[25.1.07][Andrew Gallix] 3:AM Reborn: Please update your feeds.
Buzzwords has moved to its new location at http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/buzzwords/
Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds.
The new Buzzwords RSS address is: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/index/buzzwords/feed/
If you go to the 3:AM homepage, there are also new, separate feeds available for all the areas of the site, and indeed for the site as a whole.
Apologies for the inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on the new 3:AM site.
If you have any problems with any of this, please email jamesbridle@3ammagazine.com. [permalink]
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[11.1.07][Stevens] 3:AM Review: Bending The Bars "Bending the Bars is not like Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, not an account of a life filled with regret, nor, despite mentioning him a couple of times, is it as heavy as the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. It is very much a literary endeavour, written in the form of stories rather than straight memoir or diaries." Susan Tomaselli reviews John Barker's Bending The Bars.
In 1972 British urban guerrilla group The Angry Brigade, also referred to as the Stoke Newington Eight, was accused of 25 attacks on government buildings, embassies, corporations and the homes of Tory MPs between the years of 1967 and 1971. After what was to be the longest criminal trial in English history -- lasting 111 days -- John Barker, along with Jim Greenfield, Hilary Creek and Anna Mendleson were sent down for 10 years imprisonment. The other defendants (including Stuart Christie) were found not guilty. By his own admission, Bending the Bars is John Barker's selective account of those seven prison years he served.
Held in Brixton during the trial versed Barker and Jim Greenfield in a "crash course in certain realities of Life," as well as fast-learnedinter-personal skills. But for new kids on the block, they were not totally green: "We gained some respect early on for being so tight-lipped about the case, admitting nothing." (In fact, Barker still remains schtum on the case, saying only that in this case the cops had "framed a guilty man"). Comparatively speaking, those early days in Brixton were almost a relief from the "tour of misery" that was the police holding cells, yet "at night it was eerie in the halflight. Screams and moans, shadow faces at the open grilles in the celldoors, whispers for snout and the sound of sobbing."
Receiving his sentence and being classified as a Category A (and issued with a Danger To The State certificate, later revoked) to be incarcerated in a long-term prison, Barker forces himself to look out the window on the drive there, taking in familiar London sights: "My childhood, its streets and parks that's where I'd spent them and I'd never imagined this in those days. Not in the plot, I'd barely known the existence of prison." From Brixton his sent first to Wormwood Scrubs -- a prison "like a behaviourist experiment. It could be rats, ants or cons, only the scale was different" and "more like a battered old submarine in a World War II movie with a crisis every five minutes" -- and then to a Long Lartin cell 'til to finish his sentence. "L-L," he writes, "closer to science fiction with its flashing lights and electric locks," his cell "a bland cube painted in grey and brown speckle... the light was too dull, boxed away in a frosty partially transparent casing screwed to the ceiling. I got the shivers again, it was in asylum mode."
The grind and ennui of inside life is written about in an honest fashion: the boredom of an all-day shut-in; the smallest gestures, like reading a letter, are amplified ("I read the first two paragraphs and stop. I hate rushing a letter, it's something to take slowly and stretch out like a bath"); Association/End of Association; the bullshit ("the stuff Oscars are made of"); the depression; and dropping acid, smoking pot and watching TV sometimes the only cultural highlights. Barker explains to a fellow inmate that you have to try to "live out the contradictions. You've got to make some kind of life here cos you're not dead, but you never forget you're in jail and that it's totally abnormal and anti-life."
Bending the Bars is not like Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, not an account of a life filled with regret, nor, despite mentioning him a couple of times, is it as heavy as the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. It is very much a literary endeavour, written in the form of stories rather than straight memoir or diaries. In his introduction, John Barker notes: "The impetus for writing came from the stories of' Brownie' that had started to appear in Republican News. Written from inside Long Kesh prison, they had a humanist, political wit to them. Now it is known that Brownie was the pen name of Gerry Adams, and int hat retrospect these stories were part of the long haul by Gerry and other Kesh graduates like Gerry Kelly [who makes an appearance in this book] to pull the Irish Republican movement out of the rut of a military-only Catholic nationalism."
As the Irish prisoners filter through, Barker forges certain relationships and, as a libertarian communist, feels an affinity to their political struggle, even spending time in the 'chokey' for a sit-down protest in their support -- "all good socialists together" someone jokes at one point. In the post-9/11 world, where the term 'terrorist' does not sit comfortably, this may be jarring to some readers; yet to the state, at least, that is what these men were considered to be. As mentioned before, at no time does John Barker protest his innocence, yet his thoughts on his time with The Angry Brigade can be read in his review of Tom Vague's Anarchy in the UK (AK Press). In that, he wrote:
"Personally I've found it painful thinking about this past, doing it for the first time in a very long time. I don't regret what I did, as I said to the only person who ever asked me, a screw soon after my conviction, but the 'me' of then seems very distant and, though I respect what I did, I have felt critical and not wholly sympathetic. Some of the rhetoric and righteousness of AB communiques now makes me cringe. [..] Romanticisation requires a timeless context, as if undertaking a rebellious act is heroic whatever the circumstances. I respect my past because the anger and commitment felt were real enough but it was not heroic. I was very young, hadn't experienced serious repression, and the AB actions were all before the IRA made bombing a serious business."
