3:AM Magazine

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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CagePrisoners is an old tale but it is indicative of wider problems. The Great Game was a term for the swashbuckling imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia for Central Asian rule. It continued well into the Cold War with players like Kissinger and Nixon making alliances and manipulating peoples like Haig with his toy soldiers. Now the left has discovered its own version of the Game – where all that matters is strategic partnerships and the language of resistance, and secularism, liberty and the rule of law are discarded as bourgeois frivolities. The results for people who actually are fighting for freedom, particularly dissidents in Islamic countries, are disastrous. The antiwar left doesn’t support the rights of women: indeed, we know that the SWP, the driving force behind the antiwar movement, does not even support the rights of female activists in its own organisation. Forget the anti-imperialist rubric. Feminism is key to everything. It’s the only recent radicalism that has worked and has to be supported if the suffering in the Arab world will ever end. To paraphrase Orwell, hope lies with women.

Max Dunbar reviews Meredith Tax‘s Double Bind.

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London: From Punk to Blair isn’t a love letter to London, in the way that some collections of essays develop an authorial group-think as the writers fall in love with their shared subject. Both the tone and the content are brilliantly heterodox. There are some well-known names amid the collection – Rushdie, Hanif Kureshi, the always brilliant Patrick Keiller – as well as newer writers and experts on particular subjects. Instead of trying to capture London in a book, Kerr and Gibson have gathered a group of people with interesting perspective and stories to tell. They reflect London’s glories, and its gross inequalities, its gleaming shards and its seedy underbelly.

John P. Houghton reviews the revised edition of London: From Punk to Blair.

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The language of disaster is fragmentation. Violence fractures everything. The living legacy of dictatorship and war is present in every word of every line. A senseless, sprawling chaos of religious terror, Ba’ath repression and collateral damage forms an unnerving background to the collection, like a sports commentary delivered by a jabbering maniac. Blasim’s Iraq is a place where you can go out for milk and cigarettes and get blown up by a car bomb. The title story, narrated from the afterlife, is about an Iraqi conscript forced into becoming a suicide bomber. Another story, ‘The Song of the Goats,’ explores an inter-family conflict between two brothers, one an embittered and emasculated Iran/Iraq war veteran, the other working for Saddam’s secret police. Blasim says that ‘I have nine siblings, and all my family in Iraq went off to do different things. I left to be a writer, one of my brothers went to study religion, and one joined the police. And all of us, we have different opinions about families and about life.’ The truth is never simple. It’s as Rumi says, so often we believe we see the whole world, when in fact we are holding just a fragment of a shattered mirror.

Max Dunbar reviews Hassan Blasim‘s The Iraqi Christ.

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Paul Klee in the Bauhaus in 1921 said, ‘ the point of the entire process is simply to be able to exercise control’, that ‘accurate perspective drawing has no merit whatsoever, if for no other reason that anyone can do it.’ He thought ‘there is absolutely no necessity for a single viewpoint. For some time now, though not that long, we have been able to do without it.’ Klee talked about ‘stray centres’ and ‘stray viewpoints.’ Panofsky in a famous lecture at the Warburg talked about ‘fishbone’ perspective. Scolari thinks Klee’s painting ‘Uncomposed Objects In Space’ of 1929 is not even a fishbone perspective because ‘perspective is so off centre’ Klee avoids fixing the ‘muddiness of reality’ to a human perspective. Scolari likens Klee’s approach to a musical pentagram, ‘a device for ordering notes that in no way dictates how they are to be composed.’

Richard Marshall reviews Massimo Scolari’s Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective.

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This is a collection of ghost stories “purposely without ghosts”. The epigraph, from On the Road, serves to announce the emphatic Americanness of the contents. Like Kerouac with his continuous roll of typing paper, most of the authors herein have opted for the unadorned style, which has its roots in that country’s Puritan past. The collection satisfies eminently one’s appetite for such work. There are few or no ghosts of the literary sort haunting the first hundred or so pages of this book. And then, all of a sudden, in the last story, up springs a manifestation that couldn’t be more unAmerican, in the best of all the good senses of that near-universally approbative adjective.

Tom Bradley reviews Fiddleblack‘s first annual anthology.

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The stalker and the stalkee continue to communicate throughout the book, even though the latter has long stopped replying to the torrent of emails, now growing more abusive, now asking: “Can we have a coffee?” Lasdun takes all this really hard, but does not get ruined – instead, he keeps writing. When serious smearing kicks in with emails being sent to his employers, he becomes paranoid about little things – as any freelancer would. Halfway through this saga, I had an uncharitable thought: perhaps it’s not so bad to have a stalker? When your editors are ominously silent you can always assume they have been fed some libellous news about you; left alone, you only have yourself to blame.

Anna Aslanyan reviews James Lasdun‘s Give Me Everything You Have.

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The Fox knows her stuff, and provides insights into the British public’s weird relationship with journalists. Everyone knows the British tabloid killed Diana but no one in the memorial crowds seem to have asked themselves why they wolfed down Diana gossip by the ton. Members of the public regularly turn to newspapers for financial gain, to advance their own agenda, to conduct petty disputes against neighbours and local authorities, or simply to get attention. And yet it is the hacks that are the vampires. The self righteousness and contradictory attitude that many newspaper readers have towards journalists, leads to some alarming scenes. A colleague of the Fox’s, doing a rural doorstop, is actually held at gunpoint by an outraged family.

Max Dunbar reviews The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox.

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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 .

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