3:AM Magazine

» Being Scott McClanahan

I don’t think I have a process. I guess most writers are lying when they babble on about their process. It would be like talking about how you pray or make love. You don’t really think about it, you just do it. You do it because you’re infected with it. I just write when I want, and I write what I want. I think I was a really bad writer when I worried about process. Of course, maybe I’m still a really bad writer. I think people should quit trying so hard. I haven’t tried hard in years.

Andrew Worthington interviews Scott McClanahan.

» Leiter Reports

Rosenberg’s position is a bracing one, and a useful challenge to lazy anti-naturalist tendencies in a lot of Anglophone philosophy, but it does seem to me to be based ultimately on armchair philosophy of the kind naturalists are supposed to decry. Physicalism is not a scientific result - Carnap thought it would be, but we know it isn’t the case that everything that is causally explicable is explicable in terms of causal relata that are physical. So my view on this issue is certainly not Rosenberg’s, as much as I admire his work. In any case, it seems to me that American literature departments have recovered quite a bit from the intellectual disaster of the 1980s, a happy development. And if I may paraphrase Nietzsche, life without literature would be a mistake!

Richard Marshall interviews Brian Leiter.

» Indie Rock Virtues

So if you say there’s clearly some kind of distinction between philosophy and literature we can say there’s a continuum where at one end of it you’re clearly doing philosophy and at the other end you’re clearly doing literature and that will be helpful. But if you say that we have to establish this rigid line between philosophy and literature, so that everything is either one or the other and nothing can be a mix of the two, then you’re doing something that is not helpful at all.

Richard Marshall interviews experimental philosopher Josh Knobe.

» Is it about a bicycle?

Vault deals with storytelling (you have to read Vault) and the mechanisms of storytelling. It deals with the many simulacra that build up a story, brick by brick, lie by lie, fabrication by fabrication.Vault is as fragmented as Europe before and after the war, Two not One. Vault has to be fragmented. McKuen is fragmented. The book is fragmented. David Rose himself is fragmented. I am fragmented. You are fragmented.
Vault is not a historical novel. It could have been, but it is not. It is lying out there in the ether waiting for us to catch up. More than a book about a man and war and his enjoyment of cycling, it’s a metaphor.

Paul Kavanagh reviews David Rose’s Vault.

» Going Underground

All three authors were such youthful ‘outsiders’ wanting in. Colin Wilson came from Leicester, the drab industrial midlands; Laura Del-Rivo from Cheam in the stuffy stockbroker belt of Surrey. Only Terry Taylor is an actual Londoner, born in Kilburn – but, in the persona of his novel’s 16-year-old protagonist, he breaks down the sprawling metropolis to its crucial hepcat constituency. The spark that crackles through all three books is the yearning for change and difference, of finding a way of living in the centre of all happening without resorting to the drudge of work – by far the biggest fault line in this generation was the one that opened up between the baby-boomers and their parents.

Cathi Unsworth takes a trip with New London Editions’ ‘Beats, bums and bohemians’ reissue series of novels.

» Nice Nihilism

Rosenberg is a fearless naturalist, whose ‘nice nihilism’ doesn’t imply that we can become nihilists. He disturbs the comfy domestication of the naturalistic world view. Evolutionism and physics gives us a nihilist universe, purposeless, meaningless, ultimately devoid of everything we think is important. But it has constructed us as having evolutionary reflexes that grant us illusions of freewill and purpose we cannot but believe. Of course, this is hardly the last word on the matter. There are plenty of people, naturalists and non-naturalists, who contend that he’s plain wrong. But the strength of his book is that it sets out his position clearly and therefore allows those who disagree to know what they must do to answer him.

Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.

» The real Cape Kennedy is inside your head

In his vision of a ruined Cape Canaveral, Ballard presents the reader with a microcosm of the universe as a whole. In seeing the Earth from outer space, the astronauts—and thus, the viewers of those astronauts—understanding of time and space is dwarfed by the trauma of seeing the planet float in outer space. To see the planet from afar with all its flora and fauna, its pathos and drama, surrounded on all by sides the infinite stretch of cosmic stasis means sacrificing coherence for vertiginous contingency.

Dylan Trigg on J.G. Ballard’s Cape Canaveral stories.

» Japanamerica: Cosplay in the USA

The appeal of cosplay outside Japan is a perfect example of the transcultural boomerangs that characterize much of contemporary popular culture. As Japanese otaku of an older generation will tell you, cosplay, and the devotional fandom behind it, came from the United States: photos of costumed fans at North American sci-fi conventions, such as those revolving around Star Trek, appeared in magazines imported to Japan in the 1960s and 70s. Japanese readers adopted the practice, using characters from their homegrown anime and manga series. As the popularity of manga and anime spiked outside Japan, fast-evolving Internet access provided overseas fans first with a peephole and then a massive window onto what looked like an enticing made-in-Japan phenomenon.

By Roland Kelts.

» In ye Land of ye Olde Folks: Downtown Remix

The October 22 event not only presented to the viewers samples from Home’s latest book Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie, but also reasserted the author’s punk-yoga performative approach to reading-writing as the territory of contestation within the contemporary cultural arena: the complicity that is always already a form of resistance against utilitarian nihilo-cannibalism. Almost as an embodiment of the subtext of the virtual, compulsory anti-narrative, Stewart Home’s act was a reworking of the static-kinetic dialectic through postfuturist literary remixing.

