Letter From the Editors
Our aim is to create a place for cultural and intellectual life outside of academia, outside of commercial interests, and outside of the ever-proliferating range of narrow specialisations in the arts and sciences. We don’t deny that these things have their place, but that place already exists and is amply populated.
Rather than propagate the ghettoisation that seems to be the fate of so much work and thought, we’d like to present material that any inquisitive and intelligent reader can engage with; whatever their occupation, whatever their educational background. We’re committed to the notion that this doesn’t mean catering to the lowest common denominator, nor does it mean diminishing the clarity and force of material. On the contrary, we believe that it requires everybody involved to raise their game: readers shouldn’t expect their hands held, and writers should be clear. It’s easy to communicate within a narrow community of your peers, whether your peers are painters, noise musicians, Cambridge poets, film enthusiasts or neuroscientists, it’s much harder to bring what’s significant about your little corner of experience to the notice of the wider world.
We start out from the areas in which we are most closely involved; literature, music and poetry, but we don’t intend to remain only here. We aim to present original work by new poets, musicians, writers of short stories, photographers and artists, as well as to print essays by historians, biologists, economists and anybody else engaging with their own environment, and able to position and articulate the significance of that environment for the rest of the world.
If all of this seems a simplistic and broad manifesto then to an extent it is – it’s a sketch of the territory we want to cover, drawn with the intention that its contours and significant features will become better understood as we progress. We wouldn’t want to proceed in any other way than this – we’d perhaps even distrust anyone who claimed to do so.