“Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy.” Ben Marcus interviewed. * All the Words from Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things - An Archaeology of Human Sciences” in Alphabetical Order. * Ewan Morrison on the self-epublishing bubble. * Jonathan Franzen’s warning that e-books are damaging for society. * The Jesus and Mary Chain riot. * Leonard Cohen on how to read poetry. * Everything Woody Allen has ever written has been on a typewriter he bought when he was 16. * Alternative titles for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. * The paranormal Peter Sellers. * The 50 best David Lynch characters. * P.G. Wodehouse’s American Psycho. * The King’s Road in the summer of 1976. * Why Paul Auster isn’t going to Turkey anytime soon. * Folio, the “French equivalent of our Penguin paperbacks,” turns 40. * Gabriel Josipovici on Alfred Jarry. * The very first time the Sex Pistols were mentioned in the press. * Zizek!, a documentary. * The evil genius of David Shrigley. * Jim Jarmusch’s vampire love story. * “I do not listen to music while writing. I feel my own rhythm would go out of tune if I listened to music.” Banana Yoshimoto. * In praise of Mina Loy. * Jeanette Winterson on the male mystique of Henry Miller. * Brendan Behan’s Dublin, a 1966 documentary. * Orson Welles narrates Future Shock. * Madrid’s Raymond Roussel exhibition. * Virginia Woolf’s BBC lecture “Craftmanshp” (audio). * Lydia Davis talks Nabokov’s marginalia & translating Flaubert (video). * James Joyce & Walter Benjamin in Paris. * Georges Perec on how he structured Life A User’s Manual (video). * The memoirs of Richard Seaver recall an avant-garde golden age in Paris. * Keith Haring & William Burroughs‘ collaboration, The Valley. * Michael Levenson’s Modernism reviewed. * A scrupulous fidelity, on Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser. * Geoff Dyer on unusual histories. * “Dyer’s approach to the heaviness of Tarkovskian cinema..is to treat it as lightly as possible.” * A user’s guide to Roberto Bolaño. * “If you have read several books by Don DeLillo, sooner or later you will have a Don DeLillo moment.” * Truth vs. fiction. * The Death of the Cyberflâneur. * February’s Words Without Borders is international graphic novels. * More on the Lloyd Johnson exhibition. * Teju Cole’s small fates. * Paris in children’s books. * The sound of brain waves. * A tribute to Derek Jarman. * Girls and skateboards. * J. G. Ballard on the Disneyfication of museums. * 30 writers talk about God and reason. * The greatest books of all time chosen by 125 authors.

An in-depth interview with 3:AM’s one-man avant-garde movement Matthew Wascovich in the Village Voice. * The trouble with productivity. * Back to the Futurism. * David Foster Wallace on the future of fiction in the information age (video). * The phantom metro stations of Paris. * The unknown pleasures of Mickey Mouse. * Ray Bradbury’s 1965 trip to Disneyland. * The 2006 South Bank Show devoted to J.G. Ballard. * Steve Reich’s “Radiohead Rewrite”. * How to piss off the Germans. * What makes a cult author? * The cult books of 2012. * “It’s dangerous to be an artist. That’s what we talk about in Naked Lunch.” David Cronenberg. * “Transition & the old grammar forms no longer useful..” Paris Review excerpt letters of William Burroughs. * Burroughs 23. * More than 100 William Burroughs MP3s. * Patti Smith, the Mother Courage of Rock. * Crass’s Thatchergate tape. * The digital resurrection of Sex and Guts magazine. * Blake Butler on Nikanor Teratologen. * Interesting piece on the legacy of Empire (the band). * More on the Lloyd Johnson exibition in London. * The Ramones on NYC cable TV, 1978. * Mag Resistance. * Soundscapes of North American cities. * Notebook on Cities and Culture. * Momus interviewed. * The Rest is Noise Festival. * Roxana Gay on running a micropress. * What happens to marginalia in the age of the Kindle? * ‘Larkin put considerable effort into establishing his persona…present[ing] himself as a full-time librarian who, at the end of a day’s work, after preparing and eating his solitary dinner and washing up, wrote unpretentious and “unliterary” poems, based on common experiences and the emotions they prompted.‘ * Alain de Botton argues that art should be less ambiguous; Rhys Tranter wonders if he’s right. * Where have all the book illustrators gone? * ‘Belief & Technique for Modern Prose’, Jack Kerouac’s 30-point list of “essentials”. * Pie-chart of Haruki Murakami themes. * Copyrights Wake: SOPA, James Joyce & the future of intellectual property. * Orson Welles narrates animation of Plato’s cave. * Raymond Roussel & the upside of crazy. * Tracing Rimbaud’s mysterious Java journey. * 10 offbeat literary works of non-English writers. * “I have always regarded translation as the best school a novelist can have.” Juan Gabriel Vásquez (& the Room for London project). * Mark Stewart’s new single. * Social networks and the death of privacy. * Lionel Rolfe and literary L.A. * A video tour of Salvador Dali’s house. * Michel Houellebecq on de Tocqueville, Nietzsche and democracy. * A new review of Masha Tupitsyn’s Laconia. * W.G. Sebald, politique de la mélancolie.

