3:AM Magazine
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21/07/08: The kids ain’t alright
In all the fuss in Britain over youth crime, Ben Myers wonders why books are never cited as a bad influence:
You never see the tabloid headline PECKHAM KILLER HID KNIFE IN PAPERBACK OF BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, or JACQUELINE WILSON NOVELS WARP BRAIN.
In the US, where even children’s literature regularly incurs the wrath of the Christian right, it’s slightly different. Yet when teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve of their Columbine High classmates, the media were quick to consider their record collection, but not their reading tastes.
Now I’m not saying literature should be added to the media’s list of easy targets - not at all. I just wonder why Marilyn Manson is vilified but not the similarly hilarious American Psycho.
Of course, books are occasionally blamed for causing trouble. Think of the hullabaloo over Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. But getting up the nose of a major religion is an entirely different matter. Nobody was suggesting for a moment that reading Rushdie was leading the kids astray.
Maybe it’s just the physical act of reading that keeps it out of the conservative media’s glare. Maybe it just makes sense that something that involves sitting perfectly still in a quiet room and flexing the imagination could never seriously be blamed for the rise of knife crime. Because that would be utterly absurd.
But I think the real reason literature stands outside of youth culture occurs at a deeper, more insidious level: because the media simply no longer consider literature to be a part of youth culture - that books are for the good, clean, knifeless middle class children. If it’s not part of the culture then it can’t be part of the problem. In which case is literature now confined - not for the first time - by class whereas the edgier, more visceral video games, movies and music span all the echelons of society?
: The Funnies
Comics Reporter interview Wondermark’s David Malki: ”I think it’s cool that other people have appreciated this work in the same way that I do. People like to bring up Max Ernst to me a lot, whose work I finally looked up after having never seen it. He was doing almost exactly what I do! His stuff is awesome, and I’ve even seen a few images I recognize among his work. Seeing his stuff is really inspiring. I’m not familiar with Shane Simmons, but I’m a big fan of [Terry] Gilliam. And there are other people who’ve used Victorian clip-art to make comics or other things. But I still feel my work is different enough from any of these others that I’m able to feel out my own way.” More illustrated jocularity + Harvey Pekar & Rick Veitch’s Next-Door Neighbor + At CBR, Jonathan Lethem on Omega the Unknown: “I’m never thinking about what I or my characters might have to tell to ‘society.’ It just isn’t a term I think in. The story has some themes, I guess: conformity, franchising versus the small businessman, mediated versus ‘real’ experience, etcetera, but those are pretty much just what sneaked in when I wasn’t looking. In writing it, I concerned myself primarily with the character and material directly — teenagers with problems, evil robots, corrupt and borderline-autistic superheroes, hamburgers, that sort of thing.” + An interview with Jordan Crane: ”From now on, I don’t care if I never learn anything more about drawing. I just care about writing, and being engaging as a writer. I mean, that’s your f—ing job. Whether you look at someone like Stephen King or someone supposedly “good” like Flannery O’Connor, both of them, aside from their numerous differences, are engaging. That’s the hardest thing to be, the most important thing to be.” [via Comics Reporter] + Unshelved, a comic book club [via LHB] + Gary Groth on Ralph Steadman.
26 important comic books, how they got Golden + Paul Karasik profiles Will Eisner: The best Spirit stories crackle. These noir-ish picaresque tales have a jazzy sense of New York humour. Eisner drew it as he knew it.” + Standard Attrition, the Vertigo group blog + Coming soon, Beasts 2 + Sausage and Carot, Simone Lia’s new comic for DFC + The mighty Mark Kermode talks to Jamie Hewlett: “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. I remember we filmed [Tank Girl] in Arizona, in this extreme heat, and Rachel [Talalay, director] had just discovered that she was pregnant, which made her very emotional and snappy. So there was Ice T, dressed as kangaroo, and Malcolm McDowell, who was incredibly bad tempered the whole time, constantly rowing with Rachel, and key bits of the movie just got missed - they simply forgot to film things.” + Empire magazine’s 50 greatest comic book characters [via Forbidden Planet Blog] + “Chris Ware is to the contemporary comics world as John Updike is to American (prose) fiction.” [via Journalista!] + Pádraig Ó Méalóid hangs out with the Moore family: “A very tall, skinny, and exceptionally hairy man stood up and said, “You must be Pádraig. It’s a pleasure to meet you at last.” This was Leah’s father, Alan Moore, which you all may know I am a big admirer of. Deirdre was even more surprised that I when he then shook her hand, saying, “And you must be Deirdre.” I just felt that the whole thing was all wrong. Alan shouldn’t have been telling me it was a pleasure to meet me: instead, I should have been grovelling in from of him, going, “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy.” + And don’t forget to check out Pádraig’s interview with Alan Moore.
