What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
3:PM Magazine: ‘Thirteen O’Clock’ by Sam Jordison
Fiction: ‘New Pen’ by Paul Ewen
Poetry: Monika Rinck in Maintenant, SJ Fowler’s series on contemporary European poets, ‘Six Poems’ by Monica Rinck, Paul Stubbs on Gregory Corso’s Gasoline
Reviewed: Max Dunbar on Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God & Ian Buruma’s Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, Karl Whitney on Tom McDonough’s The Situationists and The City
Non-fiction: ‘From Enid Blyton to Porn and Back Again: Childhood Reading As an Accident Waiting to Happen’ by Stewart Home:
Another example of someone failing to understand our schoolkid culture was the very well intentioned student teacher who took over the music class for a term in the mid-seventies. Up to that point we’d only been taught classical music, which we didn’t like, and so the student thought he’d try and relate to us by giving classes about Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited among other things. This educational progressive couldn’t understand why we hated this as much as classics, when to us it was obvious that Dylan made music for grammar school wankers. Northern soul was the pre-eminent musical culture for the hipsters among us, with jazz funk about to come in, and with the rest of the kids just liking typical seventies hit parade dross.
By 1975 when I turned 13, I’d also discovered that books could be used as talismans. I had two in particular that I’d leave on top of my desk at school to wind up the teachers. The first was My Queen And I by republican MP Willie Hamilton. I hated the monarchy and thought it should be abolished, a view that my teachers didn’t share. Hamilton upset them because he called the Queen ‘a clockwork doll’, Princess Margaret ‘a floozy’, and Prince Charles ‘a twerp’. I obtained Hamilton’s book when it first appeared in 1975, a good two years before the Sex Pistols gave a further boost to widespread anti-monarchist feelings with their song ‘God Save The Queen’. I read My Queen and I when I acquired it, but the copy of Das Kapital: A Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx that I sometimes placed on my desk wasn’t read until after I left school. Still it served a purpose when I was 13 and 14, since it caused a great deal of upset.
[Image: The Sound of Drowning]
First posted: Sunday, March 14th, 2010.
