EDITORIAL

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CRAZY OIK

A shilling life will give you all the facts – as Wystan said. So here’s a short life of the Crazy Oik now we’ve reached fifty. It started in the spring of 2009. The intro on the website asked:

Do we need yet another literary magazine? They say the best reason for writing is that no one is writing the stuff you want to read. Well, maybe they are – but you’re just not getting to see it. Publishers grow ever larger but stay blinkered by blockbusters. Creative writing courses proliferate to squash talent into a commercial straitjacket.  But there are cracks in the monolith. The internet and publishing-on-demand have changed the landscape since TS Eliot, editing The Criterion, had to shake his begging bowl under some rich cow’s nose. Now you can put up a website for fifty quid and run a magazine with a subscribers’ list of one without filling the back bedroom with hundreds of unsold issues. Nobody’s going to go broke running a magazine these days and a potential readership of 1.5 billion awaits. 

Unfortunately oikitude is a defining characteristic of our typical contributor. Crazy rich gits, like say, Beckford, Firbank, or even Proust have the cash and the contacts to ensure they get into print. The Crazy Oik will change all that and give voice to the neglected and the uncommercial. Dig out that stuff you buried in a shoe box years ago. Even better – start writing again. We welcome material your old English teacher might hold at arm’s length saying “Ooo no! This won’t do!” We look for a spark of wit or weirdness. Are you a crazy oik or not?

One hundred and ten contributors popped up and filled 5000 pages of prose and poetry amounting to 1.2 million words. They weren’t all unknowns but there was a bit of shoebox rummaging. For example Keith Howden’s The Gospels of Saint Belgrano which he dug out of a drawer where it had lain for years. I larf every time I re-read it.

Having a larf might have figured in the Oik’s message statement. I’m aware this frivolity could inhibit Arts Council funding. Har bleeding har! But the Oik doesn’t need money. Becoming rich and famous may be the aspiration of the Creative Writing graduate but we prefer art for art’s sake. Think creative monks – like those who produced the Book of Kells. No publishers required. Imagine the idyllic scene in the scriptorium on the Isle of Iona circa 800 AD:

Brother Anselm: Benny! Come and look. I’ve just finished the capital S after only six months.

Brother Benedict: It looks very fine Anselm. I see the snake offering Eve the apple. What scales! What fangs! And the apple! Who could resist it! But Eve? Who’d fancy such a podgy porker? I think we should squash her tits down a bit, beef up her shoulders and narrow her hips.

Brother Anslem: Hmmm. Maybe also a moustache?

Perhaps it’s immortality you’re after. And why not? The Oik was a bit late in acquiring an ISSN but it has one now and all back issues are stored in the British Library at Boston Spa. If you’re passing call in. I guess they could fish out a few. It might be some time before the complete set is under glass in a cabinet like the great Book of Kells in Trinity College, Dublin. Yes, far-fetched I agree – but if they took out all the rude bits it’d be in with a chance

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keith howden

3. Manager: Arthur Buckley 

Manager: Arthur Buckley. It proclaimed
one of life's losers. Empty and likeable,
the world's fool, still my friend, unchanged
except his age and girth. He'd stayed the affable
man I remembered. The full-back features,
the swollen, heavy muscles of the neck,
retained their trademark. His body was
fuller but not much clumsier. He took
pride in old photographs damp had spoiled
with emulsion’s bombs. Some were past teams,
some, action fragments scissored from old
newspapers, some gripped by blurred frames,
in postures fixing the naiveté
that held him gullible, the easy butt
of more worldly games. He could betray
my secret ridicules to grief, a target
making my blame ambiguous for one
of life's persistent losers. 'In this game
for twenty years, what have I ever won?
No medals. Never a cup.' I pitied him,
not his incompetence or lack of prizes,
but all he never knew, his dull goodness.
His world would need new rules and referees
for him to kiss its cups or wave its trophies.