20/07/08: Hope you guessed my name
Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight opens in the UK next weekend. Novelist Alan Bissett considers the history of the character all the buzz surrounds:
Frequently rated among the greatest fictional villains of all time, the Joker is the same chaotic trickster who appears in every culture, from Loki in Norse lore to the Judeo-Christian Lucifer, or the Dionysus of Greek myth, inspirer of ritual madness. His literary antecedents are Shakespeare’s Fool, happily ridiculing King Lear; Professor Woland from Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, a lurid showman who wreaks havoc in Stalinist Moscow; and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs. Indeed, the idea for The Joker first came to Bill Finger after seeing Conrad Veidt in the film adaptation of Hugo’s book, a German expressionist nightmare with a permanent smile.
A classic piece of pop-culture design himself – with his fixed grin and chalk-white face – we can see the Joker’s visual influence on V for Vendetta, Stephen King’s It and Bono’s ‘Mr MacPhisto’ persona from U2’s Zoo TV tour. His anarchic spirit cackles in Tyler Durden, Jack Sparrow and Andy Kaufman. If Batman is the classic anti-hero then the Joker is surely an ‘anti-villain’, charismatic and colourful, a glam-rock hood thumbing his nose at authority. Politically, he is an anarchist. Philosophically, he’s exisentialist. His art school is surely Dada. He doesn’t commit crimes, he commits ‘performances’. Life for the Joker is a cosmic farce, the only logical reactions to it being laughter or murder. Batman’s great dilemma is: how do you defeat someone who cares nothing about his own existence? In The Dark Knight we see the Batpod speeding towards a raving Heath Ledger. ‘C’mon!’ taunts the Joker, ‘Kill me!’ Batman bottles it, swerving at the last moment. The Joker, we sense, is almost disappointed. Even the great supervillains from the comic world – Lex Luthor, The Leader, Doctor Doom – are mere variations on the mad scientist theme, hellbent on world domination. The Joker doesn’t want to run the world. He wants to fuck with its head.
19/07/08: Guilty pleasures
This week 3:AM briefly commends to your attention:
* Portishead - Having blown away a decade’s worth of cobwebs, Portishead’s Adrian Utley talks to Dazed and Confused about his love of noise. Plus recent wonder The Rip has been covered by some familar faces.
* Lowbrow art - Mining the creative underground, Juxtapoz, Sketchy Pad and Creep Magazine are bringing talking apes, octobots and sinister balloons to an otherwise grim summer.
* Werner Herzog - As if we’d ever need one, here’s a reminder of the magical chilling world of Werner Herzog.
* 1927 Cabaret - Before the joys and horrors of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival begin, highlight of last year 1927 Cabaret have returned from the road and remain as beguiling as ever.
* Googoo g’joob - He was the eggman.
18/07/08: The very edge of the novel’s possibilities
3:AM’s Lee Rourke on the return of British avant garde fiction:
Ever wondered what happened to British avant garde fiction? Well, it seems to have found a home in London’s conceptual art world.
Given the homogenised state of modern literary fiction today, it’s hard to believe that an experimental (British) literary avant garde ever existed. Yet, back in the 60s a number of writers - most notably BS Johnson and Ann Quin - almost managed to convince the literary establishment of their day that there was something more to the British novel than we were led to believe.
Looking back at their remarkable work these days, long after their working-class bluntness and radical modernism forced most critics into paroxysms of derision, it’s difficult to imagine it reaching the top of a publisher’s slush pile, let alone making it all the way into print. We’ve known for a long time now that marketing departments don’t want to deal with multifaceted and circuitous fiction - because we rarely see it.
However, a new generation of experimental voices can now be heard, thanks mainly to publishers such as Book Works, a publisher that has embedded itself firmly in London’s art world. Book Works have just published their first two titles, in a series of nine, on its Semina - “where the novel has a nervous breakdown” - imprint. Semina takes its inspiration from a series of loose-leaf magazines issued by California beat artist Wallace Berman in the 1950s and 1960s.
[..]
I’m hoping that such a venture will not send critics and readers alike back into the safe embrace of contemporary literary fiction, and that once again literature can begin to forge ahead into new directions. It’s about time we ignored the grumblings of a past generation of critics (too many to mention here) who tired of our old avant garde’s investigations and embraced, once more, the notion that fiction doesn’t always have to strive to be “literary” to be authentic.
Further: Richard Marshall reviews the Semina title One Break, A Thousand Blows! for 3:AM / Stewart Home, Semina commissioning editor, in conversation with Bridget Penney
: In sin & in epic glory
”We’ll never be reasonable to anyone ever again. It’s war from here on out.”
the eXile – the Mark Ames-edited Russian newspaper that ran into trouble a while back – returns in a new guise:
We were never like the others: the fake-alternative, fake-angry papers. That’s why our spectacular death has pissed off so many people who never had the nerve to go where we went, and who always wanted to see us snuffed out—quietly, without a fuss. We lived out our name as we lived out everything else. We’re now in true eXile, just as we’d announced from the beginning 11 years ago—and that is why we’ve named the new online webzine that we’re launching today “The eXiled.” It’s now an accomplished fact.
