Wednesday, September 14, 2011

The Mysterious Human Heart

"The produce in New York is really just produce, oranges
and cabbage, celery and beets, pomegranates
with their hundred seeds, carrots and honey,
walnuts and thirteen varieties of apples.
On Monday morning I will walk down
to the market with my heart inside me, mysterious,
something I will never get to hold
in my hands, something I will never understand.
Not like the apricots and potatoes, the albino
asparagus wrapped in damp paper towels, their tips
like the spark of a match, the bunches of daisies, almost more
a weed than a flower, the clementine,
the sausage links and chicken hung
in the window, facing the street where my heart is president
of the Association for Random Desire, a series
of complex yeas and nays,
where I pick up the plantation, the ginger root, the sprig
of cilantro that makes me human, makes me
a citizen with the right to vote, to bear arms, the right
to assemble and fall in love."

Matthew Dickman, American Poetry Review, Nov./Dec. 2008

Friday, September 9, 2011

View on a City

"Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white leaps...the city seen for the first time, in the first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

The Merry Month of September

There are twelve months throughout the year
From January to December -
And the primmest month of all the twelve
Is the merry month of September.

"Where, oh, where has the sunshine gone?" - ask the children when the summer is rainy and chilly, but when it comes to the last days of August, the weather usually changes. The rain stops.. Sometimes it rains at night, but keeps the sky clear all day...The sun shines like anything. The flowers show their brightest colors. Everything is rich and alive.

Orchards now are apple scented,
Mists across the meadow lie,
Sunlight's gleaming soft and golden,
Hazy blue the kindly sky.
Spiders' webs are diamond hung,
Swallows twitter in the heat;
Chestnut leaves begin to yellow,
Robin's tiny song is sweet.
Asters and chrysanthemums
Make the cottage gardens gay.
Loveliness is everywhere
On this warm September Day!

Monday, September 5, 2011

Magazine Scene

The are people reading magazines everywhere; and there are no limit to the choices available. Of all the print media, they offer by far the broadest range of human expression in text and pictures. Unlike television, magazines have to be read, and reading is active.
There are untold number of magazines. Nobody knows for sure how many magazines exist.
Consumer magazines, business, and trade magazines are in one trade category. Science and technical periodicals are in the second category. Finally, professional publications are in the third category.
We live now in the Age of Information, and magazines continue to be the prime carries. No other country in the world can equal the United States for sheer numbers and variety of magazine publications. Where else, could there be seventy-six magazines on skiing and snowmobiling; forty-five devoted to brides; seventy-one astronomy publications.
So we left just with one important question about the "spirit of future?"
The answer is below:
"Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?"
(Henry IV, Part I)
Our cyberspace opened the door to technological revolution, transforming all three publishing fields -books, newsletters, and magazines alike. Text that survived for five centuries cannot disappear overnight, or perhaps at all. So far, every new technology, from computer to digital photography, has created new inducements to read.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

What about Magazines? History Please!

Magazines today cover every aspect of life, and cater to a market of special interests - the days of the great general-subject magazines are over.
As for history of magazines, they appeared much later on the scene. Through the history, there may have been approaches to a magazine in antiquity, especially in China, the magazine as it now known began only after the invention of the printing press in the West. The word "magazine" comes to us from France, where one of the first world's magazines, called Journal des Scavans, was first published in Paris in 1655.

On February 16, 1741, came ti life the first American magazine, appropriately named American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the political State of the British Colonies, published by the Philadelphia printer Andrew Bradford. A few days later The General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, for All the British plantations in America appeared, published by a fellow Philadelphia's and rival printer, Benjamin Franklin.

There was a good reason for a delay of the magazine. Magazines had to wait until the literary and practical arts had developed enough in America to create an audience large enough for its own periodicals. As for magazines, the golden age for magazines came in the quarter-century from 1825 to 1850. Before 1825 there were less than a hundred magazines in America; after 1850 there were more than six hundred.

Three magazines funded during this period of American history are still surviving: Scientific American, began in 1845; Harper's Magazine, founded in 1850 as Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Its rival was and remains the Atlantic Monthly, established in 1857.

Highlights of the 20th Century, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Liberty, and Life, include the rise and fall of such mass-circulation business. Success stories were written by the Reader's Digest, founded in October, 1921 by De Witt and Lila Bell Wallace; Time, started in 1923 by Henry Luce and his partner Briton Hadden; The New Yorker, the creation of editor Harold Ross in 1925.