American Painting & Poetry

Last Friday, Paul Hoover coerced his wife, Maxine Chernoff, as well as Bill Berkson, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman (the last two are married to each other) into reading poems in front of some American paintings in the de Young.

The idea was to traipse around the galleries, but the audience grew too large, so the venue was shifted to the auditorium.

The thing I like best about readings is the banter. Hass recalled Seamus Heaney replying to a host's query as to whether he wanted a tall or a short whiskey that "there's never been a tall whiskey" and Mrs. Heaney continued, "And there's never been a short poetry reading."

Berkson mentioned that Jimmy Schuyler was considered the best art writer of the New York School poets who also wrote about art. I've ordered his Selected Art Writings for $2.45 (plus postage) on Amazon.

I had never heard Martin Johnson Heade's name said out loud, so I was glad to hear Berkson pronounce it heed—I had assumed it was head.

I was also glad to hear Berkson credit the Chronicle's long-ago art critic Alfred Frankenstein for his work on trompe l'Oeil—those paintings should comprise the best gallery in the museum, but they are unfortunately overlit and whelmed by all sorts of Curatorial Ideas.

Mr. Dreiser

There's a benefit reading for David Meltzer at Bird & Beckett, Thursday at 7.

In his fascinating set of interviews, The San Francisco Poets (Ballantine Books, 1971), Meltzer gets William Everson to tell a wonderful anecdote: Taking the bus to San Francisco on furlough from his C.O. camp in Oregon in 1943, Everson spotted, he thought, Theodore Dreiser, also on board.

Everson caught up with the master at a rest stop, in the men's room, and blurted out an introduction.

"Dreiser looked at me and I suddenly discovered I had nothing more to say. He slowly buttoned his fly, and as he turned to wash his hands, he said two words with extreme irony: 'So what!'

"Then he started in ripping a paper towel from the rack, he crumbled it in those fearsome hands and proceeded with contempt. 'There are thousands of you. You crawl about the country from conference to literary conference. You claim to be writers, but what do you ever produce? Not one of you will amount to a goddamn. You have only the itch to write, nothing more...the insatiable itch to express yourself. Everywhere I go I run into you, and I'm sick of you....'"

Higher Standards

An anonymous file card has just been received in response to my sleek postcard sent to subscribers, donors, and advertisers, suggesting the Top Ten Things You Can Do for Literature. It reads, in its entirety:

TWO THINGS ZYZZVA CAN DO TO REVIVE MY FLAGGING SUPPORT

(1) LESS MAD MAGAZINE MEETS GOYA OR COSTUMED HERMAPHRODITIC IMAGES ON THE COVER

(2) TRY SOME IMAGES THAT MIGHT LIFT ONE'S HEART. SEE FAULKNER'S NOBEL PRIZE ACCEPTANCE SPEECH, 1950

In reponse to this exhortation, all of us here at ZYZZYVA (as we spell it) pledge to raise our standards forthwith, esp. in the visual dept.

What must the Maasai

What must the Maasai think, after touring our Farmers Market, with its statue of Gandhi presiding over the morels at $54/lb., [click on images to enlarge]
eggs a buck apiece,
a free place to park your veggies,
a free recyclable bag to tote them in,
and, just down the road, student fares to Ougadougou ten times as much as to London.
P.S.: Ougadougou's own Grand Market burned down four years ago.

Gather Ye Sweet Peas

Fiction with a Hook

I got blogbasted—flamed—for a story in the Spring issue.

A blogger who calls himself "Literary Rejections on Display" thought the story was a gimmick, accepted only because of its "hook"—the 91-year-old author had a stroke a while ago.

I don't read cover letters, so I didn't know when I first read the story about Roger D. Coleman's "disability." Nor did I know until he sent the contract back that he had published seven stories last year.

It is true that Coleman doesn't always write correct and coherent sentences; his plotting is, at times, rather strange. But what wonderful phrases.

If his story had been truly disjunctive and incomprehensible (flarfy), it would have been understood as avant. As it was, I thought it strange and marvelously maladroit.

If you'd like to read the story without the discomfort of actually subscribing or buying it on the newsstand, here is "Alien Fusion."

The issue also has a poem shaped like a tortured spine; it was written by a victim of scoliosis. I can't remember when I knew the source of the poet's inspiration. In any case, I'm always a sucker for concrete poetry. [Unfortunately, I don't know how to transfer its format to this blog. If you ask, I'll send you a xerox.]

P.S.: Since we're discussing Spring, may I point out that the cover is derived from an 1808 Ingres in the Louvre.

Zyzzyva the Zombie

Our special correspondent in Oregon, Jeremiah Rickert, has just read Piers Anthony's 1998 Xanth series novel Zombie Lover, and reports:

Breanna, a girl who has come to the magical land of Xanth from Mundania (the non-magic real-world) accidentally naps in a grove that is normally used to signal one's desire to be married. Xeth, the king of the zombies, has been searching for a living bride because he doesn't like zombie women. He finds her in the grove and decides to marry her.

She flees, but Xeth turns loose his zombies to find her. Through a series of adventures, Breanna ends up on the Isle of Women, which is populated by women who insist on marrying royalty.

One of the women there is Zyzzyva Zombie, a warrior who was killed in battle, but turned into a zombie very soon after her death (so she's very close to a living woman). Breanna helps Zyzzyva learn how to attract men instead of beating them up, in an effort to free herself of Xeth and his zombies' pursuit.

The training pays off and Zyzzyva is able to woo Xeth the Zombie king, and Breanna is free of the unwanted zombie-suitor.

Eventually, in a later b00k, we're happy to report, the king does marry Zyzzyva Zombie!

Zombies appear in ZYZZYVA in Sam D'Allessandro's 1987 story "Zombie Pit" and in Rob Roberge's 1996 story "Swiss Engineering."