Robert Anton Wilson “defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @ 4:50 AM on binary date 01/11″. More on STML . A memorial is planned for 18th February. * As Art of Fiction notes, 2007 could be the year of The Fall: Reformation Post TLC, the new album due out February 12, Renegade: The Gospel according to Mark E Smith, a television appearance as Jesus, not to mention Perverted By Language: Fiction inspired by The Fall (edited by one Peter Wild) * A Sunday Times feature on Ballads of the Book (Chemikal Underground Records), a collaborative album where Scottish authors — Ian Rankin, Ali Smith, Alasdair Gray (who also provided the artwork) and AL Kennedy — write the lyrics to music by the likes of Teenage Fanclub and Arab Strap. Bill Duncan on the project: “Cross-art-form collaboration is a buzz phrase in the Scottish cultural landscape now, and I’ve been involved in a couple of projects that have fused words with sound and visuals,” he says. “Ballads of the Book is a genuine example of two art forms enhancing one another to create something rich and strange.” * AL Kennedy on Ballads of the Book: “It’s understandable that writers might want to hang out with musicians — many hunched and quietly spoken typists have no other way of looking cool. Although writers get respect in certain quarters, they don’t get trailers filled with artichoke hearts and a running buffet of buff and sexually indiscriminate youngsters. Writers generally get accommodation that would disgust a £20-a-night comic, and any Byronic glamour attached to their trade disappeared with, well, Byron.” * Wired claim that Amplifer magazine “trades reviews for ad buys” * An archive of MP3 interviews with (mostly) musicians. Worth a listen, Thom Yorke, Morrissey, The Decemberists * Morrissey and Euorvision * Alice Coltrane, R.I.P. * The San Francisco Chronicle look at John Coltrane’s political activism (via Largehearted Boy). * Erasing Clouds ask 100 musicians the same questions * Word diagramming * The architecture of Second Life (via Design Observer) * Forbes magazine’s 10 most expensive books of 2006 * The Lit-Blog Co-op’s Winter Read This!. Scott McKenzie on other nominee Stephen Graham Jones, who’s also interviewed by Dan Wickett * Harold Pinter has been awarded the L égion d’Honneur. Pinter’s People, sketches and monologues from 1958 to 2006, and featuring comedian Bill Bailey, opened at London’s Theatre Royal yesterday (30 January) for a four-week run. * 3:AM Magazine get three mentions as Best Website in Laura Hird’s Best of 2006. This month’s issue also runs a joint review of Stephen Hall’s eagerly anticipated Raw Shark Texts and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, as well as an interview with the best living Irish author, Patrick McCabe * Tom McCarthy’s Remainder gets an A- review from the Complete Review: “How could the [Booker] judges possibly have overlooked it? We still don’t know.” Exactly. It is also reviewed in the new Bookforum * There’s an interview with PJ Harvey in the book Dorset Women, which, as the name suggests, documents the lives of 35 women from the West Country * Ewan McGregor as Kurt Cobain? (via Sigla) * Illustrator Harry Horse has committed suicide. More in The Independent, plus Neil Gaiman remembers the man. * Literary LA (via Bookninja) * The Decibel Penguin prize has to change its entry criteria. * Mountain*7’s best books of 2006 part two, including Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice (part one here) * Clip/Stamp/Fold, an amazing archive of “the radical architecture of little magazines” from the Sixties and Seventies, The Punk Paper: A Dialogue and Fanzines: Their Production, Culture and Future ( all via Things Magazine) * The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize * Kill Poet * Jonathan Lethem remixed: “These stories are for filmmakers or dramatists to adapt. They’re available non-exclusively — meaning other people may be working from the same material — and the cost is a dollar apiece. There’s a simple written agreement to sign, which imposes a couple of restrictions, and that’s it — once you’ve paid your dollar and signed the agreement, you’re free to adapt or mutate the story as you please.” (via BoingBoing). * “Scarlett Thomas will suck you so far into her world you’ll get blown out the other end.” Stop Smiling review The End of Mr Y. Read 3:AM’s interview with Scarlett, and then read MySpace is a disgrace, why she won’t be signing up * Zadie Smith’s fifteen tips for writing and reading better * Conversational Reading on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “I didn’t think I’d finish it. In fact, I was sure of this — my failure — for a good 500 pages. For the first 200 pages, I felt confident, my readerly sails as big as my belly, and I was plowing out to sea.” * “Good People” a new David Foster Wallace story in the New Yorker * Ian Rankin’s hidden Edinburgh [MP3] * One Book — One Edinburgh, three formats of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, including a graphic novel, will get Edinburgh reading in February * The Guardian on the Herg é centenary exhibition in Paris * The Times talk to Philip Gourevitch about the Paris Review Interviews: “These interviews are collaborations, not confrontations, to put it really simply. The qualification is that the editors and interviewer in some big way have a lot of esteem for the person — not that we don’t think there are problems, but it does mean that if we basically think someone’s not very good, we don’t think, ‘Let’s go and expose him.’ He’s exposed himself by then.” * An interview with Samir El-youssef, who co-authored , Gaza Blues with Etgar Keret: “I wanted to write about the Palestinian community in Lebanon as a real community with problems and tensions and contradictions, and not just as a heap of people waiting for the problem to be solved.” * Martin Amis érable * Powells interview Paul Auster: “These books that I’ve written over the years, they’ve all come to me out of the deepest, most inaccessible places in my unconscious. Almost without fail, when something presents itself to me, that’s it. I don’t second-guess it. I just go with it, if it feels right.” * Ward Six, the blog of J. Robert Lennon and Rhian Ellis, ask: Where’s all the good Science Fiction? * The 25 greatest gigs ever. Irvine Welsh: “We were at a Genesis gig at about that time and I shouted at Phil Collins: ‘Fuck off ya baldy wee twat’ and my hair started to visibly receed at THAT MOMENT. I recall Phil — in that poignant moment of silence — being a little bit hurt. Sorry Phil’, but it was some quiff I had and I couldn’t help the arrogance. * A short profile of “Harlem’s most notorious heroin peddler” and author, Leroy “Nicky” Barnes * To Hell with Journals, edited by Lee Brackstone (so it’s a little Faber heavy), featuring Daren King, Michael Smith, DBC Pierre and Willy Vlautin * Danny Kelly on Clinton Heylin’s Babylon’s Burning: from Punk to Grunge. 3:AM hope to bring you an interview with Heylin soon.
