Editorial by Billiam Tantam

Editorial

 

            This is the second magazine of ‘Sketches’ to have been brought out, and I think that it has come a long way from the first.   For one thing, it should have a bigger readership (cross fingers!), and for another, there have been more submissions, which means a more varied read.

 

            With regards to creative writing at SOAS, there has been more interest, though is still limited in numbers.  There seems to have been a lot of attention given to a certain academic within our institution running for the Laureateship – and to him we say good luck!  I’m sure he’d do a darn sight better job than that joker Andrew Motion.  Literary Society has grown a little, and the Reading Group has started up in earnest. Literature, it seems, has been denigrated to the lower rungs of our entertainment preferences, a fact that I do not think is fair, but can understand.  Recently, the introduction of Guitar Hero into our house has meant that my endeavours to become a Guitar expert have relegated the Musils, Orwells, Greenes, and Ginsbergs to mere footstools. However, occasionally a piece of writing will grab you and remind you of how much more fulfilling the act of reading actually is. 

 

            Over the Christmas Holidays I was caught up in the delights of the flesh; good food, fine bed-linen, a doting girlfriend, and left my books to sit idly by, but as January 3^rd approached, I happened upon a poem that made the hands on my watch stop dead, leaving only my breathing to count the restful minutes.  The poem that brought me to such a crescendo of epiphany was Pablo Neruda’s Walking Around, a poem whose frank portrayal of a man beset by insecurities resonated like harmonics in a guitar body within my mind.  Lines of immense beauty are scattered by the poet in abundance; “It happens that I am tired of being a man” … “I do not want to go on being a root in the dark // hesitating, stretched out, shivering with dreams”, lines of such timeless resonance that they weigh on us like a marble weight.  Anyway, I divulge from our little pamphlet.

 

            Once again being overtaken by the excitement of literature that feels relevant to our own lives, I’m excited about this magazine beginning to take flight on its own, and hope that the fact all of the submitters are SOAS students will mean that we can in some way connect better with the sentiment to their pieces.  Perhaps I’m getting away with myself – use it to stop your coffee cup from staining the table whilst you’re playing Guitar Hero, but maybe afterwards, when the evening chill comes through the window, have a quick leaf through, and think on beauty.

 

Thanks for your donation!

 

Billiam