The Mercury Wilson’s School’s sixth-form newspaper
Volume 4, Issue 7, March 2015
TKAM(E), LEE SAW, LEE CONQUERED ROBERT COCHRANE Like the sudden appearance of Boo Radley in the corner of the Finch house at the end of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, the announcement of the publication of a second Harper Lee novel has been met first with shock, then disbelief, and finally a warm sense that this is the moment you have been waiting for all your life.
Lee and following the enormous success of its predecessor, will surely be an essential read.
Its removal from the specification last year by Former Education Secretary Michael Gove was met with outrage from many – in the words of Heck Tate (but it could have just as easily been Mr Mulcahy), ‘there’s just some kind of men you have to shoot before you say hidy to them’.
‘Go Set a Watchman’, planned for release in July this year, will follow Scout 20 years after the events of ‘TKAM’ (as it has become affectionately known to generations of GCSE students in this country) as she visits her aged father back in Maycomb.
Perhaps the sequel will elevate Lee’s masterpiece back to its rightful position as a great work of fiction, which transcends the boundaries of ‘British’ or ‘American’ writing.
The novel was written several years before ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, and was only recently rediscovered. Some have claimed that the famously reclusive Lee has been coerced into releasing the novel by her publisher, citing her increasing ill health, and have even encouraged readers to boycott the release. Lee was reported to be suffering from deafness and blindness, and was apparently vulnerable following the death of her sister earlier last year. But Lee is certainly no Mrs Dubose, and as Atticus says, ‘you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view’. Lee has shot down these reports quicker than One Shot Finch on Tim Johnson, stating that she was ‘extremely hurt and humiliated’ by the claims and was ‘happy as hell with the reactions to Watchman’.
senselessness of the Deep South ethos.
‘Go Set a Watchman’ is bound to answer some big questions: what happened to the Ewells after Bob’s death? What became of Boo? Is Cecil Jacobs really a large moist chicken?
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ was always the best text on the GCSE English syllabus. A powerful critique of racism, as well as spawning such phrases as ‘pass the damn ham please’, ‘a little bantam cock of a man’ and ‘Cecil Jacobs is a big wet he-en’, Lee’s great achievement was to wrap the profound themes of her work within the accessible viewpoint of children, and in so doing display the
The first printing of the novel is set to release 2m copies, so make that baby step down to the book shop and immerse yourself in the world of Maycomb once again. As for Lee, we can only assume that she will return, Boo-like, to her world of seclusion, having given us another wondrous gift.
Lee shot down these reports quicker than ‘One Shot Finch’ on Tim Johnson
‘Go Set a Watchman’ is an unexpected gem in the hole of the tree of literature and, endorsed by
Want to write for the Mercury? Budding journalists, or those just passionate about a subject, are always needed. Anyone interested in writing, be it a front page spread, or a back page sports column, should contact the editors at:
[email protected] [email protected]
Sixth Form Mercury, March 2015
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Contents
EDITORS’ LETTER We’ve got a really diverse issue this week! Robert Cochrane has brought us a great investigative article on Harper Lee’s upcoming novel; Tom Coates has looked at the naming of comets and Kyle MacNeill has dived into the upcoming ‘PC Music’ scene. On top of this, we have the usual style icon from Linden Hogarth and cartoon from Charlie Stewart, as well as a praying-mantis themed poem by Lewis Harrington.
Article
Page
‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Sequel?
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A new take on the Philae Comet landing
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‘Madame Mantis’
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The Style Icon
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‘PC Music’ and the Comic
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Max Cobain and Kyle MacNeill
PHILAE COMET— “WHAT'S IN A NAME?” TOM COATES Shakespeare once wrote "What's in a name? That which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet", and in doing so sparked both romantic poetry and existential questions for nearly 500 years. For the purposes of this article, the latter is perhaps more important than the former, and combining this with a more contemporary and equally significant event leads to interesting results. The event here is the Philae landing on Comet 67P; the names in question the aforementioned Philae as well as Rosetta, the name of Philae's carrier and Agilkia, the newer name for the much less catchy "Site J." These names are notable in one collective manner: they all originate from Egypt or are related to the study of antique Egypt, or Egyptology.
great deal further than its brick and mortar counterpart. The question then, other than the appropriate link between these two islands, remains - why these names?
The name "Rosetta" is perhaps the most obvious and transparent reference of the three, referring as it does to the Rosetta stone, the keystone discovery in the translation of hieroglyphics. "Philae" and "Agilika" in turn refer to islands on the Nile, both islands on the Nile and both sites of the same ancient Egyptian temples, Philae being the original site of this temple and Agilika the site of the relocated temple after the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, and definitely appropriate for the laborious relocation of the probe Philae, which has travelled a
The answer must lie in something intrinsically human - the use of the past to understand the future, or in this case explore it. Throughout human history there has been a tendency to look to the stars with an eye on the past, as perhaps reflected in the oldest fashion by the names of each and every planet, and most recently, and publically, with this latest probe.