Marcel Duchamp on French TV, 1963. * A new short story by Lydia Davis. * Tim Parks vs David Shields. More here. * A critique of logocentrism. * Installing the Lloyd Johnson exhibition. * Justin Taylor interviews Gary Lutz. * Unsaid Magazine. * Mark Fisher on the non-places in Steve McQueen’s non-film. * The atemporality of “ruin porn”. * Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! * William Gass. * Hari Kunzru and The Satanic Verses. * Twitter avant la lettre: Félix Fénéon. * Mark Baumer’s 50 books in a year project. * Generation X - live! And on the box (introduced by Marc Bolan). * Ned Beauman on Quentin Meillassoux. * ‘Killing Digital Curation’. * Günter Grass, artist (via @BibliOdyssey). * An extract from Noah Cicero’s The Insurgent. * David Winters on Ben Marcus‘ Flame Alphabet. * Blake Butler interviewed. * Guillaume Apollinaire’s Little Auto reviewed. * The wait for Harry Crews is over. * Trotsky speech in Copenhagen, 1932 (video). * Geoff Dyer’s Zona. * “Powerful documents of 1950s discontent & its alternatives.” The TLS on the newly re-issued Terry Taylor, Colin Wilson & Laura Del-Rivos. * The New Inquiry’s Un(der)known Writers series. * Simon Critchley on the eurozone crisis as Greek tragedy: “Tragedy requires our collusion with that fate. In other words, it requires a measure of freedom”. * Amazing pictures of Hells Angels, 1965. * Alain de Botton attacks art for art’s sake. * An American documentary on David Bowie from 1980. * Kafka’s Modernist lineage. * Roberto Bolaño on Neruda, Kafka, and the abyss. * Luc Sante on Patti Smith. * A Kevin Cummins / Joy Division exhibition. * The Waterstones 11 (includes Jenni Fagan). * Vintage London newsreels. * London’s Soho in 1973. * Robert Birnbaum interviews Russell Banks. * Sport as literature. * Mark SaFranko interviewed. * “Cinema has become more hyperbolic and I think that a lot of movies bludgeon you with, if not simplistic, but simple ideas.” David Fincher. * Will Self on the joy of slow. * Adam Mars-Jones on Jeanette Winterson. * The Last Resort. Catalogue here. A skinhead culture Timblr. * What was J.D. Salinger writing all of those years, and is it any good? * The rise of Groupthink. * An interview with Mark E Smith. * David Foster Wallace’s 10 favourite books.

Andrew Gallix on death of literature. * Why write novels at all? * Is literary fiction a sham? * Photography-embedded fiction. * W.G. Sebald’s eleven books to read for a class on major trends in European fiction (via @timesflow). * Why brutality makes David Lynch laugh. * On Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse. * Inside Billy Childish‘ art studio. * David Foster Wallace’s annotated books. * ‘Invisible Girls & Phantom Ladies’, Alan Moore’s 1983 article on sexism in comics. * Tilda Swinton on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. * Will Self on psychiatry. * Michel Foucault lectures 1978-80, English & French [MP3]. * “What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write.” Raymond Chandler writes to Hitchcock. * Reassessing the Saul Bass & Hitchcock collaboration. * Harry Houdini’s great rope escape [video] * 10 legendary bad boys of literature. * Writing the City. * Dubravka Ugrešić on the writer in exile [PDF]. * Lines that shaped Manhattan, in praise of New York’s 200-year-old grid. * Owen Hatherley on why not all skyscrapers are built by phallic capitalism. * Downton Abbey, a reading list. * Akira Kurosawa’s hand-painted storyboards. * A Clockwork Orange location pictures. * Juan Pablos Villalobos interviewed. * Gerhard Richter, the sublime on a postcard. * 100 essays by Jacques Derrida. * Julian Barnes on Félix Fénéon. * Lee Rourke reviewed. * Paul Mason on Northern Soul. * Trinie Dalton interviewed. * Patti Smith on Rimbaud [video]. * 10 great silent sequences in sound movies. * Velvet Underground vs. Andy Warhol. * Gil Scott-Heron vs. Jim Carroll (via @vol1brooklyn).

