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So apparently Hillary Clinton is a big fan of the Rolling Stones. I’ll admit that I’ve been spinning Beggar’s Banquet and Let It Bleed more than a little bit these days. Something about the apocalyptic energy of those tracks—recorded in the months leading up the 1968 Democratic convention and the debacle there that led to Nixon’s election—seems to speak to my soul. But Clinton explains to CNN that what she admires about the Rolling Stones most is Mick Jagger’s “work ethic.”

Hmmm. “Work ethic”? While I’ll grant you that over the years Jagger has been, shall we say, tireless?—you’d also have to admit that the Glimmer Twins have been more juiced that Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds. After listening to Clinton go on about how Obama couldn’t choose his family, but he could certainly choose his pastor, I couldn’t help wondering whether—at least for baby boomers and younger—who you name as your favorite isn’t the actual Rorschach test for your soul.

So, with that in mind, I’m officially kicking off my call to everyone to leave your favorite lewd, lascivious, or just plain drug-addled Stones lyric in the comments section. This could take a while, I realize. (And remember folks, we’re a fair use operation, so please limit your quotes to one stanza or less.) Here’s my choice to kick things off from “Let It Bleed”:

She said, “My breasts, they will always be open
Baby, you can rest your weary head right on me
And there will always be a space in my parking lot
When you need a little coke and sympathy”

Today is the fifth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. We’ve got a special article for the occasion, from David J. Morris. A former marine, Morris contributes Entries from The New Combat Contractionary: An Exercise in Interpretive Lexicography Relating to the Recent Hostilities, which provides the reader with definitions for such terms as “combat slumming,” “Operation Nostalgia,” and “gift guilting.” You ought to know Morris for “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground,” “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth,” and “Trophy Town,” all of which have appeared in our pages in the past year.

Of course, we’ve covered the president’s adventure in the Middle East extensively in the past five years. Here’s some of our coverage:

• “Inside Saddam’s Spider Hole,” by Chris Hondros, Spring 2004
• “Capturing Saddam,” by Carleton J. Phillips, Spring 2004
• “The Big Suck: Notes from the Jarhead Underground,” by David J. Morris, Winter 2007
• “A Window on Baghdad,” by Chris Hondros, Summer 2007
• “Someone Won’t Be Coming Home Tonight,” by Carolyn Cole, Summer 2007
• “Last Photographs,” by Ashley Gilbertson, Summer 2007
• “Art Born of the Need to Tell,” by Daniel Heyman, Winter 2008
• “Trophy Town,” by David J. Morris, Winter 2008

The New York Times is also taking this opportunity to look back, with their “Five Years In” series. Richard A. Oppel’s “Iraq’s Insurgency Runs on Stolen Oil Profits” looks at the unlikely source of funding for the insurgency, Michael R. Gordon’s “Fateful Choice on Iraq Army Bypassed Debate” looks at the effects of Paul Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army, and Solomon Moore’s “In Mosul, New Test of Iraqi Army” examines the successes and failures of the nation’s fledgling army.

Finally, Reuters is also earning accolades with their Bearing Witness: Five Years of the Iraq War commemorative website. They combine video, still photos, interview audio, maps, graphs, and a detailed timeline to create an impressive resource for looking back at our nation’s half decade in Iraq.

VQR once again scored big as the finalists for the National Magazine Awards were announced today in New York City. The awards, the Pulitzers of the magazine world, are sponsored by the American Society of Magazine Editors in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

VQR picked up three nominations:

• General Excellence (circulation under 100,000)
• Single-Topic Issue for our Fall issue “South America in the Twenty-First Century“
• Photojournalism for Chris Hondros’s photo essay “A Window on Baghdad“

Literary magazines did very well this year, with Georgia Review, Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and New Letters all receiving nominations.

Highlights for us include a fourth consecutive nomination in the General Excellence category and nominations in two categories new to us: Single-Topic Issue and Photojournalism (this makes six different categories in which we’ve received nominations). And this adds up to thirteen nominations we’ve collected in the past four years, more than many larger and well-known publications including Time, Newsweek, The New Republic, Harper’s, Foreign Policy, Fortune, Mother Jones, The Nation, and Wired.

