VOLUME I, NUMBER 1

FALL 1997

The View from Below

I personally would like to see a new evolutionary classification, which would combine the advance and ancestry principles. We would have groups (or "clades," from the Greek for branches) of common ancestry—and grades of advance for which new designations would be needed . . .I would hope that Metazoa would be restored to its original use as a grade label and that Man would be placed in a new major grade, which might be called Psychozoa.
—Julian Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine (1957)

In preparing a brief introduction to this journal, we were reminded of two somewhat disparate cinematic images that suggested to us the potential, as well as the folly, of this enterprise. The first was Charles Foster Kane's Declaration of Principles for the New York Inquirer in Citizen Kane. The second was Mary Wilke's (Diane Keaton) assessment of "little magazines" in the Academy-of-the-Overrated scene in Manhattan.

Like any "little magazine," this forum for fiction, poetry and criticism runs the inescapable risk of pretension and insularity. Pretension, it seems to us, would be difficult to discern in practice, and we doubt that such a result would serve any useful purpose. On the contrary, pretense, it seems to us, is often the beginning of the creative impulse, and to stamp out pretense would be to consign too much that could interest or excite, because we find it superficially annoying or tiresome, to the margins of public discourse.

We will make a concerted effort to avoid the insularity that we believe a narrow range of ideas promotes. To this end, we will endeavor to exhibit as broad a spectrum of styles and views as the submissions we are provided allow.

In closing, we must ruefully admit that what first struck us about Charles Foster Kane¹s Declaration of Principles was its unbearable naiveté as contrasted with our own notions for this journal, which we perceived as far more sophisticated. Yet as we review this introduction, we find that we have not mocked that Declaration of Principles at all — we have written something very much like it.

—The Editors

Articles

The Wonderful Horrible Story of Logical Positivism, by Henry Nicholls

H. P. Lovecraft and the Myth of the 20th Century, by Joseph Morales

Fiction

Only a God Can Save Us, by Adrian Smith

The Spawning, by C. J. Rowan

Poetry

Three poems by William Chace

Untitled (Clouds return the sky...)

Untitled (You're redeemed...)

Untitled (So, they're here too...)

I, Igor, by C. J. Rowan

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