Digital Vanishing Act

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Edward Champion, “3:AM Magazine — How Twelve Years of Literary Content Disappeared in an Instant,” Reluctant Habits 6 July 2012

3:AM Magazine, the first literary magazine to champion Tom McCarthy’s work and a pioneering avant vanguard that had published the early work of Tao Lin, Tony O’Neill, and Ben Myers, had vanished in an instant, with the hosting company seemingly disappearing along with it. While a substantial chunk of the magazine’s content was still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, there was no backup. And according to editor-in-chief Andrew Gallix, the site was held together by little more than “a doctored WordPress system”.

“It never occurred to me that our server could just be switched off without a word of warning and that the owner would do a runner!” wrote Gallix to me by email. Gallix’s efforts earlier in the week to reach the host were unsuccessful. Emails bounced. The phone had been disconnected. Gallix hadn’t received so much as a notice that his valiant magazine was disconnected and no longer in service.

While Gallix had used another host for a site dedicated to McCarthy’s work, he never switched 3:AM over during the twelve years he ran the site. He had a full-time day job. He wanted to read and he wanted to write. If the server crapped out, it would find a way to resurface after a time. “I kept postponing the move in the hope that things would improve,” said Gallix.

There was no reason for Gallix to worry. Because he had experienced very few problems. “The site was down on some occasions,” said Gallix, “sometimes just for a couple of hours; at worst for a whole day: there didn’t seem to be any real cause for concern”.

* * *

3:AM began, as many literary magazines begin, with a short story. Gallix started corresponding with an American named Kent Wilson, and a website was born. 3:AM Magazine, initially a static site comprised of a handful of stories, was founded in 1999. But Wilson had an unanticipated spiritual awakening. And 3:AM, which abided by the motto “Whatever it is, we’re against it,” didn’t fit into these mysterious ways. Wilson asked Gallix to take over 3:AM in April 2000.

“We were the first to really make use of the global dimension of the web,” said Gallix. “All the editors and contributors met online, and it was only after that some of us became friends in real life”.

This commitment to friendship and passion sustained a literary magazine with a distinct and inimical tone. “While in the middle of a feverish pawing at the back-clip of her bra,” begins one typically edgy and entertaining story around this time, “I did not think much of her whispering in my ear that she could not stay for the night because she had to go home feed Satan”.

But as long as the website continued to work, Gallix didn’t rue over the technical logistics. Wilson had given Gallix the name of a host: RMIhost.com, which was run by Reece Marketing Inc. Reece Marketing Inc. was a one man operation run by Brandon Reece. And when I tracked Reece down by telephone on Friday afternoon, he told me that he was stunned that someone was still using it.

“We haven’t done hosting for four or five years,” said Reece, who sounded somewhat surprised at the news that 3:AM had vanished. “I haven’t hosted anybody’s site since 2008.”

Gallix informed me later in the afternoon that he had paid an annual hosting fee, but it was unclear whether someone had taken over from Reece. He received an email every year asking to pay for the next year. So what was RMIhost.com?

“That’s all still up there,” replied Reece. “It’s not doing any business.”

Reece claimed to not know anything about 3:AM Magazine. He said his company had once specialized in website design and had operated out of Dallas. “It was never a successful side company,” said Reece.

Reece recalled a guy named Kent when I asked him. He identified a “born again Christian,” and confirmed that this was Kent Wilson when I provided the surname. But Reece didn’t appear to know what Wilson had given him. Was it possible that he wasn’t even paying attention to RMIHost?

“I don’t ever remember hosting 3:AM Magazine,” said Reece. “I think I would know.”

Reece referred to “a server admin in Bucharest” — a gentleman named Florin — who he promised to email tonight. When I asked Reece if RMIhost had leased any particular server, he seemed baffled.

“DNS,” said Reece. “I haven’t done anything like this in a while.”

Reece was busy “looking for something new right now”. He intimated that he was in a transition period and that the hosting company had been more of an unprofitable sideline. These days, he was living on savings.

“I don’t trust my personal expertise,” said Reece when I asked him about his technical chops. “I don’t even know how to do that myself. You forget everything you do.” But he did promise to get on the case by Monday. He also allowed me to pass along his contact information to Gallix.

As for Gallix, he informed me that he had tech people retrieving what they could off the Internet Archive. But even if 3:AM manages to extract the content, he’s unsure about what “more reliable and reputable host” he’ll offload his content onto. The experience revealed to Gallix “the fragility of online content”.

