Reading BLAST for the first time, I was shocked but also very confused. I felt like I had just read the confusing rantings of a group of emotional teenagers. I had to step back, think about what I had read, and then, in order to make sense of the angry and purposefully dense rhetoric, I worked to place this magazine within its time period. Once I thought about the fact that this magazine was published in 1914, I realized that Blast feels like an angry and cynical response which one might find in any transitional period, in this case, between the Victorian time period and a modern time period. The writers felt they had to shock people out of a stagnated lull in societal consciousness. They saw conformity, stagnation, and a lack of artistic growth. The words within Blast were intended to wake the more socially conscious out of some Victorian trance.

This made me think about other transitional time periods, like the transition between 1950’s conformist ideals in America and the more shocking views that came about in the 1960’s. During any transitional period like this, we see a group of subversive people trying to upset the social mores of the time. To do so, they have to be shocking, confusing, and perhaps overly ambitious. Sadly, this magazine was intended to be a quarterly publication, but it only survived two issues. This tells me the writers lost focus, funding, and / or audience.