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Posts from the ‘Zahir News’ Category

12
Jun
AAW

The Zahir website will have exclusive coverage of  Arts Awareness Week. Visit the Zahir’s facebook and twitter pages @zahiryork for daily updates of the schedule of events.

See the timetable below for the full schedule of the week’s events. Hope to see you there!

12
Apr

7.1 available online now

Issue 7.1 is available online now in the Zahir’s archive. Featuring the theme of independence, this issue explores avenues designed to question, contradict and expand your views. Be prepared but most of all enjoy 7.1 of the Zahir.

4
Oct

Freshers…

We’re the university’s culture magazine, and we’re all about questioning your own opinions and taking on board others. To find out more of the details, check out the “About” page above.

I’m Joe Walsh, editor of The Zahir. I must say, I’m more than a little humbled to have you visit the site. Heart-warming and such. I look forward to meeting all of you over the course of the next term, and hearing your various ideas for the improvement of the magazine. Remember: there’s no “I” in Zahir.

You’ve arrived at an exciting time. Last term was the launch of a brand new design of the magazine, and it promises only to get better with a bit more experience under our belts. We went from an interior of block text and weak photos to a vibrant magazine that promotes the uniqueness and experimentation that we want at The Zahir. Articles, in turn, became significantly more flexible. If you have an idea and a way in which to present it – something that doesn’t necessarily conform to the basic article format – just hit me with an idea. My Literature editor wrote a denouncement of Shakespeare in sonnet form, for example. If your article is on some kind of cultural split, why not suggest one half of the article is at one point in the mag and the other half is at a different point? At The Zahir, we want you to express yourself in whichever way puts your idea and your opinion best across. I’ll only be impressed if you come to me with a new idea, so don’t feel shy!

The website has also been revamped over summer, in the hope that it will be a much more active aspect of the magazine itself. We want your help – so feel free to send in any videos, articles or links that you think need spreading. It will become much more significant throughout this coming term, but please do have a look at past articles to get an idea about how the magazine has changed, and how the quality that we produce is unerring.

It’s students like yourself who are the driving force behind a mag like this. We’re a culture magazine, not a newspaper. By definition, we shouldn’t be confined by structure and limitations. If you can’t be experimental at university, when can you be? Please don’t hesitate to hit me with ideas – I guarantee anything you think sounds silly will set my pulse racing. And I’ll probably have come up with something ten times nuttier.

Finally, this is the final term with the current editorial team in charge, so the most exciting change will hit us at the end of this term. All positions will become available, and a couple of new ones will be coming into play. We want enthusiasm – so even if you don’t find the time to write for us this term, please don’t consider yourself a write-off for a chance to get a role in the team. It’s what you can bring to the mag as much as anything. Ideas fuel this mag, not experience.

Email me on zahir@yusu.org, or sign up to us at Freshers’ Fair at the end of Week 1 and you will receive more information about all of the above. We also have a meeting in Tuesday Week 2 (18th October) at 5.15pm in V/123 (Vanbrugh) so that I can introduce you to myself and my editorial team. You can also find us on Facebook (the zahir)and Twitter (@zahiryork).

I’m genuinely chuffed you’ve taken a gander at the site. I hope you decide to get involved.

It would make my day. x

20
Aug

Video of the Moment

Craig Dyson is a sculptor based in West Yorkshire. He is a good friend of a good friend of mine, and I am honoured that he gave me permission to showcase a bit of his work on our humble website, and even more so that he is becoming so heavily involved with another club very close to my heart: the University of York Hockey Club. Keep an eye out for his name – I’m sure this isn’t the last time The Zahir will tango with the talent.

20
Aug

Zahir 6.3

Justin Bailey's cracking interpretation of the concept of adaptability...

The Zahir 6.3 is out now. It’s undergone a massive transformation, and we will only go from strength to strength over the coming months. Articles have been changed, things are not quite as you’d expect them. But that’ s half the fun. So sit back, rest your weary legs, and enjoy issue 6.3 of The Zahir…

20
Aug

11
Mar

6.2 much to handle

The Zahir 6.2 has arrived, you lucky dogs. It’s the spring issue of 2011, under a brand new editorial team led, very proudly, by yours truly, Joe Walsh. This edition’ s all about environmentalism. Check it out, stay a while, have a cup of tea, be inspired. You shan’t regret it.

