Created in Michaelmas 2014, Notes’ inaugural issue featured Megan Madden’s stark photograph of a tea-cup on its cover: a sardonic pun on the ‘mugshot’, and a visual nod to things casual and left-behind. In his introductory note, editor Domhnall Iain Domhnallach’s praised ‘the fleeting, the makeshift, the shapeshifting and the transient’, setting the tone not only for that issue – appropriately titled ‘Ephemera’ – but for what has today become Oxford’s most frequently-printed zine of new writing and art.
Rather than setting itself up as yet another glossy high altar of print publication, Notes strives to present a fortnightly screen-grab of what Oxford’s writers and artists are at work at. Looking over the zine’s back issues, we find workshopped poems, ambitious sketches, reimagined images, and plenty of category-defying prose. Think of Notes as the Snapchat of creativity in Oxford: instead of polished gems in gilt cases, we get the gritty works-in-progress of both regular and one-time contributors, complete with snarky captions. Each issue overflows with fascinating ideas and projects. As Sarah Murphy, editor of Issue 12: ‘Cornucopia’, put it: ‘This is our ode to bounty. Such plentiful. Very art.’
This is not to say that Notes sacrifices aesthetic quality for sheer frequency and quantity. In fact, one of Notes’ many strengths is the strength and consistency of formal innovation that finds its way into these pages. The most recent issue, ‘Snake’, features among its contributions a JCR Motion, a listicle, a transcript of a lecture, a reply to a call for volunteers in a cyborg lab experiment, and a delightfully self-referential digital illustration with the caption: ‘He had the Audacity / for a double-page spread…’ While not all these pieces have fully inhabited their chosen forms (we find, occasionally, the marks of inner grammarists telling the authors to dot their i’s and cross their t’s), there is a sense that these forms represent the true vernacular of Oxford life, and serve as an idiom for the university’s many subcultures.
Another note-worthy point is the wry humour with which the publication engages its own contents. The editorial notes that preface each issue are a joy – and often a laugh – to read, in the way they sit happily alongside their (highly varied) contributors as artworks in their own right. Mina Odile Ebtehadj-Marquis’ knowing One Direction reference thus provides the perfect segue to Rebecca Roughan’s ‘Sonnet 130’ in Issue 4: ‘Ugly’, while Surya Bowyer’s introduction to Issue 11: ‘Tip’ is a worthy addition to the other poems in the issue. The fascinating Issue 7/8: ‘Out/Liars’, printed in opposite directions on either half, with Abigail Taubman’s photograph of a reflected corridor forming the centre-spread, is itself a comment on truth-telling: the contents page for Issue 7 lists the pieces in Issue 8, and vice versa.
Where could Notes go from here? The editors have thus far decided to keep the zine in hard-copy circulation, and print lends the publication not only its distinctive aesthetic but an enduring appeal to emerging writers and artists – Notes’ primary source of contributions. But for an enterprise dedicated to exploring new forms and voices, its light-touch approach to the internet is curiously limiting. The Notes Tumblr has been inactive since Issue 4, and its Facebook page is used primarily for publicity; it could, perhaps, take a leaf from SevenVoices or even the ISIS by creating a space for other aural and visual forms. Notes has, nevertheless, done well at the reverse, engaging the web from the printed page – screenshots, emails, webchats, Facebook statuses, and even a pedestrian crossing captured by a CCTV camera have all been explored (and exploited) as new, distinctive genres.
As it stands, Notes provides Oxford’s creatives with an unparalleled space for print experimentation, and for all the bold and baffling experiments that take place within, Oxford’s cultural life is richer for it. We ought to take it seriously not despite its quirkiness, but because it is a magazine that, unlike its more genteel and subdued peers, wavers bravely on the boundary between art and life. We recognize ourselves in its pages – rude, jubilant, incomplete, and sometimes undone – a ‘certain chaotic beauty’, as Sinead O’Donovan puts it in ‘Arrested’ (Issue 13). In an age of perfect media bodies and staged political marketing, there is reason all the more to commemorate the shapeshifting and transient, especially as they appear in the work of Oxford’s most startling new voices.