Modernism and music in 2012. * Remembering Josef Skvorecky & Michael Dummett. * Camus offers half-time analysis of a Paris-Monaco match (not quite Monty Python). * Michael Moorcock on Alfred Jarry, “one of the most influential writers of modern times”. * Details of the three panels to be devoted to Tom McCarthy’s work at the forthcoming Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture. * A Jean-Michel Basquiat interview from 1983. * Nihilists have feelings too, The Millions on Michel Houellebecq. * Wyndham Lewis‘ Tyro 1 & 2 [PDFs]. * “It’s sort of too bad that what once was a safe haven for truly eccentric, outsider artists is no longer that thing.” Adrian Tomine. * A Surrealist party hosted by Salvador Dali. * The Image Bank Post Card Show, 1978. * Travis Jeppesen & Rachel Kendall interviewed at Horror Sleaze Trash.* Iggy Pop and the vacuum (cleaner). * Rhys Tranter asks Robert Darnton if books have a future. * Jenny Diski on the future of publishing. * Can experimentation help print compete with digital? * Sid, Nancy (sounding like Vivienne Westwood) and Stiv Bators on NYC cable TV in 1978. * A Lloyd Johnson retrospective in London. * Youth Culture History. * A Dave Eggers monologue printed on a shower curtain. * Jennifer Miro (The Nuns) R.I.P. * The Pistols, Stranglers and Blondie on Dutch TV, 1977. * EU copyright on James Joyce works ends. * Gordon Bowker on the posthumous power of the (Joyce) literary estate. * The twilight of blues music? (via 3QD). * Where Sibelius fell silent. * Kid literary characters & their grown-up counterparts. * The Rumpus launch letters in the mail. * Natasha Wimmer on translating Bolaño. * Samuel Beckett’s notebooks for Watt. * Harold Pinter in Krapp’s Last Tape. * Slavoj Žižek’s jokes are no laughing matter. * Pingu in The Thing. * F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lost road trip. * When binge drinking used to be the height of fashion. * Christopher Hitchens on Charles Dickens‘ inner child. * A pre-punk Nina Hagen, 1974. * If famous writers had written Twilight. * A brief interview with Richard Hell whose autobiography (up to the age of 34) will be published by Ecco (HarperCollins). More here. * Richard Hell pictures on Tumblr. * Books that are never done being written. * It’s ok to have a point, a defence of literature with an agenda. * Remembering Walter Benjamin on the 120th anniversary of his birth. * “Walser’s work, has come to represent for me language’s failure to adequately represent experience, even as it rails against this.” * A 1966 interview with David Bowie. * On Adam Mars-Jones on Yasujiro Ozu. * Tarkovsky on art. * George Grosz’s drawings for The Good Soldier Švejk. * Lars Iyer on Blanchot & on the situation of American writing. * A literary satellite. * Thanatography. * Words of disorder. * Internalization of crisis. * “The Marbled Swan is something of an homage to Robbe-Grillet, although not in the way you might expect.” Dennis Cooper. * Bob Gruen’s New York Dolls documentary. * “I especially feel sorry for painters, or writers, too, because they don’t get a chance to see their audience.” Laurie Anderson. * Nicholas Lezard on Ellis Sharp’s Intolerable Tongues. * Marc Newson’s tribute to Malcolm McLaren. * Back to 1977. * A Derek Boshier exhibition. * Edmund White: a life in writing. * Daphne Oram & early electronic music. * Man Ray’s home movies (see above pic).

And, via Bookslut, James Campbell’s ‘Ernest Hemingway: war hero, big-game hunter, ‘gin-soaked abusive monster” in the TLS.

Alan Moore’s travelogue through his beloved Northampton, 1993 (via Dangerous Minds).

In 2011 3:AM spoke to:

Grace Krilanovich
Jayne Joso
Justin Sullivan
Kaaron Warren
The Cardiacs
Victor LaValle
Will Stone
Rachel Trezise
Stuart Evers
David Shields
Janice Lee
Brandon Tietz
Jenn Ashworth
Alan Moore
David Rose
Tony Black
A.C. Grayling
Jarett Kobek
Luke Kennard
Steve Himmer
Gary Lutz
Kevin Williamson
Max Wallis
Stephen Barber
Jonathan Trigell
Helen Walsh
McKenzie Wark
Ron Peck
Teju Cole
Iain Sinclair
Gary J. Shipley, Kenji Siratori & Reza Negarestani
Jean-Michel Rabaté
John Holten
Ben Brooks
Lars Iyer
Alina Simone
Craig Taylor
Richard Bradford
David Enrique Spellman
Peter Carruthers
Diane Coyle
Josh Knobe
Brian Leiter
Scott McClanahan

And for Maintenant:

Christodoulos Makris
Tadeusz Dąbrowski
Aleš Šteger
Holly Pester
Anatol Knotek
Morten Søndergaard
Emilian Galaicu-Păun
Frédéric Forte
Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson
Cia Rinne
Yuri Andrukhovych
Tomica Bajsić
Scott Thurston
Immanuel Mifsud
Tomas S. Butkus
Nikola Madzirov
Gabriele Labanauskaite
Luljeta Lleshanaku
Marcus Slease
Pekko Käppi
Colin Herd
Željko Mitić
Marco Giovenale
Valzhyna Mort
Kirmen Uribe
Ulf Stolterfoht
Márton Koppány
Ilya Kaminsky
Lies Van Gasse
Johannes Göransson
Lidija Dimkovska
Ailbhe Darcy
Anna Auziņa
Kārlis Vērdiņš
Maarten Inghels
Damir Šodan
Emanuella Amichai
Arnoud van Adrichem
Valerio Magrelli
João Luís Barreto Guimarães
Daniele Pantano

In 2011 we reviewed:

