Having It Garg

GARGOYLE MAGAZINE specialises in recklessly eclectic selections of poetry, fiction, photography, art, essays and interviews, garnered from artists working on both sides of the Atlantic. Founded in 1976 and now based in both Washington and London, the magazine (whose format is actually closer to that of a thick paperback) actively seeks out neglected artists and publishes them alongside more established names. As for editorial policy, well, anything goes.
There aren t any criteria, admits the magazine s London editor Maja Prausnitz. There are three editors on different sides of the Atlantic and each one of us has very different tastes in style, so there s no one thread holding us all together. I don t think you re supposed to say this sort of thing, but it s totally arbitrary.
After a publishing hiatus of eight years, Gargoyle was relaunched in 1997, and began to evolve from the familiar print medium to explore areas such as video, performance and children s writing (Gargoyle Jr., a project devoted exclusively to the work of youngsters, is mooted for Spring, 2000). Other future plans include monthly spoken word showcases at the Cobden Club in Ladbroke Grove, London, and a broadcast-quality video issue solely devoted to performance poetry, due next year.
Gargoyle #42 should be in the shops as you read this. It s a dense and wildly varied anthology, ranging from the biting hyper-realism of short stories by Claire Bennet and Rik Lander, to Claudia Turske s quirky food-of-love cutlet The Recipe For That Night , as well as non-fiction pieces such as Mark Wallace s essay on the fiction of Burroughs and Bowles, plus Serious Time author Joe Ambrose s account of his meeting with the latter writer in Tangier.
There are also reams of verse from the likes of John Cooper Clarke, Joolz, Labi Siffre and Dermot Bolger. Kicking off the latest edition is Australian photographer/journalist Bleddyn Butcher s requiem for former Triffids singer David McComb, who, following a heart transplant operation in 1996, died in Melbourne last February.
So what prompted Butcher to pen the elegy?
I was shocked by the lack of a decent tribute to him in the English press, he explains. I gather that in Australia, as you would expect, it was more acknowledged, but I think that what he achieved was something more than a local success I think he was a world class songwriter.

Gargoyle #42 is teeming with musical connections, perhaps the most intriguing of which is an essay from none other than Richard Hell. The man who christened the blank generation was, of course, one of the most fiercely literate artists to emerge from the CBGB s scene in the mid- 70s, and is now a full-time writer (his second novel, Go Now was published by Fourth Estate in 1996 to uniformly positive reviews). Via e-mail, he explained his Gargoyle connection to Hot Press:
The co-editor Maja Prausnitz, who actually is a gargoyle (just kidding, she s really a very sweet Valkyrie with blinding cleavage), contacted me a couple of years ago and asked me for something for the first of their new series, he writes. I postponed sending anything until it was too late for the first one, then she asked again and I had this story, so I sent it along.
His contribution to Gargoyle #42 is a typically Hell-ish exposition entitled Boy Meets Death, Boy Falls In Love . But, as he acknowledges in the text, writing about death in any abstract sense can mean walking a fine line between teenaged mordancy and philosophical exploration.
It s dicey, Hell concedes. There was never any question of philosophical exploration really, but just an attempt to depict a negative state well enough so that the quality of the evocation redeemed it from being merely either corny, immature morbidity or grown-up self-indulgent morbidity.
At the conclusion of Boy Meets Death . . . Hell writes, One thing I ve learned is that there is no last word. To the question, Can you top this? the answer is always yes.
Is this belief central to his day to day survival?
It s not a belief, he corrects me, it s an observation. Beliefs are provisional! There s never a last word . When I was 19 my first real-life girlfriend was 34, and one time when we were right stoned on weed she came up with, Absolutes make the heart go flounder. That s pretty good, huh? But it s not even just about the heart , it s about not kidding yourself that you re ever going to completely know anything, or have any final answers, or that there s any point in aiming for an absolute superlative. In other words, You gotta lose . n
Gargoyle #42 retails at #7.99 sterling. Website: www.atticusbooks.com