Below is the opening of Tania James‘s new story “The Scriptological Review” in the latest issue of A Public Space. Not many stories center around editors of small magazines, maybe none do so this endearingly. (Just typing the beginning out now, here, I see how much the story rewards rereading.) James’s story collection Aerogrammes, in which this story is included, will be released from Knopf next week; the title story appeared in a 2007 issue of One Story.

This is not a guide to good handwriting. You’ll find no dos and don’ts, no dotted lines here. If that’s what you are looking for, try Cursive First, a workbook force-fed to me at the age of eight, when the nuns tried to mold my hand around the rubber pencil grip of conformity.

What you’re reading is the final copy of the Scriptological Review, a journal dedicated to the social analysis of handwriting. Our inaugural issue appeared two years ago, with a cover story titled “Slanty Signatures and Secret Turmoil: The Correlation Between High Cursive Slant and Low Self-Esteem.” In this, we analyzed a letter from John Wilkes Booth, whose cursive was brambled with signals that the lay reader would likely ignore, such as intraletter gaps and distended a’s and o’s.

If you’re still reading, then it’s likely that you are a subscriber and a scriptophile, but for the remaining fraction who have happened upon this issue on a bus seat or in a dentist’s office (or propping open a window, as I found my mother’s copy of volume IV), let me introduce myself…

It was OK to start with literature and art. As long as you said what you meant, and what you really thought on reflection (subject to later correction), then if you spoke honestly about anything you would be striking a blow. The magazine started with just $8,000, which four of us had pooled, plus $2,000 we extracted from friends and relatives in $20 subscriptions, sold on the basis of 100 copies of a prototype issue we had xeroxed and stapled. When we sold our first official issue in 2004, the meaning of n+1 as a title was simply that we’d try to document, or discover, one next step in every action that people said was settled, solved, or complete. One more step forward in the arts, in fiction, in government, in dance, in dating, in economics. We weren’t afraid of steps to the side, either, on the diagonal.

[....]

The truth that appears to me now is how much continuity there is in small literary and intellectual magazines in America. Some decades leave the feeling that you may be the last one left. When we started, we felt lonely, and as if we were picking up obligations from giants.

—n+1 founding co-editor Mark Grief over at New Statesman on a renewed place for little magazines in American today

In the same vein as Lewis Hyde’s well-known book The Gift, Hemley argues that, even when writers aren’t rewarded in direct monetary terms for the publication of their writing, this doesn’t mean there aren’t real benefits to the publication, though they may not be readily apparent. It’s not a new argument, but Hemley lays it out succinctly and with compelling personal examples. Hemley begins with the “Dispatches from Manila” column he wrote for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency when he was in the Philippines. He didn’t get paid for the column, but it forced him to work on a topic he was already interested in pursuing and garnered him a considerable amount of free advertising. As another example, Hemley brings up a decision by his friend Steve Yarbrough to give an essay to Michigan Quarterly Review as opposed to other, “heavier hitting” and better-paying publications. Yarbrough made his choice “because the editor there had always been a supporter of his and had published his first fiction.” The MQR publication eventually led to the reprinting of the essay in Utne Reader and work writing in Hollywood, paid work.

As founding editor of Defunct, Hemley is himself “an editor who doesn’t pay.” Defunct is a beautiful, well-designed online publication (Marcelle Heath wrote about it for Luna Park back in 2010), functioning “as a literary repository for everything that’s had its day, from defunct technologies to defunct religions and fads and foods and beliefs.” The latest issue has some interesting new work from David Shields, Paul Collins, and Elizabeth Kadetsky, along with stunning photographs from featured artist Noah Doely, such as “Naturalist,” shown above.

What does Hemley think about not paying his writers? “I wish we could pay them,” he writes. Throughout the essay it’s apparent Hemley wishes things were otherwise, that authors received generous remuneration for their work in real dollars. Though publications such as Electric Literature and One Story work hard to put sound financial compensation for writers at the forefront of their mission, the majority of literary magazine have never had the funds to do so. It’s the nature of the work. Alongside such pieces as Nicholas Ripatrazone’s recent essay on author payments at The Millions, Hemley’s essay adds to the necessary exploration of the unusual economy of literary art in the 21st century.

The following is the introduction to Mississippi Review volume 39, numbers 1-3, an issue reprinting highlights from Frederick Barthelme’s three decades as editor of the magazine. 

Introduction: Thirty Years Before the Mast

Thirty-three and a half, to be exact. That’s how long Frederick Barthleme worked as editor of Mississippi Review, an odd little bi-annual literary magazine published by the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Working with his cohort, the indispensable managing editor Rie Fortenberry, Barthelme twice a year produced a peculiar and idiosyncratic issue highlighting the kind of writing he found most interesting— intimate, brilliantly composed, often funny, always engaging. He began, in 1977, with the innovators of the 60s and 70s—Barth, Hawkes, McElroy, Beattie, Federman, Atwood, Lish, Carver, and soon added many emerging writers, eventually publishing more unknowns than knowns, and in the process accommodating many of the finest literary writers of the 70’s, 80’s, 90s and of the first decade of the 21st century.

