The Beat interview Tony O’Neill: “Getting published for the first time on 3:AM was a huge validation. Because not only was somebody saying ‘we like you, we like your writing’ the people saying it were obviously people who liked the same authors I did. Having someone like that dig your stuff was worth more to me than having Joe Schmoe from whatever-house saying it, because they probably hated all the guys that I dug.” * Richard Milward‘s book of a lifetime: “I’m absolutely mad on mad people. Some of my favourite artworks and novels appear to have been spewed from the hands and minds of mad folk, from Henry Darger to Alfred Jarry to Jean-Michel Basquiat, but none has made a more prominent dent on my brain than the Comte de Lautréamont‘s potty page-turner, Les Chants de Maldoror. It’s like an old, twisted rulebook on how to break all literary rules.” * “I first met George Whitman in 2007 when he hit me over the head with a book.” Jeanette Winterson on Shakespeare & Co * The London Review of Books on Guy Debord and the letters of the Situationist International: “Debord the swashbuckler, the romantic hero of art schools to this day, comes centre-stage, and the letters are a fine study in the art of enmity.” * Also in the LRB, Richard Gott on Cornelius Cardew * Adam Gopnik on Damon Runyon: “Popular fiction is supposed to be essentially story-driven; the proof that it works is the sound of the pages turning. But a few of the great pop writers were stylists, above all, and their success is measured by a different sound, that of the snort of appreciation followed by a phrase read out loud to a half-sleeping spouse in bed at night. The pages stop turning while we admire the sentences…Of all the pop formalists, the purest and strangest may be Damon Runyon, the New York storyteller, newspaperman, and sportswriter who wrote for the Hearst press for more than thirty years, inspired a couple of Capra movies, and died in 1946. Runyon’s appeal, though it has to be fished out like raisins from the dreary bran of his O. Henry-style plotting, came from his mastery of an American idiom. We read Runyon not for the stories but for the slang, half found on Broadway in the nineteen-twenties and thirties and half cooked up in his own head.” * Inspired by Roberto Bolano‘s 2666, The Rumpus take a speed-read through literary uberbooks * 3:AM‘s interview with Peter Murphy is coming soon; meanwhile Murphy talks John the Revelator with Mark Thwaite: “I like that phrase “apostolic fiction”. The gospels are narrated by scribes who don’t really enter the story until the final act, if at all. John is a watcher. At first his function is to bear witness to his mother’s life, and then his friend Jamey’s, but as the story unfolds, he becomes more of a participant, changes from passive to active. Not a big transformation in the grand scheme of things, but it’s huge for him. I suppose J the R is kind of an inverted version of the mythic rite of passage tale. Instead of the archetypal call-to-adventure, a boy leaving the tribe to go out into the wilderness and prove himself, John attains manhood by staying to watch over his mother. A less glamorous version of the hero saga maybe, but a trial by fire nonetheless.” * 3:AM‘s Chris Killen talks to Tao Lin: “I think if after Richard Yates I published 10 remixes of Shoplifting from American Apparel (which comes out before Richard Yates), or published something “equally retarded” like 3-5 consecutive books of drawings, over a period of 3-8 years, it would be “giving up” in a way that is exciting to me, and so would be an “artistically acceptable” development in my career arc, encompassing both “giving up” and “not giving up.” It would be a sort of non-sequitur in my career arc.”
