3:AM Magazine

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.

Stewart Home on Claude Pélieu: Claude Pélieu was an associate of William Burroughs and his 1973 anti-novel Kali Yug Express is a continuation of the cut-up experiments begun more than a decade earlier by Brion Gysin. Although the book appeared in French (the language in which it was written) and German back in the 1970s, [...]

The weirding of philosophy. * Ben Woodard‘s Slime Dynamics reviewed. * Nick Land and sci-fi. * Berlin’s abandoned shopping trolleys. * Decoy Paris. * An interview with Christine Schutt. * Beckett reading from Watt and directing Godot. * An interview with Gabriel Josipovici (video). * László Krasznahorkai interviewed. * The beginning of Thomas Bernhard‘s Correction. [...]

Stewart Home said ‘there’s a need to upset the bourgeoisie art lover.’ In any context where we quote Home saying this, the meaning of the words in the quotation marks remains stable. Claims that this is not the case over-generate, can’t account for indirect disquotational reports using quotations, can’t guarantee the truth of a strong disquotational schema for quotation ( eg ‘Rebecca Gayheart Sits in a Jacuzzi, naked, While Smoking and Talking With Her Husband, Eric Dane, and Former Miss United States Teen Kari Ann Peniche’ in English is true if and only if Rebecca Gayheart sits in a jacuzzi, naked, while smoking and talking with her husband, Eric Dane, and former Miss United States Teen Kari Ann Peniche), and various other things.

Richard Marshall reviews Jarett Kobek‘s If You Won’t Read, Then Why Should I Write?

I did buy an introduction to psychogeography which again barely mentioned any women writers – quite a feat, when Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’ is absolutely central. Is it that people are interested in making psychogeographic musing as a male thing? Streetwalkers do a lot of looking: why aren’t we open to their musings? Plenty of women write fabulously about place. Part of the problem may be in the concept of Muse – if you’re male, it’s easier to appear to have a hotline to inspiration in the form of a Muse because a Muse is traditionally feminine. It’s a whole lot harder for women who write to have a Muse like that, or a gendered muse at all.

Richard Marshall interviews Clare Brant.

Jennifer Egan‘s twitter story, “Black Box“. * Rilke in pictures. * Stewart Home on the 10 best ways to fail. * Tom Bissell: “To write is to fail, more or less, constantly”. * Steven Millhauser interviewed, 2003. * Witold Gombrowicz‘s Diary. * Le Récit minimal. * Brian Dillon: “[T]he only future that seems to have [...]

So, is the dark a manifestation of London power, where London is the power and the dark its manifestation? Or is the dark the power, and London the manifestation? And when does a substance make its powers manifest? What stimulation is required to bring out the promised power…What many of these stories do, in fact, is suggest different gradings of necessity. Perhaps we should understand these stories as particles, each with basic, fundamental properties all linked to the basic law of the London haecceity, but some derived more directly than others. But there is no agreement about any of this and that may well be because no one knows what the basic laws are. No one knows which are the most fundamental ones. No one in fact knows if London is a power even, although Shakespeare thought it was, Ted Hughes agreed, and it seems all metaphysical cities are metaphysical London.

Richard Marshall reviews Oscar Zarate‘s It’s Dark In London.

Tim Parks on academic critics. * Ben Marcus on living in the end times. * Ben Marcus‘s “Watching Mysteries with My Mother“. * Kathy Acker audio archive. * Simon Critchley on Philip K. Dick (part one). Part two is here and part three is over there. * A Philip K. Dick documentary. * David Winters [...]

Unprinting. * Tom McCarthy and Ben Marcus at the Horse Hospital in London on 7 June. * Ten short films by Stewart Home from the 80s and 90s. * The making of The Rings of Saturn. * Walter Gropius on Utopianism (MP3). * Alain Badiou: a life in writing. * Why Alain Badiou stopped voting. [...]

Home has always been political. He attacks lazy green anarchists because of their racism. He attacks high culture for the same anti-fascist reasons. Conversation and internationalism and peace is what his underlying mission is. He identifies with Black Atlantic movements and claims a radical inauthenticity since 1962. Everything in Home is apportioned to scribble over every idea Heidegger ever had. High culture is just the obvious site of his attention. It confuses some critics who can’t quite work out what their problem is . So they ask of his novels: Are they extreme pulp? Are they po-mo jokes? Are they anti-novels? And his art generally confuses people who are really still hung up with Heideggerian notions of authenticity and want to find something serious in modern high art.

Richard Marshall on the Stewart Home retrospective, Again, A Time Machine.