zingmagazine #6

Editor's Note

I am watching the first round of the Masters. The wind is up—more than it has ever been. Putting is a real science. And the TV channel covering this first round, USA (by delay), is interviewing Nicklaus (73 for the day). The greens are slow he says. That’s the story. A year ago Tiger Woods won the whole gig and he is looking strong today, although he is not leading it. His score is very close to his last year’s winning “budget” and everyone is still wondering what he will deem as the last year’s champion’s dinner menu. 51 years after Jackie Robinson’s debut in Major League Baseball—as much as things change, they stay the same. By the way Fuzzy Zoeller is also in contention. I’d like to hear Puff Daddy’s commentary, right about now—”I’m coming up, I want the world to know.”
But really the issue at writ is the sixth issue of zingmagazine. And the cover donned is our second of the visual type (previously zing presented autographed letters—letters which are now on the back). So here Issac Asimov poses from his ’50s laboratory. And his response to the kids of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Middle School, though somehow at that time, disappointing, now seems happily funny—and zing delivers his requested visage to the public almost thirty years later. Wonder who will notice.

Segue thirty years (for me). Anyone else don’t go further than fifty. A.A. Milne’s:” The Engineer”: Let it rain! Who cares, I’ve a train, Upstairs, With a brake, Which I make, From a string, Sort of thing, Which works, In jerks, ‘Cos it drops, In the Spring, Which stops, With a String, And wheels, All stick, So quick, That it feels, Like a thing, That you make, With a brake, Not string . . . , So that’s what I make, When the day’s all wet. It’s a good sort of brake, But it hasn’t worked yet. Now We Are Six.

Has it worked yet? That’s the string. And with the Asimov image that’s what zing provides—a nothing vision yet based on a reflection of time. Like the cited “rain” and the “wind” at the Masters, atmosphere seems to enhance and hamper the outcome both of the day with a train and the day with a club, and yet its very contentiousness may be the entry into something other, experimental. Take a dive.

Devon Dikeou
New York, New York
1998