3:AM Magazine

» The Natural Science of a Singular Gentleman

What fiction constitutes, in a way, is a form of journalism. I have always thought that journalists often underestimate the literary potential of the situations they experience in their working lives; that they think there’s something more important they could be doing, or that real life is taking place elsewhere. But they are actually processing fascinating raw material. Just as authors do, they actually use words as effectively as possible to communicate their thoughts to the public. No matter how elegantly an author sculpts his subject matter, he is nothing more than a high-flying journalist. One that is probably wasting more paper than most people in order to express themselves!

David Gavan interviews J.P. Donleavy.

» Awakening Benjamin

I am interested in a certain mode of posthumous isolation that is not incompatible with the growing fame of Benjamin in the intellectual world. It was important for me to estimate his uniqueness by the way in which he engages the past of philosophy. The problem is of course that much of what he writes does not look like philosophy. That is why I think of my book as a philosophical portrait of Walter Benjamin, as gathering his corpus of writings so that it can be recognized as a configuration of philosophy.

Richard Marshall interviews Eli Friedlander.

» Philosophy as the Great Naïveté

The intellectual life of most philosophers is closer to that of novelists and artists and musicians than people who study novelists and artists. There is great naïveté in the ambition to write the great American novel, naïveté that is mirrored in the ambition to solve some of the long-standing philosophical questions once and for all. It’s utterly natural to view someone who is trying to write the great American novel, or is trying to explain once and for all how autonomous action is possible, as not only naïve but also ignorant (of the greatest of Melville, or the greatness of Kant). So there really is a cultural divide between the vast majority of humanists and the majority of philosophers.

Continuing The End Times philosophy series, Richard Marshall interviews Jason Stanley.

» How Art is Made

Aspiring writers often praise Shklovsky’s oeuvre as a guide to writing fiction, but ordinary readers will be delighted too, for this book tells you how some of the greatest works of the world literature are made. Shklovsky dissects the process looking at a range of texts, from fairy tales to Kafka’s “anti-novels”. Those who remember his magnum opus, A Sentimental Journey, can also work out how this book is made: the trademark one-sentence paragraphs, seemingly stray thoughts, memories of youth, tributes to friends – all this as a backdrop to the main theme.

Anna Aslanyan reviews Viktor Shklovsky’s Bowstring.

» Talk of Circadian Rhythm

Night of course fascinates us. Most children go through a phase of being afraid of the dark - and it’s odd that the darkness of the bedroom is so different to the darkness of outside, and that you can be scared of one and relaxed in the other. Night is when the best things happen, conception and laughter and roaming through cities, and it’s also when the worst happens, suicides, murders and a life-altering mistake behind the wheel: the bad, hesitant phone calls (’Is this [Title] [Last Name]? I’m terribly sorry, but I have to tell you that your -’) always seem to come at night. Men and women who work nights aren’t always well paid but seem to carry more weight and experience than their dayclock counterparts.

Max Dunbar reviews Ian Marchant’s Something of the Night.

» 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.

» Modernism Then and Now

Periodisation is fascinating; every critique presents a different starting point and this point gets earlier each time, with suggestions stretching back to Wordsworth, Swift, Dante, even Catullus. The danger, as Josipovici acknowledges, is that modernism is turned into a period of art history, a style. This is why I prefer the formulation of modernism as an event, one that will always exist, and with which artists must in some way contend. The event is, to use the term that Weber borrowed from Schiller, ‘the disenchantment of the world.’

David Winters and Anthony Brown get their heads around literary history.

» 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.

» 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.

» Four Poems

The girls try to cut into their arms with blunt knives-
Sunita is eating out of the food disposal.
They get up and run to the bathroom, scrambling
past each other to be the first.
I look at my plate and I feel guilty for my hunger pangs and
Sunita has clods of food in her soft, dumpy hands-
when they realise they have to drag her
on her behind, down the corridor, her big mammal laugh
booming.

By Melissa Lee-Houghton.

» 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.