This issue’s banner is a detail from Derek Owens’ Nightmare Fishes at the Robot Hotel.
We began publishing 96th of October in the winter of 2020. It was then our hope to have “shown up on radar” within 5 years. Soviet history might have sufficed to teach us the success-rate of five year plans. But we needn’t be so historical. Since the death of print sometime in the seventies, this has been the general trajectory of journal publication. From the xeroxed zines of the ’80’s, through the the blogs of the oughts, to the nothing really of today, publications like ours last for about five years. They’re typically labors of love by a single person, who has fun meeting a few new people and dreaming big dreams, before realizing that this was a whole lot of work for a mainstream success that was not going to happen. Usually, the publication “goes nova,” disappearing after a particularly luxe issue. This has just happened with The High Window, the only poetry magazine we cared to read.
We however, are evidently slow learners, so we continue to fight the good fight, relying not only on native cussedness, but a few solid grounds for confidence. There is a lot of brilliant work out there—and we, and apparently only we, are able to recognize it. We trust our judgement, we trust the genius of our contributors, and—arguably a long shot—we trust that the day will come when more than a few folks will tire of what the mainstream gatekeepers let through. To nudge forward the coming of that golden age, we’re offer a few observations.
Octobrist Manifesto 2: Canon Fodder
The modern age is one of the great ages of faith: this may come as a surprise to those who believe religion is a useless fossil, and that their supernatural needs have been well met by antidepressant drugs and streaming entertainment. It will come as even more of a shock to those who think themselves spiritual rather than religious, and believe they’re a cut above the materialist hoi-polloi. But Faith, if we understand this in terms of dogmatic belief, moral euphoria, and the conviction that those who don’t think as we do are all damned—this is alive and well in our political convictions.
Politics was well on its way to becoming the new and universal religion by 1900; after World War One, Fascism, Communism and Capitalism were the only faiths anyone felt were worth fighting for.
But the current of history was against them, and Stalin’s view of great art as great propaganda has triumphed. From the identity box-checking (quotas) of galleries and museums, to the ecstatic applause for ever cruder political messages—of which Kent Monkman, who favors the name Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, provides a parade example—beauty has been universally discounted in favor of “social importance.”
Conservatives are innocent of these particular repressive measures: they’ve always hated art and education, and raced to cut the funding. It was the proponents of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion who persuaded the public that the conservatives were correct.
Politics in art produces propaganda art, which, even in such illustrious instances as Goya’s Disasters of War or Picasso’s Guernica, fails to provide an aesthetically satisfactory experience—though some still feel morally bludgeoned into claiming it does.
Poetry is one of our particular interests, and politics has vitiated much of the work of America’s finest poets, of whom Adrienne Rich is perhaps the parade example. Her father abusively groomed her to be a literary prodigy, resulting in a first book at age 21, which Auden gave the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1951. It was equally astounding for its technical perfection and utter lack of content. Thereafter, she, in a lifelong reaction against her father’s tyranny, wrote poetry which meticulously eschewed any aesthetic charm, and took on only political themes. We would be hard put to name a poet whose work is more admired and less interesting. Allen Ginsberg, whose career was infinitely more varied, sometimes achieved equally disappointing results with his political poetry—which now seems hopelessy dated where its forgotten topics don’t just make it hopelessly opaque.
Imagine a canon of art and literature that was honestly built on aesthetic merit and intellectual depth. A canon that correctly rejected Harold Bloom’s belief that the books of western Europe are on God’s bookshelf, and the color-coordinated choices of the Woke, would start with some classics that are truly classic, and in fact classical. The ranks of Asian women writers would be led by Murasaki Shikibu (The Tale of Genji) and Li Ching Jao (Song Dynasty poet). The Bhagavad Gita would not be sidelined. The study of African literature would begin with Egyptian classics like The Shipwrecked Sailor and the great hymns of The Coffin Texts. In painting Alice Neal, Hannah Hoch and Remedios Varo would displace Frida Kahlo, whose self-portaiture was as unending and monotonous as her unibrow.
The obssession with politics has corrupted our taste, replaced any sense of history, and made a virtue of bad manners.