Introduction to Misfit 28

“But I don’t want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat, “we’re all made here. I’m mad.
You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?" said Alice.
“You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn’t have come here.”
~ Lewis Carroll

We live in wild, crazy times. Not the way Steve Martin acted suggested as a wild and crazy guy. More like the times of The Borgia’s, the way Machiavelli described them. Or, maybe something more sinister, if that were possible. Anything seems possible now.

Nabokov wrote a novel called Bend Sinister. The title is a heraldic reference to the left-handed bend of an arm on a coat of arms that indicates a bastard. I wonder if Nabokov was prescient. Had seen the current president’s Phony coat of arms he once flew over Mar a Lago: flashy gold and red colors on a field of blood, left hands rampant with digits extended.

Imagine a need for attention so dire that the owner of this fake name, changed from a Germanic one to sound more American, to plaster his name all over properties he owned or sold branding rights to. Imagine having to invent a lineage deserving of a coat of arms. Would you vote for someone that needy? And that is a minor character fault in a much larger case file of degenerate and illicit behavior. One thing we can do to remedy this madness: Do not make this collective mistake again. Do not vote for this man.

Despite my vow not to write about himself again, I was given a serendipitous cue, a prompt, I guess you could call it and I felt compelled to go with it. So, shoot me. Vows are made to be broken. Ask the Orange Frito (aka Beaver Tail Head). You can stop reading now if you’re a fan of his, I’ll never know.

On more localized, practical matters. We have decided to settle on three issues a year. The reading schedule will now include time off around the holidays, and in the summer, because we are real people with actual, sometimes, complicated lives. This year I will not be reading new work from Sept 15th until the first of next year, January 2020. I will, however, continue to read books for review. We will post when we are reading and when we are not, on the front page of the current issue. I will not read July and August of 2020 either, and it should be assumed there will be no reading from now on in November, December, July and August. During the other months, I will read, as before, until we have enough good stuff for an issue and then close the magazine to submissions. We still won’t do exact schedules, other than those stated. I do not want to feel obligated to fill an issue by a certain date or feel obligated to post by this or that date. We’ll post when we’re ready to, as time and schedules permit.

Happy reading and stay low. There are more bullets in the air than ever before, and no one seems to want to stop them from flying.

Thanks to you for reading and thanks to Jennifer for the technical expertise and making the magazine what that you see before you and to Gene for all the original art that makes our presentation special. And to our poets, one and all, without whom, we would have nothing.