Mount Ranier. Photo: Hardy Griffin
Hardy Griffin’s view of Mount Ranier, taken from an airplane, strikes me as a wonderful paradox for our cultural moment: grandiosity, spectacle, a sense of the implacably immobile. Somewhere, we know, there must be movement. After all, the plane was moving at something like five hundred mph above the rolling earth. Yet all seems frozen in time. If there is a Hokusai wave surging up to engulf us, it remains outside the frame.
That’s a long way round to saying: Welcome to our latest effort at collecting a bounty of written and visual material which we hope, at very least will divert and perhaps resonate with you.
This issue introduces a new theme: PLACE & PROCESS. Here you will find Sam Farhi’s “Gorge Us,” a seductive, edgy, backward glance at growing up in Ithaca, NY. Farhi’s debut novel The Sapsuckers is just out from Spuyten Duyvel Press.
Curated by Dana Delibovi, our POETRY section is as rich and varied as one could desire. Under SOUNDINGS, Jody Lin’s “Tenderness of Glass” offers a treat for the mind, via the ear. And the feast continues with superb TRANSLATIONS of Daniela Prado’s work from the Spanish by Lizzie Fox and Jeannine M. Pitas.
FICTION is aptly represented by Walter Dunn Jr.’s “The Saddest Game in Town.”
And this issue’s ESSAYS and LYRIC ESSAYS, featuring work by Jenine Holms, Bronwyn Mills, Ian C. Smith and Andrea Jackson offer a dynamic mix of insightful and expressive intelligences.
This issue’s ENFANT TERRIBLE is the eminent jazz vocalist Marilyn Kleinberg, interviewed by Jan Schmidt – followed by a selection of REMARKABLE and SUMMER READS.
Our ¡VIVA! juxtaposes two extraordinary moments in Sonny Rollins’ extraordinary career – as witnessed by Rafi Zabor and Robert Christgau.
We also want to acknowledge the recent passing of several other cultural eminences, among them: Carlo Ginzburg, Marjane Satrapi, way too soon; Clive Davis, Bob Weir, Willie Colón, James Blood Ulmer and Country Joe McDonald.*
A special ¡Presente! shout-out goes to Michael Dorgan, writer, martial artist and multi-valent culture hero, who died on June 30th. An excerpt from his memoir No Fight, No Blame: A Journalist’s Life in Martial Arts appears in CS2.
Our felicitations to Mel Brooks on his centenary, in appreciation of the ongoing brilliance sanity-saving absurdism. May he live long past the Mosaic age of 120, to become, literally, The 2000 Year Old Man.
As ever, we love to hear from you, both in response to what you find in these pages, and also with suggestions toward future content.
A final note: gazing at Ranier’s glacial slopes conjured up in my ear some lines from “Franklin’s Tower,” a Grateful Dead song from 1976. When Robert Hunter, the band’s primary lyricist, wrote this couplet, he could not have conceived the chilling truth his words would take on fifty years down the line:
If you plant ice
You’re going to harvest winds.
A final final note: by the time our next issue comes out in late November, we will have celebrated the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street, which occurred in London’s East End on October 4th, 1936 and precipitated the collapse of official fascism in the UK.
Wishing you all good things in this fruitful season.
—Eric Darton for The Editors
* In McDonald’s post-Fish solo career, and reflecting his continued anti-war activism, he recorded a musical rendition of Robert W. Service’s poem, “The Man From Athabasca,” which was originally published in the 1916 collection Rhymes of a Red Cross Man. Worth a listen with good headphones, across the span of generations.
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