Literary oriented articles, stories, essays, and documentaries as featured in previous editions of 3 A.M. MAGAZINE.
BOMBS AND BUDDHISM: AN INTERVIEW WITH BILLY CHILDISH
FEBRUARY, 2002
"I just think it's possible to have another opinion. I’d like to be included. And for that opinion to be recognised as valid. Maybe pop culture isn’t the best way of promoting art and art isn’t actually pop culture anyway. People like Andy Warhol are game players and that’s ok. You mustn’t be too serious, take life too seriously, but it’s a real matter of balance. I like jokes and having fun but cynicism isn’t having fun and jokes. It’s exploitative. And it's got very little blood in it." Richard Marshall interviews Billy Childish.
"Feral moons flashed the digital lens on the dusty dance floor of the Spanish Moon. The restless corpses all came out to bleed their hearts that evening, as they can only once a millennium. They opened the night like their desiccated bodies: with a primal song. And in the end, they danced." Michael Tod Edgerton reviews Exquisite Corpse's first Millenial Marathon Reading bash. Exclusive photos by Andrea Garland.
"I'm doing these pieces which are very carefully constructed and very referential in a simulacrum pulp style and they can't read that there's this dialectic going on between pulp and high brow. My problem is I miss out the middle-brow which is what they count as literary." Richard Marshall interviews Stewart Home.
"The trail to Tony White's Attack! Book classic Satan! Satan! Satan! is a sex/mad/gore splattered masterclass of some of the best writing and writers of the last century." By Richard Marshall.
"Metaphors are like tar babies. It is sometimes easier to pick one up than it is to put it back down. That is, once we start working on one, we can become overly impressed with our own cleverness and try to carry it too far. As someone has pointed out, writing allows us to appear more intelligent than we are but we shouldn't push it. When you reread your stuff and think, 'Damn, I'm good!' you may be in danger." An interview with Scott Rice, creator of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.
"We talked to a lot of people who were experts in this area and they said the threats were individual acts of terrorism, the Internet which allows fascist groups to coordinate and swap information, an unpoliceable network that's just completely out of control and the government in Britain doesn't do anything about it." Richard Marshall interviews Sam Kingsley, producer of Gas Attack.
"The books sell like crazy now which gave me the wherewithal to leave my day job. So, I can write more than ever now, and five books in five years, with a sixth book on its way at this point, it's not like I'm resting much. In fact I'm working harder now than I have ever worked in my entire life, but what the hell, my life is my job now, and my job is my life and that's the way it should be." Dan Epstein interviews the author of Fight Club.
"I didn't like disco, I didn't want to go to the gym and I didn't want to grow a moustache back then. I didn't think about going out and scoring every five minutes. I didn't want to hang around in bars. I grew up being into reading books, rock and roll, art, and my friends were always really mixed people. I'd go into that world to get laid just like anybody. It still doesn't interest me at all. I'm an anarchist by philosophy so I'm not interested in this collective stuff so it doesn't comfort me to feel like I'm part of some sub-group." Dan Epstein interviews novelist Dennis Cooper.
"There are some interesting creative people doing agency work but at the same time -- and I don't mean to sound elitist -- it isn't art. Art is something that pushes the boundaries, challenges our notion of, in this case, what an interface is, that's what an artist does. If they happen to make money in the process with that kind of work and it's unique then that's fine but that shouldn't be the goal." When Mark Amerika was in London for his show at the ICA he told Richard Marshall all about the past and future of digital art.
My definition of work is something that you don't want to do. So if you do want to work, is that work, or is it play? The ideal is not doing nothing but doing work that you want to do at the time when you want to do it." Richard Marshall interviews lazy sod and absinthe peddler Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler where slackers meet Dr Johnson.
"I think the funniest thing was using someone's Marxist ideological analysis techniques to talk about consumer differentiation through social class and actually debriefing this to a contingent of international marketers including some from Russia. So I was actually selling Marxism back to a post-Marxist Russia." Richard Marshall talks to Greg Rowland about crazy golf, semiotics and, of course, The Idler.