It remains unclear whether Reece was playing dumb or acting in good faith. But he was willing to pass along his contact info to Gallix, even after I informed him of the significant online outcry that had followed 3:AM‘s server outage. And these efforts do represent a step in the right direction to preserve 3:AM‘s vast archive.

No matter how the 3:AM predicament works out — and there are positive signs that it will — preserving online work may very well be as dangerous as other historical precedents. Or as Tom McCarthy, reached on holiday, declared to me upon learning the news, “My first reaction is: ALEXANDRIA!”

[7/6/2012 6:45 PM UPDATE: As of 6:45 PM EST, 3:AM Magzine has been restored. Many thanks to all who helped out with this story and to Mr. Reece for following through with his promise.]

Delete

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Nick Clark, “Web Hits Delete on Magazine’s 12-Year Archive,” The Independent 6 July 2012

When avant-garde literary website 3:AM Magazine went down a week ago, staff hoped it would be up and running within the day.

But they now fear that 12 years of archived material — every article they have published — may be lost for ever after it emerged those responsible for the site’s servers have vanished.

Andrew Gallix, editor-in-chief, told The Independent that the events of the past week have been “traumatic” and highlighted the “the fragility of online content”.

He added: “I never expected those who were meant to host and back up our content to just switch us off without even telling us.”

Messages of support flooded in from Facebook and Twitter for one of the original book blogs. One reader wrote: “Twelve years of writing, vanished. Here’s hoping it’s able to continue somehow.”

Mr Gallix has run the site since 2000, with the literary webzine attracting acclaimed writers including Lee Rourke, Tony O’Neill and Booker Prize nominee Tom McCarthy.

[…] As for 3:AM, Mr Gallix is trying to track down the person responsible for the servers. After a few false leads, as well as a disconnected phone and emails bouncing back, he believes he has tracked him down.

“At this stage, we do not know if we’ll ever be able to speak to him and if he can switch his server back on long enough to allow us to move 12 years’ worth of content to another, more reliable host,” Mr Gallix said. “I should have backed it up somewhere else, but it never occurred to me.”

London’s Outrage

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Here is my first interview with Jon Savage. It appeared in 3:AM Magazine in June 2002:

London’s Outrage Andrew Gallix interviews Jon Savage

3:AM: You were about 23 when punk came along. When did you first hear about it and why did it appeal to you so much?

JS: Being a pop fan from the year dot: I was a teenager at the height of the mid-60s pop explosion. Wanting to rock and there being no rock. The countdown to punk was very simple: Nuggets (1972) and Hard Up Heroes (1973) rekindled interest in the hard, mutated sixties pop that you could buy in Rock On [Ted Carroll’s record shop] in 73-75 (ie Yardbirds, Kinks, Who, Them etc). Patti Smith’s Horses. Charles Shaar Murray’s article about the Ramones (November 75). The Ramones’ first album (April 76). Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel”.

3:AM: I believe you were training to become a solicitor in 1975: did punk save you from a life of tedium like bank clerk Mark Perry, for instance?

JS: Yes. It enabled me ultimately to quit the law and enter the media — another kind of hell but not that particular kind of hell.

3:AM: Unlike Mark Perry, you graduated from Cambridge University. Did your social/intellectual background prevent you from feeling totally integrated within the new scene or, on the contrary, did it help you better understand its numerous influences and appreciate it even more?

JS: Um, I would have to say that despite the influence that those three years of University might well have had on me, you would have to place 13 years of growing in Ealing, and another 8 of being a teenager in Kensington and wandering around central London. I’m a West Londoner and was acutely aware of my pop-saturated environment. So for me not to be fascinated by punk would have been stranger. Plus there is the emotional element (oh sorry, because I have a brain I’m not supposed to have any emotions) and I was totally pissed off, isolated and alienated, in 1976.

3:AM: Why did you pick up a pen rather than a guitar? Did you ever consider forming a band?

JS: No, because to be in a band, in 1977, was to go up and down the country in a van getting spat at. I don’t think so. Plus, I was working in the lawyers’ office at the time and so was unable. Steven Lavers and I had a concept band called Para — I was Para Noia and he was Para Normal — but that’s all it was. If I had been in the same situation 12 years later (like Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne) then I would have no doubt started tinkering around with samplers.

