3:AM Magazine
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18/06/13: The Missing Links
Vintage motel postcards. * Faulkner cubed. * In the Undercroft. * This year’s Paris Literary Prize (the second) goes to C. E. Smith for Body Electric. * Maurice Nadeau R.I.P. * Maurice Nadeau by John Calder. * Trailer for forthcoming J.D. Salinger documentary. * On this year’s Serpentine Gallery pavillion. * Nice interview with Olivier Assayas. * Sofia Coppola in Interview magazine. * Geoff Dyer on Garry Winogrand. * Pocket Notes “documents process, charts, maps, lists, graphs, diagrams, drafts, recordings, and the leftovers of experimentation”. * Borges takes a leak (see above). * An interview with Masha Tupitsyn: “[D]eep emotion in this age is a radical act”. * The shock of the New, 1982. * Desert modernism. * A new translation of Kafka‘s The Man Who Disappeared. * William Gaddis: a very fine shambles. * More on the letters of William Gaddis. * From Old Notebooks. * Terry Eagleton reviews Paul Morley‘s The North. * Christine Schutt “The Duchess of Albany“. * Krasznahorkai and Sæterbakken. * Seeing through Edward Hopper. * The Charleston Bulletin Supplements. * Celebrating Federico Garcia Lorca. * John Updike interview, 1968. * A memory of Arturo Vega. * Black Flag and Raymond Pettibon. * James Wood on Rachel Kushner‘s The Flamethrowers: “It is nominally a historical novel (it’s set in the mid-seventies), and, I suppose, also a realist one (it works within the traditional grammar of verisimilitude). But it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading”. * Rachel Kushner interviewed in the New Yorker, Paris Review, and by Hari Kunzru. * Art and photography curated by Rachel Kushner. * David Bowie and The Riot Squad cover the Velvet Underground in 1967. * Writers and children. * Sorbonne Confidential. * Punk is dad. * Niven Govinden Black Bread White Beer reviewed. * The disappontment of cinema. * Feminist photography from the 1970s. * “In Case of Emergency” by Matthew Newton. * On gesture writing. * Dan Holloway on “Alt Lit: “At what point is recycling the creation of something new — at what point does it cease being theft and start becoming a necessary part of progress? The mainstreaming of fanfiction has hinted at the question and perhaps it is Alt Lit that forces it into conversation”. * World Literature Series 2012-13. * Mickey Mouse in Vietnam, 1968. * Tibor Fischer on Céline: “…a tone that would become a staple of late-20th-century writing, through to Johnny Rotten gurning at his audience”. * Craig Brown: “Sebald was just Ronnie Corbett with indigestion”. * Manchester’s legendary Twisted Wheel club bulldozed.
Follow The Missing Links on Twitter: @andrewgallix
11/06/13: The Missing Links
Download Valéry‘s Monsieur Teste. * William Gaddis‘s correspondence. * 3:AM‘s David Winters on Micheline Aharonian Marcom‘s A Brief History of Yes. * An interview with Lars Iyer. * Five new stories by Lydia Davis. More here. * An extract from Lynne Tillman‘s work-in-progress, Men and Apparitions. * Spectral brides. * The Returned. * 10 artists who destroyed their own works. * 3:AM‘s Greg Gerke on James Salter. * Christy Wampole on the “essayification of everything“. * Ben Myers‘s new book. * Sid Vicious on his way to a Bowie gig, 1973 [see picture]. * An interview with Anne Carson. * John Douglas Miller on the haunting avant-garde. * B. S. Johnson and the amniotic fluid of words. * The consecution of Gordon Lish. * An excerpt from Gordon Lish‘s Peru. * Jack Gilbert interviewed by Gordon Lish. * Grid politics. * Nabokov on The Metamorphosis. * The bad luck of Samuel Menashe. * Nicholas Lezard on Xavier de Maistre‘s A Journey Around My Room. * Robert Macfarlane in Camden Lock. * Landscope, a 2005 film written and narrated by Tom McCarthy about Jem Finer (of The Pogues)’s work: “It was never shown due to a concern that they [the BBC] had too much conceptual art on that week”. * On William Gass‘s The Tunnel. * William Gass on A Humument. * 100 literary rumours by Blake Butler: “Gary Lutz has beaten Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! more than 400 times”. * Edouard Levé‘s Amérique. * Rest in pieces: Otto Muehl is no more. * An interview with John Gray. * Rachel Kushner interviewed. * Another interview here. * Rachel Kushner reviews Richard Hell‘s memoir. * A review of The Flamethrowers. * Rachel Kushner‘s success is not due to her gender. * Romola Garai on Pussy Riot. * Ex-Menswear Johnny Dean speaks. * Maurice Blanchot on Bachelard. * Deleuze et Blanchot. * A documentary about Chris Marker. * Printing out the internet. * George Plimpton on film. * Just another IKEA catalog: cheap Swedish furniture in amateur porn. * An interview with TV