"In the other books I've written, characters tend to ponder and wonder and think, and I just thought, 'Fuck it. I'm just going to write something that starts at 90 miles an hour and never slows down.' And once the characters were born, which didn't take much time at all, they essentially shanghaied the whole book. And I thought, 'This is really scary, the characters have taken over the book. Wait those characters are me, I made them up AAAHHHH!." Dan Epstein interviews Douglas Coupland.
"When novelist Paul Auster was invited to become a regular contributor to National Public Radio, he hesitated because he didn't want to write "stories on command." "Why not solicit stories from listeners?" his wife, Siri Hustvedt, suggested. And so Auster asked for succinctly written true stories, and within a year, he received more than 4,000 submissions. He's read them all, some on the air, and selected 179 of the best and most representative to create a unique and unexpectedly affecting book. Here are clearly written and simply told stories "by people of all ages and from all walks of life" that Auster, his wonder and respect palpable, organized into 10 intriguing categories: animals, objects, families, slapstick, strangers, war, love, death, dreams, and meditations." Dan Epstein interviews Paul Auster.
"You know, the British are so sexually underrated. This image they project of stuffiness, rigidity is really a kind of arch sadomasochism. I'd call their libidinal tastes "hierarchical." They adore being put in their place or putting others in their place. I've had sex with a few dozen Englishmen who loved to be restrained, taken against their will. It's some kind of sublimation of their class preoccupation." So-and-So interviews Bruce Benderson.
"Baptising her three characters in terms of a kind of backwoodsman minimalist hoky – as if Brian Eno suddenly started doing Doc Boggs without changing a thing - there’s something wonderfully unexpected and opposite in this stuff. It’s a mysterious wacked up yet austere mysticism that opposes itself simultaneously in a fused, mocking hypnotic pop you don’t see much of these days in the art world. It’s as if Sterling, who refuses to sell her stuff to Charles Saatchi and is described in certain circles as ‘the missing link between Yoko Ono and Tracy Emin’, is still high serious about bringing something about." By Richard Marshall.
"The poet who meant most to me when I was starting was Sylvia Plath. I had two books of poems only in the mid 1970’s - ‘Crossing the Water’ and ‘Ariel’. I carried them everywhere with me. A lot of the poems I was writing were riddled with their influence. And I went up to Ted Hughes at a party in the 80’s organised by Faber and he was on his own and I went over and I said, ‘I just want to tell you that Sylvia was the poet who meant most to me when I started and that I had those two books and that I learned much of what I’ll ever learn about writing from them. Possibly more from ‘Crossing the Water’ although ‘Ariel’ is the better book..’ And he says to me ‘ I used to think that. I no longer think that. I’ve come to the conclusion that everything that Sylvia wrote was touched by her own particular magic.’ And then I told him that I had done two of her poems from ‘Crossing the Water’ in a workshop in the South Bank Centre when I was poet in residence and he smiled and said ‘I remember Sylvia writing those poems. We were in America and she thought she was writing like Elizabeth Bishop. Which is fascinating because you remember the poems and you think ‘Of course! Yes! Yes!’" Richard Marshall interviews Matthew Sweeney.
"On a personal level, the novel cycle is a kind of ongoing argument with myself: why should or shouldn't I do the things I fantasized about doing? I wanted to figure that out for myself, and not rely on the standard moral, religious, and legal rights and wrongs, because I don't believe in the idea of a collective truth. I'm an anarchist, by philosophy. I believe everyone has everything they need within themselves to make the right decisions. Anyway, I'm less afraid now that I'll go insane and do something fucked up to myself or to someone else, but I'm hardly free." Stephen Lucas interviews Dennis Cooper.
"Tommy’s ‘Vatican Bloodbath’ takes as its central conceit ‘The 500 year long struggle between the Vatican and the Royal Family for control of the world’s drug trade.’" By Dick Marshall.