3:AM: When did you start your fanzine London’s Outrage? Were you directly influenced by Sniffin’ Glue? What were your favourite fanzines?

JS: London’s Outrage was done at the end of November 1976: went to see The Clash, saw The Sex Pistols, and did it in two days. I was highly influenced by Sniffin’ Glue, Who Put The Bomp, Bam Balam, and, on the visual side, Claude Pélieu and John Heartfield.

3:AM: Could you tell us about how you produced London’s Outrage, how it was distributed and how many copies you sold?

JS: 50 copies xeroxed. 1000 copies printed. Distributed through Rough Trade — the first one, I might add. All sold. London’s Outrage 2 (all photos and montage set in Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grave and Notting Dale) — only 50 copies xeroxed and sold.

3:AM: I was surprised to discover that Sniffin’ Glue actually had an office: did you also have a professional approach to your zine? Did you ever consider turning London’s Outrage into a more commercial proposition like Jamming, for instance?

JS: No. I always disliked Jamming because I hated The Jam and the whole point of fanzines was to construct a new verbal / visual language, not to ape the existing music media. I also thought Sniffin’ Glue lost its edge when it got ‘professional’. Plus I thought Danny Baker was an idiot, unlike Mark Perry for whom I have great respect.

3:AM: “Outrage” was a punk buzzword like “boredom” or “anarchy”, but why exactly did you call your fanzine London’s Outrage?

JS: It was already on the Sex Pistols’ flyer (for the Notre Dame Hall gig) that I converted for the front cover. Easy.

3:AM: In a TV programme a few years ago, you spoke of the influence of Sheperd’s Bush on the Sex Pistols and of Notting Hill / Ladbroke Grove on The Clash: what impact did London have on the punk scene?

JS: Well, it started in London, didn’t it? This is too wide a question. The answers are in England’s Dreaming. The one thing I would say was that London was so decrepit that 15-25 year olds could leave home and squat or find cheap flats. Obviously, this is no longer possible.

3:AM: What were the punk years like for you on a day-to-day basis? Did you hang out at Louise’s [where the Pistols and the Bromley Contingent used to hang out] in the early days?

JS: No.

3:AM: Were you a regular at The Roxy [London’s first exclusively punk club]?

JS: Yes.

3:AM: Did you shop in Sex, Seditionaries, Acme Attractions, Boy or Beaufort Market [all on London’s King’s Road]?

JS: Yes. In a way that was my introduction because I shopped in Acme and must have been to Sex before I heard the British punk groups. I didn’t shop in Boy because I thought it was naff. My friend Poly Styrene had a stall in Beaufort Market, so I used to hang out there.

3:AM: Who were your favourite bands? Do you still listen to some of them today?

JS: Ramones, Sex Pistols, early Television, early Clash, The Adverts, The Buzzcocks, The Saints, Wire, Penetration, The Slits, Siouxsie, Subway Sect, The Prefects, X-Ray Spex — the distaff side. Still listen to them today, not all the time, but I still like the energy, the humour and the strong emotions. I hated The Jam and The Stranglers: ghastly retro rubbish, old information. The point about punk was that everything should be new.

3:AM: In England’s Dreaming, you claim that punk’s gay roots were hidden as soon as the movement went overground: how important were those roots?

JS: As important as they are throughout the history of popular culture and artistic movements: damn near central. Many of punk’s original participants were gay, and much of the original aesthetic was also. There is much about this in England’s Dreaming. Gay involvement in pop culture is always downplayed, if not ignored, by scared and insecure het boys who can’t admit that much of what they love comes from queers. Well it does, so get used to it.

3:AM: How did you graduate from the world of fanzines to the weekly music press, Sounds, Melody Maker and later The Face?

JS: Quick pick up of anyone on the scene who had a brain in early 1977: in my case, thanks to Dave Fudger and Vivien Goldman. For the rest of it, read Paul Gorman’s In Their Own Write.

3:AM: How did you get on with other young, hip gunslinging punk rock critics like Tony Parsons, Julie Burchill, Caroline Coon, John Ingham or Jane Suck?

JS: This is the bitching question, right? Pass.

3:AM: Much of what you have written (on Joy Division, for instance, or the intro to The Manual) is punk-related: is it still very much an influence for you?

JS: Well, obviously. It’s not like I’m sitting here with spiked up hair or bondage strides, but I do not regret any aspect of my involvement with punk at all and despise those who, in order to achieve some illusory ‘adulthood’, deride their adolescent ideals. I think that successful adulthood depends on the integration of youthful ideals with mature experience of the world.

