Assembling was an annual compendium of “otherwise unpublishable” avant-garde art and literature compiled by Richard Kostelanetz and others between 1970 and 1982. Contributors were invited to send in up to four pages of 1,000 copies of 8 ½ x 11 pages, which were assembled alphabetically and bound into books.

I can recall taking my contributions to several editions of Assembling to Hanging Loose Press’s Bob Hershon at downtown Brooklyn’s Print Center, used by many artists and writers in those days before cheap copying.

My first few were prose experiments, but for 1979’s A Critical (Ninth) Assembling, I wrote a piece called “Some Young Writers I Admire” about ten people, several of whom were friends.

Three of the ten I lost touch with; I’m pretty sure they’ve stopped writing. There are a lot of casualties in literature.

I’d like to post about some of the others in the coming days, people still around, writing and publishing, like me, after more than 30 years.

The one pick you’ve probably heard of was then a poet. I praised his chapbooks Tiger Beat (Little Caesar Press, 1978) and Idols (The SeaHorse Press, 1979) and the little magazine he edited, Little Caesar, which I subscribed to. At the time I wrote the piece, he was the director of programming at Venice’s Beyond Baroque center, which had published several of my stories in their literary magazine.

I did not mention that once he had sent me a folded-over piece of paper on the outside of which he’d scrawled: Prepare to meet thy God. Inside, when I opened it, I found a rare colored Xerox photo of Leif Garrett.

The poet and editor I admired is famous today as a novelist: Dennis Cooper.

More of my admired no-longer-young writers in coming days.

David Carr’s Media Equation column in The New York Times today looks at the possibility that cutbacks and layoffs may not be enough to save The Star-Tribune in Minneapolis.

(Full disclosure: In December 1979, The Star-Tribune’s pre-merger predecessor, The Minneapolis Tribune, gave my first book the most perceptive review it received: “Richard Grayson’s anthology of short stories is unbelievably bad, bad, bad. How bad is it? Well, after a writer reviews his chosen book, he gets to keep it…I am not keeping this one. I want to give it to someone I really despise.”)

Immense thanks to Ed for letting me guest-blog, and I ask for your patience with someone new to this. Although the number of us over 55 seems limited among lit-bloggers (there’s Frank Wilson at Books, Inq., Lynne W. Scanlon at The Publishing Contrarian and Michael Allen at Grumpy Old Bookman — if there are more, please let me know) and I find myself more and more playing the old man card to excuse all my failings, I’ll try not to do so here.

On the other hand, blogs, like the daily newspaper, tend to focus relentlessly on the present. Having graduated from an MFA program over 30 years ago and published my first book in the 1970s (when even my astute copy editor did not catch my error of referring to a “silicone [sic] chip”), I probably can’t add that much that’s unique to most discussions of what’s going on now in literature, so I figured I’d write about stuff from the past.

Like I wanted to write something about my friend Scott Sommer, who was my age and whom I met in 1979, the year our hardcover fiction books were published by the same publisher and edited by the same editor. He died in 1993, of a sudden heart attack, at only 42. Writing in The New York Times Book Review 22 years ago, Ed’s good friend Sam Tanenhaus said that Scott “displayed a unique comic voice, at once acerbic and melancholy, as if Holden Caulfield had teamed up with the young Samuel Beckett to recite the woes of lovelorn hipsters lost in a daze of Quaaludes and Kierkegaard.”

Yeah, there were hipsters in 1985, too.

…and yet in the absence of Ed there is another Ed: your humble narrator, Ed P., occasionally referred to on this blog as East Coast Ed.

There are so few Eds roaming the landscape that we need to band together. (So it is written in the Ed Manifesto.) It’s a strange name—Edward‘s not strange, but Ed is so abrupt. And yet I like it, Ed C. likes it—there is the idea that you are getting the maximum possible impact from two letters.

To kick things off, I want to share my favorite recent blurb: Sarah Manguso on poet Jennifer Knox’s forthcoming Drunk By Noon (Bloof Books). The blurb itself is like a poem!:

Since Knox favors premise over conclusion, her poems simply speak—they do not explain. In this way they are not entirely unlike scripture. The part that is unlike scripture is the one that’s like “Wait, I was reading these poems and laughing but my hearing aid fell out and then my face just kind of blew off in a beautiful rainbow spray of bullshit-dissolving napalm.”