Holiday mailbag

by Mikhail Horowitz, Nina Shengold, January 19, 2007

It's not all drudgery for literary editors. While most people's mailboxes groan with Hallmark Santas and glossy, cheesy, mass-produced family snapshots, we receive autographed missives and one-of-a-kind greeting cards from literati near, far, and altogether beyond the pale of this Vale of Tears. It has taken us weeks to sort through this bounty. Here's the creme de la creme:

This warm holiday greeting, titled "The Hippest Gift of the Magi," was sent to us by William S. Burroughs, who currently resides not in Heaven or Hell, but in a dim, stale place that is vaguely reminiscent of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at 2 a.m.

Likewise, our goomba Dante Alighieri, who has been greatly vexed over the past 200 years by the commodification of Christmas, sent this card to us as a small token of his dyspepsia. Don't him get started on Kwanzaa.

Finally, this opposable-thumb-in-cheek commentary from Charles Darwin: proof that there is no antipathy between natural selection and the ineffable mystery of creation.

We also received, from Franz Kafka, a box of chocolate truffles engraved with their crimes, and from Ayn Rand, a Grand Supreme Tower from Harry & David. Best of all was this newsy letter from Eugene O'Neill, which came with a bottle of single-malt eggnog:

Well, this was another fun-filled, adventurous year for the Jimmy Tyrones! We just can't believe how the time has sped by! Our Jamie's a chip of the old block—in more ways than one! Catch his act at the Peach of a Bun On Saloon—he brings down the house every night! And who woulda thunk that skinny little Edmund would grow up to be a sailor, with a touch of the poet to boot? Put that in your pipedream and smoke it! Speaking of Mom, she's been up to her old tricks—can't keep that gal down! She looks like she did on our wedding night, that's the god's truth.

Cheers,
Jimmy


Mikhail Horowitz is the author of Big League Poets (City Lights, 1978), the former Cultural Czar of the Woodstock Times, and the most roundly castigated and universally vilified performance poet in the mid-Hudson Valley. His collection of jazz fables and pattern poems, The Blues of the Birth, is still available (though not for much longer) from Sundazed Music www.sundazed.com.

Nina Shengold won the Writers Guild Award for her teleplay Labor of Love and a Henry Miller Award for her novel Clearcut (Anchor Books, 2005). She is Chronogram's Books Editor and Artistic Director of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-phobic theatre company Actors & Writers (www.ninashengold.com; www.actorsandwriters.com).