Fiction:
Andrej Blatnik’s You Do Understand
Dawn Raffel’s Further Adventures in the Restless Universe
Julian Barnes’ Pulse
Michael Peverett’s The Littlest Feeling
Brandon Tietz’s Out of Touch
Charlie Caselton’s Meanwhile Gardens: An Urban Adventure
Daniel Kramb’s Dark Times
Dan Vyleta’s The Quiet Twin
Carl Hiaasen’s Star Island
Richard Kalich’s Penthouse F
Joseph McElroy’s Night Soul and Other Stories
Sam Leith’s The Coincidence Engine
Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics
Gary Indiana’s Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975-2010
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad
Oliver Rohe’s Vacant Lot
Best European Fiction 2011
Edward St Aubyn’s At Last
Michael Crummey’s Galore
Jayne Joso’s Perfect Architect
Blake Butler’s There is No Year
Jenn Ashworth’s Cold Light
Édouard Levé’s Suicide
Emma Jane Unsworth’s Hungry, the Stars and Everything
Patrik Ouředník’s The Opportune Moment, 1855
Marc-Edouard Nabe’s L’Homme qui arrêta d’écrire
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child
Ben Brooks’ Grow Up
Ivo Stourton’s The Book Lover’s Tale
Teju Cole’s Open City
A.L. Kennedy’s The Blue Book
Lars Iyer’s Spurious (3:AM Novel of the Year 2011)
Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole (3:AM Publisher of the Year 2011)
Enrique Vila-Matas’ Never Any End to Paris
Paul Kavanagh’s The Killing of a Bank Manager
Benjamin Markovits’ Childish Loves
Tiff Holland’s Betty Superman
Frank Kill’s Crimes in Southern Indiana
Gerald Kersh’s The Angel and the Cuckoo
Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1
Gavin James Bower’s Made in Britain
Gary Lutz’s Divorcer
John Holten’s The Readymades
Johan Harstad’s Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
Joshua Mohr’s Damascus
New Cross-Fucked Musings on a Manic Reality
J.M. Coetzee’s Scenes from Provincial Life
Andrzej Stasiuk’s Dukla
Simon Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy
Terry Taylor’s Baron’s Court, All Change
Colin Wilson’s Adrift in Soho
Laura Del-Rivo’s The Furnished Room

Poetry:
Jeff Hilson’s In The Assarts
Paul Stubbs’ Ex Nihilo
Eighteens
Eileen Myles’ Inferno (A Poet’s Novel)
James Davies’ Plants
Will Stone’s Drawing in Ash (3:AM Poetry Book of the Year 2011)
Maureen Seaton & Samuel Ace’s Stealth
Andrew Spragg’s the fleetingest
David Berridge’s BLACK GARDENS
Nathan Thompson’s Questions for Painters
Sean Lovelace’s Fog Gorgeous Stag
nick-e melville’s Stuff
James Mclaughlin’s Aeido
Megan Boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee

Non-fiction:
Simon Morris’ Getting Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head
Lawrence Rinder & Colter Jacobsen’s Tuleyome
Daniel Harris’ On the Road: A Journey Through A Season
Ken Worpole’s Dockers and Detectives
Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World
Darin Strauss’ Half a Life
Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness
Stéphane Hessel’s Time for Outrage!
Laurie Penny’s Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism
Richard Lloyd Parry’s People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman
Gérard Garouste’s A Life of Disquiet: Self-portrait of an Artist, a Son, a Madman
Sam Harris’ The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Bruce Benderson’s Transhumain
Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009
Erik M. Conway’s Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook
Owen Jones’s Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class
Edward S. Robinson’s Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present
Christopher Hitchens’ Hitch-22
Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon
Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel
Iain Sinclair’s Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project
Gay Talese’s Frank Sinatra Has a Cold: And Other Essays
Luke Haines’ Post Everything: Outsider Rock and Roll
Fredric Jameson’s Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One
Clare Solomon & Tania Palmieri’s Springtime: The New Student Rebellions
Gavin Knight’s Hood Rat
Masha Tupitsyn’s Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film
Matthew J. Goodwin’s New British Fascism: Rise of the British National Party
Stephen Duncombe & Maxwell Tremblay’s White Riot: Punk and the Politics of Race
Barry Miles’ In The Seventies
McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
Edouard Machery’s Doing Without Concepts
Roy Wilkinson’s Do It For Your Mum
Eric Schwitzgebel’s Perplexities of Consciousness
Sebastian Groes’ The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature
Joan Didion’s Blue Nights
Emrys Westacott’s Virtue of Vices
Charles Fourier’s The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy
Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality

Situationist Aesthetics: The SI, Now
University of Sussex, Brighton, UK – Friday 8th June 2012

Keynote: McKenzie Wark (The New School, NY), author of The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International (2011), Gamer Theory (2007) and Hacker Manifesto (2004).

