Notch Magazine
Literature Review
Literature lives. It needs geographic locations. Online space is fine for the masses, but serious writers need a base of operations. Back many years ago, a wise video game said, “All your base are belong to us,” meaning that artists need a place to flourish. So, for decades, those places have been—New York City and Paris (of the French variety, not Texan). With people there, the rest of the world can enjoy the culture of these two places, making them far more culturally relevant. Despite having a few million people each, they have enormous weight, and beneath those cities are subways that guide people along. Paris goes one step further with the macabre catacombs that run beneath the city, literally enclosing all those skeletons.
But enough about the undead living beneath Paris; this is about literature. The undead may influence literature, but we can acknowledge the living, breathing writers. Notch Magazine maintains thematic consistency across all its issues. They take their time, and that time is money, so it appreciates. Finance calls that interest—audiences like the idea of actual effort being put into a consistent issue. Plenty of reading series, literary magazines put odds and ends together. It shows. The submissions are closed, but as the great philosophers Guns N’Roses sang, “nothing lasts forever, not even the cold November Rain” from their epic work “November Rain.” Whiplash occurs when the level of dissonance becomes too much to bear. One piece may have a lovely poem about the moon, the next one about the premature death of a parent. Nobody wants to handle all of that on a single page. Besides, Beach Sloth’s staff is very anti-moon poetry; there are enough poems about the moon, we are tapped out. Please, dear God, please do not send more moon poetry. We’re full of that lack-of-meaning word salad that always manages to forget croutons.
Philosophically, Notch Magazine goes for otherness. There are many outsider artists in the world, and we should let them in more often. Art sometimes feels hermetically sealed, as if allowing any outside influence would be a bad thing, would infect those pristine, polished, and ultimately meaningless aesthetic choices. Art ought to be a conversation with the audience, asking for input, asking what they got right and wrong. Notch Magazine seems willing to have that conversation, and I am most thankful for their unique perspective and for their willingness to engage with other perspectives.
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