My local public library lured visitors up to the Rare Book Room, where they had a supply of cotton gloves on hand for anyone who wanted to browse through their copies of the Limited Editions Club (illustrations by Matisse) and Arion Press (illustrations by Robert Motherwell) editions of Ulysses, as well as Liz Cole's project-in-progress - a pop-up version of Finnegan's Wake.
And lunch was on the house: gorgonzola-apple sandwiches, olives, salad and Banbury cakes (based on chapter 8, IIRC).
*happy Peg*
LNHammer, re markets for epic poetry: There's some folks over at Amazon who've compiled lists of favorite book-length/epic poems (including some by not-famous, not-dead writers), and assorted journals who hold contests expressly for long poems (including Malahat and The Paris Review).
Tina: seems to me a space cop procedural sestina might fit right in with the other goings-on over at McSweeney's.
:-)
Mythago suggested:
re Holly M.'s comment, I think part of the problem is that (unless one is part of the Literary Scene, and thus probably published already) the editors are unknowns. In a writer's group, you KNOW that Person A has real issues with strong female characters and Person B gets bored if there isn't an action sequence every ten pages, so you mentally adjust for their criticism.
As a writer, you have no way to know what an editor's preferences and issues are. There's no way to know that the editor who rejected your manuscript is just plain sick of mission-to-Mars stories, no matter how good yours was, or that the name of the main character is the same as his nutbar ex's.
I find don't quite agree with this, for two reasons:
(1) A fair number of editors maintain blogs or participate in online forums these days; others often take the trouble to specify authors they enjoy reading, either in their guidelines or in the various market guides or in interviews. I'm of the opinion that it's currently easier than it ever has been to make educated guesses about a particular editor's taste.
(2) Analyzing the magazines/books they've already published is also a way to assess what they tend to accept (or not).
(It's not a surefire way to gauge what they're _going_ to be buying, of course, but then again, the editor doesn't have a surefire way to determine what Random Person Browsing in a Bookstore is going to purchase 12-24 months from now - especially considering that Random Person may simply opt for Tolkien or Heinlein or the latest movie tie-in. And, ultimately, it's not like Random Person will be any less quirky or baggage-laden than fellow writers and editors. . .)
In any case, even with (1) and (2), I'll readily concede that there's still plenty of room for mysteries and intangibles and unfortunate coincidences like the examples Mythago provides, but I figure that's also the same exhilaration-friendly space that causes a reader to remain unmoved by Poems A, B, C but lock onto Poem Z, even though all four poems might be equal in style and substance. The submissions game is still ultimately an intricate form of roulette, BUT there's a distinct difference between the person poking random quarters into the slots and the player who tracks the fall of the cards and understands how the odds work. Sure, the slots pay off once in a while, but. . .
Which is also my response to Alaric's rhetoric about WCW. Sure, stunning work sometimes appears out of nowhere, but so does an awful lot of cliched, boring drivel (some of it even in print. *grin*). Reading widely helps trains the eye, ear and mind to clue into cliches and understand how and where It's Been Done Before. While it's not guaranteed to make one a better writer, I frankly believe it improves the odds.
(And by "widely" I mean both classics and schlock. I'm trying to remember who said that one of the lessons he learned from Thornton Wilder was to sit through an entire season of bad plays and pick them apart, the better to understand what makes a good play good. . . ).
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