3:AM Magazine

» Between the click of the light & the start of the dream

Most of my novels are deliberately set in nightmarish dystopias and either read like a screenplay or function according to the laws of cinema. In other words, I employ the techniques of screenwriting and the machinery of celluloid to represent the horrors of everyday hyperreal life. I do this a lot in the novel I’m writing now, The Kyoto Man, the third and final installment in my Scikungfi trilogy, which combines different kinds of written and visual media. One chapter is a comic book called “The Nightmare of Reality.”

Alan Kelly talks to D. Harlan Wilson.

» Blake Butler: A Belated Primer

I feel like I’ve gotten better over time at getting it closer and closer to what I want the sound to be earlier on in the process. For years I wrote and labored over every inch of it, and ended up beating a lot of things to pulp, overworking it, resulting as I mentioned in a ton of dead novels that I’ll never do anything with, but also in that process I learned how a sentence can come onto you, more than you coming onto it. I definitely spent a lot of time in revision, and playing, teasing those sounds into their final form, but the closer I can hit to that rhythm in the first draft, the more powerful it feels in manipulating it later.

Susan Tomaselli interviews Blake Butler.

» Stupid Women With Glasses

If your body dictates that you should try to breed with a violent sociopath, then you may find yourself with a good story to tell. If you survive. Animals do all that scanning stuff too, but they don’t write books or pop songs. Still, that’s no reason to ignore science. Or animals. It’s just that recent scientific developments in no way supersede all the fascinating work on love that humans have produced over the last few thousand years — science is just another strand of it.

Sophie Parkin discusses love with Anouchka Grose and asks tricky questions about her new book.

» Capitalism’s Leni Riefenstahl

A recurring theme is the intensity of Ayn Rand’s fan letters. ‘Your novels have had a profound influence on my life. It was like being reborn…’ ‘You gave me the answers, and more important, a moral sanction for existing.’ ‘About a month ago I noticed how much I was talking about your books to my teachers and classmates. As a result of my enthusiasm I have now lost two friends. I am beginning to realise how unimportant these people are.’ If these sound like letters from disciples, that’s because they are; rejected by the establishment, intolerant of debate, Rand’s Objectivism became a fully-fledged cult, with an inner circle, show trails, a philosophy that went beyond politics and economics to dictate art, emotion, sexuality.

Max Dunbar reviews Jennifer Burns’s Goddess of the Market.

» Outside the Academy’s Lustrous Gates

It’s a conviction of mine that had John been born in another place and time - America, say - he would now be a regularly published poet, garlanded with awards and recognition, teaching at a university in New York or San Francisco. As he was born in South Manchester, this was never going to happen. The mediocrities who run the arts in this country are good at looking after their own; the UK arts world is a golf club that certainly doesn’t admit big, shambling ex-trade unionists from the wrong side of the tracks. The club has its token working-class northerner in Ian McMillan. So John puts on packed, delerious spoken word nights in Fallowfield and on Oxford Road, edits the radical art magazine Citizen 32 and does free workshops in Fuel Withington and the Cornerhouse.

Max Dunbar reviews John G Hall’s Bang!

» Walking On Eggshells

The book’s most telling sentence is this: ‘In fact, passion is to be distrusted.’ The worst thing is to take a side. Buruma goes out of his way to avoid a strong, coherent opinion or conviction. In this, he is a creature of contemporary discourse. Situating yourself between two opposing propositions can make you seem wise in a kind of Zen Buddhist way. Repeat the posture too often, though, and it leads to a kind of derangement, a wilful stupidity. Buruma sways on the fence, windmilling his arms.

Max Dunbar reviews Ian Buruma’s Taming the Gods.

» From Enid Blyton to Porn and Back Again: Childhood Reading As an Accident Waiting to Happen

Novels about youth culture in the form of skinheads and hell’s angels were big in my school, and I was passed copies of Richard Allen’s Boot Boys and Peter Cave’s Chopper by other kids before I started picking up books like these myself. I was particularly impressed by the Mick Norman hell’s angels series — starting with Angels From Hell — in which gay bikers were even harder than the straight ones, and outlaw motorcycle clubs were the last chance of freedom for a British society menaced by a repressive right-wing government. Although more popular with boys, youthsploitation was also read by girls.

Stewart Home on his childhood reading.

» Japanamerica: Anime must eventually transcend Japan ‘national’ brand

While most Japanese know of a new Disney or Pixar film by its brand first, learning of the title and story later, Americans and other non-Japanese fans of anime and manga, with a few diehard exceptions, generally have little to no awareness of the studio names behind the medium. Instead, they bounce from one title to the next, possibly pursuing an artist, but developing no sense of a studio’s character or identity, and thus no brand loyalty. Indeed, if there is a brand associated with anime and manga, it’s national. Japanese pop culture is branded as “Japan”: Cool Japan, J-Pop, and the former coinage, Japanimation.

By Roland Kelts.

» Open Contempt for Generally Accepted Norms: An interview with Slava Mogutin

I’ve always admired artists and writers who pushed the boundaries of the generally accepted moral norms. … I’m not interested in making conventional art. I’m looking for beauty in marginal, transgressive expressions of human nature and sexuality. My work is not about shocking or provoking anyone, it’s about expressing myself in the most honest and radical way. It’s about rejecting taboos and stereotypes and celebrating diversity, life and love in different shapes and forms.

By Stephen Lucas.

» New Pen

I was finding it difficult to make contact with writers like me, so I started hanging around the pen section of my local stationery shop.

