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Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun

Chon is more interested in how the myth of the Donald is just the latest iteration of America’s preference for stories over reality, its inability to wake up, shake itself and get its shit together. Bonneville’s Pizza Galley fantasies, his father’s wack-job rantings, Mesman’s craving for acceptance: they are all of a piece. America, Chon argues, that country built — like countries everywhere — on violence, displacement and loss, consoles itself with narratives of its unique, God-given swagger, a shining city on a hill. But Chon also shows these myths need renewing, and so America’s alt-right darns them with new strands.

Alex Diggins reviews Jeff Chon‘s Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Most of Enriquez’s short stories end with this sort of cliffhanger, or just barely an idea of an ending; enough of one that the reader can create their own darkly tinted future for the characters. This does not detract from the stories, rather it reinforces the influences at play on Enriquez’s work, and emphasizes the way in which she turns classic tales of horror on their heads, reconfiguring the endings we expect from these sorts of stories.

Teddy Burnette reviews The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Maria Enriquez.

Poem Brut #116 – Automatism

In the beginning I approached visual poetry with the sense of needing to find a narrative, but then I found the more powerful, more liberating flows, arose when the rational mind went quiet and spontaneity was allowed to guide the hand, without the interruptions of teasing thoughts trying to force a pattern. The pattern could weave itself, the artist as perplexed and inspired by the resulting object as anyone. In this sense, in retrospect, I perceive a degree of automatism in the approach.

In the 116th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Thomas Helm.

Alan

Alan did not care about losing and he certainly did not care about winning. It was just that he would not be beaten. He knew that people were better at football than he was. Me for a start, although I was two years older. But he thought it was nonsense that you might measure victory or defeat in terms of who had scored the most goals, the most runs, the most points.

A short story by Robert Stone.

Correcting the Record

We can respect the private grief this death must bring and sympathise with that sadness. But that shouldn’t involve changing the record and distorting the proof. The most decent thing to do is to leave him as he chose to live his life, aloof and apart. Coronavirus has killed over 150,000 people in the UK alone in the past year. More than a million around the world. Every single one of those deaths is a tragedy. Prince Philip deserves no more public mourning than any of them. Not least because he’d got what he wanted. “In the event that I am reincarnated,” he famously said. “I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation”. That’s who he was.

By Sam Jordison.

Adjacent to Love

With him, there was a standard of love she felt herself failing to live up to, but which she wanted and hoped to approximate; with Caleb, by contrast, her relationship seems destined to remain static for as long as it lasts. She will always be in loco parentis and he will always make what seem like modest demands, so they will always stop short of a breaking point. Presumably for this very reason, the narrative skips the long duree of their marriage and we cut straight from their wedding to them in old age. One can easily imagine Lydia avoiding the subject of climate change during those years, since, unlike the climate itself, it never seems to change. And all the while, ‘it happened slowly, and then it happened all at once.’

Sam Burt reviews Isobel Wohl‘s Cold New Climate.

Poem Brut #115 – L’Inferno under Revision

The page of literature has retained its ontotheological reputation. Before the built environment of the grapheme can be figured, before writing can be marked, certain prepropositional circumstances are supposed necessary that any project going under the name of art commence. Such discursive biases, however, besides being redundantly geocentric (for, one can route them to, say, architecture’s prepropositional ground), are apparently ignorant of a certain ongoing immanence, just as primordial as it is momentary: as Leon Battista Alberti inscribed, “QVID TVM?”

In the 115th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Albe Harlow.

The Poetics of Non-Space: An interview with Matthew Turner

Buildings, and how we interact with them, are shadows of thoughts and feeling before we become fully conscious of them. A cluttered home can be stream of consciousness made real, which is much more convincing than traditional articulations of that narrative mode, that for me is usually too ordered and well defined. Space in my writing expresses pre-conscious and pre-personal undercurrents which one of my favourite writers, Nathalie Sarraute, defined as ‘tropisms’ — a phrase borrowed from how plants move towards the sun or other stimulus, such as wind, gravity and darkness. I think my characters grow towards walls and objects, and in turn spaces grow inwards around them. Kafka wrote in one of his notebooks that everyone carries a room around inside of them, and we can hear the noises it makes — it’s this kind of relationship.

Matthew Turner interviewed by Andrew Gallix.

Of Monkeys and Monsters

Instead of sleeping Kierk is out grabbing beers at a bar, sitting at the open window in the breeze and watching the late-night groups of people walk past in fits of laughter or discussion. Then he’s out to join them, meandering past the bright lamplights and shuttered store windows of New York City at night. To be a scientist again, to be working on consciousness again—he can’t believe it. He is a secular priest once more.

An excerpt from The Revelations, the first novel by Erik Hoel.

The Shit Poetics of Queer Men

The ribbon was and is a symbol of AIDS awareness. Gay Twitter was not happy. These symbols, once associated with dirty filthy queers—profane and untouchable—were now incorporated into a semiotic system concerned with cleanliness and sanitisation—sacred and hand-ringingly tactile. In both scenarios, historically important symbols for the queer community were sanitised, stripped of their queerness, and used in disorientingly different contexts. In reaction to this persistent sanitisation of queerness, one might welcome a radical sullying of queerness once again

Donna Marcus reviews Castle Faggot by Derek McCormack.

3:AM Magazine

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