Ted Genoways, who took over as editor of VQR five years ago, adds that, “It’s remarkable what we’ve been able to accomplish given our modest size and financial resources. We have an annual budget that’s smaller than what Vanity Fair spends on their Oscar party and a staff of only five people, but we’ve been able to put out a magazine that is consistently among the best in the country.”
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This evening brought news of the death of legendary thinker, writer, inventor, and VQR contributor Arthur C. Clarke. The ninety-year-old lived to see some stunning scientific advances in his lifetime–many of which he must be credited with the ideas for–but never witnessed a discovery of intelligent life outside of Earth, as he dearly hoped to.

To mark the occasion, we’ve made public his Winter 1960 article, “Shaw and the Sound Barrier,” in which Clarke recounts his 1946 exchange with Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw about Clarke’s essay, “The Challenge of the Spaceship.” On the strength of the essay, the ninety-one-year-old Shaw was moved to apply for membership in the British Interplanetary Society.

Speaking of submission statistics, it’s probably time for an update of last September’s ten most common titles of submissions. Looking at every submission that we’ve received since September 2006, it looks like all of the prior top ten have been knocked out, displaced by this new group:

1. Aubade
2. Prayer
3. Fall
4. Hands
5. Spring
6. Elegy
7. Waiting
8. Tourists
9. Grace
10. After

A demobilized paramilitary fighter, “Lorenzo,” in Turbo, Colombia.

The families of five men killed by Colombian rebels are suing Chiquita for materially aiding those terrorists, Carmen Gentile writes in the New York Times. Last fall’s issue included “The Octopus in the Cathedral of Salt,” in which author Phillip Robertson explained the history of the business practices of Chiquita (née United Fruit) in Colombia. While Chiquita has defended their payments to Revoluntary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) as protection for its employees, Robertson interviews a former paramilitary fighter who says that Chiquita was knowingly running cocaine on their freighters and providing arms to terrorists.

Chiquita admits paying millions of dollars to the two rebel groups, but they deny providing any weapons. (They initially denied funding the groups, then admitted funding AUC, and only recently admitted funding FARC.) They’ve already agreed to pay $25M in fines to the U.S. government under anti-terrorism laws. These lawsuits are also being brought under anti-terrorism laws; the fact that they’ve already pleaded guilty to criminal charges will presumably ease the path for the suit brought by the families.

Steve Moran at The Willesden Herald provides 27 reasons why short stories are rejected. Not all of these apply to VQR (we don’t get a lot of “faux jollity centred around pubs in Ireland”), but these really are some good guidelines for fiction writers to keep in mind. You remember The Willesden Herald for their aborted short story competition, a result of not a single submission being up to snuff.

(Via Cliff Garstang)

How do we manage to put out such a great magazine four times a year? It was a closely-held secret, but a physics student has cracked the code using the equations F=qvB=v^2/r and L=Iw=mrv=rp (where p=mv). Baffled by the outcome, he writes:

I also tried starting with M=Torque/B and substituting I*(angular acceleration) for torque but you just end up with VQR.

As we well know, L=Ren Weschler and B=Percolator. It’s only a matter of time until the kid figures that out, and then the jig is up.

This was supposed to be a blog entry about how authors submit poetry to us covering clichéd topics that there’s just no way we’re going to print. But then I did the math, calculating the percentage of our submissions and published work that contain any of a dozen mainstays of poetic terminology, and found that precisely the opposite is true.

As it turns out, our editor is all about those dreaded paeans to cats. The moral of the story is that talent transcends topic, I suppose; in the hands of a skilled poet, even stone/bone can be made a vital couplet again.

03/17 Update: Those who exist in the pointy little overlap in the Venn diagram of Lit Geek and Stats Geek may also enjoy the ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past year, the percentage of submissions that are totally inappropriate for us, our rate of international submissions, and the hazards of being way too efficient in dealing with submissions.

03/17 Update 2: To clarify the original post and to correct some of the blogs linking here: we’re not declaring that we publish “clichéd” poetry, only that words that would appear to be clichéd don’t preclude a poem that uses them from being good, or worthy of publication. As noted in the original post: “talent transcends topic.”