3:AM Magazine

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.

» Read more...

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.

» Read more...

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.

» Read more...

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.

» Read more...

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 .

» Read more...

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.

» Read more...

If it is expensive in this country to be poor, then it follows that there is a great deal of money to be made from the poor. Loan sharks have earned millions from estates where the average wage is maybe twelve grand a year. These guys, of course, aren’t regular lenders. They hang around in pubs and betting shops, in the ginnels and walkways of working class Britain, and find customers through the school run and Facebook trawls. They lend small amounts of money, adding arbitrary interest payments and late fees, dragging the process out for years. If you can’t pay, they can’t take you to court – these are illegal loans – so they use threats, violence, coercion and intimidation to obtain payment.

Max Dunbar reviews Carl Packman‘s Loan Sharks.

» Read more...

Governments are elected on change platforms. Once elected they announce a programme of Great Reforms for everything from welfare to schools to bin collection. And real progress has been made on formerly controversial issues like gay marriage. Yet UK drug policy remains preserved in aspic. When government commissions even suggest that a change is needed, or point out the exaggeration of health risks, their reports are torn up and their academics denounced in the press. It is as if, once someone assumes serious elective office, they are taken into a Whitehall basement somewhere with a lot of large, sinister men, and told: ‘Congratulations on becoming a minister. We would like to wish you the very best of luck with your legislative programme. Just one thing, though: if you ever make a serious attempt to change the law on drugs, we will murder you and your families. Coffee?’

Max Dunbar reviews Narcomania: A Journey Through Britain’s Drug World.

» Read more...

What on earth is anticipatory history anyway? The introduction mentions two things which it isn’t – quite – though it has drawn enough from both to make their consideration relevant. The first is a concept of ‘progressive history’ put forward by Hayden White, which encourages the study of history ‘to find out what it takes to face a future we should like to inherit rather than one that we have been forced to endure’. The second is the conservation strategy of ‘anticipatory adaptation’, where plans accommodate expected change on a (wonderful phrase) ‘no regrets basis’ – so that even if things don’t happen as predicted some kind of benefit will still be felt. The mixture of philosophy and pragmatism that characterises both gives a good flavour of the anticipatory history project.

Bridget Penney reviews deSolvey, Naylor & Sackett’s Anticipatory History.

» Read more...

We are biased towards usefulness. ‘Pataphysics resists this bias. It bombards us with samples of the inutilious. Rennes schoolboys invented the world ‘pataphysics’ in 1888. Alfred Jarry was the leader of that particular gang. Absurdism, Dada, Futurism, Surrealism, Situationism et al find roots in its soil. Hugill notes that the name works like the self defeater lying at the heart of Groucho Marx’s joke that he wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would accept him. We seek out solutions to problems. ‘Pataphysicians seek out solutions to non-problems.

Richard Marshall reviews Andrew Hugill’s ‘Pataphysics: A Useless Guide.

» Read more...