3:AM: Where does your obsession with pop culture (from Picture Post Idols to house music through The Kinks) come from?

JS: Being a sentient being with quivering antennae in early sixties suburbia. The Beatles hit hard, and then I saw the Kinks on the telly in summer 1964 and couldn’t believe that boys could look like girls and make such an unholy racket. Compared to the other great option, sport, this mix of glamour and perceptual subversion was so much more attractive. Football: just a bunch of people in bad clothes running round in the rain, getting shouted at. I still loathe sport culture, not the sport. I was 10 in 1963, so the whole parade of sixties pop was unfurled before my greedy eyes. I couldn’t get enough of it.

3:AM: How did you come to write The Faber Book of Pop with Hanif Kureishi?

JS: His idea. A good one, as it happens.

3:AM: Did you like him as a writer?

JS: I liked Buddha, didn’t like Intimacy at all. Ultimately, we both want quite different things.

3:AM: Why do you think it took so long for punk to have an impact on British fiction?

JS: Because fiction always lags behind music. And because the literary ‘scene’ in England is SO vile. Example: when in 1975, I left university for the world, my guides were not Martin Amis or Ian McEwan, but Patti Smith and The Ramones. They told me all I needed to know, not the overhyped products of an incredibly small, and inward-looking clique.

3:AM: Who are your favourite contemporary British writers?

JS: I don’t think in these terms. All my reading is concentrated on my work which is at present located in the 1930s.

3:AM: How did the British Film Institute’s Never Mind the Jubilee punk season come about?

JS: I was asked by Hilary Smith (National Film Theatre Head) and I said yes. I knew most of the footage because of the research I’d done for England’s Dreaming and Arena’s Punk and the Pistols programme.

3:AM: What impact do you hope it will have? Punk is often seen retrospectively through the black and white photos of the music press: maybe these films will show how colourful it really was? It might also prove once and for all that there were no mohicans back in 77…

JS: Well that’s a start! I think seeing beyond the clichés presented by lame thirty/fortysomethings (example: Never Mind the Buzzcocks — a total travesty; another example, the super-straight Nick Hornby) is extremely important: punk was wild, outcast, vicious and protective at the same time. It wasn’t boring, and it wasn’t straight (I don’t mean this just in terms of sexuality, but in a perceptual sense). It did not, initially, reinforce the dominant values. So if you’re pissed off, you might pick up some tips. You might find a bunch of outcasts coming together curiously uplifting. There is, also, some great music there (and that’s where I came into all of this). Otherwise: punk is dead. It was 25 years ago: half an adult lifetime. Bye bye.

The Book That Can’t Wait

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Argentinian indie publisher and bookshop Eterna Cadencia has published an anthology of the best young Latin American authors using disappearing ink. The aim of “The Book That Can’t Wait” (“El Libro que No Puede Esperar”) is to force people to read debut works, so that young authors can move on to their second book. Eterna Cadencia devised a new type of ink that starts to fade when it comes into contact with light and air — and disappears completely within two months. The first print run of the anthology sold out within a day.

Some of you may recall that my story “Celesteville’s Burning” revolves around Sostène Zanzibar, a French author, who writes a novel in disappearing ink.

Un livre sur rien

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Gustave Flaubert, letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852

Ce qui me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c’est un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache extérieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-même par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans être soutenue se tient en l’air, un livre qui n’aurait presque pas de sujet ou du moins où le sujet serait presque invisible, si cela se peut. Les œuvres les plus belles sont celles où il y a le moins de matière. […] C’est pour cela qu’il n’y a ni beaux ni vilains sujets et qu’on pourrait presque établir comme axiome, en se plaçant au point de vue de l’Art pur, qu’il n’y en a aucun, le style étant à lui seul une manière absolue de voir les choses.

What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would have almost no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible.

(Wo)men Without Qualities

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Tim Parks, “The Chattering Mind,” The New York Review of Books (NYRblog), 29 June 2012.

“Who is the most memorable character in the novels of the twentieth century?”

[…] I can’t be bothered to think of a name myself. […] But now suddenly it occurs to me that by far the main protagonist of twentieth century literature must be the chattering mind, which usually means the mind that can’t make up its mind, the mind postponing action in indecision and, if we’re lucky, poetry.