Since the beginning of the movement there has been a problem as to what to call artistic works by members of the SI. It was understood that none of them was a situationist production, but what to call them? I propose a very simple rule: to call them ‘antisituationist.’ We are against the dominant conditions of artistic inauthenticity. I don’t mean that anyone should stop painting, writing, etc. I don’t mean that that has no value. I don’t mean that we could continue to exist without doing that. But at the same time we know that such works will be coopted by society and used against us. Our impact lies in the elaboration of certain truths which have an explosive power whenever people are ready to struggle for them. At the present stage the movement is only in its infancy regarding the elaboration of these essential points.
- Attila Kotányi at the Fifth Conference of the SI, 1961

Is it oxymoronic, heretical or just plain wrong to talk about Situationist aesthetics? The Situationist International (SI) condemned attempts to discuss its work in terms of aesthetics, but perhaps it is now time to brush the SI against the grain.

When it first announced its programme, the SI insisted that ‘There is no such thing as Situationism’. A few years later, before expelling its members deemed to be too invested in artistic production, the SI declared that in an age of spectacle any work of art produced by a Situationist must necessarily be ‘antisituationist’. The SI’s tactical intransigence regarding the political value of the aesthetic, and its refusal of the possibility of a specifically Situationist aesthetic, threw up problems that remained unresolved by the time of the SI’s dissolution. Since 1972, particularly in Anglophone contexts, Situationist practices have penetrated an array of cultural spheres, and much cultural production which the SI would have dismissed as spectacular has claimed some Situationist influence.

The SI located itself within but against culture. This symposium asks whether such a position is tenable, and what possibility might there be for Situationist aesthetics after all. Do cultural phenomena such as punk, or the current psychogeography industry, for example, work as or against Situationist aesthetics? Is it possible to identify art works and/or practices indebted to the SI that do not recuperate its politics but fortify and develop them?

Possible themes include, but are not limited to:
· the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International
· the work of artists, writers, thinkers or film-makers proximate to or influenced by the SI
· critiques of the SI
· (post-)Situationist theory now
· détournement, plagiarism, and recuperation
· spectacular and anti-spectacular aesthetics
· the uses and abuses of psychogeography
· punk and art writing

Please submit proposals of no more than 250 words for papers or presentations of 20 minutes to Sam Cooper at situ.aesthetics@gmail.com by 16th March 2012. For further information: situationist-aesthetics.blogspot.com.

Edward Gorey’s animated intro for PBS’ Mystery!. * Ill angelic poetics, a discussion of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Dream-Land’. * Portrait of A Bookstore as an Old Man, a 2005 documentary on George Whitman. * Writers & their addictions. * I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you. * When Christopher Hitchens met Jorge Luis Borges. * Samuel Beckett’s BBC Radio Plays, 1958-1991 [MP3]. * Do the classics have a future? * How digital is reviving subscription publishing. * Textal harassment. * Sukhdev Sandhu on his teenage passion for The Smiths. * China Mieville on M.R. James & hauntology. * David Lynch’s Ruth Roses & Revolver. * Ezra Pound’s daughter aims to stop Italian fascist group using father’s name. * Jenny Hendrix on the afterlife of Tintin. * Readings & interviews with Henry Miller. * Interview with Maurice Girodias. * Walter Benjamin’s Paris address book. * Saul Leiter & the typographic fragment. * Teju Cole’s Wall Street & Brooklyn Bridge. * Jamel Shabazz’s street snaps of 80s Brooklyn. * Stuart Kelly on the best books of 1911.

BBC Radio 4, 4pm, Bank Holiday Monday, 2 January 2012

Written and presented by Mark Hodkinson.
Produced by Mark Hodkinson and Ian Bent.

Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, Depeche Mode, The Damned, Hawkwind, Nick Lowe and hundreds more owe a debt of gratitude to the tragic artist Barney Bubbles for shaping their image through radical record sleeves and posters. Nymphs floating into outer space, Ferris Wheels sparkling against a cityscape, faces made from light bulbs, paper clips and cassette tapes… this is all the work of Barney Bubbles.

Bubbles (real name, Colin Fulcher) was a designer with roots in both the commercial world (he worked for Sir Terence Conran and created the ‘archer’ logo for Strongbow Cider) and the London underground scene of the 1960s/early 1970s where his Notting Hill-based company, Teenburger Designs, contributed to Oz and Friendz and numerous record sleeves. His work, often drug-fuelled, was an imagination set loose – colourful, playful, three-dimensional, merging the prosaic with the profound. He was appointed designer and art director at Stiff Records and devised innovative marketing concepts. Elvis Costello’s ‘My Aim is True’ included adverts in three UK music papers from which a poster of Costello could be constructed. Ian Dury’s ‘Do It Yourself’ sleeve came in 28 slightly different ‘wallpaper’ versions.

He was a key player in the explosion of 7” records in the punk and post-punk era. Before, singles had come in plain paper bags or with generic label artwork – Bubbles and his peers saw them as a mini-canvas to complement the music within. Later, he directed several pop videos, including ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials and singles by Squeeze, Fun Boy Three and Elvis Costello.

In the early 1980s Bubbles fell out-of-favour, with little demand or acclaim for his work. He had suffered regular bouts of depression and his behaviour had become erratic, involving incidents of self-harm. Amid personal and financial worries, he committed suicide in 1983 at the age of 43. Since his death, his work has been re-evaluated and its influence acknowledged. Sleeve art has also become seen as an art-form in its own right and its loss mourned in the download age. He is seen as seminal influence on the YBA scene of the early 1990s, inspiring the likes of Damien Hirst and Jay Jopling.

