3:AM Magazine

They are all concerned with radical politics. They reject neo-liberal capitalism and its political forms. They reject the notion of autonomous, rational, self-determining individual agency which is assumed by neo-liberalism and which is assumed in discussions about economic and individual freedom. ‘They reject also the ontological assumptions regarding worldly relationality implicit in any conception of the human as homo economicus.’ Yet they are not anti-democratic. They call on ‘better or more fully evolved democratic thinking and democratic agency or forms. So what’s the problem?

Richard Marshall goes all Holly Golightly with The New French Philosophers.

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Dinh is a serious poet, reflecting, like T.S. Eliot, a philosophical dissatisfaction and even disgust with the world, except where Eliot’s poetry looks at the world from the vantage of high culture and intellectualism, Dinh’s is looking up from the streets with its slang idioms and banalities, and what it reveals is, in his best work, a vivid acknowledgment of the harsh reality and tortured consciousness of the urban disenfranchised and poor.

Gary Sloboda‘s essay on Linh Dinh.

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I think of Moses, how he needed to take a break from all the worded wounds of the former slaves. I think how he took his stuttering self up to Mount Sinai, for forty days and forty nights, in order to make known the words he could speak. He brought down two stone tablets containing ten Tweets: The Ten Commandments. Is that it? was what the critics said. They wanted something complicated and erudite. Later, of course, they, themselves, turned those ten commandments into 613, even though there is really only one.

By Bobbi Lurie.

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I can’t remember how it was before reading Barthes’ Camera Lucida. But after reading that book it has become nearly impossible for me to go back to old pictures without seeing death all over the place. Photographs capture death like no other medium, says Barthes; this is the essential theme of this greatest of books (violently summarising his elegant arguments). To greater or lesser extents of factuality, photographs capture life before death, reenacting life, yes, but more importantly condemning the photographic object/subject to another death. This is much more evident if we see pictures of now dead people, of course; but in fact we are all dead in each picture of us, for we are about to die and already dead for a hypothetical viewer in some hypothetical future.

Fernando Sdrigotti on his photographs of the London student demonstations of November 2010.

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We are fallible people and one of the reasons we read fiction is to read about other flawed persons, to see how they deal with their lot. All the characters in The Portrait contain idiosyncrasies and imperfections, rounding them into quiet and sprawling spheres of highest order and complexity, so each is a fleshy character with a specific number of hairs growing out of her and a memory full of her years lived, times of both happiness and confrontation.

Greg Gerke.on stylized sentences of despair in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

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It is not strange that our response to Chekhov or to Vermeer should have the character of nostalgia. What we reflect on is the image of that world we dreamed up perhaps when we were very young, when the idea of a moral life had already been imparted to us, and we had begun to envisage what it might be, but before we had grown used to the thought that it was a fiction to be left behind (…) What strikes us about Vermeer or Chekhov is the unobtrusive manner in which life’s passage is observed. When the voices that normally obtrude upon the world are silent—chief among them our own—we feel as though these voices had hung about the world like a veil, and that for once, it has been rent; these voices, and their erstwhile concerns, were idle, and had only dissuaded us from truth.

Adrian West considers the fundamental role of guilty conscience in the melancholic pleasures of fiction.

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Forty years on, it seems astonishing not that people watched Fat Man on a Beach, but that it got through any commissioning process, let alone on ITV, now notorious for its pursuit of the lowest common denominator at any cost. Given the contempt in which 21st century television holds its audiences, to be explicitly told that “Now might be a good time to get a cup of tea” before Johnson recites his poetry feels like being credited with an unusual level of intelligence — at least, the viewer could opt to refuse to be patronised, and be rewarded for choosing to stick with the host.

Juliet Jacques reviews You’re Human Like the Rest of Them: The Films of B S Johnson BFI Flipside DVD.

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It gives us a picture of Blair’s Britain which is, refreshingly, less than flattering. Britannia is unremittingly icy, not cool. Crime-based films have long shown London at various stages of its history and Croupier is no exception. The Long Good Friday captured London on the eve of the East End’s transformation from dead docklands to financial hub whilst Mona Lisa portrayed Soho on the verge of change, post-Groucho Club new sophistication, pre-rainbow-flagged gay village gentrification, and with old-style gangsters still around.

Nicky Charlish on the 15th anniversary of Mike Hodges‘ Croupier.

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I’ve been taking photos quite seriously for a couple of years now, both digitally and on 35 and 120mm film. Some of these photographs formed part of my mood board as I was writing Black Bread White Beer. Taking photographs, thinking about them, was an integral part of the writing. Everything from these images were absorbed into the book.

By Niven Govinden.

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The history of literature is, of course, strewn with the neglected, the misunderstood, the forgotten, the never fully realized, and minor figures more influential than renowned. If one were to draw a Venn diagram comprised of each of these categories, Marcel Schwob, along with a handful of others, would be at the heart of their intersections. But how, one despairs, can a man praised so highly during his own life fall completely by the wayside posthumously, as if it was his vitality alone that kept him from obscurity?

Stephen Sparks rediscovers Marcel Schwob.

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