Author Archives: andrew gallix

Mr Writer

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I am interviewed by Kelly Buckley in the first issue of The Great Small Fishes (September-November 2007):

MR WRITER

Andrew Gallix is The Editor-in-Chief at the critically acclaimed literary magazine, 3:AM. Not only has he been hailed as a man who has championed underground writing for years, but his own delicious oeuvre, published via the internet or small press, is well worth checking out. His style has been described as if ‘he invented Warhol on Monday, punk rock on Tuesday and then took the rest of the week off after declaring the project a sodding mess’ by renowned author Jim Ruland. Among other literary-related side-projects of Andrew’s, the 42-year-old is also part of a music band called The Ungodly Hours, the members of which are all writers. Oh, and if that isn’t bohemian enough for you, Andrew is half-English and half-French and lives in Paris.

Q: How do you think your passion for literature began?
A: Sadness and madness is the short answer. I don’t want to turn this into a sob story, but I had a very unhappy childhood during which make-believe was my only refuge. I used to invent characters I literally lived with: not only did I draw their pictures and write stories about them, but — more worryingly perhaps — I would talk to them all the time in my head. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought for one minute that these characters were real, but their ‘presence’ was such a source of comfort that I came to view interaction with other human beings — especially of my age — as a distraction from my mind games. For instance, I would hold silent conversations with my imaginary friends at the same time as I was talking to real people. The result is that I perceived reality through the idealistic prism of fiction and, like Emma Bovary, found it sorely lacking. Tom McCarthy, the author of Remainder, was telling me about trauma victims’ feeling of unreality and compulsion to re-enact the traumatic experience — the only one that seems real to them. My relationship with books and writing is linked to something very similar. Anyway, those who knew me as a kid always say that I was always either reading or writing. Both activities went hand-in-hand: if I read a book I liked, I started trying to write something similar. Nothing much has changed.

Q: Who have been your main influences throughout life, personally, professionally, creatively etc?
A: I could quote many writers who have meant so much to me over the years, but if I had to single out one defining influence, I’d have to say: punk. The punk movement was my Dada, my Surrealism, my May 1968… Nothing comes close to the adrenaline rush of those days. The fact that I was a kid at the time also meant that I experienced the whole thing at one remove, so it remained untainted by the necessary disappointments of reality. Trying to recapture that excitement is one of my main goals as a writer.

Q: What made you start 3:AM Magazine?
A: The site already existed. It had been launched by an enterprising young American called Kent Wilson. I sent him one of my short stories, he published it, we exchanged ideas on how to transform 3:AM into a proper webzine and he immediately offered me the position of editor-in-chief. Why did I accept his offer? Because webzines were a new phenomenon and everything was yet to be invented. Because I had this clear vision of a magazine which would put cutting-edge fiction into a wider cultural context through literary news (“Buzzwords” was arguably the world’s very first literary blog), or music coverage (many of the authors we liked had been influenced by punk, indie or rave music). The last reason, which I wasn’t fully conscious of at the time, is that 3:AM would provide the perfect excuse not to focus on what was most important to me: my own writing!

Q: What drives you to continue with it and your other projects every day?
A: The main reason why I’ve never been able to pack it in is that we’ve been so damn successful. Lots of other similar webzines have appeared in our wake, but I still think there is something pretty unique about what we’re doing. 3:AM is also a collective endeavor whereas writing is a very solitary exercise. That collective element restores a little sanity in my life.

Q: Did you imagine 3:AM would take off in the way that it has? Did you have a goal in mind at the beginning or has it been a purely organic process?
A: I had a clear vision of a post-punk literary magazine, but I had no idea we would become so influential. The internet was still largely uncharted territory back in 2000. There were already many websites publishing poetry and fiction, but no online literary magazines as such. We pretty much created the template, not only with our blog, but also by embracing the digital age. Most of our contemporaries were secretly hoping to graduate from the Net to traditional paper organs. We didn’t, which is why we soon abandoned the monthly issue format and went ‘live’ with constant updates. Similarly, we were the first truly international webzine with editors located all over the world collaborating on a daily basis although none of us (at the time) had ever met.