Smith. * Matthew De Abaitua on being Will Self‘s “live-in amanuensis” in the early 90s. * Will Self‘s rules for reading aloud. * Will Self on his punk / post-punk days (video). Thanks to Dirk Felleman. * Against Alice Munro. * The task of the translator. * Tim Parks: “…[I]t is impossible to translate a work from the past and not be influenced by what has happened since”. * On literature in translation. * All life is an act of translation. * An excerpt from Tao Lin‘s Taipei. * Ned Beauman interviewed. * Ned Beauman on gang stalking. * Winnie-the-Pooh read by AA Milne, 1929. * Towards JG Ballard‘s Crash, 1971. * A new story by Nicholas Rombes. * Digital The Rite of Spring. * James Bridle at the ICA on 15 June. * Wu Ming Foundation‘s top 10 utopias. * Wu Ming in the New Statesman. * Borges‘s course on English literature: “Borges was fond of the idea that an inability to forget would make life unbearable and meaningless. There are so many things we can do without. Professor Borges is one of them”. * 5 unsolved literary mysteries. * How words saved Matt Haig‘s life. * Outsider photography. * Alan Moore interviewed in The Believer. * How to read Agamben. * Alexandre Kojève: after revolutionary terror. * Robert Coover reads Italo Calvino‘s “The Daughters of the Moon“. * Marcel Schwob: the passive adventurer. * Does great literature make us better? * Knausgaard‘s A Man in Love reviewed in the Telegraph. * Matt Smith: the rise and fall of the hipster Doctor. * Bernard-Henri Lévy on art and philosophy. * Street art has become the establishment. * “Psycho Killer“. * “The Cherry Tree” by Sheila Heti. * Teju Cole on Google’s Macchia. * The first picture of the moon, taken by John William Draper, 1839. * “Merde” by Leos Carax. * Low theory. * McKenzie Watk on the bourgeois novel. * Cendrars revient. * A Different Stripe. * The Riot Grrrl collection. * Granta podcast: George Saunders. * Tom Sharpe R.I.P. * Campus fiction. * The End of Oulipo? * The Sun on a topless book club. * Craig Taylor talks about Five Dials: “One [subscriber] prints copies of the magazine at her workplace and then puts them in a folder with her company’s crest emblazoned on the front. She then leans back at her desk and reads Five Dials with a look on her face that might imply she is examining a spreadsheet”. * An interview with Irvine Welsh. * Richard Linklater‘s Slacker, 1991. * Poetry in rabbits. * Gilles Deleuze on cinema. * An interview with Paula Rego. * James Joyce on being in love. * A poem by Roberto Bolaño. * The MLA on how to cite a Tweet. * The Electric Prunes‘ psychedelic liturgies. * How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. * The UK to become world’s biggest gallery. * Nice piece on Gatsby. * Oulipolooza!
Follow The Missing Links on Twitter: @andrewgallix.
10/06/13: Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint
The very talented Nicholas Rombes — a regular 3:AM contributor — has announced that he was working on a twenty-year novel (2009-2029) entitled Nightmare Trails at Knifepoint! The first part is scheduled for 2019, and the second for 2029. While you wait, check out the author’s fine piece on Shane Carruth‘s Upstream Color.
03/06/13: Wallace Stevens Speaks to Our Time
You’ve seen the titles of many internet “posts,” “articles,” and “think-pieces”:
“The Ten Most Overrated Writers”
“Why Terrence Malick Isn’t as Good as the Critics Think”
“James Salter: “It’s hard to think of any other women on the spur of the moment here”
“Why Stephen King Hates The Shining“
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens’s Racism”
“Who in Academia is Afraid of Criticizing Virginia Woolf?”
Wallace Stevens’s correspondence with José Rodríguez Feo, a Cuban editor, translator, and critic nearly forty years younger than him, is certainly the most unlikely, but also maybe the richest in the The Letters of Wallace Stevens. Stevens spoke to Rodríguez Feo about many things he would often not touch when others queried, especially his views on his contemporaries.
On May 23, 1947 Stevens wrote to Rodríguez Feo:
I did not see Time magazine, but from what you say gather that someone has taken a crack at [T.S.] Eliot. Someone takes a crack at everybody sooner or later: not only at everybody but at everything. In the long run, as Poe said in one of his essays which nobody reads, the generous man comes to be regarded as the stingy man; the beautiful woman comes to be regarded as an old witch; the scholar becomes the ignoramus. The hell with all this. For my own part I like to live in a classic atmosphere, full of my own gods and be true to them until I have some better authority than a merely contrary opinion for not being true to them. We have all to learn to hold fast.
