3:AM Magazine

In any case, I think that everyone can at least agree that the great project of the Western World, the unicum distinguishing it from all other human societies, is its ambition to build a way of life without God. I can’t think of other examples, maybe Confucian China, but I get the feeling that all that was just something for the elites, and in the poor countryside the local gods were going strong. Here the project, be it consciously or not, is one for the masses. There’s no point trying to reach different conclusions by recalling the success of the Pope, even with younger generations, and people’s devotion to Padre Pio, or Communion and Liberation and whatnot.

Excerpt from Paradise Overload by Walter Siti, translated by Brian Robert Moore.

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I walk along the bank and chuck the rest in piece by piece, up by where a little waterfall churns the clear water. Still nothing. Then, a minute later, the first eel approaches.

It methodically passes along the rocks on my side of the falls, as if sniffing like a dog or cat. It noses a fallen leaf, moss, and swims near or round a couple of pieces of fat without so much as a glance. Its fin grazes the surface of the stream, sending brush-thin ripples out across the water.

By Ellie Boughton.

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All three authors are clearly short story writers. All three are Australian. All three are writing proudly from the perspective of their multiple heritages or motherlands. And all three are taking risks, experimenting, and going against the grain of the nation, shrinking boundaries and capsizing borders in ways that only writers of an aspiring cosmopolitanism could dare imagine.

By Kiran Bhat.

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Borges, recognised that the idea of a national literature which espouses themes and topics directly associated with the author’s homeland is an extremely limiting factor; one that is distinctly modern and European. In order to overcome this, many of Borges’s contemporaries sought for Argentina to let go of its literary connection to Spain. At the time of Borges’ writing Argentine identity had become too closely associated with a need to break historical continuity with Spain which, paradoxically, placed them in an eternal dialectical relationship with what Benedict Anderson calls their ‘mother nation’.

By Matt Bluemink.

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Every writer has a moment of crisis in his career; where the gap between the reality in front of him and his ideals is too big to contend with. The war of 1965 was just one of the armed conflicts that Ali Sardar Jafri witnessed, but it deeply changed his literary ideals. I want to recreate here the year of 1965 because the experience of the sixties buried the utopian hopes of Sardar for good.

By Gargi Binju.

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It was three or four weeks into the UK’s lockdown period that I first became aware of Coronavirus conspiracy theories. In America, the ‘empty hospitals’ movement saw members of the public filming deserted hospital car parks, as evidence that the pandemic was nothing more than media hysteria (obviously, the lack of cars was down to non-essential procedures being cancelled, and visitors banned). In the UK this gained less traction. Rather than vigilante journalism, British ‘truthers’ focused on minimising the impact of Covid-19 as ‘no worse than the flu’, the mounting mortality rate brushed aside with the thought ‘they would have died soon anyway’.

By Thom Cuell, extracted from Dodo Ink’s forthcoming Trauma: Essays on Art and Mental Health anthology.

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My grandmother claimed she had accidentally dropped him one day and so her mother scarred her with permanent burns and sent her to work for a week without shoes. Her words came out so flat I couldn’t believe they were real. I thought, this isn’t how you talk about being tortured, like you’re reading the weather report.

An essay by Freyja Howls.

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Germany as a country is a disparate concept, my father tells me. During the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it was made up of hundreds of principalities, and each of those principalities had different customs, governing bodies, dialects and ethnicities. One of the penalties imposed on Germany after the First World War was the confiscation of much of its land—a bit given, technically given back, to Poland, some to Austria. Some used to create a whole new country. So Germany, as you know it, is a fabricated concept. All nations are. And by extension so is what it means to be German.

By Madeleine Dunnigan.

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Through Chopin and the exhibition, I saw how unstable the relationship between poetry and language can be, and how naive my understanding of how poets work with language really is. Granted, Chopin was working and caught up in a wider artistic and political movement linked with Dadaism, Lettrism and, by extension, Marxism yet, through a dialogue with his own body, Chopin was demonstrating how we associate poetry as a way accessing a language that comes from “within” when we never really know what “within” entirely means.

By Liam Bishop.

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In mid-2020, as Americans around us die in staggering numbers, it’s hard not to look at the way we treat the people who have contracted COVID-19, some who lived, some who died, and some still battling for their lives. We lament the tragedy of the selfless and hardworking healthcare professionals sickened in the line of duty. We sneer at the young and assholeish who partied in Cancun for spring break and now are on ventilators. We sigh at another elderly person whose aging body couldn’t fend off this pernicious virus. And we judge the overweight and obese for letting their bodies become this vulnerable to it. The stigma of this illness, for some queer people, even echoes their lived experiences of HIV and AIDS, and the impact it had on the lives of their family and friends.

By Fletcher Cullinane.

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