3:AM Magazine

» Restless People from the Sick City

The original idea came from a conversation I was having with a friend of mine about Manson lore, and that’s where I first heard the urban legend about the LAPD confiscating a sex tape starring Sharon Tate and a bunch of Hollywood A-listers. The story went that the cops had organised underground screenings of the flick for years. I heard this at the time I’d been considering my next book, what direction to go down, all of that stuff. I had this half-formed idea lingering around about two junkies involved in a get-rich-quick scheme that goes wrong because they can’t keep off drugs. Jim Thompson on crack was my starting point with that. When I heard the Sharon Tate story, the two ideas came together and I was off and running. I never really plan these things out, I just start writing and trying to piece it all together like a puzzle.

Tony O’Neill talks to Alan Kelly.

» Cosmic Station Master

“I started off wanting to write about the world. I wanted to do these huge, great big books, crossing continents and time. After Cloud Atlas, maybe I’m more interested in a smaller, more modest scale. And, with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet it was more a case of my using a microscope rather than a telescope. More recently, I was going to say that I’m returning to the broader canvas. But maybe it’s more an understanding on my part that there’s no difference between a small canvas and a large one. And, whether you choose a microscope or a telescope, it’s all the same cosmology. Yeah, I want to try and get the world.”

David Gavan talks to David Mitchell.

» The Future of Landscape: Doreen Massey

To begin with: why is distance always negative, something to be overcome? There could be a whole thesis countering this but at the most simple of levels, what of the pleasures of travel? This inattention betrays a deeper attitude. Our overvaluation of speed (time here as only money) has robbed us of many things that are at least equally precious. But, second, ‘geography’ is more than distance. What an impoverished view of the planet! What of the variety of place? What of specificity and difference? If time is the dimension of change, then space is the dimension of coexisting difference. And that is both a source of nourishment (something that the globalisation gurus seem altogether to have foregone), and a challenge (how negotiate difference, how to address inequality, and so forth). So I don’t accept the terms of debate, that ‘geography’ is just a negative tyranny.

Andrew Stevens talks to Professor Doreen Massey in the final part of his The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image series.

» Under the Microscope

San Francisco based writer Joshua Mohr’s second novel Termite Parade succeeds triumphantly because we instantly care about his characters. A story is the sum of its characters, sprawling, brawling and cavorting across the page. For all the clever writing in the world, if the characters that walk upon the stage of those previously blank pages are not real, do not come alive like close friends we didn’t know we had, then we’re wasting our time. Termite Parade resonates from deep in the American psyche like some plaintive ballad in the tradition of ‘Frankie & Johnny.’

By Jonathan Woods.

» ‘To the Very Beginnings of the World’

This is the strength of the graphic novel. The texture and background. The background to Marlow’s journey up the Congo River is coloured brown and grey and off-white, the colour of faded journals and dying memories, faded yet still retaining some necrotic vitality. Perhaps colour is too strong a word. There are rather varying shades of darkness. The book, in fact, opens your eyes to just how many shades and facets darkness can have. ‘No use telling you much about that,’ Marlow says of a two-hundred mile trek, ‘paths, paths everywhere, up and down chilly ravines.’ The double page shows a line of coolie slaves on a precarious route cut across an aural cacophony of grey swirling lines, broken up here and there by dark questing patches that could be areas of water or the wing of some monstrous bird.

Max Dunbar reviews Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

» The Whisper of the Village, The Knock at the Door

Wiesenthal spent his life following the Nazi ratlines. The Catholic Church, the CIA, the governments of Latin America, all were happy to help war criminals keep one step ahead of Nuremberg. (Segev points out that many of the ratliners were humanitarians who probably didn’t realise who they were helping.) Those who stayed, didn’t necessarily suffer. Confirmed fascists were comfortable with a Europe of light sentences and big opportunities. This was especially true in Wiesenthal’s native Austria whose historical antisemitism went unchallenged by the physical demonstration of the endpoints of its arguments. Nazis were able to serve in cabinets and run businesses under their own names. They finished their easy time and were welcomed to their home villages like heroes. Wiesenthal complained that ‘The dumbest Nazis were the ones who committed suicide after the fall of the Third Reich.’

