Dear Readers
At the onset, I need to thank you for supporting a free online magazine like DoubleSpeak. We have a very limited set of readers but somehow we have been able to reach out to many aspiring, amateur, established and professional artists from across the world. Their contributions to this magazine make it the way it is, and as the founder of this magazine I cannot be more grateful.
The letter section though is remaining empty. One of the main ideas of creating DoubleSpeak was to initiate an educated discussion forum where readers or experts would share their critiques on the published pieces. The new writers would learn from those and the ones who are already established in their fields could take the opportunity to reflect on their work. The space remains open and wanting for such good letters. We live in a world where instant gratification (likes and shares on social media platforms) to creative pieces is abundant, but that perhaps fails to add value to the creative process in general. A creator needs the appreciation and applause but the readers feedback helps the creator to explore more, reflect more and eventually create something unique in the process.
DoubleSpeak does not follow any religious or political dogma. It promises to publish every free thought, albeit being of some literary quality. We are living in a time when, in India itself, we are seeing arrests of artists and free thinkers for opposing any dogmatic ideology. DoubleSpeak has vowed to keep upholding the principles of free thinking and hence it is imperative for us to inspire and encourage all kinds of free thinkers to contribute to our collective intellect and conscience.
In his book Tolstoy writes – Art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced, calls it up again within himself and expresses it by certain external signs. DoubleSpeak Magazine wishes to collect those signs and archive them so that we all can go back to them whenever needed. The need is intellectual, moral and at times unavoidable.
I hope, our readers will take time to read carefully and more importantly analyse and critique the published pieces to make sure the space of free thinking and logical discourse lives, far from the frowns and threats of any authoritarian power.
Arpan Krishna Deb
Founder and Managing Editor
DoubleSpeak Magazine.
Dear Arpan,
I did not realise the ‘Letters’ section was open to all. Let me finish reading all the pieces by next week, and come back to this.
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Dear Arpan, the following is not a ‘whole’ letter per se, so I suppose can be retained as a reply merely to yours. — Upon reading through the last edition of the magazine, I noted some three points which I’d like to share with you.
A. Since this is, primarily, an English-language publication, perhaps some threshold level for fluency in the same can be decided upon, and submissions suitable sieved?
B. In submissions where poems are being translated, perhaps some context can also be asked for, of the original, from the contributor? Some such translations, without this, I found nearly impossible to make sense of, I’m afraid.
C. Also, to encourage cross-submission-conversation, perhaps something like the ‘latest comments’ sidebar at johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com can be introduced to the doublespeak website. What do you say?
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