But our job isn’t done. We’ve got a lot of bile yet to be pumped, a lot of unfinished business—and thanks to our readers, we’ve got a little pot of money to fuel our insurgency against what we can only describe as “the fucks.” You know who we’re talking about here.
How will “The eXiled” differ from our now-abandoned Mother Ship, the USS eXile? For starters, we’ve pulled out of Russia for good—we’re not going to stick around there and see what the ministry experts think of our literary golden shower into Medvedev’s mouth. Like the pro-Chechen site kavkaz.org, we’ve moved our servers out of Russia and to a secure location that’s more appropriate. Which in our case means that we’ve moved our operations to Panama.
Yes, Panama. Just because we like the sound of it. Fact is, Russia just ain’t fun anymore. We’re bored of all the overpriced low-quality nonsense that governs every aspect of that birch-infested bog. We’ve moved to somewhere a little nicer, where we can exchange our mud-stained parkas and boots for loose-fitting short-sleeved Hawaiian shirts, and where we no longer get harangued into “bonding” with the locals via their filthy peasant drug alcohol, because we can bond with Pedro and Manuel via their clean pure white rock cocaine, a far superior and more noble substance. I mean, everyone in Panama smiles all the time! A cynic might say “That’s because they’re fucking cokeheads!” to which we could only reply, “Cynic!” Unless we’re on coke, in which case we’d answer, “Haha! Yeah, you’re totally right. In fact, I never thought of that before…”
So, what do you folks out there in reader-land have to look forward to here? Death. But before you die, we at The eXiled will be there to hold your hand and make sure your last days and months on this planet of ours really, really hurt. We’re the doctor who refuses to give you morphine for that tumor eating its way through your pancreas, telling you, “We don’t think it’s right for you to cop out and get high simply because you’re in excruciating pain day and night, and you’ll continue to shriek in pain until you finally die from shock in about four months, which is really three months and twenty-nine days more than any living creature could possibly bear. So, suck it up, you nation of whiners you!”
15/07/08: 3:AM in conversation
As part of the London Lit Plus festival, 3:AM are hosting an evening with novelist and film-maker Chris Petit, tomorrow at the infamous Wheatsheaf Pub.
Chris Petit is the director of cult British road movie Radio On, recently re-released on DVD by the BFI, and author of the essential London noir Robinson and the thrillers The Psalm Killer and The Passenger.
3:AM in Conversation: Chris Petit
Upstairs at The Wheatsheaf
Wednesday 16th July 2008 from 7.30pm
11/07/08: The Missing Links
Will Self, “the only gay writer in Britain who’s a practising heterosexual” * Jessa Crispin on Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music: “Michael Bracewell’s history of Roxy Music does not go for conventional thinking — not about the band, and certainly not about how to write a rock biography. There are no stories of life on the road or time spent in recording studios. Bracewell, a British novelist and journalist who has written extensively on art, music and fashion, decided to focus on the path each band member took to get to Roxy Music. Eno and Ferry do not even meet until page 335.” * Some good reading in the July Bookslut: interviews with Aleksandar Hemon & Lisa Appignanesi; Reading Ulysses; Alberto Manguel and the new Alexandria; Hollywood Madam on Belle de Jour; Anais Nin’s Winter of Artifice reviewed * Jonathan Coe on writing: “I’m very undisciplined. I stare at the computer until I get bored, which takes about five minutes” * What makes bad fiction bad? asks J Robert Lennon: “I think we–meaning, you know, literate culture–have a problem talking about why we dislike things. We’re pretty good at praise–it’s not unusual for somebody to tell me they like a book, and then tell me precisely why, and for me to read the book and like the same thing. “The characters are hilarious.” “It has an exciting plot.” “The prose is clear and engaging.” But ask somebody why they don’t like a book, often you’ll get something like “It just sucks,” or “It’s boring.” There are, of course, specific things that make the book bad, but we often just can’t put our fingers on them. I believe that book reviewers, and all readers, for that matter, could use a refresher course on criticism–and I don’t mean, like, literary theory, I mean simple, ordinary expressions of dissatisfaction.” * John Sutherland laments the end of “proper” lit-crit * A review of Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2008, guest edited by Steve Almond * An interview with Lorrie Moore: “I was obsessive with writing, but I wasn’t ever disciplined. Because if you’re obsessive you don’t need discipline. You just do it all the time. Why would you impose a regimen, when this is your love?” * And Lorrie Moore reads ‘Paper Losses’ * Sub Pop is 20: “The label has continued to be crucial to the Seattle scene: It could be argued that Band of Horses and Fleet Foxes would not have received the exposure they did without Sub Pop’s international appeal. But to put it in simpler terms, Sub Pop put this city’s music scene on