Like a cow stuck in a barn door, the third edition of the Seeker has taken longer than anticipated to turn out. After many a heave-ho, gentle endearment and wracked nerve, however, we’re pleased to declare it arrives in rude health.
In Issue One of the Seeker Andrew Radford wrote about the music of New Orleans; in Issue Two Khalid Majeed and Omar Tarin spoke politics in Pakistan. Since then the world has been taken by surprise by America’s apparent inability to cope with natural disaster in one of its oldest cities. The inadequacies of relief efforts after the earthquake in Kashmir were, sadly, less unexpected.
Elsewhere, 70% of Iraqis voted in their country’s first open, democratic elections, while in Britain the Liberal Democrats hounded a perfectly well-respected and admired leader out of office after he confessed his perfectly human weakness for tippling. Harold Pinter’s genius was given due recognition as he picked up the Nobel Prize for Literature, while in the Seeker’s own beloved Glasgow, imbecility won the hour as the city council paid a think tank to canvass the views of hairdressers on the issues of the day, with a view to giving them a formal policy-making role.
This issue we return to New Orleans in Scott Malby’s sensuous, rhythmic ode to the blues. In our poetry section you can also enjoy dispatches from the closet (no innuendo intended) in Ashok Niyogi’s Poem Written in Darkness and a couple of very different poems from Alexander Cuthbert – one a chippy, sideways view of Scotland, the other a memory of early learning in Dundee. Glasgow-based Lisandra Sousa’s verse leads one into a poised, slightly poisoned world of art, truth and beauty and in Neruda’s Complaint Papa Osmubal evokes a certain consanguinity with Latin America and the great Chilean poet himself.
We also give you elegiac, enigmatic prose from Conrad Watts; a story in the musical rhythms of urban Scots from Lynsey Calderwood; cerebral, troubled and troubling fiction from John Regan; and a morality tale of sorts set in the Kafkaesque underbelly of Edinburgh from Stuart Mark.
In our articles section you can read about Donald Young, a 16-year-old tennis player who has already made sporting history; graphic novelist Charles Burns, whose work embodies both the beauty and alienation of youth and youth culture; and colourful femme de couture Barbara Hulanicki, who helped spark a cultural revolution in sixties London.
To paraphrase an old song, sometimes you need something to remind you that there’s something else. We hope you find it here.
Kenny Hodgart - January 2006