Stewart Home gave an interview for Lucy O’Brian at a recent conference on Punk. 3AM Bring You The Full Text Of The Interview
"At the end of the afternoon we went back to camp and then walked out on the playa again to see the Man burn. All the residents of BRC were out there, in a giant circle around the Man, with about 200 fire dancers in the circle dancing away. All the stops were out. There were many many exotic costumes, including a guy dressed up like a transformer robot with giant feet that lifted him several feet off the ground." Heidi Harley leads you through the world of the Burning Man.
"Besuited or naked, but always side by side, Gilbert and George are both embodied in their art and the embodiment of their art. Their art is love immortalised as a kind of shrine to mortality itself: the fundamental facts of existence, the reality check.' This is part of what Bracewell wants us to recognise in their works, the defiant Romanticism in a world (and art world) of cynicism and hard nosed commercial realism." By Richard Marshall.
"Today, anyone who wants to read a book that's worthwhile, has to write it themselves. No one who fears new ideas need be afraid of the lifeless commodities thrown onto the mass market by those publishing houses active in Britain_They throw one Martin Amiss imitator at us after another, and hype this garbage as the future of English fiction. This is a joke, English fiction has no future.” By Richard Marshall.
"Manning winds his language out of the living knowy speech of Armley wide-boy sass to get to an observation that's as good as one by Elizabeth Bishop. But what Manning does is combine his quickly represented and precise experience and reflection with a snappy punchline word Œdosserjuice' which picks up on the vernacular joy of pub boy crack. This is how the book gains its momentum no matter that this is a story ostensively about vampire/goth rock bands Buffy the vampire Slayer for the Motorhead crew its actually the joke-spooling insanity of each cummed up sentence that kicks the book forward. It's a physical, deranged act that matches up with his vision for ŒRock'n'roll Œreal blistering, passionate rock Œn' roll [that]always plays better on a diet of poverty and cheap drugs.” By Richard Marshall.
"A lot of the false literature around today is based on championing moral values that everybody already agrees with." Tim Parks, one of our most important writers, speaks to Guillaume Destot and Andrew Gallix. The author of Destiny lays into today's false literature and political correctness. Then he goes on to attack one the very foundations of western literature: "The mind is ever seduced by easy analogy. We're constantly seduced by this connection process and in fact it doesn't tell us anything at all. This is basically a criticism of the whole way of thinking, the whole way of literature. . . . The good thing about language is precisely that it's euphemistic. It doesn't get there, but thank God! Otherwise, how could you write a poem like the Inferno? It's interesting that the inferno was pretty much Beckett's favourite work, because if you're going to go through hell, you'd better have a euphemistic language."
Roll over Gutenberg! Mark Amerika, cyberpope, shaman and “filterer of white noise”, knows there is “another way”: he is already looking back to “those times when books used to gather dust in warehouses.” Guillaume Destot and Andrew Gallix met him on a sunny day in Paris. It’s more of a manifesto than an interview—and it’s a 3AM world exclusive. ALL HAIL THE ANTI-NATURALS
MARKING AMERICA AND THE WORLD
by Kristine Feeks.
by Andrew Gallix.
TESTOSTERONE
"James Robert Baker's narrative unfolds with enough twists and turns, flashbacks, chance encounters, violence, anger, and sex, to make your head spin": Greg Wharton on Testosterone.
ATTACK BOOKS
"Attack! is an unequal-opportunities employer, we're out to finally and irrevocably destroy the Oxbridge upper-middle class death grip on "literature". Our bible is The Intellectuals and the Masses. We have swallowed wholesale the knowledge that the reason novels got so tedious, self-referential and dull in the early 20th Century was as a reaction against mass-literacy. They didn't want the oiks to read books. God no! Well fuck you, you snobs! The oiks are biting back." Andrew Gallix interviews Steven Wells leader of the latest literary insurrection
BYTE-SIZED: LIT LITE FOR AN ACCELERATED CULTURE
Byte-Sized: More lit-lite for an accelerated culture by Lucie Aveliere, Chris Byrne, Greg Farnum, Bob Castle, Charles Langley, D. Renee Heslin, Andrew Gallix, and Thomas J. Miller. KNOWING WHERE TO LOOK
Richard took the three grand and the junk he had begun collecting and opened a second hand store "in a small, dingy town on the fringe of Detroit, Michigan (a large dingy town), on what was once a lovely little Main Street." With that, Michael Zadoorian's Second Hand, a novel about the struggle to find meaning amidst the detritus left behind by the great machine of the world (obsolete cities, families, things) begins in earnest. Review by Greg Farnum.