Q: You have quite a team working with you now at 3:AM now. How did the team grow?
A: At first, it was just me, then people gradually started getting in touch. Whenever I received really interesting submissions I tried to bring the authors on board. Today, we have a pretty large team but most of the work is still done by two or three people.

Q: Please tell us about the 3:AM book, The Edgier Waters, how it came about, how it was funded, etc?
A: We’d been toying with the idea of an anthology for a while and 3:AM‘s fifth anniversary seemed the perfect opportunity. The main problem is that most anthologies don’t sell, so publishers were very reluctant, which is why I came to the conclusion that we were wasting our time. Andrew Stevens then met James Bridle who worked for a new cutting-edge publisher called Snowbooks and it turned out that they were willing to publish it. There were no funding issues as the book was released by a proper publisher. Had we not found Snowbooks, we may have gone down the self-publishing route.

Q: Please tell us how you make a living — do any of your independent projects make you money?
A: I have been teaching at the Sorbonne University in Paris for quite a while now. The day job funds all my other projects, none of which have ever made any money (apart from journalism). I’d love to be able to write full-time. Then again, having a day job means that I don’t have to make any compromises in my writing. Paradoxically, many ‘alternative’ writers spend their time trying to make money precisely because they have shunned a steady day job, although there is little demand for what they produce.

Q: Can you tell us more about The Ungodly Hours and what exactly your involvement is.
A: I’ve always liked writers in bands, so we decided to create a band composed solely of writers as a kind of art project. Vim Cortez, who edits Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, writes most of the music. Matthew Coleman, with whom I’m editing the forthcoming Offbeat Generation anthology, is the singer. I play bass, drums and manage the band. Film should be a big part of this project (Matthew is also a film director), but we haven’t got round to that yet.

Q: Would you like to get a big publishing deal?
A: I’d love to.

Q: What can we expect next from Andrew Gallix?
A: Well, there’s the Offbeat Generation anthology I’m co-editing, which will be published by Social Disease towards the end of the year. I have a couple of short stories in forthcoming anthologies. I’m also working on a series of interviews for 3:AM, as well as a non-fiction piece. The next big step will be the novel.

Surplus Will: Tom Bradley on Gallix

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The mighty Tom Bradley has published an article about my fiction in nthposition:

Tom Bradley, “Surplus Will,” nthposition 7 August 2007

“A myriadminded man, Mr Best reminded. Coleridge called him a myriadminded man… His unremitting intellect is the hornmad Iago…” — James Joyce, Ulysses

Almost nobody has ever adequately evoked that gorgeous monster-hardon called Paris. But Andrew Gallix has nailed it to the wall like a luminiferous aether of opium jelly. I reckon he can do it because his language is lush and orgiastic as the topic it encompasses. Well up to the task, with plenty left over.

One is left hankering for more, for a whole book of this Gelignite Dolly-Bird. She calls for an unzipping and delectating till consciousness succumbs, spilling out into a larger frame: effusion, sheer tsunamic detail of sense and satire, where one gets to fuck and mock multiple celebrities, ankle deep in menses and jizz, all over million-franc Persian rugs.

Gallix’s heroine has only just awakened from a drunken swoon when she sees a silver-greasepainted faun tiptoeing among the piles of her fellow fucked out orgiasts. He has awakened her with his “muffled squishy sound as of manifold foreskins peeled back in unison”, as he despoils the flopped bodies, the semi-comatose pataphysicians, post-structuralists and “pointilllist ponces in pointy shoes.”

Such a silver faun must soon transmogrify into an incubus outright, and so he does. He coalesces into Beauty itself, personified with a dick attached, and he despoils Gallix’s heroine, to the accompaniment of this mentholated whisper: “You can only take so much Beauty…” And that’s how much Beauty he gives us. The depravity of Gallix’s Paris is transfigured by paragraphs of sheer transcendent Beauty, given out with virtuosic offhandedness, as we ascend into Gallix’s galaxy: “…Fanny’s angelic features were bathed in gold, her halo melting like fondue cheese, and sparkling fruit carved in dewdrops dangled lasciviously from chandeliers like overripe testes.”

