3:AM Magazine

» Ninety-four Pages & Then Some

If philosophers have misconceptions as to what philosophy is, they’re likely to produce poor philosophy. Now I wouldn’t want to say that scientific facts can never be relevant to a philosophical problem, or anything like that; the dispute here rather concerns the distinctive aims and methods of philosophy on the one hand and of science on the other. But there is also the fact that scientism or science-worship is a cultural phenomenon, an element of the Zeitgeist, and in certain ways a dangerous one; so it is depressing to see philosophers succumbing to it.

Richard Marshall interviews moral philosopher and Anscombe expert Roger Teichmann.

» Time Will Tell

I’m very attached to some fairly conventional notions of right and wrong. I hope that they apply, perhaps in some generalized form, on larger fields of play. I imagine two areas affected by oncoming events: The last few hundred million years, we (metazoan life on Earth) have depended on relatively high boundaries between individuals. When humans showed up to think about this situation, “self” issues were a large part of the resulting ethics. For much of the last 150 years, notions of bloody confrontation have been the general perception of evolution. I think we’re entering an era where self, identity, and mortality will be reexamined.

Richard Marshall interviews SF singularity Vernor Vinge.

» The Splintered Skeptic

Proust and Joyce – and Woolf, who is my favorite in that line – are brilliant artists. But the stream of real human thought is probably much less interesting to most people than what is portrayed in their fiction. Our real stream of thought is probably no more really like the streams of thought we see in their writings than Elizabethan-era conversations were really like what we see in Shakespeare plays. It’s stylized art, in a medium of words.

Continuing The End Times philosophy series, Richard Marshall interviews Eric Schwitzgebel.

» Messages from Unseen Agencies

Telegraphic Transcriptions is not an easy read, nor does it seek to be. It is confrontational, unapologetically dense and complex. Emmerson notes, amongst other ephemera of a late twentieth century childhood and adolescence (I think this is the first time I have seen the triangular savant and shaman Bod used as a poetic reference) Stock Aitken and Waterman, but in musical terms Emmerson himself is much more Stockhausen. This is sharp edged, jagged, determinedly dissonant work.

Tom Jenks reviews Stephen Emmerson’s Telegraphic Transmissions.

» Cosy Moments Cannot be Muzzled: Censorship in an Age of Freedom

What is important is not so much censorship as pre-censorship - whips in the soul. Cohen argues that ‘with censorship in all its forms’ you should ‘remember the far larger class of works that authors begin then decide to abandon. The words that were never written, the arguments that were never made.’ Do you believe in freedom of speech? Are you sure? You’re a talented writer, a good professional, you have something to say, a story to tell, a warning to give, a truth to expose. But are you sure you want to risk your life, your job, your home, your relationships? Are you sure you want to go through all of that just to write?

Max Dunbar reviews Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom.

» Finding Alfred Jarry

The first performances of Ubu Roi caused a stir. Partly, this was because of the shock of the new – as Brotchie points out: ‘it was as though a modernist play from the middle of the next century had been dropped on the stage without all the intervening theatrical developments that might have acclimatized the audience to its conventions.’ On the other hand, many of Jarry’s friends in the avant-garde weren’t leaving anything to chance: they turned up with mischief in mind, and caused – or at least contributed to – an uproar in the theatre. At one point the poet Fernand Gregh shouted out his opinion: ‘“It’s as beautiful as Shakespeare,” to which his own brother shot back from the balcony: “You’ve never even read Shakespeare, you imbecile!”’

Karl Whitney reviews Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life.

» Come Hear the Music Play

Cabaret was a critical, award-winning success. It effectively evoked Berlin before Hitler’s rise to power and the precarious six years’ peace which preceded the outbreak of war in 1939. It seemed to bring to life the bitter depictions of Weimar Germany made by Otto Dix and Georg Grosz (the former’s Portrait of Journalist, Sylvia Von Harden is said to form the basis of a posed scene in the Kit Kat Klub during the film). Its poster, showing a bowlerhatted Sally Bowles, belongs with other iconic ones of that decade, such as those for Chinatown and The French Connection.

Nicky Charlish on the 40th anniversary of Cabaret.

» Eadweard Muybridge: An Eye Over the Abyss

In the first years of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic work, the preoccupation with precipices, peripheral zones and abyss-edges propelled his itinerary, as though the experimentation of his work necessitated journeys to topographical frontiers at which previously habitual forms had expired, and the only way forward would now be via from-scratch innovations that treated existing technologies as scorched-earth detritus. As a result, Muybridge’s eye is always on the originating edge of vision and in interrogative movement, scanning terrains that are themselves in flux and newly-created.

An exclusive excerpt from Stephen Barber’s Muybridge: The Eye in Motion.

» Reloading Beckett’s philosophical libraries

Beckett did indeed have doubts about the stabilising anaphoric resources of language. He did feel the existential unease of both the nihilist and the Heraclitean, where his sympathy is with Holderlin’s lines, “…suffering humanity perishes and falls blindly from one hour to the other, like water dashed from crag to crag year after year, down into the unknown.” But it is through the resources of classical logic that the sorites has been understood as a problem of ignorance, and human fallibility. Beckett takes ignorance to be an essential aspect of the human condition. He gropes blindly towards the epistemic solution to the sorites rather than via deviant logics, nihilism or contextualism.

