Volume 48, Issue 3

THESE DAYS, THE BUZZARDS who sit on the telephone wires just outside the offices of literary quarterlies seem plumper and more numerous than usual. Some fly down at night and nibble the subscription database. Some perch on mailboxes and raise the rates. Some descend to pick at the Promethean livers of editors, staff, and interns, feasting on their vital energies. Others have the glassine faces of taxation and bookkeeping. Edgar Allan Poe, assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, wrote "The Raven" about these birds, changing the species so as not to piss them off.

The current state of affairs has caused many editors to reconsider the role of our magazines in the cultural future. Adapting to the digital universe has not been enough. We have saved production costs, but require more in-house labor. And there's hardware and software to be bought, and stronger eye glasses. And a jungle of issues about rights and remunerations as published material circulates in novel ways.

Rationales are offered: we are the AAA farm team for book publishers; we have no financial prospects, and so are free to print innovative and controversial things. But what matters most is simply the process of collecting thoughts and dreams from a diversity of verbal and visual artists, and doing so for four issues a year—for almost half a century in our case. It is a chronicle of consciousness. Go to our archives and grab an issue from your favorite year-to-remember. It is like breathing the atmosphere of then.

In this issue, bones and war, critical oneirologies, a stranger comes to town, a person makes a journey. . . .What will happen if we ever wake up? Who will feed the vultures?

David Lenson
for the editors

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