If you haven’t read 3:AM’s interview with Lynne Tillman yet, do that first, then read Boldtype’s: “NYC influences me— its rhythms, characters, weirdness, problems. The city reassures me, just by going out onto its streets. There’s so much life around me that’s not mine. I can observe it, and it takes me away from myself.” * Also in this month’s Boldtype, a review of Brandon Stosuy’s Up Is Up, But So Is Down. Brandon Stosuy tells 3:AM how the book came about, his fascination with Dennis Cooper and his project on Norwegian black metal. * “The unhappy ending is such a profoundly embedded feature of contemporary life and literature.” Richard Gwyn picks 10 books with unhappy endings: 1. The Bible by various authors * Scott Pack (whose blog is always a good read) wonders what’s the point of John Banville’s pseudonym? * Artforum on Malevich’s archrival and “the greatest Russian avant-garde artist that no one has ever heard of”, Pavel Filonov. * In the latest LOST Mag, David Lynch discusses The Death of Film.* Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, which seemingly has an appalling response rate for submissions, is guest-edited by Will Oldham: “our brains are allowed to transmogrify and delete, mutate and evolve, seed and fertilize images from inside and out of us. so then if you wander, head down, with confusion possibly ruling for a while, and then raise the face to a lit image that pops open footlockers of your mindbrain, you have made these!” * Scott Espostio’s Quarterly Conversation; of particular interest, the reviews of Greil Marcus’ The Shape of Things to Come—”Ultimately, it reminds me of the Beastie Boys. It’s music made of cultural junk..”—and William T Vollmann’s Poor People. * Is ‘literary’ a dirty word? Amanda Ross, of the R&J book club (sorry, I can’t bring myself to write their names), thinks so: “I really hate that word. For our readers, if we said a book was literary, it might put them off.” * Culture NI profile Marvel and 200AD colourist David Campbell. * In the “rise of the graphic novel to literary respectability”, Bryan Appleyard finds the work of Alison Bechdel to be the best. * 3:AM’s David Thompson reviews Batman: Year 100: “[Paul] Pope demonstrates that ageing icons from the Thirties can be reinvented for each new generation.” * Travis Jeppesen provides Largehearted Boy with Book Notes to Victims. Travis reads from Wolf at the Door on Twisted Spoon Press Audio (tks. Andrew G.). * “People have made the claim that Rock & Roll is dead almost since the day the first electric guitar was plugged in to an amplifier. And today it might even be true. But if Rock is drawing its terminal breath, poetry, as an important cultural expression, is approaching archaeological status,” says Alexander G Rubio. * Jarvis Cocker is to curate this year’s Meltdown festival. The line-up hasn’t been announced yet, but if Cocker’s stint a while back as guest editor of the Observer Music Monthly is anything to go by—Lee Hazlewood and Pierre Henry spring to mind—it should be good. * If ‘The Wasp Factory’ was, by his own admission, his classic debut album; ‘Complicity’ his angry punk record; ‘The Crow Road’ his sprawling masterpiece; and his SF books – written as Iain M Banks – the obligatory side-project, then his latest mainstream novel, ‘The Steep Approach to Garbadale’, looks set to be seen as that mid-career staple: the return to form. Time Out interview recent green convert Iain Banks. * Granta’s best young American novelists. * An interview with octogenarian publisher Peter Owen: “We could have had all [Hermann] Hesse’s books, but I did something silly. I changed the title of Narcissus and Goldmund and Frau Hesse went berserk.” * Under threat: John Calder’s bookshop, The Feminist Library, Gay’s the Word and London Magazine. * 12 rare books of the avant-garde (via gmtPlus9 (-15)) * Dylan Hears a Who (via Backwards City).
