3:AM Magazine

» The urban age: an interview with P.D. Smith

‘Every city is unique, but there are certain features shared by cities. It was fascinating trying to identify these and then exploring them through time and space. It was like writing a natural history of cities and urbanism. The global view was always central to the project. Certainly, having to absorb so much material was a challenge, but it was also immensely rewarding. It brought home to me the astonishing continuity that runs through city life around the world, from the first cities to today’s megacities.’

Karl Whitney interviews P.D. Smith about his new book City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age.

» Truth, reason & democracy

During the Bush administration, Ron Susskind famously reported that one of Bush’s top advisors (probably Karl Rove) sneered that the administration’s critics were continuing to live in the “reality-based community”. That was a mistake, he said, because “we are an empire now, we create our own reality”. This is a telling remark. It illustrates not only what was wrong with that administration but why truth is so important a concept – and not just for philosophers. When we ignore the difference between what those in power say is true and what is true, we risk not only losing our rights, but the ability to even give ourselves any critical voice. So that is why thinking about truth matters - because the truth matters.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Michael Lynch.

» The philosopher with no hands

Many scientific discoveries have a direct bearing on philosophy. To say that science makes philosophy redundant is to say that science can supply all the answers: all legitimate questions can be answered by the methods of the sciences. This claim is trivially self-refuting. The methods of science cannot establish whether every legitimate question can be answered by those methods. So the claim is illegitimate by its own standards. For that matter, the question of what the ‘methods of science’ actually are, or ought to be, is a philosophical question. You can ignore philosophy, or try to reform it, but you can never do away with it altogether. Any attempt to dig its grave will only be more philosophy.

Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews animalist philosopher Eric Olson.

» Whether we last the night

By 2007, Studs’ normally robust health had deteriorated. He had open-heart surgery in 2005 at the age of 93, and had gotten less and less mobile. His hearing was mostly gone. His longtime transcriber and assistant Sydney Lewis had moved to Massachusetts to work for Atlantic Public Media. André Schiffrin sensed Studs would go soon, and asked Lewis to help him write one last book - his memoir. In the end, it became Touch and Go.

Robert O’Connor continues his series on the complete works of Studs Terkel with his second memoir, Touch and Go

» Searching high, searching low

Rosen ranks dignity as having a meddling moral priority. Murder is worse than indignity, but indignity is nevertheless immoral in certain circumstances. Abu Ghraib is non-trivially morally repulsive and not just distasteful. Rosen is careful in arguing for a position that allows for such a distinction. Dignity survives his analysis and historical narration but not fully intact. Secular and theological underpinnings are erased. The book has a shocking ending. Rosen adopts a radical stance because considerations of dignity and the subtle errors of the religious and secular defenders of dignity suggests that no less extreme view is available. Rosen takes a refreshingly modest stance towards his extreme conclusion. His downbeat style belies his controversial finale.

Richard Marshall reviews Michael Rosen’s Dignity.

» Adventures of an eclectic disk jockey

The jazz section ends with an interview of Joe Hammond, the great producer and critic who discovered innumerable artists like Billie Holiday. Specifically, in his interview he tells of how he discovered Count Basie - he was listening to WMAQ (Chicago’s NBC affiliate) and he heard an exciting pianist he had never heard of. It couldn’t have been Earl Hines, who was out on tour, so he called his friend Lloyd Lewis at the Daily News (who owned the station at the time) and asked him who it was. The last section includes a piece on Mahalia Jackson that originally appeared in Talking To Myself telling about her and their relationship. Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of Gospel music is also interviewed, crediting Studs with discovering Jackson. Studs feels the need to clarify that he was the first white DJ to play her for a white audience, but the truth was that by that point Jackson was well known among black audiences. She could fill stadiums by the time he played her on his show, but the audience was entirely black.

Robert O’Connor continues his series on Studs Terkel with his book on musicians And They All Sang.

» 29M

A broad cross-section of Barcelonans had come out to protest reforms which affect everybody. There was a palpable combination of playfulness and potency about the occasion. One irony of protest since 2008, has been that as resistance has become more direct, the message has become subtler and there’s an intellectual agility about this movement that is, to me at least, a revelation. Occupy is accused of lacking coherence but, by eschewing leadership, they have challenged the notion of hierarchy that underpins most organisations and which, for the most part, even those on the left take for granted. If, as Eliot said, “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important,” Occupy have shown that one person needn’t be considered more important than another for an organisation to be effective.

By Max Liu.

» Against All Ends: Hauntology, Aesthetics, Ontology.

Unsurprisingly, the main features of this aesthetic are sampling in music and appropriation in the visual arts. By emphasizing the anachronisms of these samples and appropriations, mainly through the maintenance of the distance from their origin and the decay that occupies that distance: as crackles and scratches, or faded colours and images that become almost literally ghostly. Instead of mere repetition, this distance provides a sense of loss and mourning, making the present the future of that past, and in turn providing the possibility of another future for the present, a new utopia.

By Liam Sprod.

» Stewart Home vs Heidegger

Home has always been political. He attacks lazy green anarchists because of their racism. He attacks high culture for the same anti-fascist reasons. Conversation and internationalism and peace is what his underlying mission is. He identifies with Black Atlantic movements and claims a radical inauthenticity since 1962. Everything in Home is apportioned to scribble over every idea Heidegger ever had. High culture is just the obvious site of his attention. It confuses some critics who can’t quite work out what their problem is . So they ask of his novels: Are they extreme pulp? Are they po-mo jokes? Are they anti-novels? And his art generally confuses people who are really still hung up with Heideggerian notions of authenticity and want to find something serious in modern high art.

