Contacts | Submissions | Buzzwords | Twitter | Facebook
© 2000-2021 3:AM Magazine | Design & build by Rhys Tranter, Florian Kräutli and STML
She is applying to Miami, the one
In Ohio, or else Stanford. Or Lorain
County Community College.
She will take a train, she says,
From Ann Arbor to Columbus
But now the barista’s brains explode all over
The chrome machines for how you feel
About the stretched distance of steel
That will separate you from her.
By Nicholas Rombes.
What “it” is remains the poetic potential on the page. I’m inspired by motherhood and Ireland’s history with the monks of Ireland’s manuscript creation. As a teacher, I find it funny how the English language is just 26 letters of sound and how the electronic impulse in the brain translates an image to a sound via a letter. To see the potential of a new language on the page is poetics in motion.
In the 118th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michelle Moloney King.
And after all, what is earth if not a giant island floating in the sea of infinity? Are we not stuck on Buckminster Fuller’s ‘spaceship earth,’ in eternal orbit around Helios’s chariot? If we are formed by isolation, then we must ask ourselves what comes after isolation? As we emerge from the pandemic, we have to decide what kind of islands we will choose to live on in the future. The effects of the last year, this extended period of isolation, will have a profound effect on the world we will come to live in, but it is up to us what kind of world that will be.
An essay by Matt Bluemink on reimagining the future through desert islands.
How do we build a meaningful life on our own terms, asks this invigorating, open-hearted memoir. Once women have avoided being reduced to real estate ourselves, how do we claim rooms of our own? How do we make a home that provides both freedom and security, that nurtures but doesn’t stifle? Does this entail sharing one’s life, as her best male friend insists? If so, are we prepared to compromise, or would we prefer absolute liberty, accepting the solitude that brings?
Madeleine Feeny reviews Deborah Levy‘s Real Estate.
It seems that the English language only becomes bodied (comes back from the death of abstraction) in advertising.
A short story by Adrian Bridget.
Meades, recalling an interview with Anthony Burgess, gives us a quote with which it is appropriate to end our random reconnaissance. He describes him as an ‘ambulatory encyclopaedia’, who suffered from the ‘all-too-English disease of being too clever by half’ and reminds us that this is ‘rather better than being moronic, but there is this English prejudice against cleverness’. It exemplifies why Meades, like another in his pantheon of heroes, the Sixties novelist Robin Cook (aka noir novelist Derek Raymond who would, like his admirer, eventually leave Britain and become domiciled in France), is not a popular pundit or household name in his native land — he doesn’t easily fit into any establishment. He’s not clubbable. He’s too perceptive. And, as this anthology shows, he’s still fired-up, on form, and as fertile as ever.
Nicky Charlish reviews Pedro and Ricky Come Again by Jonathan Meades.
Robert is outwardly sociable but profoundly solitary. His relationships are stifled. While he and Karijn have an active social life, share domestic chores, and communicate in constant, grating wisecracks, Robert keeps things from her. These secrets are unsettling not so much for being secrets as for the undeveloped way they exist alongside the supposed intimacy: there seems neither dissonance nor habit about them. Robert’s mode of operation is an unostentatious self-isolation, and most of the other men in the novel — including Patrick, Vanyashin, and Liam, the friend whose wake he attends, seem to share a version of it.
Louis Rogers reviews Chris Power‘s A Lonely Man.
That is why the tomb into which we deposit life post-mortem is not the only tomb about which to speak. The autopsy, the burial, occurs in life itself, when we entomb living experience, when we carve meaning into pain. Life is not possible if we do not bury the most significant parts of its experience. Meaning is the first “form” of this burial, in the service of which memory forms the borders of the tomb. In order to make real progress” in the form, we must force life to resolve there. To bear, we must bury.
Liza Michaeli investigates memory.
Written beautifully and gleaming with insights that bring to mind the joy of writing, it is a hard and painful but necessary read, which reminds us that we need to develop a culture of care. Although initially reluctant to identify with the term ‘carer,’ Mills ultimately celebrates it, surrounding it with a wave of empathy and new wisdom — a much needed recognition of the vital role carers play in society, and how it affects every aspect of our lives. This memoir will stay with its readers. It is a masterpiece of a memoir.
Susana Medina reviews Sam Mills‘s The Fragments of My Father, out now in paperback.
Art corresponds to the human tendency to self-destruction. When a person wants to create, has inspiration, he or she destroys herself, surrendering to his or her interactions with chaos. Art denotes chaos, and opposes itself to established meanings and orders. And our desire for death, or self-destruction, is associated with our fondness for chaos and the transgression of established meanings and orders. It is not that much about how art affects the mental background but about how art is a way of interacting with what attracts us and what destroys us psychologically.
Julie Reshe interviewed by Svetlana Gusarova. Translated from the Russian by Duane Rousselle.