Clare Margetson, “The Hay Relay: The End-less Wait is Over,” The Guardian 4 July 2007
I blame Andrew Gallix’s slow writing movement. David Hockney, too. Sparked by his concerns about our non-visual age I’ve taken a leaf out of his book and taken to gazing out of the window a great deal recently. But all these fantastic clouds in the sky are a huge distraction. So, we’re late, we’re late in putting up this post.
Jonathon Sturgeon, “In Praise of Literary Failure,” Flavorwire 30 October 2014
The book’s introduction, too, is one of the finer pieces of literary criticism to be released this year. Written by Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief of 3:AM Magazine, which purports to be “the first literary blog,” the intro deftly surveys the gamut of literary failure. Especially good and poetic is Gallix’s take on the scourge of the writer, the blank page:
Blankness is the sine qua non for inclusion in the BDLF, but it is seldom sought after directly. Manuscripts and books remain blank to us through being censored, lost, drowned, shredded, pulped, burned, used as cigarette paper or wrapped around kebabs, fed to pigs or even ingested by their own authors…These brief biographies are sketches that merely gesture towards the possibility of narrative development; stories that are cut short or fall silent. Stories that would prefer not to.
Douglas Lord, Rev. of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure by CD Rose, Library Journal 16 October 2014
Don’t be taken in, as I first was, by Sorbonne instructor Andrew Gallix’s Very Serious Introduction in which he notes all sorts of high-level details, such as that most of the writers “…devoted their lives to the pursuit of some Gesammtkunstwerk…”.
David Winters, “An Interview with David Winters” by Matthew Jakubowski, truce 21 October 2014
My first book review was of Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel. I sent it to Andrew Gallix at 3:AM. He published it, and made me an editor shortly afterwards. I’m grateful to Andrew for that. And to Barthes!
… As for “guiding” the magazine, for me the most attractive aspect of 3:AM is its refusal to “stand for” anything! As Andrew often puts it, the site has “no party line”. It was always supposed to be a broad church — or an anarchic ship of fools, to mix the metaphor. The most amusing attacks on us have come from bloggers who treat book reviewing as if it were some sort of moral crusade; who want to divide readers’ tastes into “right” and “wrong”. We find factionalism quite infantile, and upsetting these dogmatists is as good a reason as any to keep publishing.
Simon Critchley, Memory Theatre
Poetry lets us see things as they are. It lets us see particulars being various.
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation
How can I, in my speech, recapture this prior presence that I must exclude in order to speak, in order to speak it?
Karl Ove Knausgaard, “Handke and Singularity,” Archipelago Books 24 September 2014
Therein lies the merit of the poem [Paul Celan’s The Straightening], the fact that it cannot be referred to other than by quoting it, cannot be retold, cannot be used for something secondary, and points to nothing other than to itself; in other words, it is singular, primary, the thing-in-itself, as a stone on the ground is singular, primary, the thing-in-itself. That is to say as close to the singular and the primary and the thing-in-itself as a language can come, because even in a language which persistently negates itself, representation is of course unavoidable. Where it reads ‘Grass, written asunder,’ I imagine, in all its simplicity, the grass that grows on the lawn in the dark outside the window by which I sit and write, and by ‘written asunder’ I understand a form of violence which perhaps — or perhaps not — has something to do with the way in which it is seen or represented.
[From an essay presented by Knausgaard at the Skien International Ibsen Conference, 22 (?) September 2014.]
Lars Iyer, “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom: Lars Iyer Interviewed,” by Daniel Fraser, The Quietus 12 October 2014
Diagnoses of the death of literature are old news. We’ve heard it before. There’s a dying breed of cultural pessimist, which mourns for a lost world of old culture, for the time when Art and Literature were taken seriously. But there’s another kind of cultural pessimist, who mourns for the lost modernist energies that depended on the old cultural world as a kind of foil.
Maurice Blanchot, “The Disappearance of Literature,” The Book to Come
To write without “writing,” to bring literature to that point of absence where it disappears, where we no longer have to dread its secrets, which are lies, that is “the degree zero of writing,” the neutrality that every writer seeks, deliberately or without realizing it, and which leads some of them to silence.
Yves Bonnefoy, “The Art of Poetry No 69,” interview by Shusha Guppy, The Paris Review 131 Summer 1994
I completely agree with you that poetry is also a formal use of language. Indeed, only form allows us to hear the tone of the words, and it is precisely because verse is sonorous reality that words in it are no longer subject to the sole authority of conceptual thought. This enables us to perceive reality otherwise than through language. Form in poetry silences the conceptual meaning of words; it is therefore the condition of the direct gaze upon the world.
ANDREW GALLIX 