3:AM Magazine

Contemporary British poets read original poetry on the subject of incarceration & imprisonment. Tim Atkins / Richard Barrett / Julia Calver / Tom Chivers / Matthew Gregory / Stephen Emmerson / Jeff Hilson / Colin Herd / Holly Hopkins / Kirsty Irving / Antony John / Mendoza / Tamarin Norwood / Chris Page / Holly [...]

Howard Devoto interviewed in The Quietus. * The Marcel Duchamp audio archive. * 10 reasons not to blog. * William Burroughs: “To me, Paris is now one of the most disagreeable cities in the world. I just hate it”. * Launch of A Tale of Three Cities. * Leeds Other Paper. * Dennis Cooper interviewed [...]

The Making of London is an ambitious project, and one that would inevitably leave many people disappointed by the author’s choice of subjects. London writing is a phenomenon so vast, for every name mentioned there are bound to be numerous omissions. Why Ackroyd but not Jeanette Winterson with her magnificent historical canvas, Sexing the Cherry? Why Iain Sinclair but not Stewart Home who is, in the words of the former, “commanding the desert around the northern entrance of the Blackwell Tunnel” (the only nod to Home made in the book)?

Anna Aslanyan on Sebastian Groes‘s study of contemporary London literature.

This is a book well worth the trouble finding and reading. There are some pretty wild things happening in this area of thought at the moment and its important that we don’t get locked into the idea that only the pop philosophy and psychology books are worth reading or accessible. Machery is a fast thinking and sharp guy, a young turk with loads to say. He’s written something that gives us more smart things to think about and is part of an ever-changing landscape that’s trying to grasp what we are and what we’re becoming. Like a great novel, it is a piece of writing that gives us insights to inscapes that are mainly invisible.

Richard Marshall reviews Edouard Machery‘s Doing Without Concepts.

Best of luck to Dan Treacy. * Kenneth Goldsmith interviewed in The Believer. * Geoff Dyer on writing: “Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn’t do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn’t do and you have a draft of War and Peace. The corollary of this is that what he [...]

Is London an alienated creature? Is this book a story of alienation? Alienation from what? As a postfuturist response to the perplexities of postmodern ramifications, it clearly speaks about a “nonexistent” feeling of being isolated from something that “does not exist,” as Terry Eagleton reflects on postmodernist culture in Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (1986): “[T]here is no longer any subject to be alienated and nothing to be alienated from, ‘authenticity’ having been less rejected than merely forgotten”.

Nikolina Nedeljkov revisits Stewart Home‘s Memphis Underground.

A Stewart Home retrospective: From his earliest work Stewart Home has expressed an avantgardist desire to write himself into the archive of culture. Mixing myth and polemic, with plagarism and a savage ideological critique, the parodic manifestos of Generation Positive, progressed into the self-historicising magazine Smile, the Neoists, and finally The Art Strike – an [...]

Stewart Home himself was fictionalised in a passage read from one of Iain Sinclair’s books and later when I asked Stewart about this he said that they had just met accidentally and Iain Sinclair had used the meeting in his book with some added colour to expand a train of thought. I began to wonder if the whole weekend was a self-referencing literary exercise and any one us could become a character in a number of different works. This was when I told Stewart Home I was superimposing grid references over the text of this weekend. Sinclair had me thinking that events could be seen through various literary prisms; as if relating a walking scene to a memorised text. It may be that as Sinclair was intimating, things have been so psychogeographically and psychopolitically circumscribed and redrawn as to be gasping for breath and existence. We have to maybe superimpose new maps.

Raymond Anderson on the These Silences experimental literary symposium.

Patricia Highsmith (pictured), ‘cantankerous old cunt’ or too subversive to be pinned down? * Patrick Neate‘s Bookslam is bringing out an anthology. * Heavy metal was also first used to describe ugly guitars. The phrase, of course, originated with William S Burroughs in his 1962 novel The Soft Machine, featuring Uranian Willy, the Heavy Metal [...]

Transmitting the Image, Rick Poynor on Andrzej Klimowski. * S. T. Joshi on the satirical impulse of Ambrose Bierce [PDF] * Children of Sebald, is W.G. Sebald the reason so many writers are turning to archival sources? * On Mass Observation. * Rhys Tranter on George Craig translating Beckett‘s letters. * Archive of hand-lettered book [...]