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19/05/13: The Missing Links

Chris Petit‘s The Museum of Loneliness. * A brief history of appropriative writing. * If streets are sentences. * Celebrating the A303. * An interview with Glenn Branca. * The Japanese have a name for it: tsundoku. * What next for Joshua Cohen?: “It’s the book Nabokov would’ve written had he liked Joyce”. * Robert Walser: scribe of the small. * An introduction to Josef Winkler. * Ben Marcus on “The Dark Arts“. * On Anne Carson‘s Red Doc>. * He is perhaps the closest Ireland has come to producing a Susan Sontag“: Brian Dillon interviewed by Kevin Breathnach: “My patience for fiction that isn’t very sophisticated is kind of limited. This sounds stupid, but I like really, really, really good fiction. I get bored very easily with what you might call ‘middling’ fiction”. * Ben Greenman and Darin Strauss in conversation. * An interview with Maggie Dubris. * WG Sebald‘s legacy. * Sebald‘s A Place in the Country reviewed. * Tracking Sebald. * A conceptual literature bibliography. * Stop the South Bank developers! * Femen. * Mike Covey‘s “The Offbeats” (featuring Ben Myers, Joseph Ridgwell, Matthew Coleman and a brief cameo by Lee Rourke). * A forthcoming documentary about JD Salinger. * Generation X to reform? * An interview with David Shields. * Faction of the Fox (thanks guys!) * Prozac and artistic creativity. * Garbage girls. * Iain Sinclair and Jonathan Meades in conversation (video). * A museum devoted to East Germany. * Nina Hagen interviewed. (See her infamous live masturbation lesson here.). * Kafka‘s Metamorphosis — read backwards. * “Did you hear about the Oulipian stripper? She delivered a lipogram before vanishing, with an invisible wink.” * Ten Lessons in Theory. * Stanislaw Lem‘s Summa Technologiae. * Punk as fashion, music, and theory. * Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee‘s correspondence. * Bill Drummond. * As I Lay Dying trailer. * Adrian Tahourdin on the one and only Iggy Pop. * John Berger‘s G. * Laurie Penny‘s “Saudade“. * Quiet Paris. * Dan Holloway on the Albion Beatnik bookshop‘s viral success. * Empty hotel corridors. * Retyping The Great Gatsby on a 1936 Remington.

Twitter: andrewgallix

Posted by Andrew Gallix / Permanent link / Comments (0)

Our job is done: we’ve finally made it into Private Eye‘s legendary Pseuds Corner! OK, it’s cheating a bit. The offending article — which appeared in “The Missing Links” — is in fact a quote from Dan Holloway about his wordless novel Evie and Guy. Thanks Dan, we’re sharing this accolade with you.

Posted by Andrew Gallix / Permanent link / Comments (0)

18/05/13: The More Difficult to Pronounce, the Better

Hello,

I am editing fiction for 3:AM Magazine this summer. Guidelines.

A couple of things I would like to add:

Ezra Pound’s poem “Portrait d’une femme” was “rejected by the North American Review in January 1912, according to Pound, on the grounds that ‘I had used the letter ‘r’ three times in the first line, and that it was very difficult to pronounce.’” *

Line: “Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,”

I don’t edit this way and frown upon those who do; in fact, the more difficult to pronounce, the better.

James Salter: “The secret of making [art] is simple. Discard everything that is good enough.”

I am not looking for toss-offs or something “good enough” for an internet journal. This is 3:AM Magazine, it’s been here for over thirteen years, that’s centuries in internet time.

If this is brusque, think of the process this way. Roughly 15% of all submissions (print, internet, and otherwise) never get replied to. I am replying to all because I take this seriously.

Here are links to two shorter stories that I was grateful to be an editor for:

Amber Sparks’s “May We Shed These Human Bodies”

Lance Olsen’s “Robert Smithson”

Best,

Greg Gerke

* Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations p.287

Posted by David Winters / Permanent link / Comments (0)

17/05/13: Critics Who May Not Yet Exist

Hi. Susan Tomaselli is taking a well-earned sabbatical from 3:AM this summer, so I’ll be stepping in as co-editor in chief, focusing on non-fiction. I’ve been commissioning for 3:AM since 2011, so some of you will know me, and will have worked with me already. But I’d like to say that, right now, I’m open for speculative pitches and submissions, and will be reading them continuously. So get in touch. I’ll be especially pleased to hear from you if you have an idea for an essay, interview or book review related to one of the following three areas, which I’m keen to increase our coverage of:

– Fiction in translation
– Contemporary American fiction, particularly work published by small presses
– Critical theory and continental philosophy

A brief word about book reviews: I love long-form criticism, and rarely impose word limits. As long as your writing is strong and self-consistent, I won’t ask you to simplify it for the sake of “accessibility.” Similarly, for fiction reviews, I don’t demand banal contextualization or plodding plot synopses. Online, the form and function of criticism are fair game for redefinition. I encourage criticism that is creative, unconventional, and that brings books into active collision with the lived experience of the critic. Of course, I’ll happily publish a thoughtful journalistic review. But if you’re willing to write something a little wilder, I’ll welcome it with open arms. If you’re wondering what I mean, here’s a favourite quote, from Geoffrey Hartman:

It is not an exaggeration to say that the critic has become a retainer to those in our society who want not the difficult reality but merely the illusion of literacy… if he becomes a journalist or reviewer he flatters, cajoles, and admonishes the authors of books whose profits keep the publishers happy and his own job relatively secure. The only critic, therefore, whom we must take seriously is one who may not yet exist: who overextends his art, having decided that his role is creative as well as judicious. The critic’s words should enter the world of art even as the arts and institutions he comments on have entered his. As the work of art is an event in the history of interpretation, so the work of interpretation is an event in the history of the work of art.

Thanks, and best wishes,
David Winters

Posted by David Winters / Permanent link / Comments (0)

12/05/13: The Missing Links

The many identities of Fernando Pessoa. * Rare 1952 William Faulkner documentary. * The London nobody sings. * Kindergarde. * The Academy of Modern Ruins is turning an abandoned petrol station on Route 66 into The Philosopher’s Library. * Nostalgia for the Net. * Rhys Tranter‘s fascinating interview with Rick Cluchey. * 3:AM‘s Anna Aslanyan on the Christine Brooke-Rose symposium in the LRB blog. More by Michael Caines over at the TLS blog: “It appears that a ‘new genealogy’ of English post-war fiction, hoped for by [Tom] McCarthy, is already with us, if only we have eyes to see it”. * On Christine Brooke-Rose‘s Textermination and Xorandor. * An interview with translator Kate Briggs apropos of Roland Barthes‘s The Preparation of the Novel. * Paul Celan reads “Todesfuge“. * Thoughts on a sentence by Robert Walser. * Stephen Sparks on Alfred Starr Hamilton: “Can we see Hamilton as New Jersey’s answer to Robert Walser?” * Tzara vs. Burroughs / Gysin. * “Terrence Malick has legendary status for two things: the movies he has made, and the movies he has not made.” * Best translated books awards. * The invention of David Bowie. * Deborah Levy at Faber Academy: “What is the elephant in your novel?” * Tim Parks on reading it wrong. * “The Carmen Horse“, suite et fin: “The image that cannot–must not–be shown. Every narrative conceals a secret, no matter how small”. * Modernist magazines. * Freud’s couch needs £5,000 restoration job. * Christopher Turner on Freud‘s couch. * Lars Iyer‘s Exodus reviewed in The Literateur, as well as by 3:AM‘s David Winters. * Zazie in the Metro (full film). * On techno-primitivism. * Gavin James Bower on Claude Cahun. * Raymond Carver edited by Gordon Lish. * Sheila Rock‘s wonderful photographs chronicling punk‘s evolution from “individual creativity” to “collective identity”. * Jonathan Ross’s London punk demi-monde polaroids. * A rare Joe Stevens picture of Chrissie Hynde and Kate Simon wearing the iconic naked boy T-shirt from McLaren and Westwood‘s Sex (early 1976). * Paul Gorman‘s archaeology of the Anarchy shirt. * Bryan Waterman reviews Richard Hell’s autobiography. * Richard Hell‘s matutinal routine. * The Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City, 1979. * Jello Biafra on Oprah, 1990. * The current Chinese punk scene. * Punk and Situationism. * On the many failures of the Met’s punk exhibition. More here. * The new Mods. * The Electric Circus (the NYC club, not the Manchester punk venue). * Celebrating the bicentenary of Kierkegaard‘s birth. * Will Self on Modernism, pessimism, WG Sebald, post-industial landscapes and the British psyche, and Thatcher’s funeral. * Desert silence. * Why does the world exist? * Proust‘s illustrated poems. * Ray Harryhausen R.I.P. * Finnish headgear. * Tracey Emin‘s photo album. * John Waters documentary, 1993. * John Cale and Jonathan Richman on Aussie TV, 1983. * Spolia. * London fictions. * James Joyce guitar hero, 1915. * New Yorker handwrites King James Bible. * A guide to imaginary relationships. * [Out of Nothing]. * On Gogol: Dead Souls “is all the better for remaining unfinished”. * Bartleby in the University of California. * Alan McGee launches new label. * Lynne Tillman on the life and death of images (video). * On David Lynch. * HP Lovecraft‘s stories. * Taylor Mead R.I.P. * Andy Warhol shopping for Campbell’s soup, 1965. * Beach beauties. * The footed void. * Krasznahorkai on Bookworm. * Grammar rules everyone should adhere to. * John Berger: drawing is discovery. * Nicholas Lezard on Dante. * On marginalia. * Jack Kerouac‘s restless odyssey. * Retro couples. * Stuart Evers reviews Knausgaard‘s A Man in Love. * Applying neuroscience to literature. * Alex Niven interviewed. * John Cooper Clarke: top 10 poems.