TWISTED SHADOWS
This week's showcase: A review of James Schmerer’s first novel Twisted Shadows followed by a "hot on the trail" excerpt and an interview with the author.
WHAT THE BUTLER NEVER SAW
By Andrew Gallix
BYTE-SIZED: LIT LITE FOR AN ACCELERATED CULTURE
Byte-Sized: More lit-lite for an accelerated culture by Vincent Abbate, Jason Borne, Matt Devereux and Greg Farnum
NOBROW
If in 25 years John Seabrook's Nobrow "is not being taught right next to Toffler's Future Shock as one of the most important books of modern philosophy", James Brundage will be very upset.
New 3 A.M. writer James Brundage taps into the world of Kurt Vonnegut.
LITERATURE IN CYBERSPACE INTERVIEW
The Internet is changing the face of literature. Andrew Gallix interviews SUE THOMAS, Director of the trAce online writing community which is holding an international conference on writing and the Internet.
PUSHING THE DAGGER OF PERCEPTION THROUGH THE DRAPES OF NARRATIVE ESSAY
LITERATURE IN CYBERSPACE II PREVIEW: AN AMERIKAN IN PARIS
"No experience even remotely compares with true eros, with long and lavish love-making . . . Never does the world seem so freshly painted, so brightly enamelled, so new, for heaven's sake, as after the best sex." A new lick of paint, anyone? Read the health warning first! World-famous novelist Tim Parks on "intelligently pert breasts" and "perceptively warm thighs."
INTERVIEW: THE NEO-HYDROPATHES -
"I want patois and pidgin and slang and idiom and accents. I want to see English in its best party frock, and I want to see English with its hairy arse hanging out." Andrew Gallix asks English novelist and playwright Alistair Gentry if globalis(z)ation is having an impact on literature.
GLOBALISATION OR GLOBALIZATION? PART II - TOPSY TURVY
French novelist François Bon on globalis(z)ation & literature : he turns our question on its head!
"'What're you doing?'" Someone shook me hard. I opened my eyes. My fingers still gripped the shiny red handle of the plane's EXIT door : Skye Wentworth introduces an extract from Phoebe Reeves' The Revenant. Andrew Gallix interviews the author.
DANSE MACABRE IN A BLUE MOON
JANUARY, 2002
WHISKEY A WHORE GALORE: 69 THINGS TO DO WITH STEWART HOME
JANUARY, 2002
TONY WHITE’S ‘SATAN!SATAN!SATAN!’ – BRITPULP’S ‘NORTHANGER ABBEY’
JANUARY, 2002
A HUGE INFERNO OF FIRE: GUILLAUME DESTOT INTERVIEWS SCOTT RICE
JANUARY, 2002
LIFE'S A GAS
JANUARY, 2002
FIGHTING FIT: AN INTERVIEW WITH CHUCK PALAHNIUK
DECEMBER, 2001
AN INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS COOPER
DECEMBER, 2001
MARK AMERIKA: NOSTALGIA FOR AN AGE YET TO COME
DECEMBER, 2001
LAZY SODS
DECEMBER, 2001
IDLERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
DECEMBER, 2001
AN INTERVIEW WITH DOUGLAS COUPLAND
NOVEMBER, 2001
AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL AUSTER
NOVEMBER, 2001
THE SEXUAL LIFE OF BRUCE B: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE BENDERSON
NOVEMBER, 2001
LINDER STERLING’S MANCHESTER VOODOO. ‘CLINT EASTWOOD, CLARE OFFREDUCCIO AND ME: REQUIEM.’
