Launch of Corridor 8

With doom-laden reports of newspapers folding (excuse the pun), surrendering to the growing primacy of new media, it is truly heartening, exciting, and generally restorative for the soul to discover that a new magazine is being launched. And in the middle of this so-called recession!

The first issue of Manchester-based Corridor 8 will be released this month at the city's Urbis. The ambition and artistic reach of this annual arts magazine are indicated by a new commission from Iain Sinclair, whose first ever psychogeographic foray into the north west of England (no surprises that the location had to be Manchester) promises to be a groundbreaking contribution. (Again, excuse the pun. None of these are intentional, by the way!) I anticipate that Sinclair will acknowledge some level of debt to Sebald's The Emigrants, a work of prose fiction not explicitly psychogeographic but which stands as one of the first major accounts of its kind for the palimpsest landscape of Manchester. The magazine's website offers the following quotation to tantalise us:

Wandering Deansgate was like finding yourself in the middle of some dark fantasy for which you had no instructions. Cliffs of unreason. Deansgate as a river of human traffic, the Irwell its liquid margin.

Curiously enough, Sinclair's piece is accompanied by images from Chris Petit, another writer whose work crosses Sebaldian paths (Petit got there first, though, in a way) and whose current project, like Will Self's forthcoming book, is informed by Sebaldian methodologies and subject matter.

The depth and range of this first edition is impressive: from psychogeography to Alan Dunn's reflections on how the internet can abolish vast geographical boundaries in the name of international social inclusion and cohesion, Corridor 8 promises to be a distinguished publication indeed.