Max Dunbar reviews Tom Segev’s Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends.

» The War is Never Over

The chronic compulsion to express myself in art that is soaked in the viscera of my obsessions manifests itself in many different ways. And I am obsessed. Haunted by a planet under siege with the scourge of never ending war. A virus that plagues man and will not be cured until greed, deception and violence have been erased from our genetic hard drives. The War is Never Over is a series of photographic montages now on exhibit in Valladolid, Spain. After decades of ranting against Amerikkka’s genocidal madness I offer these pieces as further proof of rebellion against my own sickness.

An exclusive look at the latest exhibition by Lydia Lunch.

» Beware The Undertoad

Debbie became Mike Leigh’s house-keeper, and told him about this bizarre twist of fate, the angry young Manc in the flat below. Then out came the film Naked, with its angry, psychotic central character, and Deb and I joked it was partly about me, though David Thewlis might have something to say about that. With Craig I still had the travel bug; we decided to go round the world, beginning in Delhi. The night before we left we went for a drink and bumped into Jacqui and Debbie at the Angel. Jacqui and I went back to her new flat. I woke early, in her arms, and wasn’t sure what to do: fly away or stay here, make a life with her? Jacqui walked me to the entrance of the flats on York Way; we hugged goodbye in the grey dawn light and I went home to find Craig waiting, bag packed.

By Mark Piggott.

» Pornography’s Mirror

For many of us the thought of sex in and of itself offers no small portion of exhilaration, but the act itself, especially when performed under haphazard circumstances, brings too much clarity to its detriments. The emotion and splendor to which modern sexual conduct connects itself often allows people the privilege of setting aside the pressing biological mechanics driving the act and the desire to act – which as many of us have learned act out of need rather than want, even if what it needs is not as necessary as it once was. It is only after the act that such awareness is restored. People who engage in casual encounters are often faced with a certain reality following official completion of the act that was hidden preceding the act. Even if all preventive measures were taken against the biological aspects of the act, one is still left with the feeling that they have made a grave error in judgment.

By Chris R. Morgan.

» A Fake Tanuki In Its Environment

Maybe I’m too hard on myself on my thinking I am a pervert. I’m not indiscriminate in my tastes for making romantic advances. Though I am curious of seeing what things look, feel and smell like so I’ve never turned away any romantic advances when they’ve come to me. I suppose this does make me indiscriminate. I’m just curious about the body, but on that knife so are garden-variety perverts. Maybe a pervert isn’t always of a sexual brand. I was curious of something else with my friend. I think being intimate physically needed to happen to find it. I think I wanted to see what happens when the feeling of a severed connection drowns out the actual feeling and the memory of the actual connection.

By Matthew Dorian Corbin.

» Miranda

I wouldn’t worry too much about living in your mother’s basement. I know several successful writers who still live in the houses of people they know. Mostly in the basements of those houses. My favourite pyjamas, in answer to your very original question, are yellow flannel with tiny flecks of pink and blue. Yes, there are often days where I don’t leave my bedroom at all, and just have someone put food on a tray outside my door and knock twice and then go back upstairs. That is a Very Normal Thing for a writer to do. That was also a very good question about the dog. Yes, I do have a dog. If you’re going to be a writer, having a dog is practically essential. Probably because writers are alone most of the time. That is also Very Normal.

By Jessica Wallace.

» Tales from the Mall

One of the parts of the job Imogen likes is the dressing up. She tells all of her friends My God, you have no idea who I was today. This time around she has been asked to pretend to be a single, 32 year old secretarial worker (type C16) and head office have bought the H&M outfit for her. ‘Everyone is acting who they really are anyway, she jokes with her flatmates as she lays out her outfit for the next day, and ruminates on how totally artificial norm-women look. Other secret shoppers have had more challenging ‘roles’ or so she has heard. Once this woman’s job involved shouting at staff and throwing things on the ground. That was kind of cool.

