3:AM Magazine

Pleasure seems to have a shadow side. The long boom of the Jazz Age was followed by the Great Crash of 1929. The reliance on organised crime for access to alcohol meant that revelry was intimately entwined with murder and corruption. There is the obvious physical recompense of the hangover, a neurochemical punishment for the good times of the night before. The insight that Churchwell brings is that Fitzgerald, to some extent, shared the puritan instincts of the Temperance league. He told a friend that ‘Parties are a form of suicide. I love them but the old Catholic in me secretly disapproves.’ He knew of the foul trade behind the glittering nights and wove references to contemporary crimes into his novels. He was concerned with social status, and said that ‘I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from.’ He was sceptical of the powers behind the boom: ‘Fitzgerald recognised the Gilded Age tycoons and financiers for the glorified crooks they were’ – men like Charles Ponzi, whose name is now a byword for pyramid schemes of all types, and Jay Gould, the railroad baron and strikebreaker who once boasted that ‘I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.’ Like Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald was of the party and not of it, within and without. His own life, and Zelda’s, was cut off in dissolution and mental illness. He saw the Red Death coming. His credo was ‘Et in arcadia ego: beauty is not alone in the garden. Death is waiting there too.’

Max Dunbar reviews Sarah Churchwell‘s Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby

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Trakl tried and gave us twilights and poppies and celestial vaccines, and those toothless angels, poisoned, their useless wombs reconstructed from blue space and bloated with rats. And Klassnik? And Klassnik?… He’s here now to reiterate that having your cake is eating your cake, and that the cake is made from cum and from blood and from shit and from urine and from all manner of excruciations, but that still the cake gets baked, and that therein lies the flaw, and therein lies the dream of us, and of love, and soft grass and flowers and a moon’s silence.

Gary J. Shipley reviews Rauan Klassnik‘s The Moon’s Jaw.

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Drug-use is cool, and always has been – especially if the user is in some way artistic. Rock stars are all but obliged to take drugs at some point in their career if they are to maintain any level of subcultural credit. Meanwhile, Rimbaud famously speaks of visionary transcendence coming as a result of ‘a long, deliberate derangement of all the senses’. Huxley quotes Blake to suggest in long-tired tones that, on mescaline, the doors of perception are cleansed and everything appears ‘as it is, infinite’. Even weedy old Walter Benjamin wrote about the ‘magnificent constructions of light, glorious and splendid visions, cascades of liquid gold’ he experienced upon eating hashish in 1928. Those days are now gone, I think. It is no longer just the rock star, the artist and the romanticised down-and-out who take drugs; now everyone does it.

Kevin Breathnach reviews Tao Lin‘s Taipei.

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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.

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Every polemicist needs a consensus to kick against. There is a habit in public discourse of prefacing an assertion with ‘You’re not supposed to say this, but -’ not because there is a genuine risk in expressing such views, but to add a frisson of danger and generate interest in arguments that are, in and of themselves, not that strong or interesting. So in the introduction to his critique of postwar immigration, the Demos boss David Goodhart writes that ‘unlike most members of my political tribe of north London liberals I have come to believe that public opinion is broadly right about the immigration story’ and complains that, when he has raised such concerns in the past, he was denounced as a ‘liberal racist’. It is an accepted convention that ‘we’re not allowed to talk about immigration’, even though the issue has dominated newspaper and parliamentary debate since the late 1990s.

Max Dunbar reviews The British Dream.

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This is how we best like our authors. We want them to look away in pictures, the way Flaubert did, “because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder”; we don’t want them not to smile into the camera, the Man Booker logo in the background. To quote from Flaubert’s Parrot again, “Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can’t we leave well alone? Why aren’t the books enough?” They may be enough – as long as they are proper, artfully conceived, literary novels: we want that stuffed parrot from the Museum of Rouen, not this live menagerie kept by Sarah Bernhardt in the rue Fortuny.

Anna Aslanyan reviews Levels of Life.

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Juan Manuel Bonet says that ‘’methods of teaching art are in need of oxygen.’ Black Mountain College was an open-air American Bauhaus with plenty and then some. It lasted twenty-three years, from 1933 to 1956. It gave us Olson, Creeley, Duncan, Dorn, Levertov , Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Motherwell, Cage, Cunningham, Fuller, Noland, Greenberg and a whole bunch of other astonishments.

Richard Marshall reviews Vincent Katz’s Black Mountain College. Experiment in Art.

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We cannot comprehend Lish’s contribution to literature without an awareness that composition cuts across ontology, not only aesthetics. In Lucretius, the force of composition is described as a clinamen—our world is born from a “swerving” of atoms in their fall from heaven. Such is the purpose served by Peru’s perpetual swerving, rhyming and recursion. Each consecutive swerve steps closer toward a total curvature that delimits the work as a world apart. Peru is a paradigm of the artwork as a formally closed system. Hence, what has been called “consecution” is not a matter of mere wordplay; it is the way in which such a system defines its horizon.

David Winters explores the singular form of Gordon Lish‘s Peru.

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Something has been fixed in. Something about nothingness, about unreadability and unwriterbility, about silence and absence, abjection and a special kind of boredom. Craig Dworkin’s book is about an aspect of this fix. He looks at “works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent.” He argues that “we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed places.”

Richard Marshall reviews Craig Dworkin’s No Medium.

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The collective anxiety of Manhattan life portrayed in Speedboat, along with the more personal anxiety and paranoia experienced by Kate Ennis in Pitch Dark, are ones that are still resoundingly relatable to our lives today. Substitute Xanax for the Valium and Percodan scattered throughout Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and one has our world, a world in which external realities affect our inner states of mind, a world we inhabit with others whose differences in some way become part of our own story: “As much as this is the age of crime, after all, this is the century of dislocation. Not just for journalists or refugees: for everyone.”

K. Thomas Kahn reviews Renata Adler’s‘s newly reissued novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark.

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