3:AM Magazine

It is a testament to the steady pacing and control of Ely’s prose that we at first start out on the side of rats – set against their surely psychopathic exterminator – to then become somewhat intrigued by his assuredness in this other reality, to then finally fall back into the grey areas that the boy once occupied with his rationalisations and daydreaming. Of course, it is too late for him by then, and it will take some considerable effort to rid him of his belief.

Declan Tan reviews Steve Ely‘s Ratmen.

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What Passarello’s book does for us that makes the book much more than the sum of its parts. By not doomsaying our culture like so many non-fiction books these days, by not telling us all the actions we can take to fix some problem we are now faced with, but instead by championing one aspect of what it means to be human, for even the deaf have a voice, even the tracheotomised, if given the proper means, have a voice, Passarello leaves us with a solution we can all follow: Listen. It’s as if she is saying, Check this out, it’s pretty cool, huh? And yes, having read the collection, I can say it’s pretty damn cool. And I can also say my ears will never be the same again.

Alex Estes reviews Elena Passarello‘s Let Me Clear My Throat.

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The whole book seems to work in terms of what De Keyser and Decortis in the 1980s described as an attempt to structure events, processes, actions and products in terms of a ‘continual process operator’. There are several processes that have been brought to light as important to this sort of project. A key one is anticipation. Anticipation permits readers and all those involved to get ahead of any event with deftness and precision. Anticipation can be probabilistic where we scan parameters before everything goes out of order, selecting internalised statistical structures for this purpose, as if someone had prior knowledge of the probability of things breaking down. Reading and scanning every other page at speed and relying on previous times, previous documents, gives you enough to go on to anticipate how long, how far, how deep we’re going, according to this model. Illuminated by, say, one’s recollection of Carl Einstein and Georges Batailles and their Documents project, as well as the Wallace Berman Semina project, for example, we get a sense of this book’s purpose.

Richard Marshall reviews Book Works‘ Bring The Dead Back To Life: Again A Time Machine: From Distribution to Archive.

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When I was young I was involved in street and portable theatre and improvisation felt like a radical technique. But now it is the capitalist class, hard-hats, its satellites and useful idiots who use this technique to prepare, to envisage in advance how to deal with or promote points of conflict on its own terms. This is perhaps difficult for people who want to participate in the downfall of rationalised greed and the violence it both generates and demands, because one wants to live in relation to others without calculation, to be spontaneous. The Game, the authors suggest is a way in which this difficulty can be overcome, that how we are with our friends and comrades does not preclude learning calculation in class terms. This is surely going to be increasingly important as the worldwide war on the poor is cranked up on a daily basis.

John Barker reviews Richard Barbrook and Fabian Tompsett’s script for Ilze Black’s film – Class Wargames Presents Guy Debord’s The Game of War.

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Thomas doesn’t share the literary world’s dismissal of popular culture. She understands that you can learn something from everything. A Gok Wan style makeover show is the basic rags to riches tale. Other reality shows follow a benign version of the ‘stranger comes to town’ mythos – Supernanny or the Secret Millionaire walk into dysfunctional communities, sort out everyone’s problems and leave everything happy and resolved. Human beings are natural storytellers – pans narrans – and consciously or not, we create narratives wherever we go. The Ancient Greek philosophies that founded Western civilisation were written as fictions, Voltaire’s Candide is written in novel form and most of our religious texts can be read as fictions. We look for stories everywhere. As Thomas points out, ‘bus driver wins the Booker’ will get more attention than ‘UEA graduate wins the Booker’, even though the latter scenario is far more likely. Endemol producers imposed central storylines upon the Big Brother house probably not for ratings purposes, but because it’s what human beings are wired up to do.

Max Dunbar reviews Scarlett Thomas‘ Monkeys With Typewriters.

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Among the more recent publications from the always incendiary Critical Documents is Invocation by Jo L Walton, which is currently spilling out in serial form for Kindle, a hyperreal comic thriller and, I’m pretty sure, one of the most urgent, smart and exciting fictional projects of the moment. Invocation begins with the Johnny Thunders line “you can’t put your arms around a memory”, which is, if not the premise, definitely the promise of the book, especially if the version of that song we’re talking about is the ‘Live and Wasted’ version, where Johnny goes off into the long monologue beginning “I’ve got a problem with the business world. The business world thinks I’m crazy…” And just like the vocals in that version of the song, and maybe even more so, in its elasticity and expansiveness, there’s also a tragic and calamitous remoteness, a heart-wrenching disaffection and distance, mainly surrounding the character Myfanwy, and what she has or hasn’t seen and what she has or hasn’t done.

Colin Herd reviews Jo L Walton‘s Invocation.

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While Heroines is both subjective literary criticism and memoir, the insertion of the first-person perspective and Zambreno’s own experiences causes the text to revolve around her, rather than the modernist women she writes about. Although she looks to them for guidance as a female writer herself, she is also looking to them for a model of how to live with the social and cultural stigma of mental illness. Because of this, despite her insistence that “memoir is a woman writer’s forbidden and often avoided continent” since “the charge against women writers” is often narcissism, it is impossible to discuss Heroines without discussing Kate Zambreno, or, at least, the “I” who inhabits this text as the main character.

K. Thomas Kahn reviews Kate Zambreno‘s Heroines.

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This collection of articles written by academics, activists and journalists, among them David Graeber, Marina Sitrin, Owen Jones and Nina Power, focuses on all things new, that is, post-2008, its chapter titles ranging from ‘New Economics’ to ‘New Social Imagination’. There is certainly a demand for these concepts, especially now that the financial crisis has matured into a constant presence in our lives, and the book is a timely – indeed, necessary – attempt at formulating them. It does its best, but the absence of an established vocabulary typical for new protest movements (which often goes hand in hand with their lack of any serious, well-thought-out political agenda, as anyone who has ever tried talking to a random bunch of Occupy protesters would agree) shows. Someone has to do it, though, to start a conversation that many of us have been too busy, or complacent, or apolitical to have.

Anna Aslanyan reviews What We Are Fighting for: A Radical Collective Manifesto.

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A writer can either grow or shrink and, in times of history, surrendering to mediocrity finds easy justification in multitudinous displays of precedent. Her uncompromising realism refuses self-serving or sanitised verdicts. Her sympathetic knowledge of the Russian Revolutionary tradition strengthened her resolve throughout. Her socialism raised suffering to a higher level but she saw through to the dull, low philistinism of the Soviet Union of Stalinism and after. Her analytical and demystifying accounts of her own milieu under the most extreme pressure are uncompromising, vivid and reachy. They are truthful, analytical and psychologically insightful accounts offering neither bromide nor sensationalism. In this they astonish. Her portraits of her doomed writers are of legendary children.

Richard Marshall reviews Lidiya Ginzburg’s Alternative Literary Identities: A Collection of Articles and New Translations .

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Then halfway through the poem the speaker reports what happened on another day: “I woke up at 8 a.m. to pull the Band-Aid off of my shot.” The poems goes on to confront and confess the feeling of death in life. Where the speaker’s body feels like someone has sliced his/her throat and left the body “behind a dumpster in January” but they are still alive and feeling it. The last line of the poem ends with yet another time on perhaps the same day. The speaker factually reports: “I have to meet my mother for lunch at 10 a.m.”

Marcus Slease reviews Gabby Gabby’s poetry collection Airplane Food.

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