I have a confession to make - one filled with a kind of abject professional shame. This next issue of FourTwoNine magazine has too many typos - some more egregious than others. We were on a tight deadline to get it to the printer and most of the proofreading fell to me alone in the one day I had to do it. I was a bit overwhelmed but buckled down and tried my best to get it all done. Im a pretty good editor and an even better writer but proofreading is a job that calls for a distinct kind of craft. Im slightly dyslexic and an atrocious speller so it really doesnt fall into my natural skill set. Thats not to make an excuse but just stating the facts. I want to apologize publicly to those with whom I work and those of you who might read this next issue. Some of the mistakes I find even a fireable offense but it would mean firing myself and not sure if that would ultimately be good for the magazine since I do think the good I do there does outweigh the bad. But I feel very sad and am riddled with, yes, shame about it. I only slept a couple of hours last night my mind was racing so in a kind of panic attack about having let down others and myself. I havent beat myself up like this in a long time. I know its all a waste of emotion finally because I now cant do anything about it. I have to let it go. But admitting it all publicly is a way of my processing it so I can do just that: let it go and then move on. The new creative director and art director have done a remarkable job re-imagining the magazine. It is so beautiful and elegant and classy. The work of the photographers is amazing. I am very proud of the selection of stories and what I was able to conjure editorially and the calibre of writers in the lineup. I think it is a great visual and reading experience. But that is why such typographical errors are so worrisome and bothersome and even physically pain me - they mar all that with stupid mistakes. And yet the mistakes are not lazy ones. They are there because of the opposite of being lazy. They are there because I was working so hard and stretched a bit thin toward the end of the whole process. But I just feel as if I let so many people down, including myself. I am so, so sorry. One of the worst of the mistakes is in the title of a wonderful except of a book by Eugene Walter about his peripatetic artsy-fartsy life. The book is a memoir titled Milking the Moon: A Southerners Story of Life on This Planet. The excerpt is about his time living in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and about his friendships with Truman Capote (whose birthday it is today, by the way) and Tallulah Bankhead. The title of the excerpt is Tallulah, Truman, and Me printed in big letters over a photo of Truman. The typo reads: Tallaluh, Truman, and Me. I feel I should not only hand in my editor in chief card over that but my gay one as well. So as a kind of penance here are Tallulah and Willie Mays on the old Merv Griffin Show in which they talk not only about San Francisco where the magazine is headquartered and where I now call home and want to crawl under the covers and hide for few days but also about Willies embarrassment once when he dropped a fly ball. I really dropped the ball myself this time. I know how embarrassed he felt.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 15:24:37 +0000
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