16
Jun

The Rule of Thumb – Dan Moody

Daniel Moody voices the opposable antagonism of thumbs.
It seemed as though the world was ending. Yes, the face of every man, woman and child dared you to say otherwise. Everyone has a different opinion, naturally. To some, today is Judgement Day. To others, it is simply an end. From space however, the would-be fire and brimstone are transformed into fairy lights, as smoke trails dance and weave a web around the world, occasionally disappearing to punctuate the sentence with a lingering flash. It’s incredible what a bit of perspective can do for you. But this isn’t the immediate situation, the situation we’ve gathered to observe. The situation that requires your attention, your unique perspective.
They were always so seemingly superior, humans. So intelligent, with an impressive brain to body ratio. So sociable, with complex larynxes and countless dialects.
Yes, they were so seemingly superior, right down to their two opposable thumbs.
Yes, thumbs. Primus digitus. The hammer magnets. Enabler of first ‘the grip’ and then ‘the grab’, without which you couldn’t flick or hail a cab. Yes, the thumb. Redeemer of the hand, and eternal upstager of the toe. A provider of comfort. The decision maker.  Red, amber, green.
Mankind honed its fine motor skills, as facilitated by the thumb.
Mankind built the car.
Mankind built the plane.
Mankind built the super-collider.
And mankind built the bomb.
But did they really build these things? Yes?
NO. Thumbs built these things.
But in spite of all their potential, thumbs have always been the conflicting digit. Stranded and alone with four companions who do nothing but wiggle, thumbs became very territorial. The hands of men have always had a thirst for war, but does this thirst come from the brain?
The lowest form of combat two humans can engage in is the thumb war. But is it really the lowest, or the epicentre of an entire history of conflict? Some would argue otherwise, but I say look at the evidence.
It was always the finger on the trigger, the finger on the button. The thumb. Enabler, dictator, controller. But what was their collective ultimate goal? What did they whisper about when brought together for brief handshakes?
Freedom.
To be free of the human, to be their own vessel. Research into mutation seemed the fastest way to accelerate what would otherwise take millions of years of evolution; their liberation as they shed all unnecessary body parts.
And so, as all the worlds arsenals stand aimed and ready at major cities around the world, an unsuspecting leader allowed his thumb to linger over their nuclear control panel, the thumb took the opportunity to cleanse the world of their transports.
It seemed as though the world was ending. Yes, the face of every man, woman and child dared you to say otherwise. But you should have seen the look on the face of every thumb. A population of nearly double the human race awaiting its baptism in fire.
And from the ashes…
The rubble of cities that thumbs built…
The thumbs looked up…
Then stood up…
And smelt their enemies’ ruin.
Their time was now, the war was won.
The rule of thumb had begun.
16
Jun