The programme looks closely at the times Bubbles lived through – hippy, idealistic 1960s to punk/new wave of the late 1970s/80s; his often-troubled life; and his lasting legacy. Key contributors include figures from the rock industry, close friends and family, and fellow designers.

3:AM Novel of the Year 2011
Lars Iyers‘ Spurious (Melville House)

3:AM Poetry Book of the Year 2011
Will Stone’s Drawing in Ash (Salt Publishing)

3:AM Non-fiction Book of the Year 2011
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 (Cambridge University Press)

3:AM Album of the Year 2011
Bon Iver’s Bon Iver (4AD)

3:AM Film of the Year 2011
Melancholia, dir. Lars Von Trier

3:AM Magazine of the Year 2011
The White Review

3:AM Publisher of the Year 2011
And Other Stories

3:AM Website of the Year 2011
The Other Room

3:AM Blog of the Year 2011
Time’s Flow Stemmed

(See the 3:AM Awards 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 & 2010.)

Tributes to Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman, Russell Hoban & Vaclav Havel. * Ben Marcus on the singular fabrications on Raymond Roussel. * “If a German book hasn’t got Nazis or the Stasi in it, it’s going to be much harder for it to get noticed.” Stefan Tobler, publisher at And Other Stories. * Shane Meadows on This Is England ‘88. * Adam Curtis on the rise of geezer capitalism in modern Britain. * Alasdair Gray, Will Self et al. design banknotes for the modern world. * Alan Moore’s “magickal” keyboard. * “We are both rather contemptible individuals.” Michel Houellebecq & Bernard-Henri Lévy. * Biblioklept riff on Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. * Parodies of modernism. * Paul Auster to publish second memoir. * “I’ve always been a consciously influenced writer.” Jonathan Lethem on writing & concepts of originality. * “I think Sartre is a bag of wind and I am going to give him a good boot.” Orwell. * Lars Iyer’s draft for an essay on Blanchot’s plans for a lit review. * Why you should read W.G. Sebald. * “Virginia Woolf has become the love of my readerly life.” Gary Lutz. * No one reads Marcel Schwob. * Stewart Home remembers the Scala Cinema. * Simon Critchley asks what is normal. * Merry Christmas to you all!

NOVEL OF THE YEAR
Teju Cole’s Open City (AA, ST)
Dennis Cooper’s The Marbled Swarm (AG)
Brian Dillon’s Sanctuary (AA)
Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade (AG)
Lars Iyer’s Spurious (AA, DA, ST)
Carsten Jensen’s We, the Drowned (ST)
Jarett’s Kobek’s Atta (RM)
Edouard Leve’s Suicide (DW)
Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home (AG)
Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask (DW)
Mike Mignola’s Baltimore Volume 1: The Plague Ships (RM)
Juan Pablo Villalobos’ Down the Rabbit Hole (KW)
David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (DW)

POETRY BOOK OF THE YEAR
Sean Bonney’s The Commons (SJF)
Billy Childish’s The Uncorrected Billy Chyldish (RM)
Tom Chivers‘ How to Build a City (ST)
Sasha Dugdale’s Red House (AA)
Will Eaves’ Sound Houses (AA)
Lavinia Greenlaw’s Questions Of Travel: William Morris In Iceland (AA)
Holly Pester’s Hoofs (SJF)
W.G. Sebald’s Across the Land and the Water: Selected Poems 1964-2001 (ST)
Martin Glaz Serup’s The Field (SJF)
Will Stone’s Drawing in Ash (DA)

NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
Stephen Barber’s The Walls of Berlin (RM)
Bare Essentials: The Best of Nude Magazine 2003-2011 (AG)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956 (AG, RM, ST, DW)
John Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook (AA)
Levi Bryant et al, The Speculative Turn (DW)
Alastair Brotchie’s Alfred Jarry: A Pataphysical Life (ST, KW)
Frederic Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Constructions Photographed (DA)
Charles Fourier’s The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy (KW)
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years (DW)
Alexandra Harris’ Virginia Woolf (ST)
Owen Hatherley’s Uncommon (AA)
Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (DA)
David Millar’s Racing Through the Dark (KW)
Eirikur Orn Norddahl’s Be Quiet, Booby (SJF)
Derek Parfit’s On What Matters (RM)
Lee Rourke’s A Brief History of Fables (AG)
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead: Essays (DA)
Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? (AA)

ALBUM OF THE YEAR
The Advisory Circle’s As the Crow Flies (ST)
Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series, Vol 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (RM)
Bob Dylan’s Live in New York 1961 (RM)
Bon Iver’s Bon Iver (DA, KW)
Deaf Center’s Owl Splinters (DW)
Nils Frahm’s Felt (DW)
Grouper’s A I A: Alien Observer / Dream Loss (DW)
Half Man Half Biscuit’s 90 Bisodol (Crimond) (AS)
PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake (DA, ST)
Magazine’s No Thyself (AG)
Cliff Martinez’s Drive OST (ST)
Paul Simon’s So Beautiful or So What (KW)
Tom Waits’ Bad As Me (AA)
Bill Wells & Aidan Moffat’s Everything’s Getting Older (DA)
Wilco’s The Whole Love (KW)
Hank Williams’ The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams (RM)

