3:AM Magazine

Will Self, “the only gay writer in Britain who’s a practising heterosexual” * Jessa Crispin on Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music: “Michael Bracewell’s history of Roxy Music does not go for conventional thinking — not about the band, and certainly not about how to write a rock biography. There are no stories of life on the road or time spent in recording studios. Bracewell, a British novelist and journalist who has written extensively on art, music and fashion, decided to focus on the path each band member took to get to Roxy Music. Eno and Ferry do not even meet until page 335.” * Some good reading in the July Bookslut: interviews with Aleksandar Hemon & Lisa Appignanesi; Reading Ulysses; Alberto Manguel and the new Alexandria; Hollywood Madam on Belle de Jour; Anais Nin’s Winter of Artifice reviewed * Jonathan Coe on writing: “I’m very undisciplined. I stare at the computer until I get bored, which takes about five minutes” * What makes bad fiction bad? asks J Robert Lennon: “I think we–meaning, you know, literate culture–have a problem talking about why we dislike things. We’re pretty good at praise–it’s not unusual for somebody to tell me they like a book, and then tell me precisely why, and for me to read the book and like the same thing. “The characters are hilarious.” “It has an exciting plot.” “The prose is clear and engaging.” But ask somebody why they don’t like a book, often you’ll get something like “It just sucks,” or “It’s boring.” There are, of course, specific things that make the book bad, but we often just can’t put our fingers on them. I believe that book reviewers, and all readers, for that matter, could use a refresher course on criticism–and I don’t mean, like, literary theory, I mean simple, ordinary expressions of dissatisfaction.” * John Sutherland laments the end of “proper” lit-crit * A review of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008, guest edited by Steve Almond * An interview with Lorrie Moore: “I was obsessive with writing, but I wasn’t ever disciplined. Because if you’re obsessive you don’t need discipline. You just do it all the time. Why would you impose a regimen, when this is your love?” * And Lorrie Moore reads ‘Paper Losses’ * Sub Pop is 20: “The label has continued to be crucial to the Seattle scene: It could be argued that Band of Horses and Fleet Foxes would not have received the exposure they did without Sub Pop’s international appeal. But to put it in simpler terms, Sub Pop put this city’s music scene on the map for good. Nowadays, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t equate Seattle with Sub Pop.” * I don’t need Simon Schama to tell me Leonard Cohen is a Great Lyricist; do you? * The Village Voice talk to Damon Albarn about Honest Jon’s: “It was in the early ’90s that I started going in there. But I didn’t really talk to anyone there till the late ’90s. I’d just buy a record and then scuttle away.” * To bookmark: Peter Murphy’s Blog of Revelations, a fine blend of literature and music * * Cafe Babel celebrate Rosemonde Pujol’s Un petit bout de Bonheur and female masturbation: “It is so ubiquitous in our modern societies, from the amusing incident in American Pie to the masturbatory tales of Bukowski or Philip Roth, the former featuring a telephone (Memories of a Dirty Old Man) and the latter a ‘superb joint of purplish raw meat’ (Protnoy and his Complex) [sic]. Yet the same can not be said for female masturbation, who because of their history of unjust domination, have cultivated a certain modesty and introversion. Therefore in recent years, being more open about it has become a means to move towards a greater equality between the sexes. Pujol’s book is just one example of a new, emerging sexual vision of the female body that intends to end the culture of silence definitively through an active and reactive over-portrayal of it.” * Kafka’s papers come to light and Mark Twain makes the cover of Time * 32 sci-fi novels you should read [via Largehearted Boy] * Elizabeth Hand remembers Thomas Disch.

This week 3:AM briefly commends to your attention:

* Wordle - better than tag clouds (sorry, James), Wordle is “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your cloud with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes”. Above, Melville’s Moby Dick, as created by Steamboats are Ruining Everything.

* The Penguin Paperback Spotters Guild - Masters of book jacketing (witness Great Ideas, Volume III), Penguin Books inspire a devotional following. In the vein of Seven Hundred Penguins, the PPSG Flickr group have your favourites covered.