This Beauty, this silver faun, is a slender version of that other incubus whom we once saw tiptoeing and despoiling the flopped bodies at Shrewsbury, on the plain between Prince Hal’s camp and the rebels’. That far fatter faun, metallic with chain mail rather than silver greasepaint, was bent over a supine figure, too, like Gallix’s, and likewise whispered in its ear. But he didn’t say, “You can only take so much beauty.” Rather, he huffed, “if thou embowel me to-day, I’ll give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow… with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me.”

Falstaff’s embowelling cannibal woundings go direct and deep as Gallix’s Beauty, right down to our connective tissue. The former’s stomping ground was a blood-rank battlefield, while the latter’s is a rut-reeking Parisian parlour. But the deeper parallels hold true, those beauteous similarities obtain. As it is in Henry IV Part I, so it is in “Half-Hearted Confessions of a Gelignite Dolly-Bird”: every phrase of Gallix, every juxtaposition of words, is considered and balanced, faithful to the Shakespearean ideal.

And, like Will, he waxes hilarious, at will. An almost random selection of one liners from “Forty Tiddly Winks” will demonstrate:
“God knows how much of his mortal coil ended up in the hoover on a weekly basis.”
“One of them could actually recall being buggered by Bulgakov, and a bloody good shag it was too…”
“…as if he had spent the night snogging a siren in the snot-green sea.” (Not only the Bard, but Joyce is all through this, thoroughly assimilated and metabolized.)

In “Forty Tiddly Winks”, Gallix obliges so-called Judeo-Christian civilization with a hilariously despairing revision of the first several chapters of Genesis. His could be one of those great revisionist insights that penetrate and suffuse the collective awareness and spur new epochs: “The genocide of humanity itself.”

For Gallix, Adam has been replaced by Tim(e), the Miltonic lecturer who lives opposite Cerberus and is perpetually pursued by his own (Time’s) winged chariot. I can see why “Tim is out of joints”, and why he’s in such deep trouble with “them”: it’s because he has found out the most hideous secret of all: Eve and her hung hubby never ate of the tree in the first place, and were never as gods. Tim has Holocausted us all into a hole, Jew and gentile alike. Tim has run out.

The kiddy classroom in “Forty Tiddly Winks,” like the sixth chapter of Genesis, is peopled by critters procreatively bizarre enough to be identified with the Nephilim. Those tots prematurely pubesce, “ovulating wildly” as they gaze up at the forbidden fruit that oozes “angel-come,” in a paragraph that, beyond its other-dimensional strangeness, is physically delicious, like so many other Gallixian structures.

Miss Ramsay, the kiddies’ teacher, is terrible and unparaphrasable. She is the trans-sexed YHWH, jealous, apple-forbidding, seeing that “it was good.” She skips ahead a few pages to peek at the end of the Good Book, and finds herself suddenly in the middle of Saint John’s rant. Seeing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse “beyond the pale, skimming candy-floss clouds on foot-propelled micro-scooters,” Miss Ramsay is turned into a serpent coiffed medusa — one of many magical metamorphoses in this strange Gallixy.

Those micro-scooters go beyond art and beyond criticism, and scoot into realms we can only speculate about. We can only tentatively hazard that something seems to be undulating, or breathing behind these stories, as in the Hindus’ Unthinkable That — unadulterated strangeness.

This is my favorite kind of writing, all the more pleasurable for its rarity (almost nobody has the chops to do it): exploding with allusions to the big, the timeless, the Biblical, the Shakespearean, the Miltonic, the Joycean, claiming its own niche among those gorgeous monster hardons through sheer dint of artistic and intellectual doughtiness, and at the same time dancing light as a mote of hashish ash.

Nietzsche distinguished between artists who wring their works from a deficit of vitality, and those who blast forth from sheer surplus will. Andrew Gallix is clearly to be counted among the latter.