“Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic.”
– Terry Eagleton, Rev. of Derrida: A Biography, by Benoît Peeters. The Guardian 14 November 2012
“Women will all turn monsters.”
– William Shakespeare, King Lear
Gary Lutz, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” The Believer January 2009
This was my first real lesson about language — this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.
My story “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” will feature in Apparitional Experience, a collection of ghostless ghost stories brought out by Fiddleblack.
Jack Gilbert, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” [via]
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
Marguerite Duras interviewed by Germain Bree, 1972 [via]
I know all kinds of people who don’t write and are writers. By that I mean that the world passes to us by way of them. They hand it on; they don’t just endure it. There are many people who write and who are much farther from being writers than people who don’t. One can write very well without the blank page.
Andrew Gallix, “Go Forth (Vol. 4)” by Nicolle Elizabeth, The Believer Logger 14 November 2012
Andrew Gallix is editor-in-chief of 3:AM Magazine, which the Guardian credits as technically the first literary blog ever. He writes fiction and criticism, edits books, and teaches at the Sorbonne, and I love him.
NICOLLE ELIZABETH: What is 3:AM, and how did it start?
ANDREW GALLIX: 3:AM is one of the oldest literary webzines out there, as it was launched in April 2000. We were among the first to make use of the international dimension of the web: the founder was American, our first webmaster was Canadian, and the rest of the team was located in Britain, France, Ireland and the US. We were the first, or one of the first, to launch a literary blog (if by that you mean a compendium of literary news links). We innovated by placing fiction in a wider cultural (artistic, in particular musical) context. We also pioneered the revival of live literary events in London, mixing music, art, and spoken word.
NE: This is a collective thing?
AG: Very much so. The whole point of 3:AM was to foster a community of literary loners; to create a space where we can be alone together.
NE: Print ever or no?
AG: Two anthologies of 3:AM short stories (edited by Andrew Stevens) have been published, but the magazine itself is online-only. I think we were also pioneers from that point of view: we realized that online publications were the way forward. They cost virtually nothing, which means that only literary/artistic criteria apply, instead of financial considerations. There are no space constraints (a piece can be as long or as short as it needs to be). You can reach so many more readers than if you publish a story in a small literary journal. Christiana Spens has just launched 3:AM Press, which releases both ebooks and limited print editions, showing our attachment to both formats.
NE: Main concerns ethically?
AG: There is no party line, although we are rather contrarian, hence our tagline (a nod to Groucho Marx, the Ramones, and Adorno): “Whatever it is, we’re against it.” It sounds rather pedantic, I know, but what I consider to be real literature is always, at some level, a writing against itself.
NE: Main concerns aesthetically?
AG: Once again, 3:AM is a very broad anti-church. Personally, I think we should publish fiction that has the inevitability of death.
NE: What advice do you have for those who wish to start a magazine?
AG: Don’t give up the day job.
NE: Anything else you’d like to tell us here?
AG: Sure, but only things which cannot be told.
David Foster Wallace, “David Foster Wallace on ‘The Nature of Fun’,” The Guardian Friday 16 November 2012 [extract from Both Flesh and Not]
…The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he’s working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it — a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception — yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it’s yours, the infant is, it’s you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven’t done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it’s finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you’re terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you’ll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it — hate it — because it’s deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels… and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
So you’re in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won’t see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.
The lovely Nicolle Elizabeth has interviewed me for The Believer Logger.
Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
ANDREW GALLIX 