FILM OF THE YEAR
50/50, dir. Jonathan Levine (KW)
Animal Kingdom, dir. David Michôd (ST)
Archipelago, dir. Joanna Hogg (DW)
Captain America: The First Avenger, dir. Joe Johnston (RM)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, dir. Werner Herzog (RM)
Drive, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (ST)
Into the Abyss, dir. Werner Herzog (DA)
Melancholia, dir. Lars Von Trier (RM, DW)
Midnight in Paris, dir. Woody Allen (KW)
Submarine, dir. Richard Ayoade (KW)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dir. Tomas Alfredson (ST)
The Turin Horse, dir. Bela Tarr (DW)

MAGAZINE OF THE YEAR
Five Dials (AA)
Granta (AA)
Mute (DW)
Night & Day (ST)
Nude Magazine (R.I.P.) (AG)
Radical Philosophy (DW)
TLS (RM)
The White Review (DA, AA, ST, DW)

PUBLISHER OF THE YEAR
And Other Stories (AG, ST, KW)
Bluemoose Books (AG)
Book Works (RM, DW)
Cargo Publishing (DA)
Crater Press (SJF)
Creation Books (RM)
Dalkey Archive Press (AA)
La fabrique (KW)
Knives Forks & Spoons Press (SJF)
Notting Hill Editions (AA)
OUP (RM)
Peirene Press (ST)
Seagull (DW)
Veer Books (SJF)
Verso (AA)
Wakefield Press (ST, KW)
Zero Books (AG, DW)

WEBSITE OF THE YEAR
50 Watts (DA, AA)
Aaaarg (DW)
The Atavist (KW)
BibliOdyssey (DA)
Dangerous Minds (AA, AG)
Fiddleback (AG)
Full Stop (ST)
HiLobrow (ST)
The Junket (ST)
The Marketplace of Ideas (DW)
The Millions (DW)
The Other Room (SJF)
The Quietus (KW)
UbuWeb (AA, AG)

BLOG OF THE YEAR
Alternate Minds (RM)
Carrie Etter (SJF)
{ feuilleton } (ST)
Homunculus (KW)
Invisible Stories (AG)
Leiter Reports (RM)
Linguistically Innovative (SJF)
Mythology of Blue (AG)
Never Mind the Beasts (SJF)
The Splintered Mind (RM)
This Space (DW)
Time Immemorial (AG)
Time’s Flow Stemmed (DW)
Three Percent (ST)
Waggish (DW)
Writers No One Reads (ST)

Darran Anderson / Anna Aslanyan / SJ Fowler / Andrew Gallix / Richard Marshall / Andrew Stevens / Susan Tomaselli / Karl Whitney / David Winters

Viv Albertine’s yuletide recording ‘It’s a Christmas, Single’.

Glenn O’Brian’s TV Party. * R.I.P. Christa Wolf & Gilbert Adair. * James Bridle on the New Aesthetic. * The New Pamphleteers, how the e-book might be “a whole new literary form”. * French Theory Today pamphlet series. * Lynne Tillman on Diane Arbus’s writings. * The herstory of Riot Grrrl. * When Freud met Bacon, British postwar painters in pictures. More Freud. * Walking in the footsteps of W.G. Sebald. * Mapping Michel Houellebecq, a retrospective. * A documentary about Le Palace nightclub. * In praise of piracy. * Best Sid Vicious documentary ever. * The Sex Pistols and Ramones as Hanna-Barbera cartoons. * “I had no idea you were so handsome. Why you haven’t been offered the lead in some sexy movies I can only attribute to the basic stupidity of the casting directors.” Groucho Marx writes to T.S. Eliot. * On Mallarmé. * On Clarice Lispector. * JG Ballard on Desert Island Discs, 1992. * A Ballardian bestiary. * LA punks: a news report, 1983. * Bruce McAllister’s symbolism survey (to Kerouac, Rand, Mailer, Ellison, Updike, Bellow). * It’s the end of the world. * People who do noise. * A brief history of garage rock. * For sale, J.D. Salinger’s library slip. * The best libraries in literature. * The library phantom. * Billy Idol raps for IKEA. * Neuroscience and economics. * French psychologists try to ban film on autism. * Footage of James Joyce in Paris. * Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake. * Matthew Picton’s 3D map of 1904 Dublin built from the pages of Ulysses. * Protecting Oscar Wilde’s tomb from kisses. * Gary Pearce on Wilde. * Runnin’ Riot. * Curiouser and curiouser, Marina Warner on Lewis Carroll, Tenniel, and the Alice drawings. (See also, 3:AM’s interview with Marina Warner.) * John Berger on Bento’s Sketchbook in the Paris Review. * Teju Cole on John Berger. * “Few novels have sought to improve America as radically as Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward.” * Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose: Has literature stopped evolving? * Full Stop’s ‘Situation of American writing’, based on a 1939 Partisan Review questionnaire. * “We have lost something that used to be considered fundamental in the world of literature, which is the role of the critic.” Nicole Krauss. * Evelyn Waugh lambasts the “gibberish” written by modernist writers. * Paul Auster & Don DeLillo on New York City. * Doppelgängers, Jenny McPhee on Mary Shelley & Muriel Spark. * “Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.” The Jean-Paul Sartre cookbook. * Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage), collector of fin de siècle writings, Arthur Machen’s horror stories & erotica “of a superior kind”. * [Image: Wacky Stuff]