Yours very truly,
Wallace Stevens*
*p.558
29/05/13: Lutz, Haskell, Sparling, Sparks, Kloss reading in Brooklyn May 31st
Gary Lutz reading; cat listening
I’m happy to host the following writers at Unnameable Books in Prospect Heights Brooklyn on Friday, May 31st (7pm):
John Haskell is the author of a short-story collection, I Am Not Jackson Pollock (FSG, 2003), and the novels American Purgatorio (FSG, 2005) and Out of My Skin (FSG, 2009). Interview at Stop Smiling.
Robert Kloss is the author of The Alligators of Abraham, as well as the upcoming hybrid text The Desert Places, co-authored with Amber Sparks. His short fiction has been published in Crazyhorse, Gargoyle, Unsaid, and elsewhere. He can be found online at robert-kloss.com.
Gary Lutz is the author of Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, Partial List of People to Bleach, and Divorcer. Interview with David Winters.
Amber Sparks is the author of May We Shed These Human Bodies, released by Curbside Splendor in 2012, and the upcoming The Desert Places, co-authored with Robert Kloss. Her work has been widely published in print and online and you can find some of it at ambernoellesparks.com or follow her on Twitter @ambernoelle.
Ken Sparling has written six novels. His latest is Intention, Implication, Wind from Pedlar Press. His first, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, published by Knopf in 1996 was recently reissued by Mud Luscious Press. Interview with Sean Lovelace.
Thank you,
Greg Gerke
*** Look out for a new Gary Lutz story in 3AM Magazine this summer
28/05/13: The Missing Links
Simon Critchley’s suicide note workshop. * Writers’ letters: to burn or not to burn? * Must poets write? * 10 reasons not to be a writer by Matt Haig. * Words written and unwritten by Kevin Reid, George Szirtes and Bobby Parker. * Things coming apart. * Paul Theroux: “It’s very liberating to just disappear, very liberating”. * Raymond Roussel, millionaire: “He makes sport of all Paris”! * Lydia Davis wins the 2013 Man Booker International Prize. * Lydia Davis in conversation with Emily Stokes, 2012. * A 2011 interview with Lydia Davis in Gigantic magazine, 2011. * Ali Smith on Lydia Davis. * Lydia Davis and microblogging fiction. * PennSound audio archive of Lydia Davis readings, 1983-2010. * Lydia Davis’s “Break It Down” read by James Salter. * James Salter interviewed by Stuart Evers. * Gerhard Richter‘s November series. * On Fernando Pessoa, the metaphysical courier. * Steve Jones and Paul Cook interview, November 1977. * Donald Sutherland on Stan Brakhage. * Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Decisive Moment, 1973. * Clash City Rockers: “[T]he chemistry of the four us is so unique. But also each person is the sum of their experiences when they play music. You’re expressing yourself in a way that is not quantifiable”. * Chris Marker and the spiral of time. * A celebration of NOON. * Susana Medina says “no” and “ah”. * Garry Winogrand‘s classic and unseen photographs. * German stereotypes. * Objects lost and found at Grand Central. * Missed connections. * A loose adaptation of Max Ernst‘s La Femme 100 têtes. * When Northern Ireland’s punk history went up in flames. * Keith Haring exhibition in Paris. * Louise Erdrich: “I approach the work as though I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life”. * The philosophy of immortality. * At home with Patti Smith. * “Culture is not a thing with an essence; it is continuously in the process of becoming something else.” * The essay, an exercise in doubt. * Ismail Kadaré: “The writer is always to some extent in exile…because he is somehow outside, separated from others“. * Italo Calvino‘s correspondence. * An interview with The Fits. * When Kurt Cobain met William Burroughs. * How long can the ‘Keep Calm’ trend carry on? * Guy Debord action figure (pictured). * The Smiths‘s debut TV interview, 1984. * A 2008 BBC adaptation of JG Ballard‘s “The Enormous Space“. * Harry Matthews: “The Poet as Outlaw“. * Postmodernism and the administration of fear. * Adam Thirlwell podcast at Granta. * Brian Dillon on Eileen Gray: “She produced a pure black lacquered square to be mounted on a wall like a flat-screen TV in 1915 — the same year as Malevich’s more celebrated painting”. * Paul Delany on Vancouver as postmodern city. * George Saunders interviewed. * Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank‘s Pull My Daisy, 1959.
Follow me on Twitter: @andrewgallix
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
: 3:AM in Pseuds Corner!
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.
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:
Best,
* Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems and Translations p.287
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
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