3:AM Magazine

“I’m gonna piss ‘RIP JOHN CALLAHAN’ in the snow.” * Jon Savage on the cult of the Screamers, the punk band who never released a record. * ‘When We Fell In Love’, Tony O’Neill on William Burroughs. * Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Radiant new movie.* Tim Parks on fiction in translation. * 10 of the best nameless protagonists in literature. * Will Self on train food (via) * Why Steve Almond isn’t grateful to the NYTBR for trashing his new book. * Prospero, a new books & arts blog from The Economist (via) * “There’s Hitchcock: my god, what a plotter! He makes these lovely, infernal machines!” David Mitchell. * The psychology of collecting, Orhan Pamuk on how museums help us cope with trauma (via) * Every Doctor Who theme, 1963-2010 (via) * 9 1/2 minutes of deleted scenes from Trainspotting. * Julien Temple, un punk avec une caméra. * “With a quiet style and exuberant use of references, Borges scrutinised reality in short yet labyrinthine works.” * Jake Edelstein‘s Tokyo Vice is BBC4′s Book of the Week (look out for an interview on 3:AM soon). * Lee Crum’s portraits of New Orleanians. * Forbidden photos of everyday life in East Germany. * The Chap Olympiad. * Believer editor Vendela Vida: “We try to be as oblivious to all the changes going on as we can be.” * Granta archive is now on-line, subscription only. * The rise and rise of the tattoo. * Sam Jordison on burlesque, a “strip-tease that middle class people can watch without feeling guilty.” * James Othmer‘s favourite novels that capture the grind and absurdity of the office. * Nicolai Howalt‘s abstract photographs of car crash textures inspired by Ballard. * East End Shopfronts, 1988. * The novel is centuries older than we’ve been told. * Bret Easton Ellis on the horror of humanity. * Frederick Barthelme leaves the Mississippi Review sets up Rick Magazine. * In this month’s Creative Review, Will Self talks about his grudging admiration for the ad industry [paywall] * Cultivated hysteria: The noir novels of David Peace (via) * Legendary punk artist Linder Sterling talks. * A Joy Division cake. * Casting Kurt Cobain. * Primary school ‘street’ talk breeding illiteracy. And Tony White’s response. * Bryon Gysin‘s ‘Permutation Poems’, permuting. * Alain de Botton on Auguste Comte, the atheist who tried to found a religion. * Rarely heard Phil Spector b-sides. * ZE Records. * The Alan Lomax Archive just launched a YouTube channel (via) * When did Bob Dylan start looking like Vincent Price? (via) * Lautréamont’s poison-drenched pages. * The call girl turned councillor and author. * Wu Ming reviewed in The Independent and London dates announced for October (3:AM interviews here). * The future of Smoke in the balance (3:AM interview here).

Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel:

Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.

As part of an evening devoted to Freud and Surrealism at the Barbican Art Gallery on 29 July, the International Necronautical Society will hold forth on “Architecture, Neurosis and Death”:

7-10 PM: International Necronautical Society INS Commission on Crypts: Architecture, Neurosis and Death

An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society. The INS is a semi-fictitious organisation founded by author and artist Tom McCarthy, closely modelled on the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.

We are reopening poetry submissions. Please send them in a Word doc to Darran Anderson, 3:AM‘s Poetry Editor. Don’t forget to include a short, third-person bio and attach a picture (if you have one). Please be patient. We may not be able to respond to everyone. If you haven’t heard back from us within a month, please feel free to send your work elsewhere. Fiction submissions will soon be reopened too.

Plenty to get excited about this autumn with This is England ’86, the scooterboy sequel to Shane Meadows’ skinheads and solidarity film. There’s an advance showing of the Channel 4 series at the BFI Southbank on August 25.