Our Reason For Living

There are a number of reasons for this magazine. One reason arises from my belief that the American publishing industry is failing us. There are a few good presses like Coffee House Press, City Lights, MacAdam/Cage, Bootstrap Productions, Unbridled Books, and others that manage to publish interesting, well written, entertaining, and challenging books; however, most publishers produce crap. What passes as "new literary fiction" from the big publishers is often formulaic and bland (there are exceptions, of course, but they stand out, proving the rule). One first novel is often just like any other first novel: a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman that, with a little revision, could just as easily be a memoir. Don't believe me? Ask James Frey. Genre fiction, at least occasionally, allows the first time novelist to avoid bland uniformity (see Will Christopher Baer's Kiss Me, Judas as an example of good genre-type work). Unfortunately, to be considered a success in some of the genres (mystery, suspense, thriller are the most notorious) by the publishing industry, a writer must become a machine and crank out a novel every year and that means developing a "formula" that replaces the creative process and leads to misery (read Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night, a traveler, the climax of which involves a storytelling machine). To put it simply: the big publishers don't like art. Art is messy, unpredictable, erratic, nonconformist, entertaining, and challenging. Art, they believe, is hard to sell (and in that they just may be right, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't try). Gimmicks that pass as art can be packaged, marketed, turned into a "product" or a "brand."

Art and literature, they think, is especially hard to sell to a population weaned on and obsessed with television and video games. I think the reason they believe that is because they see art and literature as a fixed, immutable quality. Art and literature is seen as old. The truth, however, is that art is the crystal ball of the future.
        
Another reason for this magazine comes from Joseph Campbell's work. Mythology, which is always read metaphorically (unlike codified religion), helps us cope with the transitions of life. The problem is the old mythologies are failing us. I believe the reason is one half of the metaphor is dying. The tenor of the metaphors in mythology remains constant, but the vehicles have lost their impact. The vehicles of the old mythologies were based in nature: cows, dogs, horses, birds, lions, insects, etc., plus fantastical creatures like dragons and centaurs and, my favorite, the Minotaur.

There was a symbiotic relationship between humans and animals. From that relationship, which placed animals in the role of being our avatars to the spirit world, grew a large chunk of the world's mythology. Humans no longer have the connection to animals that we once possessed. We are now a mechanized, electrified, digital species that lives apart from nature. Think about this: people who don't own pets might spend weeks without any direct contact with an animal, and probably have never had contact with a "wild" animal outside of a zoo. John Berger wrote about this idea of becoming separated from our animal brethren in his essay "Why Look at Animals" which appears in his book About Looking. It's worth a read.
        
What I believe is that the modern day shaman – the artist – has to search for our new avatars. We have to find the new vehicles for the metaphors that will help us cope with life and death in this new world. Anything else is just empty entertainment, and we are already entertaining ourselves to death.
        
The Project for a New Mythology also arises from Dzevad Karahasan's book Sarajevo: Exodus of a City, which is, unfortunately, out of print. In the chapter "Literature and War" he writes "For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first - the holy books say that it was created in words – and all that happens in it, happens in language first." The suggestion that we have made the world the way it is by the things we have written, and the things we have read, has alternately made me marvel at our human capacity for good, and cringe at our capacity for evil. A line from the movie Contact always springs to mind when I think about this topic. It's an alien, in the guise of the main character's father, who says of humans: "You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares." Good art should encourage us to work for our beautiful dreams by either documenting the beautiful dream and giving us something to aspire to, or honestly documenting the nightmare, which should make us yearn for its opposite. John Gardner once wrote that moral art "rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and worse in human action." Art that doesn't do this is cheating us and we need to learn to tell the difference.
        
All of that, taken together, is what The Project for a New Mythology is about: presenting honest, trustworthy art that helps us create the world we want to live in. Sometimes that art will be frightening or comforting, disturbing or charming, but always entertaining and challenging.

"For, let us not fool ourselves: the world is written first - the holy books say that it was created in words – and all that happens in it, happens in language first." - Dzevad Karahasan

The Project for a New Mythology