NOVEMBER, 2001
AN INTERVIEW WITH MATTHEW SWEENEY
NOVEMBER, 2001
AMERICAN PSYCHO: AN INTERVIEW WITH DENNIS COOPER
NOVEMBER, 2001
THE PRIMITIVIST OFFENCE OF TOMMY UDO'S 'VATICAN BLOODBATH'
OCTOBER, 2001
LUCY O'BRIAN INTERVIEWS STEWART HOME
OCTOBER, 2001 - 3am ESSAY
BURNING VIRGINS
OCTOBER, 2001 - 3am ESSAY
BOOK REVIEW OF MICHAEL BRACEWELL'S 'GILBERT AND GEORGE: THE RUDIMENTARY PICTURES'
OCTOBER, 2001 - 3am ESSAY
REVIEW OF JUDAS PULP: 'RAIDERS OF THE LOW FOREHEAD'
SEPTEMBER, 2001 - 3am ESSAY
MARK MANNING'S BIG BLACK COCK - REVIEW OF 'GET YOUR COCK OUT'
AUGUST, 2001 - 3am ESSAY
TIM PARKS
JUNE, 2001 - 3am INTERVIEW
3AM
REPORT: THE TRAVELLING BLUES OF TOM PAULIN'S WILLIAM HAZLITT
"Tom Paulin began reinventing Hazlitt as a travel writer. Usually
a crap genre, travel writing by Hazlitt was shown to be a way for Hazlitt of writing the Republican Sublime, a political writing that completed the urgent detail of a still-life by injecting movement, life, gusto, into his accounts of his European journeys. Travel writing then became something more like the stuff out of blues singers, fiddlers, balladeers, travellers and ramblers --
on the road like Woodie Guthrie rather than on holiday with Peter Mayle". By
Richard Marshall.
JO CUNT'S PRISON-ART: MICHAEL BRACEWELL'S PERFECT TENSE
"Bracewell has developed a counter-cultural exercise that looks like its opposite; a sex and death pulp novel that has no sex, no death, and is written in the exquisite prose of a polished master out of the House of Toff, an insane attic sister of Anita Brookner" By Richard Marshall.
LINKING IN AMERIKA
"A hypertext is never over, never read in its entirety; it never forces only one reading upon you and is essentially liberal. No wonder its early proponents were active in counterculture movements of the sixties. The development indeed feels like the last bastion of real democracy against the growing commercialisation of the Internet. Written texts are linear sequences which give only one interpretation of the world. The hypertext is anti-hierarchy, it is a sort of anamorphosis, allowing different simultaneous visions and viewpoints." 3am Magazine welcomes Charlotte Gould.
ONLY ANARCHISTS ARE PRETTY
JUNE, 2001 - INTERVIEW
"I'd have to say that I'm not a fashion connoisseur, or fixated with punk in general, but these are clothes that can't be ignored. Even after almost thirty years, they have the same power that inspired the cultural revolution that was punk, and have had a massive impact on how we dress today." Andrew Gallix interviews Andrew Wade
TOM SHEEHAN
Our readers will no doubt remember Tom Sheehan's beautiful "One Oh for Tillie". You'll lick your lips at this new, generous serving of Tom's poetic prose. Tom is one of 3 AM's favourite writers, and there is more to come with an interview of him, featuring glimpses of a little place of happiness somewhere in America. If you've lost your childhood and the built-in magic of it, try Saugus, or try Tom's stories.
STEVEN WELLS AS THE NEW JANE AUSTEN
JUNE, 2001 - LITERATURE: ESSAY
"Against Martinamiss's New Parnassus Wells launches a tanked-up anti-literature that belches, farts and roars itself into a demented lunacy of extremist, secularist hywl, a word that describes the kind of impassioned almost supra-linguistic delivery usually found in raving mighty Welsh Evangelical preachers. He's Jane Austen popping out of the bodice of decorum. Jane Austen with her tits out! On Crack. OFFICIAL!" By Richard Marshall.
