Category Archives: About

Down the Tubes

Posted on by

Boyd Tonkin, “The Week in Books,” The Independent 14 July 2012

When a dodgy server pulls the literary plug

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Andrew Blum’s eye-opening book Tubes, which asks the question: where is the internet? Andrew Gallix, editor of the smart and sparky literary webzine 3:AM, has had reason to find out. His server went down and 3:AM, with its 12 years of archived articles, vanished. Who ran the server, and from where? Gallix’s quest led to Dallas, to Missouri, and to some bloke called Florin in Bucharest, Romania — the zine’s unwitting host. Florin seems to have switched it on again. O, brave new world…
[Full title: “The Week in Books: Welcome back, Ovid — for English poets, you always were the champion
Plus — in search of the internet and the true colour of fiction”]

The Pure Event of the Word

Posted on by

An extract from my review of Aaron Hillyer’s The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No (Bloomsbury) featured in this week’s Times Literary Supplement:

If language cannot speak the world, “can the world speak in language”? That is the crucial question at the heart of The Disappearance of Literature. It proceeds from an agonistic relation to language, which is construed as a curse or, at best, a negative force. From this post-Hegelian perspective, words give us the world by taking it away: they negate things and beings in their singularity, replacing them with concepts. The answer, Hillyer argues, is to negate the negation by deactivating “the tendencies that cause our experience of the world to be as abstract as the language we use to describe it”. Literature must go through a “zone of decreation” that deactivates its habitual signifying and informative functions “in order to communicate communicability itself, openness to the world itself”. Such openness is predicated on the author coinciding with her work; disappearing momentarily into a thingly, asignifying language that now speaks itself. Only a writer who has vanished into “the pure event of the word” — where the telling becomes the teller — may express (although not in so many words) “what absolutely escapes our language”.
disappearance

Those Who Never Achieved Greatness

Posted on by

Stuart Kelly, “Stuart Kelly: Diversity Rules in Non-Fiction,” The Scotsman 13 December 2014

But my personal favourite in this genre [literary biography] has to be The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, by CD Rose and Andrew Gallix, a glorious alphabetical compendium of those who never achieved greatness.

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure 300dpi

Beautiful Losers

Posted on by

Julian Hanna, “Beautiful Losers,” Rev. of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C. D. Rose, 3:AM Magazine 11 December 2014

The introduction, a brilliant extended meditation on ‘real’ failure by 3:AM’s own co-editor-in-chief Andrew Gallix, complements the fictional failures that follow.
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure 300dpi

Glorious Failure

Posted on by

Keith Watson, Rev. of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C. D. Rose, failure magazine November 2014

The BDLF is a clever put-on, a brisk stroll through Borges’s Library of Babel guided by Rose’s fastidious prose and copious literary references, but it is also a clarion for the infinite possibilities of literature. As Andrew Gallix observes in his introduction, “Writing about fictitious or lost works is a means of holding literature in abeyance, of preserving its potentiality.” Rose’s failures are also potential successes, each one a small recognition that the actuality of literature will never equal its potentiality. Reading Ulysses will never quite match the idea of reading Ulysses. And in that sense, all literature, no matter how great, is a glorious failure.

The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure 300dpi

 

Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time

Posted on by

I was interviewed by Linn Levy for her fine piece on Guy Debord, Situationism, and punk:

Linn Levy, “Debord j’adore,” Edelweiss December 2014: 52-53
Debord1
Debord2

. . . Et le punk? «Faut-il dire que le punk était situationniste?», s’interroge Andrew Gallix, écrivain, professeur à la Sorbonne, punk depuis l’âge de 12 ans et fondateur du premier blog littéraire «3:AM Magazine». «Non. Les idées de Debord ont été l’une des très nombreuses influences de ce mouvement éminemment postmoderne, au même titre que Dada, par exemple, ou le surréalisme. Il faut voir le punk comme un collage, ou comme une installation artistique : une conjonction d’influences diverses qui ont coexisté pendant “une assez courte unité de temps” (pour citer Debord) avant d’éclater en une myriade de mouvements. Entre 1976 et 1979, dans ce pays socialement à la dérive, l’esprit du situationnisme a été en quelque sorte mis en acte par le punk; il est réellement descendu dans la rue. Debord entendait mettre la révolution au service de la poésie, c’est-à-dire transformer la vie en art, et c’est précisément ce que le punk a réalisé. Il est évident que pour Malcolm McLaren, même s’il était avant tout un homme d’affaires, les Pistols étaient une situation au sens debordien.»

Photobooth

Posted on by

Paul Gorman, “What We Wore: An Intelligent and Egalitarian Celebration of Our Collective Visual Invention,” Paul Gorman Is 30 October 2014

Paul Gorman has posted several pictures of Nina Manandhar’s What We Wore: A People’s History of British Style on his website. I appear in this one, across the page from Tracey Emin:

Towards Blankness

Posted on by

Thom Cuell, Rev. of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C. D. Rose, The Workshy Fop 10 November 2014

In his introduction, 3:AM Magazine editor-in-chief Andrew Gallix notes a tendency in modern art towards blankness, exemplified by ‘the white paintings of Malevich…as well as John Cage’s mute music piece’. The literary apotheosis of this trend is Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the scrivener who stopped, er, scrivening. If we accept this theory, then we must accept that the writers Rose commemorates have inadvertently achieved greatness, ‘through their work being censored, lost, shredded, pulped or eaten by pigs’.
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure 300dpi