By Richard Marshall.

» I Love You, Susan

Herbie knew about a scheme where you could breed black widow spiders for the U.S. Government and they would pay you handsomely for your contribution to the whatever-it-was effort. He thought that sounded like a legal, easy way to make money growing something at home, and he was talking about it to anyone who was interested.

He still lived in the little Sears Roebuck house, next to the big oak tree, with a lot of other people, including an odd and beautiful girl named Susan.

Susan had pale skin and long thick dark hair, and a curvy womanly body. She didn’t always finish her sentences, which didn’t always turn out to be about anything anyway, and it was hard to tell if she really liked you or not. But she was trying very hard to space in, from a very long way away, and she was beautiful, and really those two things combined can make a person perfectly worthwhile.

By Jessica Ruby Radcliffe.

» The Men Who Stare at Guitars

He had stood on tiptoes and used his weight to push down and in, but the sticky stuff meant his cock slid all over her right buttock leaving slimy snail trails of lube and Cowper’s fluid – he’d looked it up the day before – pre-cum. ‘Fucksake,’ his girlfriend had said, looking up from the yeasty duvet. ‘It’s not like this in the movies,’ he had said. ‘What movies would that be?’ His girlfriend had replied, ‘Dumbo? Bambi?’ I was thinking more, ‘Anal Housewives 4,’ he had said, his cock now limp and embarrassed. ‘Maybe we should try a different position.’ ‘No,’ his girlfriend had said, ‘I’m not in the mood now,’ and had turned over, cocooned herself in the duvet and turned her back to him.

By Steve Finbow.

» Three Lessons for Christopher Christopher

The young woman slowly peels the thin moustache away and lets it fall like a hair-slug onto the ground – and her beauty is revealed as if by a magic spell. ‘Do not judge a book by its cover, Chris. Do not let your lute lead you into quarrelsome ways. And try not to discriminate against public performances involving dwarves called Andy and women with false moustaches.’ ‘No-one has ever called me Chris before,’ says Christopher Christopher with a look of happy dismay. The young woman smiles and Christopher Christopher feels his heart swooning and his cheeks redden. And so he pulls out his lute and starts to sing.

By Alan McCormick & Stefan Wiese.

» Kicker Girl

Now lookee here, girl, what do you call that mess on the wall?

Dunno.

It’s a scribble, isn’t it? And a scribble don’t belong on the wall, it belongs on paper. Am I right or am I wrong?

Yep, s’pose so.

Right or wrong I asked, girl.

Right.

Right, thank you.

Granddad Pete was always shooting off about something and his granddaughter, Sophie, was normally in his firing line. She peered out from her lofty vantage point and endured it all with the cold stare of teenage oblivion.

By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.

» The Maid

Might as well enjoy the perks of being a victim while I can, I think to myself, as I get into the car. After today there will be no more free cabs, pity drinks, or polite condolences. There will be no more questions, no more talk. The real silence will set in and nobody will want to know, because in many ways, this never happened. This cab ride home is the end of it being a reality to anyone but me. I can sense all this — the months ahead — as the car pulls away. I can sense that this feeling of fear — fear of sitting alone in a cab, sitting alone anywhere — is here to stay. I can sense that I don’t own my own thoughts anymore, as we leave Manhattan.

By Christiana Spens.

» The Final Sentence

Sat in the hospital bed, I examined the flesh wound below my right shoulder. Passing out had saved me. Rather than shooting me again, believing me dead, Austin Rayner tried to flee: tripping over my body, with typical gracelessness, had cost him vital seconds. Seeing people coming up the stairs, he took the lift. There were two elderly ladies inside, who asked him about the blood on his shirt. He raised his gun, but too late: as soon as he reached the ground floor, he was arrested. A neighbour had heard him destroy my computer and called the police.

By Juliet Jacques.

» Maintenant #85 - Gonca Özmen

We have nothing apart from the words. There are still some words which do not stand side by side in a line. In the attic of language, there are still different facilities which are not used. I am trying to expand these facilities of Turkish by writing poetry. I also believe that poetry has an important capacity to alter, convert and beautify the daily reality that I do not like. The outer physical world is something to be written for me. The world is always waiting for a new meaning, a new perspective, a new connection. In other words, poetry has the power to change the world.

In the 85th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Turkish poet Gonca Özmen.

» Five Poems

I read Dante I stripped a man white
A good child I lay down and took stock
My losses great, my gains many, my sins sweet
See how I’m reduced to bushes and brambles
I asked about birds I delved in the forest white
I stripped myself bare and headed out
How great to stop between your shoulder and evening
I looked long at distant mallows
I read Dante I kissed a soldier white
Once like a whole town asleep
I came back the echo of a stone you threw
The world sometimes, sometimes the world is one blood only

By Gonca Özmen.

» My Secret Wars of 1984

Each illustration holds potential for intensity, for intensities that require several word balloons. Each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. Each superhero has an origin story for misunderstanding what makes a power. Each time, the image is more distinct. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction. Elections with margins.

By Dennis Etzel Jr.