3:AM Magazine

» Radio on

The feel and mood of the office is definitely informed by my own experiences working in offices, and the particular quirks of every workplace, the unquestioned habits, the sounds you get used to, the cumulative effect of sitting in the same chair, in the same room every day, of smelling the same air. The building dread that Iris feels, and the little ways in which the office becomes increasingly absurd or “broken,” speak to the breakdown of the social contract, and the American promise of stability, of a secure future, in exchange for work. The contemporary reader knows that there is no such stability anymore. The whole construct is a house of cards, and Iris may not know what it is, but her unconscious knows something is happening here, to clumsily paraphrase Bob Dylan.

Maxi Kim interviews Radio Iris author Anne-Marie Kinney.

» To not dishonour the dead

Crossword fans will have spotted that ‘Dicky Star’ is an anagram of yardstick, and that ‘garden rule’ can be used to produce the same solution, but there are other kinds of predictions going on here too. Some are retrospective but that doesn’t make the prophecies they contain any less striking. (The writer and broadcaster Ken Hollings reminded me of the McLuhan quote: ‘To be a good prophet never predict anything that has not already happened.’) There is a connection, too, perhaps to the divinatory aspect of storytelling: Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. So, somehow out of this mandated vocabulary, the yardsticks and the coverage of a broken Dungeness, it becomes clear to Laura and Jeremy that if there were a nuclear disaster in the UK it would be covered up in a different way than in the Soviet Union. It would be displaced by the deployment of a new myth based on some traditional, typically English, craft-based activity.

The mighty Tony White interviewed by Richard Marshall.

» 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.

» This is an epidemic

Discussing Raymond Chandler, Stephen King wrote that the great crime novelist is now accepted as a compelling chronicler of 1930s America with something serious to say: however, when the literati has him to dinner, they are apt to sit him at the foot of the table. It is the same with Irvine Welsh. Trainspotting was critically admired. Savage indictment of Thatcherism and consumer society, and by the genuine article: an ex-heroin addict from the Leith council schemes who left school at sixteen. ‘They had to pretend to like it,’ Welsh said at a reading in Manchester. And perhaps they expected him to deliver his indictment and disappear back into the slums. Instead, Welsh kept writing. The range and scope of his fiction increased. He made money. He wrote more. He bought a house in Los Angeles. He exhausted the patience of his critics. The literary world welcomes working class writers - as long as they know their place.

Max Dunbar reviews Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys.

» Common sense is here again

This book invites compulsive reading, but in very much the same way as Sandbrook’s counterfactual histories for the Daily Mail and the New Statesman do. In a recent ‘what if’, he chirpily imagined a second Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands facilitated by ‘the decision to lift the ban on women serving beneath the waves’, causing an expensive refit of Royal Navy submarines to ‘make them “female friendly”’. There’s a good deal of this hell-in-a-handcart jibbing in Seasons in the Sun.

Joe Kennedy reviews Dominic Sandbrook’s Seasons in the Sun.

» From the East End to Wembley & back again

Two London-themed books published this spring, although different in almost everything, from jacket design to word count, can be read in the same subversive spirit. 1948, a monstrous haggard face casting a sinister shadow on its cover, is easily recognised as a parody of Orwell’s most famous work. More precisely, it is an inversion, where a dystopia becomes a utopia, heroes and villains swap places, while the 1948 Olympiad is contrasted with the forthcoming games. The dramatis personae include Winston Smith, a policeman, O’Brien, his boss, Julia, his girlfriend; there is even a fleeting appearance of one Eric Blair. The story is a political farce, a whodunnit which culminates in a massive Two Minutes Joy at Wembley.

Anna Aslanyan reviews 1948: A Novel in Verse & Acquired for Development by… A Hackney Anthology.

» Our veteran tree walk

It’s hard to orientate in the cemetery away from the main paths. The trees have completely obscured lines of sight on the original strong axial vistas. Even on a path leading directly towards the chapel it’s hard to see it until you’re quite close. I meant to look for the white marble lion - F. hasn’t seen it since it’s been cleaned - but abandon the idea. We look up at the sky. At nearly half past four the sun has dipped right down towards the west and to get to a gate we need to go east or south. But when there isn’t a path that goes in what we think might be the right direction, we can only follow the one in front of us. The trees are too thick to press our way through easily and the rubble of monuments potentially treacherous underfoot. The noise of traffic from Church Street or Stoke Newington High Street should give us some indication of which way to head but in here everything fades to a surrounding hum.

By Bridget Penney.

» 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.

» Re: Re: Re: Re: HELLO HELLO DEAR LADIES OR MEN:

Hey, friend!
Attention!
Hello dear, do you remember how we communicated with you? Long ago you could not see.
(Having trouble viewing this email? Click here)
If your marriage is on the verge of breakup.
Spring has finally come! Romance is in the air!
Hi - do you remember how we made love in your car?
handsome - you were so good in bed with me - I want to again make love to you - no 1 man I had never done so well as you have done - I’ll procure very great pleasure
my body was looking at your pictures just on fire! 
but it is not beautiful it turns out, met - do you take me with love, we both felt good - and then you left and never came back,
You were so hot, let’s talk again.

By Joanna Walsh.

» Death of a Ladies’ Man 4

She embraced it though: smoking roll-ups, watching Wes Anderson films, going to life drawing despite an inability to draw, writing wistful poems, arguing with her ex-boyfriend, followed by blanking her ex-boyfriend. Having a crush on her supervisor, mainly because he was her supervisor, and Freud and Foucault said that would happen. Loathing Derrida. Feeling desconstructed. Smoking more. Procrastinating. Lying on the lawn and debating pornography. Being tied up and feeling hypocritical. Having existential crises about her own exhibitionism. Being in love for a week, having sex in the library, falling out of love, a deadline. It was only a matter of time before Rachel got politically active.

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

» 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.

» Viewing

Should they go up to the bedroom, he asked. He let her walk in front of him again and on the stairs she noticed paintings on the wall. She tried to look at them, a blur of greens and blues and undefined lines. She thought about the middle-aged man’s life outside of this moment in time, how she didn’t want to know any of it. The bedroom had a single bed, a dresser, a window that looked out onto a garden and some shelves. She had placed her beer on the dresser and turned, realising that the middle-aged man was closer than she had expected. At this distance, she could clearly see the skin between his eyelids and eyebrows drooped down like his developing jowls, making his eyes look half-shut.

By Giles Ruffer.

» 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.

» Frame of House

XII

He came to hollowed

Glassless and craven but only to his own he would breathe and breathe again a silent course through reason and barricades to convince the attire of a man to heal the merkin-like franchise my rutting genitals hidden away like ancient beans in a cave sunk in a tub of fluorescence and baked to fuel the passing train (a rough dressing that floats out for anyone to see the man at the table who pulls out his cock and a water bottle to pee) today I sit in front of the fire and the warmth of the day has nothing to do with the sordid nature of basements

By Samuel Ace.

» 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.