3:AM Magazine

The first thing to recognize is that our polarization problem cannot find its solution within efforts to craft venues for better politics. This is because the dysfunctions we face lie with the fact that politics has colonized the entirety of our social lives. To explain, the social spaces we inhabit –our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, markets, places of worship, and parks — are increasingly sorted according to our political affiliations. This means that our ordinary social interactions tend to put us in contact only with those who are politically much like ourselves. What’s more, we as individuals have come to organize more and more of our everyday lives around our political loyalties. Not only do our rivals assign political significance to our daily routine; we do too.

Robert B. Talisse on our increasingly bipartisan lives.

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Sunday, 11:00 AM. Saw friends last night, felt strange. Went to the wrong house first and it was filled with people I might’ve known. I went to the next house and felt a bit more at ease because I knew it was the place I’d intended to go, but not much. Can’t have conversations with people like I used to. Can’t open up or think out loud anymore. Still. There’s this voice in my head having a conversation I’m never able to really articulate. It’s in there, now, tearing down this moment and turning it into something to fear.

By Grant Maierhofer.

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When he died, I took all those other quotes off the cover of Jerkoff and placed his right in the center atop the blonde bombshell in the pink negligee. I added a picture of him inside the book as well with an inscription thanking him for all he’d done for me in the brief time that I’d known him. Today, Fante is still with me. There’s a framed picture of him hanging on my wall, right above my workstation. He’s glaring down upon me from under that white Fedora he got in Italy, somehow still reminding me that I don’t know Jack F. Shit about writing. Thanks for the reminder Fante.

Douglas Mallon remembers Dan Fante.

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It would be difficult to find two more contradictory or divergent phenomena than that of the punk subculture and Conservative Party politics. Despite this, the year 1975 was of existential significance to both. Not only were the Sex Pistols established that year, but the first-ever referendum was held on whether Britain should remain part of the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union.

By Mirek Vodrážka.

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For Simenon, as for Kafka, writing was a gesture. The same imbrication of the physical and the linguistic that drove Kafka to abandon fragment after fragment drove Simenon to produce his improbable number of books.

By Robert Minto.

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Do not be afraid. Every Virgin has to trawl, even if it is many years, Mary of tears, black curls, white face. Eyes like a moll. Humpress of pyres. She left for her Marian tour in 1954 and came back altered.

By JoAnna Novak.

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This nebulous relatedness between the works will not be apparent to the regular gallery visitor, and that is perhaps the point: the writer as curator does not operate like the art historian as curator. The Whitechapel Gallery’s director Iwona Blazwick commented that a writer is allowed to curate much more freely and thereby suggest novel ways of looking at a selection of art. It is Vila-Matas’ prerogative to make up stories, or draw invisible lines between them. Yet he helps us by providing more perspicuous explanations in the brief, and certainly portable, novel-cum-gallery-catalogue Cabinet d’amateur: An Oblique Novel that has been published concurrently to accompany the exhibition.

R.D. Hansen reviews an exhibition curated by Enrique Vila-Matas at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.

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Reflecting on the photographs of bizarre humiliations & tortures inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by US military personnel at Abu Ghraib, Žižek made the salient observation that “the very positions & costumes of the prisoners suggests a theatrical staging, a kind of tableau vivant that brings to mind American performance art, ‘theatre of cruelty,’ the photos of Robert Mapplethorpe or the unnerving scenes in David Lynch’s films.” Above all, “recording the humiliations with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces stupidly smiling beside the twisted naked bodies of the prisoners, was an integral part of the process, in stark contrast to the secrecy of Saddam’s torturers.”

Louis Armand on protests as contemporary objets d’art.

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So the ascetic blames herself for her pain; the resulting self-loathing acts as a narcotic to relieve the pain. In this way the ascetic resists suicide. But the cost is to exacerbate suffering. This is why Nietzsche reviles the ascetic religious narcotic. ‘[I]t makes the sick sicker.’ Art is a different narcotic that achieves the same end but without the accompanying side effects. Art restores the affective attachment to life. Art’s role is to prevent suicide for those immune to asceticism.

Richard Marshall‘s final aside about anti-pessimism.

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Writing drunk is composition on the piss. There is, however, another meaning of “writing drunk”. One where the intoxication escapes the bodily boundaries of the writer and seeps onto the page. In such cases it is the prose that is pissed; the sentences themselves that are intoxicated. Confused and free-flowing, they begin to lose the regimented clarity of sobriety and slip into the blurred confusion of being on the bend. Write drunk, edit drunk, be drunk. There are, in my mind, two exemplary novels that display this prose. They are Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano (1947) and J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955).

By Duncan Stuart.

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