In mid-2010 Barthelme was impolitely jettisoned from the editorial slot as part of a putsch at the university, and I was asked to take over. I finished the contest issue that was already underway, and then, happily, was offered a position at the University of Kentucky. I had one more issue to do for Mississippi Review, and decided the best use of that issue would be to highlight the thirty years the magazine had been Barthelme’s.

And so it happened that for some months I travelled with a pair of banker’s boxes filled with sixty-five issues of MR—a complete set, containing hundreds of poems, drawings, stories, interviews, and essays, with gorgeously clever covers wrapped around unique and compelling writing. I began to read, along with Assistant Editor Elizabeth Wagner, special issues on politics and religion, on literary magazines, on the prose poem, minimalism, the New York School poets, Hamlet, cyberpunk, Caribbean writing, panic sex, issues on emerging writers, new British fiction, world poetry, issues of interviews and issues on individuals—Rita Dove, Barry Hannah, Rick Bass, James Robison. Add to that the contest issues beginning in the 90s, winners selected by Veronica Geng, David Leavitt, Amy Hempel, Lucie Brock-Broido, and others. Plus, of course, the bulk of magazine’s poetry originally selected by the brilliant longtime poetry editor Angela Ball. In those issues were National Book Award winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, a Nobel Prize winner or two, National Book Critics Circle winners, numerous Pushcart Prize winners and winners of diverse honors and awards and grants, and many stories and poems republished in Best American Short Stories and Best American Poetry, New Stories from the South, and elsewhere, not to mention the works of many fine younger writers just embarking on their publishing careers.

For years Barthelme and his comrades would, as he once wrote, “cultivate an irredeemably disheveled look and a catholic publishing program, seeing to it that Mississippi Review was a lively magazine, always offbeat, perhaps a bit ahead of the curve, if there is a curve.” The magazine has been recognized. Raymond Carver, who was an early contributor, described MR as “one of the most remarkable and indispensable literary journals of our time.” Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Charles Simic, also a contributor, in what Barthelme always characterized as “a lovely excess of enthusiasm,” reported that “Mississippi Review is probably one of the best magazines in the country.”

Volume to volume I went, choosing one or two pieces from (almost) every issue. The first under Barthelme’s editorship is Spring ‘78, the cover an etching of a dancing magician with top hat, out of which billows poofs of smoke. Inside, work by Ann Beattie, Joseph McElroy, Doris Betts, Russell Banks, John Batki, Vicki Lindner, Pati Hill, Kenneth Bernard. Over the months Elizabeth Wagner, Angela Ball and I read and re-read hundreds of poems and stories and began selecting astonishing work that demanded inclusion in this volume. Very soon the trouble was eliminating work, as the list of inclusions was far too long, and there are only so many pages that can fit in a book before the binding splits or paper goes tissue-thin.

I hope you will find somewhere in each work the seductive, the evocative, the troubling, the charming, the difficult and strange, all characteristics of Barthelme’s editorial taste. And just as he selected the work for the issues over three decades (or selected the editors who selected the work), we tried to see with his eyes, to find the generosity, the openness to innovative forms, the exquisite sensibility.

]]> http://lunaparkreview.com/thirty-years-of-mississippi-review-an-introduction/feed/ 0 http://lunaparkreview.com/30-years-of-frederick-barthelme-mississippi-review/ http://lunaparkreview.com/30-years-of-frederick-barthelme-mississippi-review/#comments Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:22:21 +0000 Travis Kurowski http://lunaparkreview.com/?p=4714

I worked at Mississippi Review for a year and a half in graduate school. Fiction writer Frederick Barthelme—Rick—was the editor of MR, and he was also my graduate school director down there in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. I am fairly certain the only reason Rick finally let me work on the magazine was because I pestered him about it day in and day out. Every time he walked through the office where I worked, I would ask if he needed help with MR. He would always say no, thanks, then look at me kind of oddly. Then one day he didn’t say no. I stayed with MR for a year or so until I left Hattiesburg. Rick gave me more opportunity and responsibility than I deserved.  I could never thank him enough.

Rick has since left MR. Still the magazine soldiers on, earlier this year releasing the hefty volume 39, numbers 1-3, an issue reprinting highlights from Rick’s three decades as editor. The issue is about two inches thick, coming in at 870 pages. It’s a beauty. More, it seems emblematic of the laborious, necessary, and rewarding work done at magazines like MR. It’s like a trophy of some kind, though I can’t think of for what exactly. Literature? Publishing? Art? Those all seems too formal. Too like something Rick would jeer at, someone who seemed always wary of labels and awards.