THE DEFIANT POSE OF STEWART HOME
JUNE, 2001 - LITERATURE: ESSAY
"Routing himself along a strictly anti-authoritarian, cosmopolitan (mainly European), multi-disciplinary and anti-careerist trajectory of journalism, installation art shows, videos, pamphlets, festivals, piss-takes, music gigs, stand-up routines, lectures, debates, CDs, experimental radio and novels, is found the London prole worker Stewart Home". Read Richard Marshall's defiant prose.
INTERVIEW: AN AMERIKAN IN PARIS
JUNE, 2001 - LITERATURE
February, 2001
Wake up! Your future dream is a shopping scheme: "The positivist science of the mind demands that we be perfectly healthy. We live in a state of total psychoanalytical coverage. (Having a sad moment? Let's talk about it!) No darkness is allowed. The shopping mall, after all, is an artificially bright environment. The System of Commodities needs happy, energetic shoppers." Andrew Gallix interviews Prof. Timothy Shortell, Scott Foust and The Anti-Naturals. "There is no Eden to return to, but there are thousands of brief moments of freedom to be gained."
DECEMBER, 2000 - Literature and Art in Cyberspace
WHAT THE BUTLER NEVER SAW
DECEMBER, 2000 - INTERVIEW WITH TRAVIS MADER
Preethi Woman
November, 2000
She gave up a high-flying job to publish her first novel. She created her own publishing house and promoted her work under the guise of fictitious PR woman Pru Menon. A few months after hitting the bookshops, Gypsy Masala is already on its third print run! Andrew Gallix interviews Indian-born, London-based novelist Preethi Nair about her publishing fairy tale.
She Has A Dream: A Publishing Fairy Tale
November, 2000
Preethi Nair recounts the extraordinary lengths to which she went to publish and promote her first novel Gypsy Masala: A Story of Dreams
LITERARY INTERVIEW: MEET SCRAWL
December, 2000
Andrew Gallix interviews Welsh novelist, Jeremy Dean.
NOVEMBER 15, 2000 - BOOK REVIEW
NOVEMBER 18, 2000 - INTERVIEW
NOVEMBER, 2000
NOVEMBER, 2000 - BOOK REVIEW
NOVEMBER, 2000 - BOOK REVIEW
NOVEMBER, 2000 - TALES OF THE LEORPARD SPOTTED COUCH
OCTOBER, 2000
OCTOBER, 2000 - 3 A.M. BOOKS
August, 2000
AUGUST, 2000
Spoken word? It's the new rock'n'roll. Andrew Gallix speaks to BILLIE PINK, Editor of totallyword.com, the new online spoken word radio broadcasting from Britain.
AUGUST, 2000
AUGUST, 2000
"The important thing was to have found a writer, a brilliant writer, who escaped all the schemes they had so worthily dismantled for us at university." It was at university that TIM PARKS, the greatest living English novelist, discovered Henry Green. His "short circuitry of thought and syntax" has remained with him ever since.
AUGUST, 2000
Avant-pop? Ambient fiction? Neuromantic? Designwriting? Fiction installations? Lit-hop? Guillaume Destot and Andrew Gallix have met MARK AMERIKA, the embodiment of the future of literature. They offer you a sneak preview of their exclusive non-virtual interview with the cybermaster.
EROS ESSAY
AUGUST, 2000 - ZOUNDS
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?
AUGUST, 2000
François Bosques interviews French poetess Lucie Aveliere who is part of a
new Parisian literary phenomenon.
AUGUST, 2000
How to write a commerically-viable novel without selling your soul? Greg Farnum presents his new novel and writing career.
ALISTAIR GENTRY: GLOBALISATION OR GLOBALIZATION?
JUNE, 2000 - ZOUNDS
JUNE, 2000 - ZOUNDS
JUNE, 2000
