The Black Herald 1 – Editorial (excerpt)
by Paul Stubbs
(first published in The Black Herald, issue 1, January 2011)
On July 2nd, 1914, the inaugural issue of Blast magazine was published in England, a project begun by the writer Wyndham Lewis, who hoped it would cement the reputation of the new ‘Vorticist’ movement – an English-speaking response to the new Italian avant-garde and futurist movement founded and preached by Marinetti. The editorial of this first issue of Blast declared: “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves”; and while our intent for The Black Herald does not mirror this rather outlandish aim, its birth is, in some way, similar to the Blast one: a response to what has gone before. For me it certainly is, having tired of the insular and island-bound verbiage of my own country’s literary magazines and the secular way in which the majority of the ‘contributors’ have seemed at times ‘handpicked’. The ‘mainstream’ exists in all countries and cultures, but in England especially it has become something of a ghost-ship, one shipwrecked onto the rocks of its own self-delusion and mediocrity, completely unaware of its soon-to-be obsolete passengers.
