3:AM Magazine

» The Future of Landscape: Patrick Wright

I use archives a lot, but I don’t go to them only as a source of evidence: sometimes, indeed, they seem to work best as surreal alienation devices - a way of thickening things up a bit and of reintroducing confusion and complexity to an oversimplified if not entirely depleted and amnesiac public culture. I start investigations without knowing where they will lead, and because I have identified something in the present that seems to demand excavation and a new contextualisation. I get a hunch something needs to be understood differently, and try to set off not in search of proof for already established ideas, or even in pursuit of confirmation and certainty, but with the aim of reconfiguring my own presently inadequate understanding.

Andrew Stevens talks to Patrick Wright in the second of his The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image series.

» Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide

The idea was to get beyond the myth of a rock star who has indeed reached iconic status. I chose to write about him because Richey Edwards was a more fascinating and complex subject than most – on the one hand he subverted the idea of rock star by drawing on his literary intelligence and peppering his interviews with iconoclastic declarations, yet on the other he completely played up to that role: the look, the rhetoric, the descent into an addiction of sorts. So you have two perceptions at play at the same time: the Byronic beauty staring out at you from the cover of NME, and the nice young man who reads books, walks his dog and enjoys Sunday dinner with his family. I wanted to explore this contradiction.

Ben Myers talks Richard with Alan Kelly.

» Scrying in Shin Urayasu

Edward Kelley would gaze into a black, table-tennis paddle-shaped piece of obsidian, or into a smoky crystal ball and relate the visions he saw to John Dee, who would write them down. Among proto-surrealistic landscapes and symbolic acts of poppets and monsters, a genuine language called Enochian was dictated to Dee via Kelley…I used a small crystal skull (large enough to lay within my left eye socket), and a crystal ball, and attempted to replicate the conditions of the scrying session and thereby touch the Enochian well-springs, as it were, of the text.

David F. Hoenigman interviews Jesse Glass.

» Answers Not Supplied

There are pages in the book that might surprise those who think of Kadare as a product of the “socialist realism” literary school. nothing in The Accident reminds you of the kind of realism usually associated with that milieu. Is Kadare turning to magical realism? Trying to write a classical whodunit? Do his ambiguous relations with the communist regime and his support of the Kosovan people relate to the story in any way? The picture of his country Kadare paints in a few strokes is vivid and he manages to create an atmosphere of the post-communist epoch without reducing the narrative to a treatise on Balkan affairs.

Anna Aslanyan on Ismail Kadare’s The Accident.

» Words Ain’t Worth No More Than Worn Out Tires

Perhaps it won’t come as too much of a shock then when I tell you that All Men are Liars is also a book about books. It’s about reading and writing books, about reading and writing ‘characters’ and about truth and fiction more generally. Whereas the earlier non-fiction books are imaginative, playful and novelistic collections of essays, All Men are Liars is an essayistic novel, a novel with a thesis, albeit an unstable, paradoxical one (the red herring of the title, for a start), like a crazy spinning top.

Colin Herd on Alberto Manguel.

» Kill Your Parents

The baby boomers grew up in a universal welfare state and have left it rotting from the inside with consultants and internal markets. They enjoyed a grant-subsidised university education and then introduced crippling tuition fees that closed the student experience off to working-class people. They graduated into a cheap and plentiful housing market and left a country where even to rent is so extortionate that almost a third of young men live at home well into their thirties. They came of age in a social democratic consensus that delivered both prosperity and redistribution, and left a doctrinaire freemarket economy followed by global recession that has hit the young hardest. They experienced an era of free love and hedonism, and left a culture of smoking bans, hectoring bishops and unit counts.

Max Dunbar reviews Francis Beckett’s What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?

» Promethean Royalty: The Secret Secretaries

In a vast grayeyard of global corporate conformist zombism, Secretary Secretaries are giant-killers. They’re going to slay the ghoulish avatars deadening young people’s eyes. And here’s another sign: in every great band one hears in every line, every lick, the ghosts of all the great bands who came before. They are the repository of what is great in rock ‘n’ roll, and yet different somehow, startling, an advance.

Alan Kaufman on lit punk SF rockers the Secret Secretaries.

» Japanamerica: Porn & Piracy, the Summer of Manga

In the annals of manga, the print-based comics medium that is now roughly 60 years old and a primary driver of Japan’s pop culture juggernaut, the summer of 2010 has been revolutionary. The sentencing in February of American manga collector Christopher Handley to six months in prison for possession of obscene materials sent ripples of anxiety through fans of Japanese pop culture worldwide.

By Roland Kelts.

» A Film Too Far

Finally Hollywood has made the definitive war epoch of our time. A film that puts into proper perspective the US role as a military superpower in the late 20th century. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Alan Smithee from a script collaboration of Joe Eszterhas, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck with historicity by Dan Brown, the film boasts a star studded cast of veteran actors who are also patriots of the highest order, all of them war heroes. In fact, everyone connected with this film is a war hero.

By Jim Chaffee.