* Sherlock Holmes - Basil Rathbone; Jeremy Brett; Sacha Baron Cohen? Like Maxim Jakubowski, the very thought of the Ali-G actor in an ulster fills me with dread. I’m taking comfort in Arthur Conan Doyle’s books (the sexy Penguin Reds, of course) before it’ll be too embarrassing to be seen with them in public. From The Sign of Four: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff… he thrust the sharp point home… and sank back into the vevlet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”

* Chet Baker / ‘Let’s Get Lost’ - His best album is the 1987 live album In Tokyo, but the definitive Chet Baker tune has to be ‘Let’s Get Lost’, also the name of Bruce Webber’s fascinating documentary on the jazz legend. Difficult to come by for a few years, Webber’s Let’s Get Lost enjoyed a limited run in some arthouse cinemas last month and is out on DVD at the end of July.

* The Wire - Forget Lost and its pretensions, the best literary US TV-drama of recent years is The Wire. And I’ll direct you to Steve Finbow’s piece in LitUp.

Andrew Gallix remembers Albert Cossery, who died last month:

All his life, Cossery sided with those he felt God had forgotten: petty thieves, pretty prostitutes, exploited workers and hungry vagrants. He despised materialism and eschewed the rat race. In Proud Beggars (1955), usually considered his masterpiece, a university professor finds peace of mind by becoming a bum, proving that beggars can be choosers. In The Lazy Ones (1948), a character stays in bed, out of choice, for a whole year. Another decides, on reflection, not to take a wife for fear she might disrupt his precious sleep patterns. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood even take up arms against all those who prevent them from snoozing in peace until midday.

For the author and his lovable rogue’s gallery, sleep, daydreams and hashish-induced reverie are endowed with mystical qualities. Idleness is more than a way of life. It offers the greatest luxury of all: time to think and therefore the chance to be fully alive, “minute by minute”. The overt message of these people whom God has forgotten (but who themselves have not forgotten God) is that paradise is not lost, but most of us are too busy to bask in “the Edenic simplicity of the world”.

There is, however, a darker covert message. In practice, living “minute by minute” meant living the same minute over and over again. Time seems to have stood still for Cossery as soon as he settled in Paris. In 1945, he checked into a small room in a hotel called La Louisiane on Rue de Seine and remained there until his death. Every day, he got up at noon (like his characters), dressed up in his habitual dandified fashion and made his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he usually repaired to the Flore or the Deux Magots where he would cast an Olympian eye over the drones passing by. Then it was time for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum. Cossery, who once described sleep as “death’s brother”, lived a strange, mummified existence, reminiscent of Beckett’s “sleep till death/ healeth/ come ease/ this life disease”.

“I think my writing is most influenced by ‘K-Mart Realism’ though also it has been influenced by ‘Tea Towel Fiction’.”

Tao Lin writes on “K-Mart Realism” over at This Recording, and offers a “K-Mart Realism” reading list:

“K-Mart Realism” was at its “height” maybe in the mid to late-80’s. Frederick Barthelme had 20-30 stories published in the New Yorker, Mary Robison also had many stories in the New Yorker, and Gordon Lish was publishing other people’s books and stories as an editor at Knopf and Esquire around then. I wrote a blog post about “K-Mart Realism” in 2005, it received no commentary.

The funniest and most detached and existential “K-Mart Realism” person to me is Joy Williams I think. They are all funny and capable of controlling themselves from using dialogue tags not “said,” sarcasm (or just describing something without judgment), and a sense of hopelessness beyond what is acceptable in the mainstream today, I believe, I just looked at the list of names. I believe that none of those people are religious. Frederick Barthelme has stated that he enjoys reading Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles. I think the people who wrote similar things to the “K-Mart Realism” people, but earlier, are James Purdy (Color of Darkness), Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises and some short stories), and Richard Yates (his later stories).

Further: 3:AM’s Tao Lin Week: Day One ['Serious literature: a short film'] / Two ['cognitive-behavorial therapy redux': six unpublished pages] / Three ['Serious word games'] / Four ['Check out the brain stem on Tao: an interview] / Five ['We are so "tao lin" right now'].

Sad to report, the artist, photographer and filmmaker extraordinaire Bruce Conner has died.

See also, Devo - “Mongoloid”, America is Waiting, Breakaway, “Mea Culpa” from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.