3:AM Magazine

Thomas Pynchon’s niece is a porn star. * 3:AM’s Richard Cabut castigates the apathetic youth of today in the First Post: “In the light of such limpness, what we need is a committed, oppositional and, yes, anarchic, rock culture to kick up a rebellious stink once more. Arise, kids, you’ve got nothing to lose but your chainstores — which, I suspect, is the problem in a nutshell”. * Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. * Iain Sinclair on obscure 1965 exploitation flick Primitive London. * Jeff VanderMeer interviewed by Bookslut. * Ursula K LeGuin reviews Ballard’s latest. Ballard is also interviewed in The Independent: “”Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I’m intensely interested in change — probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?” * This Scene is Dead. * Salome Magazine. * All about Last Night’s Party. * Babylon MySpace. * Tough on poetry, tough on the causes of poetry. * Introducing Daniel Scott Buck. * A Life Less Convenient. * Edmund White in Paris. * The wannabe writers. * Idolator. * The world’s worst novelist. * Shakespeare the piss artist. * Martin Amis’s “The Age of Horrorism”. * Top deck. * Action Man and Matt Mason. * Short Term Memory Loss reckons that dead tree publishing is doomed. * Dr Jekyll and Haydn’s nasal polyp. * 48 tracks from the birth of Indie Pop. * The many incarnations of Little Red Riding Hood. * The Guardian on Mark Z Denielewski’s Only Revolutions: “The games with typography and layout that characterised his monstrously thrilling first novel of postmodern horror, House of Leaves, have here run riot. Only Revolutions has to be periodically turned upside down and read from back to front; certain letters and classes of things are printed in different coloured inks and font-weights; each page has marginalia in tiny type alluding to historical events of the past century; some pages are marked with inscrutable blobs. Before you even begin, you are exhausted”. * Celebrating London’s 2i’s Cafe. * A history of the A-Z. * The Aliens rise from the ashes of the Beta Band. * The scourge of the Offbeat Generation brings us (straight from the UK’s lap dance capital) the Orthogonal Review. * Tom Hodgkinson on how to be free: “We can all be creative and we can all be free. For myself, I urge you to take up the ukulele. This four-stringed marvel is very cheap, very portable and very easy to play. It is, therefore, even more punk than the guitar. Get a uke and you will never be bored again. You could even make some extra cash by busking”. * It’s Stiff Records‘ 30th: “We opened a label there, Stiff Inc, but it became a financial burden on the British company, though we did very well with The Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Reagan. I got the idea from the writer Richard Williams, who reviewed the wrong side of a vinyl test pressing. I thought it would be a great joke to do a record with nothing on it. We sold 40,000. People in America liked the idea and bought it as a Christmas present for friends who didn’t like Reagan”. * The Courtney Love documentary. * A bloody good interview in Dogmatika with D. Harlan Wilson: “Bizarro is a term that encompasses many styles, themes and methodologies. The best place to get a sense of its principal characteristics is The Bizarro Starter Kit. …In a nutshell, it identifies Bizarro as a weird, surreal, experimental, thought-provoking genre with a cult sensibility. There are a few tag lines, too: ‘Franz Kafka meets Joe Bob Briggs.’ ‘Dr. Seuss of the post-apocalypse.’ ‘Japanese animation directed by David Lynch.’ All of these are apt portrayals. …Basically we Bizarros all practice a kind of blender fiction, which is to say we mix up the marginalized genres of horror, fantasy, science fiction, absurdism and surrealism to varying degrees and extremes”.

The new Paris-based journal.

The Guardian get nostalgic for goth-punk:

“Initially, it wasn’t called goth. In February 1983, NME lumped together several mostly forgotten bands (Southern Death Cult, Sex Gang Children, Brigandage, Specimen, Blood and Roses) and tagged them “positive punk”. Meanwhile, Marx fondly remembers tabloid hysteria about “suicide pact kids killing themselves listening to Sisters of Mercy”, an eerie precursor of a story the Daily Mail ran only last month warning of the “threat to our children” posed by goth and emo (although they’re two different cultures).”

Brigandage featured none other than our very own Richard Cabut, while Blood and Roses were led by Bob Short and not forgetting Flowers in the Dustbin frontman George Berger, whose recent Crass biography is still picking up the plaudits in the press.

The latest issue of Bookforum includes an extract from a conversation between Eileen Myles and Dennis Cooper which features in Up Is Up, But So Is Down: New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press) edited by Brandon Stosuy.

Dennis Cooper: “[S]ome of the most genius punk artists like Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith were poets, too. A lot of those musicians were interested in literature. I’d meet, say, Debbie Harry or David Byrne somewhere, and we’d have these long talks about literature.”

Libertine Magazine will be launched tomorrow at Manchester’s Central Library (6pm/free entry and wine). It is “dedicated solely to poetry, lyrics and the liberation of the language that they use”. The first issue includes an interview with Carol Ann Duffy in which she discusses Mozart, Madonna and Lennon/McCartney. Guillemots frontman Fyfe Dangerfield talks about Kerouac, Lewis Carroll and his own poetry. All that as well as “great features exploring the inspiration that great names of music and literature have on each other, plus a wide variety of excellent and original brand new poetry and song lyrics submitted from around the world”.

Transmission, another Manc literary magazine, are also organising a shindig tomorrow, but MyPlace is playing up so I can’t give you the details. Best contact them if you’re interested.

Gulcher, Laurence Remila’s Parisian art-punk combo, have finished recording their debut album called After Nature. Two tracks, lifted from the forthcoming CD, have just been posted on the band’s MySpace page.

Gulcher will play at:
Le Truskel on 13 October (Paris)
OPA on 13 November (Paris)
Le Klub on 29 November (Paris)

Laurence will feature in the Offbeat Generation anthology.

Travis Jeppesen (author of Victims and Poems I Wrote While Watching TV) interviews Bertie Marshall (punk legend, former 3:AM columnist and author of Berlin Bromley) in The Fanzine. Here, Bertie is talking about Pete’s Underpants, his current project:

“It’s a memoir. But you know, it happened over a period of nine months. And what you were saying about memory, each time you remember a particular event, you remember it slightly differently. The cinema does this amazingly well. I’m trying to go there with writing. So there’s one particular scene that is replayed through thinking about it, and it’s slightly different each time. I meet him in the bar three different times in the book from different perspectives. Then they start to merge a bit. But really, I don’t think about these things academically. I don’t think about it this way until after I write it, but what the book really seems to be about is the experience of this Englishman seeing the American Dream go wrong. Not the American experience of it.”

Both Travis and Bertie appear in the forthcoming Offbeat Generation anthology.

New Orleans
Moira Crone, author of What Gets Into Us: Stories and other works of fiction and non-fiction, is featured reader for this week’s 17 Poets at the Gold Mine Saloon. Thursday, 21 September, 8pm, 701 Dauphine Street (corner of Dauphine and Saint Peter), French Quarter, New Orleans. 504-568-9125. Free.

Austin
Recently fired Spin writer Chuck Klosterman reads from his new book, Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas. At BookPeople, 603 North Lamar, Austin. Thursday, 21 September, 7pm.

New York
Street Poets and Visionaries: Selections from the UbuWeb Collection shows at 5BE Gallery, now through 14 October, Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11am-6pm. With related event, The Sounds of Madness, a reading featuring downtown poets Eileen Myles, Edwin Torres, and more, Saturday, 30 September, 2pm. Exhibit, reading, and other events take place at the Oliver Kamm/5BE Gallery, 621 West 27th Street, Chelsea, New York. 212-217-5800. Free.