It was difficult to know which customers were genuinely talented wordsmiths, so I questioned them all, holding my flat pressed hands towards them, as if preparing to dive down their trousers. Success, I knew, would only come about with perseverance, and with all the setbacks and brush-offs, I held my ground, lurking keenly around the pen display for long days on end.

By Paul Ewen.

» Angel Beach

The odd trio sat drinking at the bar, making small talk, and laughing. Jonathon regaled them with tales from the past. He’d made his money on Wall St, in the stock market, hedge-funds, money-broking. George and Billy figured he was telling the truth, but it made them wonder. This burnt out fairy was living the sort of life they could only dream about. To them it seemed like a waste.

After a couple of hours George made his excuses. He had a date with a Swiss girl on the beach. ‘The girl wants to swim naked in the ocean and needs a life guard,’ he said with a smile…

By Joseph Ridgwell.

» Vague Obscenities

While she slept, Paul measured Kate, who slept flat as a cork board. She came in a hair over 4′11″. Paul checked on both snoring kids and then performed a number of Google searches about shrinking young females. He parsed through articles about minimal jail sentences, mothers struggling to juggle work/life issues, and anorexia. He stumbled across a list of famous 4′11″ women, including actress Nell Carter, author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Senator Barbara Boxer, and internet celebrity Tila Tequila. After studying a number of Tila Tequila pictures, Paul slept better than he had in weeks.

By David Erlewine.

» Herd

The alarm is a key. Unlocking him every morning he rises to ablutions habitually. I see things around a pillow, table, chair, toilet, grey panes and this is everyday. He doesn’t see that’s living. He washes and eats, dogs a long walk to the factory. There he works alone amongst the numerous silences of machines. Blending into seamless sentences, he finishes and goes home to become a single syllable. An anonymous sound no more than refrigerator humming. He blends into the bland social fabric of anonymity, a no one doing nothing, infinitely. Waiting patiently, I greet him at the cusp of head and bed and begin the unpredictable ritual of being.

By David E. Oprava.

» Two Flash Fictions

What’s on TV? We could watch murder shows. Tell me how it was done. That way I can know. I’ve been to Los Angeles, actually. About ten years ago. We went on the train. I remember nothing much of interest. I bought a nice shirt. What I’d say: I agree with those people, if they’re still around, who feel that the wash of a show of this kind doesn’t leave you, like, perfectly clean. Hit the arrow, I’d say. More of this: fleet water and flame. And what could be better, more worth your life’s hour, than Lawrence Welk, all these years dead?

By Scott Garson.

» Fabled Streams

“Doesn’t the carnival turn a little more sinister each passing block?” she says huskily, smacking her lips on the p and b. It did seem many revelers had begun chanting praises to the glorious Nada, to a sacred shush between
all songs.

Please understand, if I am kept, for a time, from my quest by the succubus, it is not because of the perfect, smoky sheen of her skin, no, nor her tightly laced up cleavage. I am disgusted by her riches, her retinue of loyal gnomes, her palace inscribed with arcane symbols. But her spells are strong. Her clairaudience anticipates and disarms each attempt to resist.

From the lowest ramparts we watch the procession. Spiked plumes, sequined masks, whips going taut in slow motion–or do I grow a bit feverish? A French horn tumbles from a float. Is stolen.

By Daniel Hales.

» Maintenant #5 - Gerður Kristný

Icelandic weather and nature have really affected my poetry. It’s dramatic. Serious weather changes can evoke stories and as do dangerous mountain roads. We don’t have dark woods or wolfs but we’ve got freezing storms and the winter darkness envelops us four months a year. That’s when things start to happen. During the summer there’s light all of the time and no need to sleep. And again, that is something worth telling… Contemporary Icelandic poetry is rather down to earth. Last year a few poets wrote books specifically about the financial crisis, but poets that write about love and the landscape are still popular. Strangely there isn’t much love or landscape on the news nowadays and that’s when it comes to poetry. Icelandic readers are open to poetry. In schools we have to study poetry and learn poems by heart…

In the fifth of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Icelandic poet Gerður Kristný.

» Six Poems

By day there’s not a peep
from Anne who lives
in widowhood overhead
– except when she dozes off
over her diary
drops it on the floor

Otherwise not a peep.

It’s another matter at night
then there’s all hell of a hubbub
Anne’s friends pound up the stairs
hollering their hellos
and crack open a feast
Some with a bottle of buttermilk
others nursing eggs

Towards dawn the neighbours are fed up
of fiddles and folksongs
The guests depart in haste
melting into the walls…

By Gerður Kristný.

» Gasoline – The Imaginary and the Pure

It is true Corso probably alienated himself further by comments such as the following in a letter to Ginsberg in 1957: “I hate poetry and all its fucking ambitious son-of-a-bitches who call me a showman because I act myself”. Yet, he is the true Beat poet, writing because he had to and because of his beloved Shelley who handed down his pen to him as if a rod of lightening out of the celestial dream cloud forming inside his head while he was only 17 and festering in Clinton prison for petty crime. After a reading with Ginsberg in 1956, Corso wrote to Jarrell to outline again his belief in the poet as an actual living-fusion of the language, an almost bodily representation of his own words, and also, like his hero Shelley as a legislator: “…I wanted to cause rebellion, I wanted to wake them up, even if my song was impractical, or somewhat silly. The poet is the minstrel, the legislator, the eternal rebel”.

The poet Paul Stubbs salutes the late great Gregory Corso.