II

The great publishing houses of Britain and America built their mighty commercial reputations on a discernable sense of literary tradition. While it would be false to make the claim that there was a time when all their lists brimmed with future classics, the nature of the business was such that if they failed in their ambitions, or if their pretensions were allowed to slip, another publisher would slide alongside and usurp their position as the new arbiters of taste.
It has never been straight forward for an underdog to steal the finishing post from a seasoned champion, but looking at the current spectrum of publishing and bookselling it is hard for one to imagine a time when it was more difficult. The ongoing dominance of publishing conglomerates is creating an ever more homogenous production line of literature, written and packaged for an ever more homogenous society.
None of this is to say that our current crop of major publishers are incapable of producing great literature, nor does it mean to suggest that there are no longer any corners of the publishing world harbouring literary pretension; however it is not impossible to imagine the industry employing its editors solely on the basis of their ability to build outward (with regard to market share) rather than upwards (with regard to quality) - the attentive will already notice the outcome of this approach on the shelves of bookshops where many works seem to have been conceived purely to satisfy a fad or to pre-empt a trend.
Within this commercial structure, the Committed Reader is left alone to seek out odd scraps of quality amongst the various detritus of any number of failed or ill-conceived publishing projects. Options being quickly exhausted and in reluctance to allow the shelf-fillers to lower his standards this reader must begrudgingly advance to the literature of the past. Centuries worth of poetry, drama, and fiction, as well as critical, speculative, and analytical prose is, and always has been, a safer bet than the qualitative uncertainty of the future; the scabs of calcified fashions and literary phases having been cleansed by the slow but abrasive passing of time.
Against his better judgement the committed reader has been obliged to renege on his engagement with the present, finding that today’s stand-out works no longer emit even a single blip of promise against the fossilised ebbs and floods of literary history.

III

As has been the case for many years, newspapers and current affairs periodicals offer readers the most immediate access to new work; the reviews that they print are frequently the first notice we receive as to the existence of a publication. The next tier of review is offered by the arts or literary periodicals which stand alongside the meagre coverage offered to the arts by television and radio. Beyond these we quickly enter the sphere of specialist or academic journals whose attentions focus on fine points and theories far beyond the interest of the majority of readers.
It has become widely recognized that it is the responsibility of every generation to dictate the tastes according to which their art should be accepted and judged. A brief glance at any number of north american periodicals will reveal the desperate efforts of literary journalists to hold true to this maxim, to form a convincing and coherent whole from the gargantuan mass of disparate and seemingly unrelated works at their disposal. We are nudged, by them, to consider who, from a plethora of writers, is most worthy of being labelled the new thomas pynchon or the literary heir to philip roth; first time novelists are neatly posted into empty slots within the ranks of american writing which best highlights the nature of their influences and the genealogy of their concerns. It would not be prudent for us to endorse an imitation of this clumsy clustering - a pursuit whose only quality is in making the world a tidy place. However, any approach that makes the routes between the past and the now more navigable might be a welcome proposition as long as that approach was calm, sensible and measured.
Any publication devoted to the development and promotion of new writers and writing must develop a readership whose attentions are drawn to those standards of taste informing the work they’re being asked to read. An examination of the British critics will find them in widespread default of their tacit promise to use their influence intelligently, sensitively, and most important: relevantly.
Standing in contrast to the ambitious journalists of tenuous links are the reviewers who have been recently termed, snarks; this journalist's notices are characterised by harsh qualitative indictments with a few unwavering judgements thrown in for good measure. As critics of the snark rightly point out, this style of reviewing is designed as a headline grabbing entertainment for those readers who excitedly anticipate each new verbal onslaught. Opponents of the snark however rarely acknowledge the necessary close reading and textual references that go into each critical attack.
The essayist who stands in opposition to the confrontational notice is commonly a writer whose reviews are distinguished by lengthy, verbosely worded synopses of whatever biography or current affairs tome he's been asked to discuss; his outline will be supplemented by endless overviews of particular significant sections of the book and, when copy is lacking, he’ll present the fruits of some personal research, just to show that here is a journalist who works for his money. The toils of these writers are replete in our weekly, fortnightly, and monthly reviews.
From the dedicated arts publications it is a small step down to the daily and weekly newspapers whose shorter reviews may be more timely, but whose very timeliness disguises an approach to new works rarely concerned with anything more than their value as entertainments. The position of the arts (formerly literary) editors of major newspapers is not an enviable one. While it may be noted that many people buy a particular paper purely for the quality of its literary coverage, the articles must at least gesture towards arousing equally the interests of the remainder of the paper’s customers; thus the editor has to insist that any article that wishes to delve deeper into its subject must also present a certain broadness of appeal which, more often than not, serves only to diminish the relative profundity of its descent.
Having considered the varying qualities of our surrounding critical climate, when asked, what use do these reviews have? we are inclined to respond, none, before dismissing them all. A review worth the paper it's printed on must accept that taste is transient and that the art of reviewing has an influence on the flux of taste; finally it must assert its right to adapt the very standards by which all judgements are tooled.

