3:AM Magazine

Virginia Woolf describes how one’s many selves are ‘built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled up on a waiter’s hand’. Olivia Laing’s Crudo chooses to examine the stack in its entirety. In her biography of post-punk poet and novelist Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus writes that ‘Acker saw her “self” as composite. To make her “self” larger, she sought to cannibalize the intelligence of others whenever possible.’ Kraus and Acker were contemporaries, vague acquaintances, and shared a relationship with cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer. Neither condemning nor forgiving, Kraus’ biography quietly states Acker’s pretensions: ‘In London, she played chess with Salman Rushdie’. It simultaneously respects and makes space for Acker’s preoccupation with bodily relationality.

By Imogen Morrell.

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Being a specialist or expert—in any field—is supposed to project an image of competence based on verifiable evidence of competence. In questioning this, The Econocracy is in essence an exercise in the deflation of economic expertise. If their argument is right, then we have little reason to believe that economists are bona fide experts, let alone ones we should leave to their own devices.

Alexandre Leskanich reviews The Econocracy by Joe Earle, Cahal Moran, and Zach Ward-Perkins.

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On its surface, Lost Empress pays homage to the Hoosiers and the Rudys of the world; we know, as we do with all feel-good sports stories, that the Patterson Pork and the IFL are going to achieve a healthy measure of success. At its core, however, Empress is a conversation with the reader. From its informal structure to its colloquial phrasings, the novel reads more like an incredibly eloquent anecdote shared at some bar with its literary bedfellows.

Brian Birnbaum reviews Lost Empress by Sergio De La Pava.

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Images of crumpled paper covered in stricken-through lines and painted over fragments of text, photographs of the manuscript bought by and housed in the Princeton University library, accompany this collection of autobiographical aphoristic poems. These illustrations manifest the unfulfillable desire of the editor and translators to evidence the selection, transcription, and translation process each artifact underwent. My own repetition of the words printed on her blackboard is an attempt to salvage an intact posthumous text from the wreck that is the oeuvre of a poet who not only died before her time, but also overedited and disowned much of her work.

Elisa Taber reviews The Galloping Hour by Alejandra Pizarnik.

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There’s a very old consciousness here, one wanting to create his own metaphor for poetry. Torn between realism, wanting to reproduce things as they are – the conversations, asides, fragmentary sights, because they’re strong and necessary as metaphors – and invention, via dislocation or substitution of materials or shape, or contrasts which by themselves take the object as it were away from both itself and the originals, there’s a sense of pushing and pulling both ways from all directions. And everything tends towards yielding materials that are being pushed around like this, and pulled, which are the very strong subjectivities in play but also a subjectivity you and I can have and share in, so this is push and pull, or fancy dialectics where ‘being clever is not armour’, as Fowler has it early on, where his ‘… hill of necessity turns to taste’, shows ‘taste’ as just this, you fighting with your other selves, or something like that.

Richard Marshall reviews SJ Fowler‘s The Wrestlers.

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I’m thinking that in a European language Brown could perhaps have been a kind of subtle prose writer; in this English, he’s consummately a poet. Maybe one of the reasons I keep thinking about what else Brown might have been is that I’m still surprised he is at all. Even so, he shows a strong swerve in the genealogy of North American vanguard poetics. Language operates as an apparently reliable vehicle for sentiment and event. A discernible “I” (or “us”?). Traditional narrative techniques recur, albeit scattershot, bent through the days. Lineation breaks out.

Dylan Byron reviews The Four Seasons by Brandon Brown.

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The book is breathtakingly bold in its rewriting of the myths women get told over and over again: your parents never meant to hurt you, the men are coming to save you, you’ll love the baby when it’s here. Just as the girls refashion personalities they can live with out of the temperaments created by their parents’ abuse, so The Water Cure refashions truths out of abusive truisms: even if your parents thought they were being kind, they still hurt you; the men’s version of saving you will kill you; the love that you can spare is sometimes not enough.

Leon Craig on The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh.

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I was surprised when I read that Irwin specifically rejects Gellner’s approach to reading Khaldun. He accuses this sort of reading as intellectual tourism. He says that to claim Khaldun as a ‘a superb inductive sociologist, a practitioner, long before the term was invented, of ideal types, a brilliant account of one extremely important kind of society’, as Gellner summarized him, is an example of pernicious Orientalism whereby western scholars impose western ideas onto their eastern material. This is an ungenerous and loaded accusation that doesn’t fairly represent Gellner’s reading of Khaldun. It’s doubly strange because Irwin has brilliantly written about how Edward Said’s book ‘Orientalism’ was a calumny against a whole field of scholars working in the field of Orientalism.

Richard Marshall reviews Robert Irwin’s biography of Ibn Khaldun.

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One of the implications of the catechism of Moderan is a universal repulsion with human flesh. The Moderan child’s transitory period with flesh has become a fragile embryonic stage prior to the final transformation into machine. Human flesh has become an obsolete form. In Darwinian terms, the fully fleshed human has become the less evolved species, an ancestor to modern machine-man. In this collection, the unmodified, unreplaced human becomes a rare, mythic figure because he is disappearing into history.

Darren Huang reviews Moderan by David R. Bunch.

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In the shadow of De Quincey, Coleridge, and Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson, Henri Michaux and Carlos Castaneda, Lin joins a literary history whose resonance depends on the relative sympathy for aesthetic and intellectual solipsism on the part of its audience. Like dreams, the recounting of drug experiences is liable to put its reader to sleep: the language to accurately evoke the extremes of physical and mental sensation isn’t readily available––in most cases, “you had to be there.” For many writers on drugs, these stacked odds have led to breakthroughs in formal innovation: Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Burroughs’s cut-up method, or Thompson’s perfection-by-caricature of New Journalistic methods.

Andrew Marzoni reviews Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

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