3:AM Magazine

All of my books are set in the same universe. I simply cannot leave the world (or worlds) I have created and start all over again, fresh—whether my next project is a book, or play or visual poem. Every single instance that takes place in my books is of the same world that originated in Mastodon Farm. There are ramifications and consequences to everything and a close reader will be able to pick up on these changes. But this is not something I consciously set out to do—not at first. And I don’t challenge people to try and keep track of all these things. It’s simply a neat little extra something for those who really want to delve into the lore of my books. The characters in my books are not wholly aware that their world is slightly different from ours either. But it is still very similar to the world we live in.

James Nulick interviews Mike Kleine.

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I think my sexual experience has always been in dialogue with philosophy. It’s something about justice. That’s why it comes out in that confrontation that you pick up on that was there on the beach—why does male desire have to be stronger than mine? So although my sexuality has always been in dialogue with my philosophical practice, it’s never been in contact with philosophy. I can’t find my sexuality in Kant. I think it was Preciado who said that nobody could have an orgasm whilst quoting Hannah Arendt.

Andy West interviews Victoria Brooks.

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I was reared as a world literature reader ( laughs). My parents were the children of immigrants and belonged to the intellectual left in New York.  My father worked on decolonization in Africa and we spent time in Uganda. I remember reading Tagore and Achebe when I was very young, alongside Chinese folk tales and the epic of Gilgamesh. In my early twenties I lived in Senegal and Algeria and was steeped in extra-hexagonal French literature and political thought. So if I have reservations about world literature it’s not because I’m in favor of re-provincializing reading.  It’s that I prefer a model of “world literatures in languages” over and against the institutional model of “World Lit” that one finds increasingly in the United States.

Krishnan Unni.P and Mantra Mukim interview Emily Apter.

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Londoner, Wayne Holloway is an unlikely candidate to be writing the next Great American Novel. Yet his latest book, Bindlestiff, abandons the city by the Thames, jumps across the Pond, and attempts exactly that. Part satire and piercing critique of the Hollywood machine, part dystopian rumination on a possible America to come (not too far away in the future), partly a tale of friendship and survival against all odds, Bindlestiff has been welcomed by outstanding reviews, particularly due to its experimental form. In early March 2019 I met with Wayne to chat about his work, politics, story-telling, and the not so rare phenomenon of British writers deconstructing the American Dream.

Fernando Sdrigotti interviews Wayne Holloway.

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With Gut Text being so focused on its relation to the organism, its attempts at becoming, I needed the text to have this spatial quality. It needed to knowingly exist in the physical world. I never want the reader to forget that they’re holding this corporeal object. Moments like the fattest period (which is fatter than any period that Microsoft would let me make normally) or the layered “text” of ff, felt ritualistic during their construction. Like I was very delicately organizing these ceremonial elements. Or building a stone altar.

Vi Khi Nao interviews Mike Corrao.

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Maybe I’m more attuned to the genre of autofiction. These days, everyone’s writing books about their lives but no one’s reading them. I sometimes think there are more writers now than readers. I barely read books myself, mainly because my attention span has been shot to pieces by a severe Twitter addiction, yet I’m obsessed with writing books, can’t stop thinking about it, in fact. But I find writing very hard work. Why put myself through it? After all, only rich people can truly afford the time and headspace to write books. The rest of us must work, raise kids, or both, and then eke out a few hundred words in the cracks between.

Lee Rourke interviews Simon Sellars about his book Applied Ballardianism: Memoir From a Parallel Universe.

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Paris was really lively and open and it was very easy to meet people, and I talked about the jigsaw puzzle work a lot, but I never told [André] Breton about them. I was much too shy. I didn’t tell any of those guys about my jigsaws. You know, frankly, very few people paid any attention to what I was doing at that time. I was a) young, and b) a woman.

As three sculptures from the 1960s by kinetic art pioneer Liliane Lijn go on display at Tate Britain, Tony White asks her about some tantalising and lesser-known earlier works.

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It’s very traditional to have theories of art. But the account that I give, for example, of cognitive functions of art links it very closely to cognitive functions in science, instead of each having its own little separate realm, its own separate methodologies, its own separate interests. I’m saying there’s a lot more interanimation. In a way it’s not expanding the scope, but it seems that there is more texture in what’s in the scope. There isn’t a nice division of labor. There really isn’t a sharp division between, say, philosophy of literature and literally criticism or even between theoretical physics and philosophy of science. That is what we have learned from the history of philosophy up to now, that the sharp divides that maybe our ancestors hoped we would find just aren’t there. It’s not my fault!

Ariane Tanner interviews Catherine Z Elgin about her philosophy – and working with Nelson Goodman.

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Richey himself was a big thinker in regards to conspiracy theories. For instance, the meaning of “I laughed when Lennon got shot”. It’s s about him knowing it was a CIA thing with Mark Chapman and that’s why in the lyric he laughed. There are notes in which he thinks it’s hilarious no one can see it and they’re thinking he wrote “I laughed” because he somehow thought Lennon getting shot was funny. With regards to esoteric ideas. To the point where all he was left in was his doubt. Someone got in touch and told us that Richey had hired a hitman to kill him and part of the difficulty is that you find yourself questioning the out-there scenarios because the whole narrative is quite out-there.

Guy Mankowski interviews Sara Hawys Roberts about Withdrawn Traces: Searching for the Truth About Richey Manic.

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You stay on the outside and become a mirror for the others — and they don’t like what they see. But this is all discrete. You just become the Sonderling, the weirdo. It would be wonderful if we could be thankful for a job, and still see where this job becomes cruel, inhumane, hilarious, idiotic, not well constructed, underpaid, too exhausting, etc. and then speak openly about it.

MH interviews Heike Geissler.

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