Andrew Motion on WG Sebald’s poems. * PDFs of Breton, Soupault and Aragon’s Dada journal Littérature. * Tim Parks on the second volume of Beckett’s letters in the LRB. * Parks on translating poetry. * Wittgenstein Jr. * Terry Taylor’s Baron’s court, All Change republished. * Philip Glass on Sesame Street, 1979. * Five years in NYC that changed music forever. * London Belles, 1973 (featuring Vivienne Westwood). * God save the Sex Pistols’ doodles. More here. * Is there a crisis in literary criticism? * Owen Jones on the new age of rebellion. * Writers’ toilets. * Mick Jagger’s first TV appearance at the tender age of 15. * Rolling Stones Rice Krispies commercial, 1964. * A dissolving dictionary. * David Bowie home movie, 1965. * Lee Rourke. * Brian Eno’s big theory of culture. * Jacques Testard on Houellebecq. * Jan Svankmajer. * Nicholas Blincoe on Jack Kerouac’s lost novel. * Bukowski and the making of Barfly. * The Beatnik scene for squares. * More on WG Sebald’s poetry. * On JG Ballard. * Download every NME cassette compilation from the 80s. * Watch Ken Russell’s The Devils. * Kermode on Russell. * Songs for a future generation: more B-52’s goodness. * Shelagh Delaney RIP. * Nicholas Lezard on Sherlock Holmes, the “only intellectual this country has ever taken to its bosom”. And also on Claude Lévi-Strauss. * A history of social housing. * Lee Miller by Man Ray. * The Jello Biafra bobbing head doll. * Footage of the Dead Kennedys in the studio, 1981. * Total surveillance. * Facebook’s broken privacy promises. * L’histoire d’Anne Pigalle. * The British Newspaper Archive goes digital. * Tom McCarthy’s desktop. * Surrealist films by Joseph Cornell. * Goethe snuffs it. * A documentary on French composer Pierre Henry. * 10 lost novels the world found again. * 10 synonyms for being a wanker. * Brian Eno’s speech at Moogfest 2011. * Confessions of a MILF. * When Sparks met Jacques Tati, 1974. * Neuroscience and economics. * Laura Kennedy (of the Bush Tetras) RIP. * Geoff Dyer on Diane Arbus bio. * Geoff Dyer by Jonathan Lethem. * Dinner with Georges Perec. * Roxy Music’s album covers. * The restored Finnegans Wake. * Authors ranked by beard weight.

The Sohemian Society presents two meetings — Nov 30 and Dec 6 — tailored for nostalgic Londoners and Born-Again Londoners, both at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, North Soho, W1 (admission fee: £3).

Wednesday November 30th, 7.30pm
ALL ABOARD!
TAKING PUBLIC TRANSPORT INTO SOHO’S PAST AND PRESENT
Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines, and Travis Elborough, The Bus We Loved: London’s Affair

Mark Mason, in his new book, Walk the Lines, travels the entire underground network on foot (above ground, that is). He finds a London of extremes, with countryside in unexpected places, poverty nestling beside prosperity, and parts of the London Underground that aren’t within London at all. Mason is accompanied by numerous characters during his sojourns, including City planner Peter Rees, a tube geek, a trainee taxi driver, the Kray twins biographer and, perhaps inevitably, Bill Drummond. Mason’s book is a mixture of witty banter, overheard conversations, historical insight and offbeat observations. It is the product of a mad and marvellous mission.

Travis Elborough’s book is a homage to that London classic, the Routemaster, a scarlet memory from the grey postwar decade. He takes us on a historical journey of this much loved mode of transport and combines technical detail, anecdote and cultural reference (Cliff Richard and On The Buses).

Tuesday December 6th, 7.30pm
If You Can Remember The 60s, You Are Probably Miles
A talk by Barry Miles.

1960s Britain - a decade characterized by unprecedented social and economic change - saw Barry Miles, or simply Miles as he later became known, begin his impressive career as a student at the Gloucestershire College of Art. In the next few years he became established as a key figure of British subculture, making the connections that led to the birth of the notorious Indica Bookshop, the advent of the 1965 Albert Hall poetry reading, the rise of Europe’s first underground newspaper the International Times and the subsequent Paul McCartney interview that secured Miles’s reputation as a respected journalist. Thus firmly established as a major player in the media and artistic communities, he rounded off this extraordinary period of his life by running the Beatles’ Zapple label and living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel.

Copies of Miles’ book London Calling: A Countercultural History of London since 1945 will be for sale on the evening.