Word: scorpion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Around the middle of last year, 500 copies of as amateurish-looking T5-page literary magazine with the vegusly menacing name of scorpion appeared in the Square. It sold for a dollar a copy, which was 20 coast more than it cost to print, and Robert Justice '66, its creator, lost 300 dollars. Whatever readership the first issue acquired had deserted both Cambridge and scorpion by the time the second came out is June...
...Scorpion is now 400 dollars in debt, and the figure is bound to go up when the magazine's now editor brings out his first issue is October. It could conceivably be the last. Guy Franklin Delano Roosevelt Kuttner '67 doesn't care about the money, although the loans are in his name, but he does enjoy caring about his magazine. "Look, I'm a Boy Editor," he'll say, gleefully posing with a telephone receiver. "I'm throwing paper clips at a dinosaur...
...dinosaur is the Harvard Advocate, a tradition-bound and, according to Kuttner, slick monolith that has long cornered the undergraduate writing market while publishing relatively little undergraduate material. The advocate's unsatisfactory state is Scorpion's raison d'etre. But Kuttner, with his staff of six (he gave himself veto power over everything the rest of the staff does, but promised never to use it, "Or else what's the sense of having a staff?") is not out to get the Advocate, only to improve it. "The Advocate needs a pep pill -- that's us. The time is ripe...
...little to do with the magazine's first year, disapproved of much of its material, but liked the idea well enough to take over, although it will mean directing Scorpion from Chicago where he will be spending a year off. The first issues had too much social commentary ("you can get that any place") and literary criticism ("it's like hair creme -- greasy and it smells bad") for Kuttner's taste. His will be exclusively prose fiction and poetry...
...other hand, there are developments, Scorpion, partly supported by Adams House, broke print for the first time with an interesting issue--all the more so because its editors seem to have solved their problems of selection by including everything they could find. The infrequent throwaway of an undergraduate publishing cartel is reputedly paying for undergraduate fiction--something nobody else can afford to do. And then there's the Island, the first fruit of an extraordinarily literary freshman class...