There’s stuff in the issue from well-known authors and less well-known ones, but, flipping through and recognizing much, all the language is hard won, at the same time humbly remaking the lived world on the page—”I’m a dishwasher in a restaurant. I’m not trying to impress anybody.” And much of the work has since gained renown beyond MR’s pages, such as Larry Brown’s “Facing the Music” and Amy Hempel’s “The Dog of the Marriage.” There’s writing from Jason Brown and Elizabeth Tallent, Ben Marcus and Joyce Carol Oates, Hannah Pittard and Tao Lin, Yasunari Kawabata and James Tate. It’s really a masterpiece, this collection, and I can’t say I’ve ever seen anything like from a the literary magazine—certainly nothing so representatively massive since those early issues of New Directions or Charles Newman’s TriQuarterly, good company to be in.

Some editors and writers view the literary magazine world a necessary one for the ends of aestheticism and intellectual conversation: for, simply put, a piece of writing to live, and to be read. Yet those who hope for monetary payment are not automatically writing for that sole purpose; often times they are part of the mechanism that allows the system of literary magazines to survive. It is possible to write for the passion of the art, the possibility of discovery and revelation, and still want to get paid.

—from “On Getting Paid: Literary Magazines and Remuneration,” by Nicholas Ripatrazone in The Millions

Now that I have given birth three times and been present at friends’ and  clients’ births, I know what none of the poems or stories made clear (were they lying? not listening?). Birth is beautiful and spiritual and mundane and shitty (literally). It is hard work—the lowest and highest—and that’s what I’m interested in writing. Not birth per se but the realness of experience. I want to write with shame and honesty and humor and ambivalence about and out of experience. Arielle and I recently co-wrote a book called Home/Birth: a poemic. During a round of midnight-hour proofreading the editor told us that every time she reads the manuscript, she bursts into tears. I’m proud of having written something about birth that makes a woman who has not given birth cry. Sentiment and sentimental. About.

—Rachel Zucker

Modernist artists understood sentimentality’s potential for lies, its ability to resonate with us in powerful, sometimes lethal ways. Sentimentality at its worst, they knew, was a way to reach the masses, to use sweetness, nationalism, or nostalgia to persuade us, against our better judgment, to do stupid, fatal things. Sentimental war propaganda is partly to blame for the nearly 17 million fatalities of the Great War. We, too, often see sentimentality deployed to dubious ends. Witness the rhetoric of George W. Bush during the runup to the Iraq war (countless other examples include paintings of happy slaves singing in cotton fields, wanting only to serve their masters; and the pretty, submissive housewives of 1950s sentimental movies). When the World War II poet Dunstan Thompson looked over the destroyed body of yet another young soldier, he exhorted all of us “to love him, tell the truth.”

That said, I think too many of us avoid emotion because we worry about sinking into sentimentality. Sure, emotive expression can be indecorous or cringeworthy, as in Work’s lyric—notbecause it is exceedingly purple but because it fails to think deeply or complexly. I also believe we have adopted the anti-sentimental stance of our Modernist predecessors without completely apprehending their reason for it.

—Kevin Prufer

The sixth installment of Words Without Borders’ International Graphic Novels issue series is up online—their February 2012 issue. The above picture is from French artist/writer Mazen Kerbaj’s “Letter to the Mother”; the below one is from Polish artist/writer Krysztof Gawronkiewicz’s “Romanticism.”

[The New Yorker] published 116 poems in 2009. At about four poems a page, that makes 29 pages, which means, with a circulation of roughly a million, The New Yorker prints approximately 29 million pages of poetry annually. That constitutes a considerable corporate commitment to verse.

—from “A Passion for Poetry” by Spencer Bailey in The New York Review of Magazines

(Adam Robinson noticed this first.)

Smuggling Afghan heroin or women from Odessa would have been more reprehensible, but more logical. You know you’re a fool when what you’re doing makes even the post office seem efficient. Everything I was packing into this unwieldy, 1980s-vintage suitcase was available online. I don’t mean that when I arrived in Berlin I could have ordered more Levi’s 510s for next-day delivery. I mean, I was packing books.

Not just any books — these were all the same book, multiple copies. “Invalid Format: An Anthology of Triple Canopy, Volume 1” is published, yes, by Triple Canopy, an online magazine featuring essays, fiction, poetry and all variety of audio/visual culture, dedicated — click “About” — “to slowing down the Internet.” With their book, the first in a planned series, the editors certainly succeeded. They were slowing me down too, just fine.

—from “My Berlin Airlift” by Joshua Cohen from The Sunday New York Times Book Review, January 15, 2012