» Frames

Being a public space, the pictures were in frames that screwed to the wall with a little brass plate on each side of the frame. It stuck me as a sad indictment that even in a hospital, particularly a ward like this, provision had to be given to stopping petty thievery. The drugs cabinet guarded maybe, but mass-produced prints of landscapes? Right beside his door were three identical frames lined one above the other to fill a gap too small for the standard poster of a riverboat or field of watercolour poppies. My apprehension about seeing him face-to-face after hearing about his deterioration meant I hardly noticed them when walking by on my first visit. On subsequent visits I barely gave a second glance, thinking them certificates of some description.

By Julian Baker.

» Gaza Pressé

“The nature of the lemon is one of constriction,” he says, when asked if lemonade is right for the war-torn region. “It is the hybrid refugee of the citrus family. Harvesting it is an act of compassion. Squeezing it, an ending of oppression. As Lena says, we’re working in the still life tradition here, breaking new ground. While Art serves no purpose other that its own existence, once Gaza Pressé is up and running, I’ve no doubt the message that relief is at hand, that refreshment is on its way, will filter out into the wider community.”

By Benjamin Robinson.

» Just to Touch

They fill a cooler with beers and get into John’s pickup to drive the couple of blocks to the new condo development. The buildings, all new paint and ungrown gardens push up like saplings as the truck crests the hill. “You fucker with your new truck.” Wes grunts and pops open another beer. “I should’a had that promotion.” “You just don’t know how to kiss ass like our boy John here.” Scott reaches from the back cab and hits John hard on the shoulder. Wes laughs and turns to look over his shoulder at Scott. “You could’a put in all those extra hours if you weren’t busy slaving over Cheryl all the time.” “I just do what she says so she’ll shut up once in a while.” John scratches his ear and turns on the wipers. “Fucking pollen.”

By Charlie Geoghegan-Clements.

» Sign Here

I am walking down the road and I see a sign and it says 4.5 miles. I ask the sign “What is 4.5 miles from you” and the sign says “4.5 miles.” This is true I think, but not the answer I am looking for. I tell the sign “Don’t get smart with me.” It says 4.5 miles. I dig up the sign and bring it with me so as to put it 3.5 miles from something thus teaching it a lesson. But every time I try and get close to a restaurant or a hospital or a landmark of some kind it always stays 4.5 miles from me.

By Eric Balaz.

» The Bee Keeper

There was a girl whose words became bees. Because she talked too much, the bees were many and they hummed in her belly, buzzed in her throat until they swarmed up into her head and stung the backs of her eyes, making her cry. The girl felt them buzz into her mouth and push past her teeth to escape into the kitchen where, a moment before, she stood washing dishes. She clamped her hands over her mouth, but it didn’t stop the bees. The girl’s mother heard the buzzing and came to see what her daughter had done this time.

By a.m. baker.

» Hair Hair

‘Hello, you must have noticed my hair.’

‘Hair today and gone tomorrow.’

‘The colour is a rust red variation on your dear child’s red balloon.’

‘It’s not my child.’

‘Quite so; but back to hair: it was inspired in part by cranberries, the indigenous American fruit not the faux Irish group from the early nineties, and by a subtle blend of mid-sixties Diana Ross and a drag queen fried of mine, Lawrence un Arabesque.’

By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.

» Two Poems

This is not a time for clandestine poets
to hurl shoes over Jericho’s crumbling walls.
Stay calm. The stench of exploding verse
will not deter the invading tanks of Saul.

You bragged that the lost tribe of Israel
would not be dragged through the eye of a needle.
There would be corrective fury. An iron heel.
An eye for an eyelash. A fire truly biblical…

Holy revenge against David’s puny catapult.
Daniel dismembered by the lion’s savage maul…

By Kevin Williamson.

» Four Poems

A dead horned owl in the dirt
near the fence that separates
me from you… Blowing
silence through my teeth, I make noises
that awaken no one. Years ago

I studied how Yonkers’ vagrants, leaning
against telephone poles, smoked cigarettes
while looking around. My father

lowered his head
every time he passed them. Not
as wise as he, I eyed them, thinking
fate could never
do that to me.

By Robert Bohm.

» Maintenant #26: Juan Andrés García Román

The paradoxical reality, for me and for other poets of Granada from different generations, is that Lorca has become a highly respected figure but without children (Do the geniuses close themselves on themselves?), while other poets less prestigious and often foreign have become our true masters… Of course I have passion for Lorca. And his trend toward the surreal imagism is very in keeping with the poetry I like. Maybe living so close to him forces you to dissociate from his poetry for not being predictable. This is regrettable but it happens… The Andalusian identity is very beautiful, yes, and sometimes you would like to declare yourself a passionate regionalist or even a nationalist, but with regard to literature I think that you cannot talk about Andalusian poetry moving away from Spanish poetry or rather the reverse. Because nearly all significant poets of the twentieth century are Andalusians: Lorca, Cernuda, Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Machado brothers… and so almost from the beginning: Herrera, Góngora. If you remove the Andalusian poetry from the whole, the whole becomes just a minority…

In the 26th of the series, SJ Fowler interviews the Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román.