Editorial

As forecast, 2011 has proven to be a strange year, a crux year — a year when things don’t turn out as intended, and when real life pushes everything else out of its way. Jobless figures are up, repossessions are up, and London was stunned by riots this summer — as well as record cold and wet. Your editor herself has been perplexed in the job department and preoccupied with quotidian problems.

What this tells us is that we need literature and art more than ever, to keep us grounded when the world seems all flux and uncertainty. And indeed, the essays in this issue — which all turned out to be about Art, in one form or another, in a year in which everything is so political — shine aspects of this uncertainty through a prism to show us its light.

The Beat poet Michael Horovitz, whose candidateship for the Oxford Poetry Professorship two years go was fuelled by William Blake’s dictum that ‘without contraries there can be no progression’, reminds us of why, amid the swirls of life, Blake is our contemporary. (And if you look at the editorial of our last issue, you can see a surprising kinship between Blake’s ‘Glad Day’ figure, above, and our protesting student of last winter. Let’s carry Blake’s image with us into this autumn.)

Three men in sit down in a pub — not a boat — to discuss a subject that at first appears frivolous — menswear in literature; their conversation deepens almost imperceptibly to about male identity, fathers, work, youth, ageing, and David Mamet’s theory of ears.

The exuberance and play expressed in a foppish teenage jacket or a bow-tie are also everywhere in this issue’s poetry: Tom Bell’s concept sonnet; Alistair Noon’s sonnet sequence; Nicholas Liu’s ghazal-that-isn’t-a-ghazal. Jon Stone’s sonic translation from the Japanese.

Wena Poon’s Sanjay Patel of Palo Alto California is so fresh and contemporary that it might be about someone you know: a story about letters and emails, place and name, and how lives are being changed by the recession. Tim Turnbull explores the limits of raw belief, in his story The Haunted Horse — with an illustration by Kate Manson.

Limits are also stretched in Toby Litt’s everyday tale of nanny-employing folk, and in two very different essays: Nancy Campbell’s The Art of Losing, with its exploration of the art of loss, characterised by Antarctica, and Sophie Mayer’s on language in art.

Of course, the final frontier is time, and literature’s business is to try to cross it. Horovitz bends a couple of centuries, and Jane Holland reaches back to the Middle Ages with a section of Gawain; Ernest Hilbert parts the curtains on the cartoonist Charles Addams [anchor], and Caleb Klaces’ poem Towards Selection looks at extinction — a subject one suspects Addams would have liked — with survival measured in minutes.

Time and language are the themes of two collections reviewed by AB Jackson. Charles Jennings reviews Owen Hatherley’s fractured urban architecture and Claire Trévien reviews two poetry collections by novelists in translation: Bolaño and Houellebecq (now, thankfully, found).

Here in the final third of 2011, it might feel a little as if survival is being measured in minutes — but we are surviving, and the vibrancy of writing here confirms that. There is lots more in this magazine than I’ve had space to mention. I hope you enjoy it, and please do get in touch to let us know what you think. Here’s to a productive and calm autumn.

Katy Evans-Bush