributors ever period: Homer, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Twain, Churchill, Orwell, Vonnegut... even Greg of Tours.

Mostly dead, of course, and out of copyright.

Silliman would declare, Whitman, sure, but where's Zukovsky?

And there are only a couple of women, and Tecumseh, Sun Tzu, and Krishna are pretty much the people of color.

The stated theme is "States of War."

I'm a little slow catching up with LQ, as Duchamp would surely have dubbed it—it launched in November— but it is concerned with history, so I am only taking the long view.

LQ was immediately denounced as pretentious, promiscuous, and over-arted by The New Criterion; sure, but so what: I had fun browsing Lapham's Folly, which is more than I can say for the latest NER, New Criterion, Poetry, Southern Review, Tin House, VQR....

What's not to love about Sherman's exchange of notes with Hood about the evacuation of Atlanta.

Or a sidebar on the "U.S. Military Condolence Reimbursement," which these days amounts to $100,000 tax free. (Lapham launched the Harper's Index.)

Or Lenin's exhortation to his people in Penza to wipe out the kulaks.

Lapham's grandfather was once mayor of San Francisco and his great-grandfather was a founder of Texaco. Lapham has a personal stake in the old days.

He's now 72; better he should launch a magazine culled from the public domain than relegate himself to the dustbin of history.

Bye-bye, Bay Lit

The Bay Guardian's monthly supplement Bay Lit used to hit the stands the first Wednesday of every month. But it has been disappeared.

Not enough advertising, apparently. First, the NY publishers stopped. Then, the local bookstores cut back. [Neither the publisher nor the executive editor responded to my e-mail asking for comment.]

Bay Lit was never great, but it was something. It paid attention, and sometimes it gave a boost to a writer who deserved one. It ran "contests" to publish local writers.

The diminution continues.

Anglo-Recognition

The Zoological Society of London has at last recognized the zyzzyva.

We are doubly pleased that they set it all caps. The eponymous litmag is of course all caps italic.

We can do it.

Dead Souls

The first two voters arrived at my polling place promptly at 7, the opening time. I remarked on their promptness. The taller dude replied, "Making history."

My polling place is the Columbarium, an above-ground burial dovecote, which was still being prepared at the last moment. [click on image to enlarge]
There are still niches available.
Emmitt Watson, caretaker and historian, who has been on the job for 22 years, from the time when pigeons flew inside the dome, offered me a coffee—they have a Starbucks machine in the lobby—and a brochure. He would be happy to give you a tour.
I asked if he was voting for the brother. Of course, he said, but it is not the black man's time.

You may remember the campaign promises I made last October.

Lehman's Erotic Best

The Best American Erotic Poems is David Lehman's latest Best (Scribner Poetry, 300 pages, $30).

Actually, it's one poem each by Dave's all-stars, starting with Shakespeare, as quoted by F.S. Key, whom Lehman acknowledges as a surprise find.

Then there's Poe, Whitman, and the usuals, arranged by date of birth.

Dave's no Susie Bright, who's turning 50 and has promised this year will be her last Best American Erotica, but he is enough of a suck-up to include doggerel by Dana Gioia.

Instead of extensive bio/poetics notes, each contributor was asked to name a favorite piece of erotic writing of whatever genre. I added a few titles to my reading list.

I was delighted to have the chance to read Auden's 1948 classic "The Platonic Blow," which he "disavowed," that is, never published. Worth the price of admission.

Lehman claims to have been inspired by "noticing that poets, especially younger poets, and younger women above all, were writing with unusual candor and passion and often with intelligence and wit about their sexual relationships."

Dave, at 60, must feel a lot of poets qualify as "younger"; he includes ten under 35.

As a litmag editor, I gotta love Jennifer L. (born in '68) Knox's "Another Motive for Metaphor":

I love to masturbate, especially/After a poem of mine's accepted in/A literary magazine. Shit—

Quis custodiet

As time goes by, the young outgrow their early mentors.

See also Hector Protector. [click on image to enlarge]

39 Down

The clue to 39 Down in the NY Times crossword today is "Zyzzyva, e.g."

Six letters.

Obviously, "litmag."

Spring is incoming

Yesterday was wintery, but earlier in the week, on at least one tony block of Commonwealth, spring had sprung. [please click on images to enlarge, they look better bigger]

Stifling the Competition

There are so many litmags out there these days, many of them cavorting at the annual AWP Conference in NYC even as we speak, that the notion there could be still more brewing in backyard labs is terrifying.

As Satchel Paige put it, "Don't look back; something might be gaining on you."

Given the chance, I stifle the competition.

Which has already received its first submission.