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I miss the days when satiric journalist Dave Barry’s newspaper columns lobbed our general societal ludicrousness back in our faces on a regular basis; I particularly miss his occasional episodes of “Ask Mr. Language Person,” wherein he would remind us of the increasingly regular abuse, by turns comical and sad and dangerous, to which we subject language—the “activity” that microbiologist-turned-essayist Lewis Thomas terms, in his 1974 book The Lives of a Cell, “the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from all the rest of life. Language is . . . the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings.”
I’d like to be able to ask Mr. Language Person whether the words old and new having the same number of letters could be a sign of similar meanings.
We are pleased to offer up in this issue—the fourth and last in The Georgia Review’s sixty-fifth year of continuous publication—“We Are All of Us Passing Through,” a “new” memoir piece by the inimitable and ever-controversial Harry Crews. I put that word in quotation marks because it leads a double life here, being both truthful and misleading: Crews’s tension-filled reminiscence has never seen the light of print, but it was written many years ago and looks back to a time still more years before its composing—but if I had told you Crews created the work just recently, I think you would have believed me.
At the end of “We Are All of Us Passing Through,” Crews reveals that his antagonist was the inspiration for a key character in his first novel, The Gospel Singer (1968), a fact that led to our presenting here another “new” bit of writing—a chapter from that book: though “old” and previously published, it is likely to be new to nearly all our readers, and the sparks struck between it and the memoir piece are, of necessity, new to everyone. (See also my introduction to the Gospel Singer chapter on page 736.)
Some of you may prefer your new and old without quotation marks. This issue features several writers who are entirely new to our pages—James Applewhite, Catherine Reid, Christine Robbins, Marguerite W. Sullivan, and Baynard Woods—plus a similar number who have published with us just a time or three—Kim Bridgford, Carol Edelstein, William Johnson, Lance Larsen, Sharon Olds, Ann Pancake, and Martha G. Wiseman. But you’ll also encounter here some of our most venerable regulars: Albert Goldbarth, with sixty-plus poems and essays since 1979, followed closely by Judith Kitchen’s nearly-that-many essays, essay-reviews, reviews, and poems since 1981. (Gary Gildner is none too shabby with his two dozen entries, nor are Elton Glaser and Myles Weber with their dozen or so apiece.) Harry Crews is our “oldest” contributor, publishing his story “A Long Wail” in the Summer 1964 Georgia Review; his closest competitor is Coleman Barks, four of whose poems appeared in our Summer 1972 issue—and who, we are pleased to note, has been writing at the top of his form of late and has been featured here several times in recent years.
In March 2012, some of the old will be all new when the University of Georgia Press brings out Stories Wanting to Be Heard: Selected Fiction from Six Decades of The Georgia Review. Marking the above-noted sixty-fifth anniversary of the Review’s founding at the University of Georgia, this nearly 400-page gathering is a must-have for personal and library collections, as well as an ideal text for a range of reading and writing classes. For further details about the contents and for ordering information, please visit www.ugapress.org and/or www.thegeorgiareview.com.
S.C.
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