Asterisms Among the Magazines

murmurations

Recent studies in animal movement modelling suggest that groups such as starlings aren't acting on organized herd mentalities, but that individuals "sought to match the direction and speed of the nearest seven or so neighbours."1 Beyond the intent of such formations, it seems most relevant in thinking about little magazines to weigh optics against aesthetics:

When we watch a murmuration pulsate in waves and swirl into arrays of shapes it often appears as if there are areas where birds slow, and become thickly packed in, or where they speed up and spread wider apart. In fact this is largely thanks to an optical illusion created by the 3D flock being projected onto our 2D view of the world, and scientific models suggest that the birds fly at a steady speed.2

I'm reminded of a time I was told this story: a reader approached Poet Q and asked her if she and Poet P always appeared in magazines together. Surprised, Poet Q responded that she didn't in fact know Poet P, personally. The reader pointed out to Poet Q two recent magazines in which her work and that of Poet P appeared side-by-side, with no alphabetical ordering. These dual occasions delight in pointing to aesthetical and chance alignments over the social connections inferred through the optics of a contents page — especially where those aesthetic values were hewn by different editors, whose connection to each author and to one another may remain unknown, obscured, or 2D.

waves

Is the currency of little magazines readership? Readership being that logistically unknowable but palpable audience not quite conveyed by circulation or print run, especially given the range of time. For a magazine can come to mean in different ways over time. See, for example, the Modernist Journals Project (https://modjourn.org).

Movement among rea— [scratch that!] A readership's movement feels like a physics problem; not the physicality of the magazine in its material form, but the passage of the magazine as it is affected by the planes through which it moves: eras, political shifts, armchairs . . . I'm very close to going in over my head when I use this analogy — so when I say Schrödinger's equation, it's only for the idea of the [literary reception] being an unseen [little magazine] still in motion within its covers.3 For we might accept that the magazine (time-dependent) is a many-different-waved formation, especially (if not constantly) under observation . . .

When the magazine becomes again observable (opened by a reader with elbows on armchair, or thumbed through on a stool in Rust Belt Books in Buffalo's Allentown, or at the reading room of an archive for poetry), its participants, aesthetics, and physicality become apparent again, as circumscribed by the situation of the reader in their particular moment.

Close it up, put it back in that jukebox archive, or on that TARDIS shelf, and energy is again non-kinetic, wholly potential — awaiting reinterpretation in the act of reading. What I'm trying to get at is that that energy is contained, as a system, within the parameters of that magazine. The physics of it hazarding —

the wave function
"researchers invent[ing] a range of . . . narratives that [link] [modernity]
to the contemporary"4
divided by
"the thing is abstraction doesn't vs. embodiment"5
equals
we don't know where the energy of the magazine will be each
time we open it

[ x ] the coefficient: time. Even if we can't know — say — its catalogic value or readership, as fixed, we can discern a little magazine's energy by those other characteristics (participants, aesthetics, physicality) plus their reception as it changes over time. This isn't purely statistical, as in usage; but the way readers have, do, and continue to engage with a certain magazine for the dimensions it opens again (and newly again) in the strata of readers' own narratives — and by the faddishness and relevance of its aesthetic grammar.

a commons?

We lineate among egos, rosters, and visionary imperatives (which used to dress in manifestos...), collapsing dimensionality from where we now sit, reading.

Sophie Seita reminds how "Ideally, a little magazine establishes a commons, with inclusive and distributed ownership. But most magazines and literary communities define themselves or are defined as much by their outsides as their insides."6

But I have always also loved a magazine that belies a commons, even as establishing a commons, as praxis, holds true! Where pattern recognition meets colloquial invention: the magazine as collection of aesthetics meeting for the first time across the arcade of bound page.

There's also much debate among those who study little magazines as to when a magazine should stop being studied ... I turn again to a formulation from Seita for an answer: when a magazine becomes recognizably inward-looking.7 The bookend as exemplar!

And if no commons emerges, how does the magazine continue? It takes on a less social schema in refusing school and recognizes a notion of building itself again and again, issue to issue, era to era — how Mark Mazower formulates that the Salonica of today is a different city built upon the Salonica of the past.8 So name might be eponym for a (wavering) set of aesthetics under cover.

names for constellations

"constellations are doors" — Jo Cook
[as recorded by Frances Zorn]

Take Orion's Belt, one of the most easily discernible signposts in the northern and southern hemispheres. Known by their Arabic names, that belt is: Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka — this asterism; prominent grouping; less than a constellation; a noted signpost; arrangement of three asterisks. These stars — in 3D — are not actually aligned. And their asterism goes by many names, depending on the episteme in which one's armchair anchors.

In northwestern Mexico, the Seri people called these same stars: Hap, Haamoja, Mojet. In Finnish, this asterism is said to be Kaleva's sword. In Maori, it is Tautoru — "string of three"—the stern of Rangi's canoe. The asterism takes different names and configures as parts of different constellations, remaining fixed in 2D association from where we read.

And just as thisreader might once have taken the notion to collate a local journal (Yellow Edenwald Field) that became an international publication (Yellow Field), so the recurrence of certain names (attached to works contained within) might splay across that span of magazines  — luminous points in a paginated sky.

Let's call one such lineation: Basinski — Wyszomierski — Kassirer.

& cloud forms

Or maybe these formations are just projections we read off clouds.