By Nikolina Nedeljkov.

» I Love You, Susan

Herbie knew about a scheme where you could breed black widow spiders for the U.S. Government and they would pay you handsomely for your contribution to the whatever-it-was effort. He thought that sounded like a legal, easy way to make money growing something at home, and he was talking about it to anyone who was interested.

He still lived in the little Sears Roebuck house, next to the big oak tree, with a lot of other people, including an odd and beautiful girl named Susan.

Susan had pale skin and long thick dark hair, and a curvy womanly body. She didn’t always finish her sentences, which didn’t always turn out to be about anything anyway, and it was hard to tell if she really liked you or not. But she was trying very hard to space in, from a very long way away, and she was beautiful, and really those two things combined can make a person perfectly worthwhile.

By Jessica Ruby Radcliffe.

» The Men Who Stare at Guitars

He had stood on tiptoes and used his weight to push down and in, but the sticky stuff meant his cock slid all over her right buttock leaving slimy snail trails of lube and Cowper’s fluid – he’d looked it up the day before – pre-cum. ‘Fucksake,’ his girlfriend had said, looking up from the yeasty duvet. ‘It’s not like this in the movies,’ he had said. ‘What movies would that be?’ His girlfriend had replied, ‘Dumbo? Bambi?’ I was thinking more, ‘Anal Housewives 4,’ he had said, his cock now limp and embarrassed. ‘Maybe we should try a different position.’ ‘No,’ his girlfriend had said, ‘I’m not in the mood now,’ and had turned over, cocooned herself in the duvet and turned her back to him.

By Steve Finbow.

» Three Lessons for Christopher Christopher

The young woman slowly peels the thin moustache away and lets it fall like a hair-slug onto the ground – and her beauty is revealed as if by a magic spell. ‘Do not judge a book by its cover, Chris. Do not let your lute lead you into quarrelsome ways. And try not to discriminate against public performances involving dwarves called Andy and women with false moustaches.’ ‘No-one has ever called me Chris before,’ says Christopher Christopher with a look of happy dismay. The young woman smiles and Christopher Christopher feels his heart swooning and his cheeks redden. And so he pulls out his lute and starts to sing.

By Alan McCormick & Stefan Wiese.

» Kicker Girl

Now lookee here, girl, what do you call that mess on the wall?

Dunno.

It’s a scribble, isn’t it? And a scribble don’t belong on the wall, it belongs on paper. Am I right or am I wrong?

Yep, s’pose so.

Right or wrong I asked, girl.

Right.

Right, thank you.

Granddad Pete was always shooting off about something and his granddaughter, Sophie, was normally in his firing line. She peered out from her lofty vantage point and endured it all with the cold stare of teenage oblivion.

By Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss.

» The Maid

Might as well enjoy the perks of being a victim while I can, I think to myself, as I get into the car. After today there will be no more free cabs, pity drinks, or polite condolences. There will be no more questions, no more talk. The real silence will set in and nobody will want to know, because in many ways, this never happened. This cab ride home is the end of it being a reality to anyone but me. I can sense all this — the months ahead — as the car pulls away. I can sense that this feeling of fear — fear of sitting alone in a cab, sitting alone anywhere — is here to stay. I can sense that I don’t own my own thoughts anymore, as we leave Manhattan.

By Christiana Spens.

» The Final Sentence

Sat in the hospital bed, I examined the flesh wound below my right shoulder. Passing out had saved me. Rather than shooting me again, believing me dead, Austin Rayner tried to flee: tripping over my body, with typical gracelessness, had cost him vital seconds. Seeing people coming up the stairs, he took the lift. There were two elderly ladies inside, who asked him about the blood on his shirt. He raised his gun, but too late: as soon as he reached the ground floor, he was arrested. A neighbour had heard him destroy my computer and called the police.

By Juliet Jacques.

» Maintenant #84 - Maarja Kangro

It depends on a poem, some of them are born with their eyes open and their legs ready to walk. But generally, yes, I do a lot of drafting. I might agree with Allen Ginsberg’s “first thought, best thought” to the extent that it’s the first thought that is often the best, but not always the first wording. Of course, it is a common truth that in poetry form is content and word is thought. You’ve hit the meaning, if you’ve hit the signifier: you cannot really separate them. However, I often first come to an idea, or a connection of ideas, or an analogy between phenomena from different realms, and then I carefully have to find a right mold for it, to avoid dressing it in wrong-sized clothes.

In the 84th of the Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Estonian poet Maarja Kangro.

» Five Poems

But I wanted to leave a souvenir on each of them.
Black, white and red. Red, white and black.
Like the flags of some Asian countries.
Then I thought, why not mark the romances,
crime stories, fantasy fiction, too? I had
plenty of blood to give and didn’t feel stingy.
All those intense faces with blood on them.
At one point the saleswoman seemed to mumble.
I remembered I still had to buy a gift,
and I left without asking for any recompense for my blood.
This is the bit of blood I’ve shed for culture.
Perhaps I would have shed more, though, if I had been asked.

By Maarja Kangro.

» (T)rust

Now you have a penetrating itch
‘the burning bush’
permanent scratch, swat that
peeled eye on the
window stain
cultivating
discipline

fl u ct u ant sin
Cauterizing:

(in)securities hide
glint / gleam
beam of the
casting

By Jo Langton.