My review of Aaron Hillyer’s The Disappearance of Literature: Blanchot, Agamben, and the Writers of the No (Bloomsbury) appears in this week’s Times Literary Supplement (p. 36).
Category Archives: News
Those Who Never Achieved Greatness
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.
Beautiful Losers
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.
Literary Failure and Failures in Literature
Mark Diston, Rev. of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by C. D. Rose, The Register 6 December 2014
The introduction by Andrew Gallix, editor of 3:AM Magazine, is a fascinating essay of literary failure and failures in literature.
Irreducible Form
My interview with Simon Critchley appeared in 3:AM Magazine today:
“On the one hand, literature is a conceptual machine that comprehends all that is, digests it and shits it out. That transforms matter into form. On the other hand, there is a kind of writing — poetry usually (Ponge, Stevens, late Hölderlin) — that attempts to let matter be matter witout controlling or comprehending it. I am more sympathetic to the second slope, but the attempt to let matter be matter without form is also an unachievable fantasy. We can say with Stevens, we don’t need ideas about the thing, but the thing itself. But we are still stuck with ideas about the thing itself, with the materiality of matter. Form, even the form of the formless, is irreducible.”
Photobooth
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
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’.
Red and Black
Daisy Woodward, What We Wore: A People’s History of British Style, Another Magazine 5 November 2014.
…Andrew Gallix, writer… “I was only 11 when I got into punk, which was very young, even back then. The first punk garment I bought was a green t-shirt with a cheesy transfer of the words ‘punk rock’ daubed onto an unconvincing brick wall… The picture above is of me and my best mate Yannick. These red and black jumpers, knitted by Yannick’s mum, were part of our own distinctive style. They had a zip down one side or on the shoulder so you could put them on and take them off easily. The colours were those of the anarchist flag.”
The same picture appeared in Clash on 7 November 2014.
Postcards From Another Planet
My 2008 Guardian piece on spam lit is referenced and quoted here:
Dan Piepenbring, “Postcards From Another Planet,” The Paris Review (website) 3 September 2014
…And in 2008, the Guardian ran a piece on spam lit and its practitioners, especially Ben Myers and Lee Ranaldo, both of whom have published volumes of work derived from spam:
These instances of found poetry—often containing nuggets of unwitting but unalloyed beauty—seemed, in Myers’s words, like “scriptures from the future” or “postcards from another planet.” Discovering them in your inbox made you feel like Cocteau’s Orpheus picking up cryptic poetic messages from the underworld on his car radio.
In the Beginning was the Unword
“The Boy Looked at Eurydice” featured in The Paris Review‘s “On the Shelf” daily links roundup yesterday.
“The history of punk is, above all, the story of the traumatic loss of its elusive essence: that brief moment in time when a new sensibility was beginning to coalesce … Punk died as soon as it ceased being a cult with no name.”
ANDREW GALLIX 