Contacts | Submissions | Buzzwords | Twitter | Facebook
© 2000-2020 3:AM Magazine | Design & build by Rhys Tranter, Florian Kräutli and STML
Reading Perec’s collection of essays Species of Space broke me out of the impasse I had found myself in. I packed up my haunted river book, accepted it as lost and melodramatically threw it off a pier into the sea, and I began again; this time writing an entirely new book about the past where terrible, wondrous and everyday stories would be told via the conduit of objects, thus bypassing the perils of direct disclosure. Written in a month-long bloodshot frenzy, after three or four years of involuntary suspended animation, Inventory was guided by restrictions as well as the friendly ghost of Perec. The idea was to treat it not as a book but instead a collection that I was merely assembling from the hoards of junk in the attic of memory.
Darran Anderson on how Georges Perec inspired his new book, Inventory.
These typewritten poems were initially conceived of as a joke (at the expense of the 20th century?) and should probably be considered as such.
They, unadvisedly, wilfully inherit from the theories of Jiří Kolář and Group 42, though to their credit possess little in the way of Habsburgian nostalgia.
Repeatedly hitting the same key on a typewriter over and over is surprisingly dissatisfying as a means of ‘writing’, and in fact starts to hurt, so the author would not recommend it.
In the 105th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Ben Britton.
Out of immense archival research and a prodigious control of language, Hester patiently assembles what amounts to be a cosmography of the fifty-year career of the multimedia artist and author. Though remarkably ambitious in scope and conducted with vigor, Hester’s large-scale arch unfolds with a surprising elegance that relationally considers Dennis Cooper’s work simultaneously as an oeuvre and as discrete, individual pieces. Hester goes further, and where I believe he undoubtedly succeeds is his positioning of Cooper’s work against historical backdrops of aesthetic, political, and critical theories.
Evan Isoline reviews Diarmuid Hester‘s Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper.
Ahead of us the spine of a desiccated leviathan, the freeway curved and plunged into pelvic convolutions. Pleased by this easy drive, by the hypnotism of the journey, a kaleidoscopic landscape activated by speed and made rhythmic by road signs, I nonetheless allowed a small part of my mind to wonder where our pilot, the rabbit, might be aiming. Puzzled more than concerned, I again sat up so as to scrutinize my co-passenger and our driver.
A short story by Nick Norton.
I am quilting a Grandma’s Flower Garden out of:
Tight fits. Things that just didn’t sit right. That I didn’t know what to do with (rather than call the boss I stashed it). Impulse buys from the market. Gifted fabrics and excesses. Dye tryouts. With paint stains. Some see-through. Ripped robes.
After I finish working, there are still things left over.
In the 104th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Eeva Rönkä.
It is a joy to learn of Cahill’s work, thinking that the verses are embedded in the Vedas, which in itself was ‘without authorship’, and in the past was strictly ‘inaccessible by women’ (Hudson, 1980). It is my humble opinion, that women should be entitled to write (let alone access) such verses, for it is their minds and bodies which are the closest to the God(s), with their ability to fulfil humanity’s highest aspiration to harbour the seed to create consciousness: Selves, Others.
Harold Legaspi on Michelle Cahill.
Stiegler’s central thesis was focused on the idea that we cannot separate man from technics. Insofar as we can consider ourselves human beings, we must understand that we are defined by our inherent technicity which arises simultaneously with our becoming human through a process of exteriorisation which he calls epiphylogenesis. Epiphylogenesis can essentially be understood as the exteriorisation of consciousness into tools, art, and other forms of technics.
Matt Bluemink remembers Bernard Stiegler.
Through poetry, A Commonplace stands for access and empowerment, for freedom from state intimidation and enclosure, and for ownership of the lands we live from. It argues for—by celebrating—the vitality of poetry: its vivid, living nature and its empathetic necessity in our critical matters. This concern, and his apparent disdain for politics which seek to turn Britain inwards, is what guards Davidson’s work against the significant risk of seeming pastoral, or over-invested in the ‘old’ features of English life which dominate his work: apple orchards, country roads, bicycles, bricks. A Commonplace elevates whichever common things are yours, without insisting that apples and bricks are everyone’s grounding.
Fiona Glen reviews A Commonplace: Apples, Bricks & Other People’s Poems by Jonathan Davidson.
I don’t bake or exercise, so this was the most finicky, screen-free lockdown activity I could find. Each line is made with the same nine pieces of metal letterpress type, which meant printing the same sheet seven times, calculating spaces for each line and colour, and praying with every pull of the handle that the alignment was right on my fussy little Adana press. I’m obsessed with printing anagrams, which seem to draw out material traces of the repetitive, bodily-mechanical process and of the type itself. This lovely paper was rescued from a retired printer’s garage, where it sat and faded unevenly for a few decades. The case of type I smuggled home the day before campus closed is 48pt Westminster.
In the 103rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by JT Welsch.
I don’t like the term autofiction. For a start I don’t think it’s a new thing. Isn’t Proust writing autofiction? And Christopher Isherwood certainly is. I think writers always play with the real and the invented, and I also think we’re in an era that is obsessed with memoir, to its own detriment. We like personal stories too much, and personal stories are very poor at revealing the political elements of a life, what’s shared. That excites me as a project, and I’m always trying to escape the I. Surely Crudo is biofiction, if it’s anything? I’m much more interested in we than I.
Claudia Bruno interviews Olivia Laing.