Editor's Note

Editor's Note After the poor-mouthing in the note to the autumn (double) issue of the Review it's a little embarrassing, though no less a pleasure, to be bringing out a regular, that is, single, issue nearly as large as the double one was. Money is, of course, at the root of such pleasure. RMMLA is by no means wealthy, but with a membership now approaching nine hundred we are for the time being a step or two away from wretchedness , and while we are, the Review can afford to continue its timid way toward expansion. With this issue, for example, we have expanded to include fiction and poetry, a break with precedent the luxury of which we could not have imagined a year ago. The inclusion of creative work should not, strictly speaking, be considered a luxury at all. The Review does, after all, like the Association itself, serve a constituency, and there seems no very good reason why that constituency should not be reflected in all its various professional aspects in the journal it supports. Especially since the creation of the poetry section at the convention it has seemed a sin of omission to exclude that side of the membership's activities here. So while the means to do so lasts, the editors hope to make the expanded format the normal condition of things. Wish us well. A word about submissions and the sometimes horrendous delay in returning a decision to a submitter. The Review is a refereed journal, which means that papers submitted to it are sent out to a number of readers—usually two—whose knowledge exceeds that of the editors. The editors make the final selection of what goes into an issue—sometimes having to choose among finely-shaded degrees of excellence— but they rely in great measure on the recommendations supplied by these outside readers. Submissions have steadily increased over the past year to the point where we are averaging about thirty a quarter. Finding sixty readers every quarter occasions a certain predictable delay, even when some of them are the same people used over and over again. It rarely happens that we're able to send apaper outthe same day we get it; it's rare when we can even send it out the same week. It must be remembered, too, that readers are harried academics like the rest of us. In most cases their reports have been incisive, thorough, and balanced—some of them small masterpieces of criticism—and in most cases they have come to us in much less time than it took us to inquire and send the paper on. But sometimes a reader will decline because of other commitments or lack of time, and we must go through the process of finding another one. Sometimes, though not very often, a reader will himself keep the paper longer than is comfortable before sending it back with his evaluation. Sometimes two readers' opinions will cancel each other out, and we must seek a third and sometimes a fourth opinion. In the case of papers written in languages that the editors can't read the problem is compounded, because we must then ask for an opinion not only of the article's scholarship but also of the more or less pedestrian matters such as its readability, coherence, grace and literacy (we English teachers are always a little surprised to find it's possible to misspell or blunder grammatically or even write badly in other languages), and such detailed and circumstantial reports take longer to write, hence are sometimes longer in getting to us. Even after a paper has come back with its evaluations it is frequently necessary to wait until still other papers with other evaluations have come back, and weigh them against each other before filling the very limited space in a given issue. There are many variables, in other words, all of them time-consuming and therefore regrettable. Members of the Association have for the most part been extremely generous in allowing for them, but anxieties and resentments are probably inescapable. We were informed recently that six weeks was an unconscionable delay, and it probably is. That the...