Richard Marshall on the Stewart Home retrospective, Again, A Time Machine.

» Under the Sign of the Black Raven

The collector merely shrugged when Martin pointed out the odd note, dismissed it as ‘doggerel’. Martin, horribly fascinated, asked the collector if he would be prepared to part with the handbill, and he agreed to do so, for a modest sum. Intrigued by his find, Martin, for a few months, spent much of his spare time in research, hoping to discover something to cast light on the dark enigma. At some point during this period, knowing my interest in such things, he showed me the handbill, asked my opinion of it. I told him that, though the handbill itself was certainly real, I thought the note faked. He enquired why; I pointed out how neat the hand was. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But you’ve no imagination. I find that utterly chilling.’

By Timothy J. Jarvis.

» The Drums

His hands were cold and he dug them in his pockets. His face was buffeted by the chill wind and a few strands of hair that had escaped from underneath his hat danced in the breeze. He moved his fingers up and tucked them away, because he did not feel much like dancing. He tensed his stomach muscles almost involuntarily. He accidently scuffed his shoe on a stone. He saw someone he vaguely recognised and they both found interest in the uneven pavement as they passed. His nose ran and he sniffed. He came by the main road and the cars were too loud for him. The passing lorries became boisterous sticky children in a waiting room. The trucks were crying out for sweets, and the cars were smashed milk bottles on a Sunday morning. They all annoyed him. The aeroplane above him sounded very far away.

By Christopher Kennerley.

» Death of a Ladies’ Man 3

Forty lilies in forty vases, forty cakes with forty candles, forty kinds of dip and forty bruschetta, forty heart-shaped sandwiches and forty kinds of cupcake. Forty sorts of cocktail, necessary for the more than forty guests, mostly from the past fifteen years of Lily’s life, but a few from that distant childhood, those blurry university years. Everyone she knew and many she wished she didn’t. But it was too late now to take back the invitations. It was too late to regret it all. “Forty years and forty lovers!” An old friend teased. Lily, as they all knew, had hardly been with anyone except her absent husband. But Lily laughed it off and turned around, and went to the bathroom, and wished this wasn’t happening. She had never been a birthday party kind of person. She didn’t want everyone to meet and talk and share stories about how they knew her, what they remembered. She didn’t want them all to get flashbacks to embarrassments, remind her of what she happily forgotten, and ask her what she was doing now, and how is Adrian?

Read the third part of Christiana Spens‘ novella, which is being serialised by 3:AM.

» Roman Road

We moved into the house next to the fire station on the fifth of November and all night the sirens raged. Our ritual began that first night. As I lay in bed reading Lydia Davis, you put your head around the door. “Can I sleep in here tonight?” “OK,” I said and turned over to face the wall. You deposited your loose change on the broken chair next to the bed and climbed in fully clothed. Our transaction continued in this way, a few loose coppers in exchange for sleeping next to me. No kisses, no sex, no affection, just uneasy sleep.

By Celia Forbes.

» Lone Ranger Ain’t No Stranger

Mescaline, mescaline, that’s my tipple of toxin.

Bit pretentious, mine’s an Amaretto on the rocks.

A book will give you all you need simpers the tiny reader on the aperitif woman’s head.

Bite hard on a porcupine, crumple it up and squeeeze out its poison onto your lips booms the Lion.

I like a concertina when it sings, steams the anvil man behind his mask of glass.

By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.

» Between Saint Roch and Music: three flash fictions

“Mother! Mother! Mother!” The lead singer shouted it over and over again. I was glad I had always called mine Mama, and that my little boy did the same with me.

The guitar screamed, the singer/player’s fretting hand shooting up and down like it was turbo powered and chicken fat greased. The bass player had the bass face, mostly, keeping a line on digging. The drummer kept his eyes closed and sticks flying. All that sound, it was hard to believe it was really only three people.

There was no definite anger in the Mother mantra. It was difficult to figure. Could have been homage, could have been fear, or rage, or respect. Could have been anything. At the end, the singer fell to his knees, went prostrate, forehead on floor. That, for me at least, clarified.

By Utahna Faith.

» Maintenant #93 - Charles Simic

When I’m writing, I’m as oblivious as a dog digging a hole in the ground with his paws. There may be a bone there or nothing at all, but while I’m doing it… that is all I know. After decades of reading and listening to debates about tradition versus avant-garde, I’m frankly bored. Good poetry has been written in all sorts of ways since the days of Rimbaud as everyone ought to admit. If someone can get away today by writing poems that sound like Byron or Emily Dickinson, poems that one can’t stop reading, let’s not worry about what the disciples of Gertrude Stein will say.

In the 93rd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Serbian / American poet Charles Simic.

» Ghost Cinema

And act like sweethearts
On a bare mattress laid out for their use
On a warehouse floor
Under the bright spotlights.

Standing afterwards
With their foreheads touching
As if about to be hung
By a single rope
From the high ceiling,

By Charles Simic.

» Maintenant Croatia

Truly revolutionising Croatian poetics since the turn of the century this group of poets represent a generation that has refused the staid political atmosphere of post communist poetry circles, and has forced their nation to expand its scope and poetic vernacular. They have achieved unprecedented success, making Croatia a world recognised powerhouse of contemporary European poetry. Centred around the iconoclastic Poezija magazine Damir Sodan, Sonja Manojlovic, Ivan Herceg, Dorta Jagic and Tomica Bajsic constituted the core of another wonderful night of readings.

Videos from a poetry reading in London that showcased the best of 21st Croatian poetry by SJ Fowler .