Read an exclusive extract from Ewan Morrison’s forthcoming Tales From the Mall.

» A Straight Line Shaped Like a Knot

They lock you in a tower with a crumpled Italian sports car and say, “Okay, you know what to do.” You bend to the wreck with the ill-forged tools that you have always used. A drunk and a mime teach you Korean. Their pedagogy rejects yes/no answers, focusing instead on sit-ups. You must say the ineffable to all those you have slighted or admired. You build an antenna to communicate further into the beyond. You are a Twinkie in a forgotten vending machine, returning to the womb of atomic matter. You rule a fiefdom.

By Ari Feld.

» Fractures

Robert was screaming those profanities at me, the way he always had. Over the years. When the shine of an adventure started to wear off. In places like Santa Barbara and New York City and Tucson. “St. Thomas is a fucking dump, you goddamn idiot! You think you and fucking Baruch are getting boat jobs to Africa? Huh? Say something you fuck!” He let the bottle fly. It hit me in the head, and I got mad. It hurt. I ran after him, and he started laughing. He was faster than me, but I kept running after him. Chasing him down the Charlotte Amalie harbor. Block after block. My sandals slapping the street. The coke dealer who gave us the rum was behind me. He was a friendly guy from Trinidad. He always had a big smile. He always wore an Oakland Raiders hat. He liked watching these displays on the waterfront. It happened every night.

By Ben Drinen.

» Magic Wand

Raymond Badgely Jr. was turning five. His parents had every intention of booking a room at the Party Palace, but since Raymond Badgely Sr. lost his job earlier that month the family had been making cuts. Late one evening, Marie Badgely flipped through channels hoping to drown out her husband’s snoring when she caught an ad for a children’s magician on the station that runs a low-budget slideshow of local advertisements. Three weeks later the magician was in the Badgely family’s den, clad in his top hat, cape, and faded tuxedo, waving his stick wand and performing amateur slight-of-hand tricks - pulling a never-ending handkerchief out of his breast pocket, linking and unlinking chrome rings, extracting shiny coins from tiny ears. Each little face with a juice-stained upper lip focused on the man.

By Zachary S. Tompkins.

» Four Poems

Wrench open that bottle of vodka:
Moscow nutritionists have shown
that a daily half-litre of Stolichnaya
toughens both tissue and bone.

Swig it down like the Russians do,
from brimming, bottomless tumblers.
Inhale, bite bread and breathe out:
exercise strengthens the lungs.

But don’t slurp borshch between shots:
long term, fresh vegetables are lethal.
Those enzymes will track down your brain
like a wrecking crane a church steeple…

By Alistair Noon.

» Maintenant #33: Eugenijus Ališanka

My creative points of departure were not history, not politics, not nation, but internal spiritual conversions and feelings… I took part in the constitutive Sąjūdis meeting, I stood in the Baltic Way… I was standing hand-in-hand with my brother and hundreds of other people at the TV tower enclosed by tanks, Soviet solders broke the chain just a few meters from us and I kept a vigil all night at the Parliament, I built barricades. That life sucked me up more than writing, it seems even I had lost the distance with what was happening around… One good friend of mine during those days of the Independence movement shut away and nearly never left home while he was writing a book about the adventures of spirit; in his words, “those cannonades just want to distract me from my work“. I was living in a different way, but my poetry was maybe more shut away from life than my fellow. Maybe not from life: it simply lived another life…

In the 33rd of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Lithuanian poet Eugenijus Ališanka.

» Five Poems

wearing army boots you clumped through the vineyards of god
somewhere on the adriatic in medana or priština maybe piran
since school days geography has been your blind spot
your worn overcoat faded by weather shows its original color
where your insignias were roman fatigue
or just the tedium at the fringes of the empire
patches stained with dirt and blood in the nights there was time enough
to think about possibilities of life about other lives here
about a woman about many women
imprisoned in attics of your dreams while the south wind
every morning blows in wreckage of jason’s ships…

By Eugenijus Ališanka.