Every couple of months someone in Toronto starts up a literary quarterly. Most of the time, they don’t even know why. Now I’m not convinced by this second issue of Schrodinger’s Cat (ugg, painful title, like calling it Rubik’s Cube), but I’m also not preprared to say that this is not a promising publication. So what can we say? We got pics, poems and stories. We got a fairly generic scheme, nice wide open pages that make me feel like I’m in a labratory, lots of variation as if the search for the cure could be almost anything. So I’ll say this. Erica and J by Graham Willard is a wonderful story. And finding one wonderful story in a litzine is not at all bad. Well, okay, there were also Gary Langguth’s three postcard stories, the one about the garage door opener actually, the kind of story where things happen in between meaning (you pour one test- tube of blue stuff into a beaker of wasp venom and the thing starts to smoke and you really don’t know why…), the rest of the stuff in the Cat seemed to happen the way we get aphxyiated when we start thinking about every breath. I was particuarly annoyed with Allison Grayhurst’s two poems whose evocation of the relationship also happened to evoke more cliches than a bad extended metaphor. It’s not the experiement that pisses me off, it’s the insistence on a conclusion that fulfills a foregone hypothesis. (I mean who do they think they are? Zygote?) I liked this mag enough to be pissed off by it, so send them your work and give ’em a read.
litzine / #2, Fall 1996 / main creators: Jonathan Blackburn, Mark Kolody, Craig Saila, Paul Tenk / $5, 4 for $20 / 3-816 Ossington Ave., Toronto, ON, M6G 3V1