the map for good. Nowadays, it’s hard to find someone who doesn’t equate Seattle with Sub Pop.” * I don’t need Simon Schama to tell me Leonard Cohen is a Great Lyricist; do you? * The Village Voice talk to Damon Albarn about Honest Jon’s: “It was in the early ’90s that I started going in there. But I didn’t really talk to anyone there till the late ’90s. I’d just buy a record and then scuttle away.” * To bookmark: Peter Murphy’s Blog of Revelations, a fine blend of literature and music * * Cafe Babel celebrate Rosemonde Pujol’s Un petit bout de Bonheur and female masturbation: “It is so ubiquitous in our modern societies, from the amusing incident in American Pie to the masturbatory tales of Bukowski or Philip Roth, the former featuring a telephone (Memories of a Dirty Old Man) and the latter a ‘superb joint of purplish raw meat’ (Protnoy and his Complex) [sic]. Yet the same can not be said for female masturbation, who because of their history of unjust domination, have cultivated a certain modesty and introversion. Therefore in recent years, being more open about it has become a means to move towards a greater equality between the sexes. Pujol’s book is just one example of a new, emerging sexual vision of the female body that intends to end the culture of silence definitively through an active and reactive over-portrayal of it.” * Kafka’s papers come to light and Mark Twain makes the cover of Time * 32 sci-fi novels you should read [via Largehearted Boy] * Elizabeth Hand remembers Thomas Disch.
: Guilty pleasures
This week 3:AM briefly commends to your attention:
* Wordle - better than tag clouds (sorry, James), Wordle is “a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your cloud with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes”. Above, Melville’s Moby Dick, as created by Steamboats are Ruining Everything.
* The Penguin Paperback Spotters Guild - Masters of book jacketing (witness Great Ideas, Volume III), Penguin Books inspire a devotional following. In the vein of Seven Hundred Penguins, the PPSG Flickr group have your favourites covered.
* Sherlock Holmes - Basil Rathbone; Jeremy Brett; Sacha Baron Cohen? Like Maxim Jakubowski, the very thought of the Ali-G actor in an ulster fills me with dread. I’m taking comfort in Arthur Conan Doyle’s books (the sexy Penguin Reds, of course) before it’ll be too embarrassing to be seen with them in public. From The Sign of Four: “Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff… he thrust the sharp point home… and sank back into the vevlet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”
* Chet Baker / ‘Let’s Get Lost’ - His best album is the 1987 live album In Tokyo, but the definitive Chet Baker tune has to be ‘Let’s Get Lost’, also the name of Bruce Webber’s fascinating documentary on the jazz legend. Difficult to come by for a few years, Webber’s Let’s Get Lost enjoyed a limited run in some arthouse cinemas last month and is out on DVD at the end of July.
* The Wire - Forget Lost and its pretensions, the best literary US TV-drama of recent years is The Wire. And I’ll direct you to Steve Finbow’s piece in LitUp.
10/07/08: An Egyptian in Paris
Andrew Gallix remembers Albert Cossery, who died last month:
All his life, Cossery sided with those he felt God had forgotten: petty thieves, pretty prostitutes, exploited workers and hungry vagrants. He despised materialism and eschewed the rat race. In Proud Beggars (1955), usually considered his masterpiece, a university professor finds peace of mind by becoming a bum, proving that beggars can be choosers. In The Lazy Ones (1948), a character stays in bed, out of choice, for a whole year. Another decides, on reflection, not to take a wife for fear she might disrupt his precious sleep patterns. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood even take up arms against all those who prevent them from snoozing in peace until midday.
For the author and his lovable rogue’s gallery, sleep, daydreams and hashish-induced reverie are endowed with mystical qualities. Idleness is more than a way of life. It offers the greatest luxury of all: time to think and therefore the chance to be fully alive, “minute by minute”. The overt message of these people whom God has forgotten (but who themselves have not forgotten God) is that paradise is not lost, but most of us are too busy to bask in “the Edenic simplicity of the world”.
There is, however, a darker covert message. In practice, living “minute by minute” meant living the same minute over and over again. Time seems to have stood still for Cossery as soon as he settled in Paris. In 1945, he checked into a small room in a hotel called La Louisiane on Rue de Seine and remained there until his death. Every day, he got up at noon (like his characters), dressed up in his habitual dandified fashion and made his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he usually repaired to the Flore or the Deux Magots where he would cast an Olympian eye over the drones passing by. Then it was time for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum. Cossery, who once described sleep as “death’s brother”, lived a strange, mummified existence, reminiscent of Beckett’s “sleep till death/ healeth/ come ease/ this life disease”.
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