“I’m not sure where we land when we fall out of love.”
– Deborah Levy, “8 Questions for Deborah Levy,” Fleeting Magazine 22 December 2012
Author Archives: andrew gallix
This Book is My Cowardice
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
I’m astounded whenever I finish something. Astounded and distressed. My perfectionist instinct should inhibit me from finishing; it should inhibit me from even beginning. But I get distracted and start doing something. What I achieve is not the product of an act of my will but of my will’s surrender. I begin because I don’t have the strength to think; I finish because I don’t have the courage to quit. This book is my cowardice.
Fleeting
The wonderful Deborah Levy was kind enough to mention me in an interview with Matt Shoard for Fleeting Magazine (“8 Questions for Deborah Levy”) published on 22 December 2012. Here’s the relevant extract:
Are you comforted by the assertion that there are yet People on Earth who know what they are doing? Or, like me, do you subscribe to the notion that people who knew what they were doing began to die off about 1945 and are now on the brink of extinction?
Yes, Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, editors of the stunning new Art Literature and Politics journal The White Review know what they are doing and they also know who they do not want to do business with. Andrew Gallix, writer and editor of 3:AM Magazine knows what he’s doing and I am so pleased he’s doing it. Uber publisher and translator Stefan Tobler at And Other Stories is a man of vision and steel; he knows what he’s doing in any number of languages. So does Matt Shoard of Fleeting and so does John Self, an incredibly astute reader and critic. Every generation throws up its new thinkers and they tend to make a cultural revolution. They have energy and purpose and sometimes wear really nice shoes. They make everyone else look exhausted and clapped out. That is how it should be.
Quotes
“I know of no other bomb, than a book.”
– Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes II
Reading Crooked
Author and filmmaker Donari Braxton has read my story “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” (included in Fiddleblack‘s first annual print edition) and his reaction has left me speechless:
“This, is, fucking, fan, tas, tic. This is the best piece of short fiction I’ve read in a good long while, at least this 2012. It’s one of the best things you’ve ever written, that I’m familiar with. It is fuck, ing, fan, tas, tic.
The world you create is disarmingly gauche and socially backwards, but the affinities between characters, however brief, are simultaneously soberingly close-at-hand, dare I say relatable, in spite of the flash format. The insights in between — those little poetic gems in the form of errant elbows — are all earned by the context-of-use, the fun-ness, and the arc, of the read, and quite a few of them are brilliant. The love story itself is pathetically honest. The writing confident, the narrative lived-in. Be proud of yourself. It’s brilliant.
…If you don’t get that your last piece here is as fiercely strong as it is, you’re reading crooked. I wish I’d written it, and I can hardly ever say that, is the truth.”
Quotes
“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
Quotes
“Women will all turn monsters.”
– William Shakespeare, King Lear
Cubic Bulk
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.
Fifty Shades of Grey Matter is Coming
My story “Fifty Shades of Grey Matter” will feature in Apparitional Experience, a collection of ghostless ghost stories brought out by Fiddleblack.
It Does Not Quite
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.
ANDREW GALLIX 