The Depressive Consider York – Alexander Allison

A confessional piece.
Choruses of ‘chug’ regularly resonate about the desolate confines of my college. The melodrama of this monosyllabic command is an anathema for me. I cannot summon the energy to make all the conceited efforts that sociability demands any longer. It seems there’s a miasma that lingers from dusk till dawn here, a pressing desire to fit a lifetime within each fleshy receptacle. I had vaguely assumed that there would be a lull in the density of this noxious atmosphere, but it just seems to spread, raucously infectious in its potency, demanding submission from all inhabitants.
University life offers no reprieve. Time not spent achieving is wasted. I suffer from acute dysthymia, a disease which spits upon perspective and leads you unwittingly to a self-indulgently engrossing nadir. There is a word in the Russian language that Nabakov chooses to translate as ‘Poshlust’, roughly meaning ‘that which is shoddy and cheap, posing as something noble’. For me, that seems to sum up university life better than any English phrase could. Depression here is like a journey where the destination will always remain beyond reach, where the scenery is consistently hollow: a bare, shoddy morass, built on foundations of cigarette butts and lies. I live a rambunctious melancholy, wary of the seemingly troglodyte existence demanded here. There is a conspiracy that everything worth doing can be done in darkness. One must perform the greatest sacrifice, and submit to psychosomatic exhaustion, conceding that whilst a mind might be a terrible thing to waste, all opposite choices are no where near as attractive.
I see boys performing petty semiotic analysis in clubs to gauge which girl he can bring home. I see girls measure out their journeys by the number of cigarettes they anticipated smoking. I see people in clothes they wore as children pretending to be adults. In general, people seem to be wearing costumes of skin, speaking in sound-bites and routinely running their fingers over scars they have forgotten the origins of.
Everyone seems to have something to complain about, but no incentive to act upon it. Loose faucets pound porcelain across inadequate accommodation every day and broken light fittings flicker restlessly, but pro-activity is beyond question. It is an achievement to do the minimum of work: a pass carries gravitas and real success is met with indignation and suspicion by peers.
The town herself seems unwilling to gratify our cravings for beautiful ordinariness. Cobbled paths have an allergy to high heels. Drunken somnabulations through maze like streets baffle those too far gone to care. Souls dead at the roots allow their bodies to be trespassed in dark corners of heaving, diaphoretic clubs. Even the word ‘love’ sounds like some dramatic, archaic illness. Bruised skies cry so often here that the cathedral’s towers, like hypodermic needles, scratch desperately at the firmament in the hope of injecting light.
Maybe my adjustment period to the north is just taking longer than it is supposed to. But I have not travelled here from 1991 just for the sake of justifying the journey. I now realise it was delusional to assume university would be some cornucopia of filial understanding and sympathy. I now realise aesthetic salvation is off the cards. I now appreciate the reassuring shield that religion can give some people. I just can’t seem to accept the, ‘If she’s a two at ten, she’ll be a ten at two’ culture. I have adopted some sort of panoramic, apathetic view of this hubbub, and it has just cemented my existential despair. The fierce opposition to authenticity I put down to people desiring to re-define themselves. I am disgusted at my instinct to judge and its symbiotic relationship with my lack of joie de vivre, esprit de corps or whatever you want to call it, but what can I do? I am not a common denominator.
I am the hero and the villain of this piece. If life is a struggle for meaning, I’m a masterpiece on its mantle. What reprieve, what comfort is there to be had? Atavistic, id based pleasures like our three-a-day food injections? No. Comfort in youth, health and potential? Hardly. Why else would I still be smoking? I should have wrinkled fingers from floating through this adolescence. What reason is there to leave my dream laced bed sheets each morning when only a panoply of plainness awaits? Church bells chime like ice cream vans in this sullen state, where a kettle’s bird song is all that wakes me.
I need to re-calibrate and codify my expectations and ambitions. It is undoubtedly the menial that has weighed most heavily on my depression. Cleaning, washing, sleeping seem like the most radically futile acts. This is reinforced by the feeling that technology should be doing them for us. Our dependency has been so romanticised that it’s almost nauseating. Ebooks won’t flutter in the wind, that’s for sure. The key to it all seems to be admitting that ‘growing up’ has now been put off as long as possible. University is a way of recessing back to a state of nature; a radical, profound freedom imbued on people who have been taught by rote for so long that instruction taking has been written on their hearts.
Depression is a matter of everything. Call it ennui, acedia, black bile, anomie, dukkha, weltschmerz or whatever, it is ultimately a lingering, numbing disquiet with people. Sartre wrote, ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’ meaning ‘Hell is other people’. All too often he seems to have hit the nail on its metaphoric head.
16
Jun

Zahir 5.3 Out now!

Hello,

With the theme of ‘urbanisation,’ the latest edition of the Zahir can be found at the usual places around campus.

Many thanks and congratulations to all those who contributed this year, we’ve had some wonderful articles.

Hopefully some of you will be able to find some time in the long summer break to think about writing for our next edition. If so j ust drop us an email with any ideas you have.

Many thanks, the Zahir.

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