3:AM Magazine

Deborah Levy‘s “Migrations to Elsewhere“. * An interview with Stewart Home. * Martin Heidegger talks. * Tributes to WG Sebald. * An extract from Sebald‘s A Place in My Country. * On fragments. * John Cage on a TV game show, 1960. * Notes on Werner Herzog. * E.M. Cioran. * Cabinet: a magazine without [...]

After the opening epoch we confront a ‘dense matrix of overlapping and interacting actors and forces – the infrastructure of network protocols, hardware and standards, activist groups, hackers, lawyers, demography – with feedback loops , arms races, struggle over resources, and reinventions all going into making spam.’ This epoch is about developing threads of the concept of community, entwining the capture of attention with making money, collective organization and the law. Spammers of this epoch ended up badly. They tended to be shallow and damaged people. In this time spam feigned respectability and in the end failed.

Richard Marshall reviews Finn Bruton’s ‘Spam: A Shadow History Of The Internet.

Kit Caless reviews Lee Rourke‘s excellent Varroa Destructor, forthcoming from 3:AM Press: “There is a twinkling humour that runs through the book: a kind of funny nihilism through which Rourke brings a dark beauty to the mundane”. * On Félix Guattari‘s unpublished SF film script. * An excerpt from Iain Sinclair‘s forthcoming American Smoke. * [...]

I can’t tell you any reason that Kathy Acker, my mother, and my dog Peggy would become linked in a text other than that they all died, and I witnessed it. Any effort I could make to be random would never escape that: it bends my light. There are slight overlaps like gender, and they fact that both women knew and loved my dog, but in the end the book reckons with the unrepresentable, not what is known. So maybe this brings me right back around to Kathy despite myself. Our last conversations were really about the unknown, about death, but they were always in the form of allegories or dreams. She couldn’t say she was dying, so everything happened in fragments or between the lines.

Maxi Kim interviews Matias Viegener.

Home writes with the barmy intensity of someone cancelling superfluity. He rocks ideas from serious to gimp and back without batting an eye-lid. His fix is bold: here he junks up loose first person narration as controlled and artful as anything in Foster Wallace, say, but without the grandeur and pomp swooningly all-consuming. His unapologetic venery is done as formulaic pulp grind-house sex. S&M snuff scenes in lurid and hilarious detail that cut across the artful deposits of cultural-study tropes covering the whole performance like sand are his deft stock-in-trade. It’s all a huge, like, whelm.

Richard Marshall on Stewart Home & his anti-realist novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane .

The whole book seems to work in terms of what De Keyser and Decortis in the 1980s described as an attempt to structure events, processes, actions and products in terms of a ‘continual process operator’. There are several processes that have been brought to light as important to this sort of project. A key one is anticipation. Anticipation permits readers and all those involved to get ahead of any event with deftness and precision. Anticipation can be probabilistic where we scan parameters before everything goes out of order, selecting internalised statistical structures for this purpose, as if someone had prior knowledge of the probability of things breaking down. Reading and scanning every other page at speed and relying on previous times, previous documents, gives you enough to go on to anticipate how long, how far, how deep we’re going, according to this model. Illuminated by, say, one’s recollection of Carl Einstein and Georges Batailles and their Documents project, as well as the Wallace Berman Semina project, for example, we get a sense of this book’s purpose.

Richard Marshall reviews Book Works‘ Bring The Dead Back To Life: Again A Time Machine: From Distribution to Archive.

Marinetti recorded in 1935. * The spectacle of disintegration. * A Crass documentary. * Utopian for beginners. * The phantom phone booth. * On Mary Ruefle. * Mary Ruefle: “I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to”. * Back to Berlin. * The novel [...]

A writer can either grow or shrink and, in times of history, surrendering to mediocrity finds easy justification in multitudinous displays of precedent. Her uncompromising realism refuses self-serving or sanitised verdicts. Her sympathetic knowledge of the Russian Revolutionary tradition strengthened her resolve throughout. Her socialism raised suffering to a higher level but she saw through to the dull, low philistinism of the Soviet Union of Stalinism and after. Her analytical and demystifying accounts of her own milieu under the most extreme pressure are uncompromising, vivid and reachy. They are truthful, analytical and psychologically insightful accounts offering neither bromide nor sensationalism. In this they astonish. Her portraits of her doomed writers are of legendary children.

Richard Marshall reviews Lidiya Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations .

The lure of the writer’s cabin. * The literary kingdom of Redonda. * Greg Baxter interviewed. * It’s a Bad Brains Christmas, Charlie Brown. * An interview with Christine Schutt on Bookworm. * Against architecture. * Nothing will have taken place. * Desperately seeking Susan Sontag. * Why Thai women cut off their husbands’ penises. [...]

As for the funding of the magazine there’s no money coming in and none going out, which I believe is partially responsible for its success. My idea of success, that is. Removing that influential and often dictatorial factor has liberated Paraphilia and preserved its integrity. And that was another motive behind the magazine’s creation: to give phenomenal art – sans the industries’ grip – to anyone who would love and appreciate it. I can’t say for certain that Paraphilia Magazine will always be an entirely non-monetary (ad)venture, but for the time being.

David Hoenigman interviews Díre McCain.