Barker had "come out of the swinging sixties and now it was the severe late-seventies." In no way does Bending the Bars glamorise his activity or the "golden age" of the British prison system. Instead it serves as a harsh reminder of the fact that, Jeffrey Archer and co. aside, the majority of prisoners are working class. In his own words, "this book is an unsentimental celebration of the class spirit and solidarity of many cons... fighting the right fights with cunning and solidarity, and winning, that possibly has not been finished off in these repressive times."
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Susan Tomaselli lives in Ireland where she edits the inimitable Dogmatika. Read an interview with her here. [permalink]
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[9.1.07][Stevens] 3:AM Review: The People of Paper Like Dave Eggers' obtrusive authority over the text of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The People of Paper becomes not only the story of the people of El Monte, but of Salvador Plascencia, as the novel falls apart over a woman.Susan Tomaselli reviews Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper.
"Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin." -- Donald Barthelme
Where to begin? Salvador Plascencia's debut novel, originally published in the US by McSweeney's, begins with tear-soaked monks on the march, walking "until [they] forgot the location of the factory," a factory where people were "born of the ground" and from "the marrow of bones" until it was shut down by Papal decree: "All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets -- rare exception granted for immaculate conception." Antonio, an origami surgeon, meets a breakaway monk (numbered 53) who imparts the whereabouts of the fabled factory and he creates Merced de Papel from scraps of paper, "spilling leaves of Austen and Cervantes, sheets from Leviticus and Judges, all mixing with the pages of The Book of Incandescent Light." Her heart is made from index pages of journals, a heart that never leaks or bursts, yet Antonio is unable to prevent her walking out the door.
Yet, this is only a beginning. Federico de la Fe, a bed-wetter and consumed by a biblical sadness when his wife leaves him, takes the number 8 bus from Mexico and heads for Los Angeles with his daughter, Little Merced, to the "dress factories and the technology of a country that would learn to soak color into the gray celluloid world of Rita Hayworth," ending up in the east LA suburb of El Monte. Other characters of note include Rita Hayworth, not only alive and well, but Mexican, having shed a few syllables from Margarita Carmen Cansino to become a superstar; Juan Meza aka Mexican wrestling hero Santos, avoiding a Vatican delegation determined to return him to his status as a saint; Ramon Barreto, haunted by his ex-lover Merced de Papel ("on Sundays it is the weekend edition that I spread on my mattress, the glossy ads I set by my pillows, and the newsprint I spread all the way to the foot of my bed"); and the Baby Nostradamus, when we first meet him, a blacked-out column where text should be, on account of him being born in a mediative state. Not forgetting the character of Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture and harvest and a harsh teacher who favours endurance as Shani in Vedic astrology, in The People of Paper he is "the most resentful and unforgiving of the planets and also is one of the saddest, second only to tiny Pluto," and is Sal Plascencia, the author himself.
Like Dave Eggers' obtrusive authority over the text of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The People of Paper becomes not only the story of the people of El Monte, but of Salvador Plascencia, as the novel falls apart over a woman. He writes: "You weren't supposed to spill put of the dedication page. But then you fucked everything. Made holes in my ceiling, cracks in my ribs, my whole wardrobe to dust. All for a white boy." And in a BS Johnson "fuck all this lying" moment, Liz, of the dedication ("And to Liz, who taught me that we are all of paper") and the cause of Sal's heartache, dispels the lies Saturn has told and retaliates with: "In a neat pile of paper you have offered up not only your hometown, EMF, and Federico de la Fe, but also me, your grandparents and generations beyond them, your patria, your friends, even Cami. You have sold everything, save yourself. So you remain but you have sold everything else. You have delivered all this into their hands, and for what? For twenty dollars and the vanity of your name on the book cover."
Spurred by lost love, Saturn wages a Napoleonic war on Federico de la Fe and EMF (El Monte Flores), a gang de la Fe employs to bring about the Saturnian fall, to wrestle back control of their privacy, a counter-war "for volition and against the commodification of sadness," a revolution against tyranny and eventual emancipation from the sight of Saturn. News of Saturn's war reaches New York millionaires Ralph and Elisa Landin, who pledge funds to sponsor Saturn's war for love, but with provisions -- "Number of times the word 'sad' appears (inclusive of 'sadness' but excluding 'Pasadena' and 'asad'): 53, Number of times the word 'happiness' appears: 4, Inventory of heartbreaks" -- only to withdraw support at later on.
The People of Paper is a fantastical world, no doubt: part Swiftian, part Borgesian, entences full of Garcia Marquez and Kafka and with more than the occasional nod to Italo Calvino. It is also a dazzlingly designed novel: the narrative is rendered as columns of multiple perspectives on the page, with each chapter lead by * * * * glyphs, and as the order breaks down, black spots blot out Saturn's prying, words are literally punched out of the paper, ink fades... And what of the ending? Sublime. Little Merced and Federico de la Fe walk south and "off the page, leaving no footprints that Saturn could track. There would be no sequel to the sadness."
