3:AM Top 5: Rhys Tranter
Rhys Tranter blogs on literature, film, philosophy and critical theory at A Piece of Monologue. He has just launched One Down, One Up, a jazz website. He writes: “Listening to music often taps into my impatient side, so my favourite tunes are changing all the time. Here are a small selection of tracks that, for […]
Lethem & McCarthy in London
Jonathan Lethem with Tom McCarthy at the London Review Bookshop on Thursday 7 January at 7 p.m ( £6): Chronic City (Faber) is a searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped up in their own delusions, desires and lies. Into the cloistered life of Chase Insteadman, handsome but inoffensive fixture on the social scene, comes Perkus Tooth, […]
ampere’s and
Today’s quick lit [& alt.cult] links from around the web: A return to Beckett & What Bolaño read: The Americans & The Spaniards & David Wallace-Wells on Lorrie Moore (via 3QD) & Bring back rejection letters & Christopher Hitchens on Stieg Larsson (via A&L Daily) & Patricia Highsmith’s New York, real & fictional (via @the_red_shoes) […]
A 3:AM Xmas: Burroughs
‘The Junky’s Christmas’ by William S Burroughs [parts two, three, four]
Cigarettes & Alcohol: An Interview with Adelle Stripe & Darran Anderson
My Grandma gave me these weird Watchtower books with all the bible stories in them, re-written with a fundamentalist Jehovah Witness bent. The JW artists create pictures of heaven, hell, paradise, sin, damnation — perfect families living perfect lives and a world free of disease. I know for a fact that some of the artists started subverting the medium and pictures appeared in Awake where in the foreground a lion would be lying down with a lamb and in the background — if you squinted — you could see a man jacking off in the bushes… They really are completely nuts. It’s a glorified Apocalypse Cult. I knew from a really early age that it was all a load of codswallop, but I was totally enchanted by the art… Those pictures pretty much sold the idea of sin to me. Sin looked like a right laugh. Paradise looked fucking depressing.
Blackheath cohorts Adelle Stripe and Darran Anderson discuss poetry, religion, drink and the forgotten art of the sea shanty.