According to Elaine Woo’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times, the magazine’s name “reflected the management philosophy of an editor who had come to despair the committee approach to choosing literary submissions.” While at Santa Cruz, I co-founded a little magazine (along with Raymond Carver, John Kucich, and Paul Skenazy) called Quarry. George edited kayak, a one-man poetry magazine (hence the name), for twenty years between 19.
“All over the world, the cows are running dry.” It was my first lesson in surrealism. “The cows are running dry,” he said in his basso profundo voice. He lifted the lever on the milk dispenser nothing came out. One evening during freshman orientation I was eating in the College V dining hall with my roommate, and went to fetch a glass of milk. As Jim Hair’s eye-catching photograph from 1973 testifies, George was a striking physical presence, six foot four with a gray mane falling away from a receding hairline, hard to miss.
He was, I believe, the very first faculty member I met. George started teaching at Santa Cruz in 1970, the year I enrolled there as a freshman.
The news has only now reached me that George Hitchcock has died at the age of ninety-five after a long illness (h/t: Mark Athitakis).
0 kommentar(er)