ABOUT THE REVIEWER Susan Tomaselli lives in Ireland where she edits the inimitable Dogmatika. Read an interview with her here. [permalink]
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[4.1.07][Stevens] And Your Point Is? And Your Point Is? Scorn and Meaning in Jeff Lint's Fiction is the follow-up to LINT, the biography of cult author Jeff Lint by Steve Aylett, which delves deeper into the psychosis of the seminal writer's work. This series of essays and reviews from around the globe, representing decades of study, is being presented for the first time in collected form.
[31.12.06][Stevens] You May Have Missed The 3:AM Xmas Bash, recently (pictured: Adelle Stripe and Matthew Coleman)
In February we reported "technical difficulties" with the main site. It will not come as any surprise to regular readers that we have been 'squatting' in Buzzwords since May. Here's the best from 2005 and 2006, before we unveil our difficulty-free new main site.
The editors of 3:AM wish its readers a Happy 2007.
Andrew Gallix, Richard McLuhan, James Bridle, Richard Cabut, Noah Cicero, Matthew Coleman, Utahna Faith, Tao Lin, Steven Rogers, A. Stevens, HP Tinker, Zakia Uddin, Matthew Wascovich
[26.12.06][Stevens] Bedtime Stories Monday 15 January 2007, from 8pm Indo 133 Whitechapel Rd London E1 1DT
"But today, when everyone can write and when the hardest thing is to find someone who is not an author, this practice has become a scourge, a public calamity and a new hardship in human life."
"In all good conscience, I believe there are very few things that reveal the puerility of human nature and the extreme blindness, indeed stupidity, to which self-love leads a man, as does this business of reciting one's own readings. For we are well aware of the unspeakable annoyance we feel when listening to someone else's work."
"And yet I'm sure most would sooner choose some grave corporal punishment before a pleasure such as this. Even when the finest and most esteemed writings are read by their authors, they are liable to kill with boredom." Leopardi's Pensieri
3:AM have two novels of the year this time round: Tom McCarthy's Remainder (which was already our Book of the Year 2005) continued its irresistible journey overground when it was republished by Alma Books in Britain. The first cult masterpiece of the 21st century is also coming out in the States courtesy of Vintage and will soon be turned into a film. Our second novel of the year was actually published in 2004, but a review copy only reached 3:AM Mansions a few months ago. Daniel Scott Buck's The Greatest Show on Earth takes society's obsession with pop psychology, celebrity culture and reality TV to its illogical, darkly farcical conclusion, offering us lethal satire of Swiftian proportions. Is Daniel Scott Buck the new Juvenal?
Hot tips for 2007: Tom McCarthy's Men in Space and Heidi James's Carbon.
3:AM NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2006
3:AM's George Berger definitive biography of anarcho-punk originators Crass. Expect an interview with the author in 2007.
3:AM ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2006
Hyped to Death is an extraordinary American indie label which specialises in "Rare, obscure, independent and undiscovered punk, post-punk, 'D.I.Y.', and power-pop groups from the US and the UK 1977-1984" thus providing a unique public service. Messthetics Greatest Hits: The Sound of UK DIY 1977-80 is the Nuggets or Pebbles of the post-punk D.I.Y. generation. Cute, quaint, bizarre, dated, forward-sounding and honest as fuck: the most endearing release of the year.
Merry Christmas (or equivalent) to all our readers. Don't forget to check out the revamped 3:AM which will be launched shortly. [permalink]
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[19.12.06][Stevens] Conductors of Chaos Redux Seated right to left -- Iain Sinclair, Stewart Home, Nicholas Royle
The venue: Upstairs at The Wheatsheaf, Fitzrovia, London W1.
The event: 3:AM Xmas Bash
Readers: Iain Sinclair, Nicholas Royle and Stewart Home
Subjects discussed: London, JG Ballard, Paul Delvaux, Clive Barker, Derek Raymond, Dennis Nilsen, Terry Taylor, Alex Trocchi, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Orson Welles at the Hackney Empire, Roland Camberton vs. Kingsley Amis, William Burroughs... [permalink]
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[16.12.06][Andrew Gallix] Wham Bam in Paname Tristam Nada, who fronted seminal French punk band the Guilty Razors (famous for being Franco-Spanish and dating The Slits) in the late 70s and went on to have a massive solo novelty hit in the 80s, has an exhibition on in Montreuil (on the outskirts of Paris) at the moment. Fittingly, the artwork (see samples below) is based on aural memories.
(From top to bottom: Lucifer Sam, Behind Blue Eyes, She Does it Right and Little Doll.)
Heat Parade: 51 rue de Vincennes 93100 Montreuil (metro station: Croix de Chavaux) 15-22 December [permalink]
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And Your Point Is? Scorn and Meaning in Jeff Lint's Fiction
