3:AM Magazine

The fact that we can experience one temporal object a multitude of times implies that the temporal object is not merely remembered through primary retention; in fact, the very idea of perceiving the exact same temporal object numerous times implies some kind of technical reproduction e.g. a recording device (either analogue or digital). Thus, Stiegler’s main line of argument suggests that as we can experience a melody multiple times, and our experience of that melody changes depending on the multitude of times we experience it, we must therefore have a form of technical retention, or ‘tertiary retention’ in which the repeatability of a temporal object becomes possible. Our primary retention is also therefore dependant on both the secondary and tertiary forms of retention.

By Matt Bluemink.

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One doesn’t scroll through a book, eyes in fixed in roughly the same place, but instead scans across, down, and across, turning the page when appropriate. Unlike a feed, the content isn’t infinitely regenerated, but has a discrete (if large) quantity: you’re heading towards an ending. At issue is two experiences of time, one associated with codex and one with the refreshing web page. The first involves racing forward into the future, awareness of a coming end pulling you forward and a visible, easily accessible past behind you in the form of surrounding text and turned pages. The second involves a continuous present, the narrow aperture of the screen, the past erased with a single algorithmically-generated refresh. Less the experience of moving into the future than the future cascading into the static now.

By Andrew Eckholm.

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After all, my resume, albeit plain, isn’t a total debacle. I have four degrees along with experience in higher education (teaching assistant, three years), experience working with people (project coordinator, not-for-profit agency, two years), solid grades, a smattering of obligatory extracurriculars. Still, when the counselor asked me to summarize my work ethic, my work style, in three words, I drew a blank, a blank that ballooned into two minutes of silence, a silence I finally broke with a long rambling account of every job I’ve ever worked (stock boy, sandwich smith, mover, backpack fitter, ski salesman, English tutor, building manager, ESL teacher, grant writer) that said more about my mental stability than my work ethic—and it was not in my favor. But the counselor was smooth, calm, a true professional. We finished the session. Two cordial, capable adults. And ten minutes later she was rid of me.

By Kent Kosak.

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You cannot live a fuller life and come out kinder and wiser than my friend, Alexander Frater, who died just upon the new year, after a time of illness. With his passing we witness the departure of a true luminary in a grand generation of British travel writers, who reinvented, or invented, what we now take to be travel writing. From Norman Lewis, Freya Stark, Bruce Chatwin and Eric Newby, to Jan Morris, Colin Thubron and Patrick Leigh Fermor – Alexander Frater was a light amongst them, and a key figure in this remarkable era, commissioning, inspiring and instigating many of his peers while editor at the Observer magazine in the 70s and 80s.

Steven J Fowler remembers the great British travel writer Alexander Frater.

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Yet it is difficult to believe that Dickens — whose imagination was so prodigious it could hardly have been turned off like a spigot by a few glasses of sherry and some bloody roast beef — ever stopped composing fiction, even in his sleep. It was very likely then, as he rolled about in bed beside Catherine Hogarth or Ellen Ternan, that he dreamed the stories later given shape by Kafka. During the night, characters and images that had come to him that morning or afternoon were transformed by Dickens’s unconscious brain and, by some as yet inexplicable trick of oneiric time and space, conveyed to the insomniac writing in spidery German beneath the lamp light of his room in Prague or Zürau, Spindlermühle or Berlin.

By Alex Andriesse.

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In Audre Lorde’s memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde writes that her name was originally spelled Audrey. When she was a child and she wrote her name on the page, she hated how the y would hang below the line. She had a hard time writing in a straight line anyway. She liked the evenness of “AUDRELORDE.”

But her mother made her spell it Audrey because, in Lorde’s words, “that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was. No deviations were allowed from her interpretation of correct.”

By Tyler Mendelsohn.

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There is a whole nation in the sky that is not subject to the codes of space we know. It is not part of any culture that we can define. It is a country without borders and without citizen allegiance. Its citizens, in fact, change constantly. It is a non-nation, bound somehow within the logic of nationality, but functioning as its antithesis.

There are around 10,000 planes in the sky at any one time, carrying something like 1,300,000 people. Add to that the number of people in airports waiting for flights at any time, and that is a sizeable non-nation. What makes us do it, and what does it mean for human life?

By Ellliot C. Mason

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But if over the years I have naturally had my differences with some of the contributors, nonetheless, Les Temps Modernes will a review for which I feel affection, because there was an occasion when the review provided me a very special kind of delight. The episode might seem inconsequential and in almost all respects this is true, true except in terms of the ever warm and ever precious feeling that a beautiful moment and an unexpected but absolutely delightful happiness will always engender—ever renewed, ever fresh, vivacious, wonderful!

By Steve Light.

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“Artist’s book” as a term is problematic because it ghettoizes, enforces the separation from broader everyday practices and limits the subversive potential of books by putting an art tag on them.

A book is a sequential collection of pages, loose leaf or bound, and it is circulating in multiple reproductions. But today, we are no longer only talking about books anymore—more capacious than book, the term publication is better because it can encompass digital files, hybrid media, and forms we have yet to imagine.

By Michalis Pichler.

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The work I do in my home is not strictly illegal, but I would lose my home if my landlord found out. There’s a clause in my contract, “These premises must not be used as a place of work.” Who defines the workplace? What do these definitions mean for the worker? According to Federici, the fifteenth century was significant when, following the defeat of peasant revolts against oppressive feudal systems, there began an active process of separation between the home and the workplace, housework and ‘real work’: men’s work and women’s work. The delegitimisation of work done at home continues to benefit everyone who profits from a foundation of unpaid labour, and state interference in every opportunity a working class person might have to bolster their income means that social mobility is made harder. These structures ensure that we remain dependent on an under-waged job market, frustrated, and forever in debt.

By Tamara MacLeod.

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