Sixth Form Mercury, March 2015
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‘MADAME MANTIS’ LEWIS HARRINGTON A seven-foot praying mantis tortures me. It moves ribbed-iron limbs To tickle, to rip a grin Across my face, Involuntary joy.
Knives parrot knives Into my forearms, I am skewered.
My eyes, burst and threshed by my assailant, Crystallise hard as armour. My limbs grow barbarous, My blood must be spraying from me, Thorned, and savagely But I wouldn't notice a gasp Slicing the air. Erupting from every star. Seeing my laugh it bites the mouth I exist purely within My joints feel the breeze and hate it. from me, This holy grip. My wounds are bandaged by Crunching the happiness My deity, then I absorb Between its mandibles. Gradually those hard limbs bring my Those bandages, I assume a smile bones My porous flesh Tastes sweeter. Past the rags of flesh into The thin, cold open air. Made to a water-table, the black rain Clacking the bow-tongue against My senses are turning And blood sliding as though it string Inside themselves, Were frozen marble-drops. Tendons lining the jaws, My jaw was set, tongue A discordant note I can feel every wrinkle in my brain A devil's sword. Screams the air smooth But I am silent. Themselves against the bone-board I look into the eyes of the mantis, Of my skull's inner walls, and see her Head like a bicycle helmet, shined as My thoughts fall, settle Reflected in herself. My mind steams a shoe, In two dimensions. clear. Eyes like the head of a pin My massacre is my backward-bride, With the spike now My bleeding maw gives birth, a shunt I stalk the farms of my home Entering mine. of gore And I must kill to survive. I give up. Between my eyes and chin, Clacking forth, telescopic That iridescent exoskeleton tears my Bone-architecture flings Useless skin and meat. A foot from my face.
STYLE ICON: - Sir Mick Jagger -Linden Hogarth For over 50 years Sir Mick Jagger has defined that classic rock star look: gaunt, wild and full of attitude. From staple skinny jeans and t-shirts so tight they could be painted on, to spangled jumpsuits and flowing scarves, Jagger has never been afraid to experiment with his style. With sartorial ensembles as groovy as his infamous dance moves, it is hard to imagine any other 71-year-old that could get away with wearing a gold and emerald sequinned jacket, let alone whilst performing to 65,000 fans in Hyde Park.
Sixth Form Mercury, March 2015
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BACK PAGE PLUGGING PC MUSIC KYLE MACNEILL Often, it is a maverick record label which can create tsunami waves in mainstream culture. For soul it was Motown, for electronica it was 4AD, and for err - sonic vocals and lyrics that sound like they’ve been transcribed from texts, it’s PC Music. Founded in 2013 by all-round artsy stereotype (Goldsmiths, enigmatic personality, off-thewall creations) A.G. Cook, PC Music is a record label and digital commune of artists that are connected by several incredibly distinctive attributes. Essentially, they are all obsessed with cyberculture: terabytes of memes, text-speak and virtual-relationships can be found in pretty much all of the roster’s tracks. There seems to be a constant cutting irony behind almost all of the songs, which question the synthetic nature of modern life with repetitive aphorisms such as ‘This guy likes me too, and I think I like you maybe’ and ‘Baby when you look at me, you know that I’ll be here forever / baby when you look at me, I know that we’ll be here together’. Sure, they’re ridiculously simple and irritating, but that’s the point; it’s essentially a critique of how artificial relationships are in the digital age.
CHARLIE STEWART
The idiosyncrasy of the label has virtually - in every sense of the term - created a new genre. What’s pretty exciting and intriguing is that the challenging of artificial relationships is entirely achieved through artificial means. Almost all of the tracks feature insanely high-pitched vocals akin to Joe Pasquale on a helium overdose. ‘Lemonade’ by SOPHIE is centred around sonic and repetitive vocals, while A.G. Cook’s own ‘Beautiful’ features similarly mosquito-high lyrics that cut through the backing instruments. And in terms of instrumentation, PC Music is also pretty out-there; it’s all about discordant bass-heavy beats that most of the time sound like they’re right out of retro SNES game soundtracks. It was last year that saw PC Music take-off as a genre and record label. Founder A.G. Cook has recently produced tracks for Charli XCX and even Madonna (this one is awful), while the roster’s songs have seen impressive positions on end-of-the-year lists. As well as playfully subverting pop clichés and the digital age, it has interestingly come under the spotlight for its feminist undertones. Kero Kero Bonito, who are on the fringes of the PC Music genre, certainly emulate this through tracks such as ‘Sick Beat’, which exclaims: ‘It's often said / I should get some girly hobbies instead / but that thought fills me with dread / I'm not into sewing, baking, dressmaking, not-eating… submitting’. At the same time, however, it has been criticised for its apparent appropriation of effeminate qualities; The Fader slammed the genre for the fact that it consists mostly of white middle-class men using femininity in a way that does very little to advance the feminist movement. Others, such as Vice, have championed the label for doing something different. This seems a fair point; it is almost impossible in such a saturated cultural time to do something that is genuinely original. But PC Music seems to have achieved that - albeit through ridiculously high-pitched singing and a properly weird aesthetic.