IV

Just as our glance back to a halcyon past when the new title shelves overflowed with future monuments of achievement was misty-eyed, so too was our earlier sketch of the committed reader gloomy to the point of cynicism. The committed reader is in possession of tastes dictated by the age in which he lives, by the comments he listens to, and the discourse he engages in. As such it is inevitable that he return to the present in his continuing search for something thoughtful, beautiful, diverting, or entertaining.
The committed reader, having perused the reviews, returns to the contemporary shelves for the first time since his sojourn to find a literature conveniently diced into marketable chunks: cover illustrations, book format, type size, back page blurbs, have become classifiable qualities determining the type of book it is and the market it is aimed at. Untempted by the thrillers, the science-fictions, the romances, or the brightly jacketed narratives for twenty-to-thirty-somethings, his eye-line falls to the soberly coloured, clearly worded, hard and paper backed covers on the literary fiction shelves - a peculiar genre whose defining characteristics concern neither narrative nor content. Literary fiction has become a malicious marketing tool which is gradually subsuming all prizes, comment and debate with its affectations of high-mindedness. It is not unusual for the protagonists of these novels to be middle-aged academics, concert musicians or dangerously two-dimensional stereotypes of comfortable mediocrity. When these characters are not set in historical tableaux they usually become involved in incidents which challenge the principles that they hold dear, threaten their professional positions, or upset their spouses. A work is generally shelved with literary fiction if its author is clever in that dreadfully self-conscious way that renders them the worst kind of company at a dinner party (where, coincidentally, many important narrative junctures in their books occur).
Our committed reader recalls the reviews of some of these titles. He remembers the mildly enthusiastic wording of a newspaper notice or a lengthy comparative article which over used dickensian and nabokovian whilst making annoyingly frequent reference to the oeuvre of Graham Greene.
It is easy to become lulled into believing that we, the inhabitants of this age, lack sincerity. Gimmicks surround us and everyone either has an angle or is searching for one. Despite reassurances that the serious artist and the genuinely thoughtful critic have always been a rarity - that any band they gather to spread and encourage dissent within the arts has, by nature of its opposition to widely accepted norms, been small and limited in its influence - the committed reader might still despair. It will not do to say that the obstacles facing our aspirational artists and readers have been encountered and overcome by previous generations; their problems were not our problems and their cures were successful only in as much as they were specific to their cultural ailments.

V

If the air in a room becomes stuffy then the only way to freshen it up is to open a window; if there are no windows then one has to knock down a wall. A magazine can, if conducted appropriately, convince its readers to look at writing with fresher eyes. The best criticism leads by example and silently encourages its reader to transpose its precepts into his consideration of other areas of literature and thought. Criticism itself can of course only ever supplement the original, creative work printed alongside it.
No-one should look to a magazine to read writers they have learned to like elsewhere, nor should they come looking for that mark of literary sophistication which has become so common in the fiction sections. If this is what they seek then we are confident that their hungers can be satisfied elsewhere. But for the committed reader, who had found himself stifled, we have begun knocking through the bricks to find fresh air, fresh writing, fresh thought.

VI

All of this might go some way towards explaining why we have launched The Ephemera. Our argument may seem little more than a general yet nagging dissatisfaction with that which is put before us and claimed as ‘new’, or ‘ground-breaking’, or ‘clever’ - a dissatisfaction which, if taken too seriously, may obscure the very qualities it craves. It may seem as if we have tastes which are simply out-of-tune with that of publishers and writers who, in their defence, slave over their work no less than those of previous eras have. It might appear that we are a little grumpy with critics on the one hand for being too serious - in the case of those whose interests lean towards academia, or, on the other, for being slap-dash - in the case of those whose readerships are wide and varied.
Either way, very little of what we've said so far concerns the work we have decided to print in this, our first issue. We hope that the work - that of three writers of fiction, one poet, four critics and a single photographer - firmly grasps our reader’s attention and speaks for itself. These writings have been chosen because they each bear the mark of thought extolled with clarity, or artistic vision phrased with the perfect words, illustrated with the perfect images. Our design is not to select and publish work whose merits compliment our own opinions and beliefs. Creative work has been chosen for inclusion when its virtues are fresh yet immediate; that is to say when it is direct but original. Critical articles and essays have been commissioned not because we agree with them but because we consider them worth disagreeing with.
Over and above every other reason, the individual works making up this number are, in our opinion and according to our tastes, representative of art and thought which is free from the stagnancy and irrelevance that we have felt the need to comment on above. Whether our tastes are yours, or our opinions shared, will remain to be seen.
It is our great pleasure to introduce The Ephemera into a world where so many things are temporary, poorly made, ill considered, lifeless and dull. Surely there is a place in amongst all this transience for writing distinguished by clarity and integrity; writing which deserves a second reading. Ours is a time when clear thought has become usurped by sensationalism; where commercialism shouts down intelligence at every opportunity it's given.
We hope things are about to change.