Chumolungma Globe

Benjamin Friedlander and Andrew Schelling
Berkeley

Chumolungma Globe (Halloween 1987). Sole issue.

The single issue of Chumolungma Globeproduced by Benjamin Friedlander and me is dated Halloween 1987. It is fifty-four pages long. We had two further volumes of Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K” to complete, which must be why we never did a second Globe. I believe we had work in hand for no. 2, returned most of it to contributors, and kept a few items for our future enterprise, Dark Ages.

Chumolungma is the Tibetan name for Mt. Everest. I’d recently been up near base camp and returned to the States with a tube of Mt. Everest toothpaste, so we hit on the mountain, and added Globe to sound newspaper-like. “News that stays new.” Highlights of the issue: an interview with Larry Eigner by BF (“all that’s left of an hour tape accidentally erased.”). A few book reviews. The rest is poetry: Ronald Johnson’s “Ark 59, Spire of Liberty (Torch & Arm),” Fanny Howe, Laura Moriarty, Jean Day, Norman Fischer, P. Inman, and a Robert Grenier handwritten scrawl like bird tracks on a glacier.

One rule: editors should include their own writing. Ben and I contributed poetry. We did the book reviews. Then closed the issue with “Rules to get home safe,” nos. 1–17. “Don’t start off dreaming … Snap the wigwam shutters shut … Close the door, slap the dog & sleep peaceful in the fitful dark.” Looking at that final page I think we knew there would be no second Globe.

— Andrew Schelling, Boulder, Colorado, January 2017