There were plenty of forewarnings. Hamlet is the most notable. To take action would be to confirm his identity as his father’s son, his father’s avenger, but Hamlet thinks too precisely on the event, he’s too smart, and so fails to become anyone at all, either his father’s son or Ophelia’s husband. He suffers for that failure and spins out unhappy procrastination in fine poetry. In a comic vein, Tristram Shandy is another forerunner, too aware of his narrative performance to narrate anything coherent, let alone act. Both Hamlet and Tristram are characters who didn’t reach the height of their popularity until the twentieth century. We had become like them.

Prone to qualification, self-contradiction, interminable complication, this new kind of character finds his most sinister early manifestation in the narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. “I am a wicked man,” this nameless individual introduces himself, then reflects “but as a matter of fact, I was never able to become wicked. I never managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.”

Again, the reason for this indeterminacy is an excess of intellectual activity; so the cause for failure is also a source of self-esteem: “An intelligent man of the nineteenth century,” Doestoevsky’s narrator tells us, with a mixture of complacency and despair, “must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure — primarily a limited being.”

Seeing the pros and cons of every possible move, this modern man is paralysed, half-envying those less intelligent than himself who throw themselves instinctively into the fray: “[The man of action] is stupid, I won’t argue with you about that, but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid.” And the voice is actually pleased with this formulation. It’s great to feel superior to those happier than oneself.

In the twentieth century this monstrously heightened consciousness meshes with the swelling background noise of modern life and we have the full-blown performing mind of modernist literature. It starts perhaps in that room where the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. Soon Leopold Bloom is diffusing his anxiety about Molly’s betrayal in the shop signs and newspaper advertisements of Dublin. In Mrs Dalloway’s London people muddle thoughts of their private lives with airborne advertisements for toffee, striking clocks, sandwich men, omnibuses, chauffeur-driven celebrities.

Looking back, what surprises how enthusiastically the literary world welcomed this new hero. Prufrock’s mind might be trapped, inept and miserable, but it is wonderfully poetic. I’ll never forget how my high school teacher gushed. Bloom may be incapable of imposing any direction on his marriage, drifting between fantasy and frustration as his wife prepares to betray, and Stephen Dedalus may be marooned in an impossible relationship with his father and jobs that give him no satisfaction, yet Ulysses is a celebration of the inexhaustible fertility of their minds as they move through the commercial flotsam and jetsam of Dublin against the vast backdrop of world literature and myth. It’s all quite reassuring, even self-congratulatory. What wonderful minds we have, even though they don’t seem to get us anywhere, or make us happy.

Virginia Woolf sounds darker notes, warning us that the mind risks being submerged by the urgent blather of modern life, yet in the end even the crazy, shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith gives us paragraph after paragraph of poetic prose before he throws himself to his death from a high window, something that Clarissa Dalloway will think of as an act of impulsive generosity. It’s as if the stream of consciousness had been invented to allow the pain of a mind whose chatter is out of control to be transformed into a strange new beauty, which then encompasses the one action available to the stalled self: suicide.

The way this aesthetic consolation is constructed shifts constantly through the century. Faulkner has no time for the easy lyricism of the mind adrift on the ebb and flow of urban trivia. Now the unending voice revolves obsessively around the traumas that block any positive forward movement: past wrongs, sexual violence and betrayal, incest, the disgrace of institutionalized discrimination. Still, there is grandeur in the sheer scale and awfulness of the mind’s shipwreck, individual and collective. Slowly you get the feeling that only mental suffering and impasse confer dignity and nobility. Our twentieth century author is simply not interested in a mind that does not suffer, usually in extended syntax, and not interested in dramatizing the traumatic event itself, only the blocked and suffering consciousness that broods on it afterwards.

Beckett resists and confirms the formula. He understands its perversity: pleasure taken in the performance of unhappiness: “Can there be misery loftier than mine?” he has the aptly named Hamm remark in the first moments of Endgame. Beckett exposes the spiral whereby the more the mind circles around its impasse, taking pride in its resources of observation, so the deeper the impasse becomes, the sharper the pain, the greater the need to find a shred of self-respect in the ability at least to describe one’s downfall. And so on. But understanding the trap, and the perversity of the consolation that confirms the trap, doesn’t mean you’ve found a way out of it; to have seen through literary consolation is just another source of consolation: at least I’ve understood and brilliantly dramatized the futility of my brilliant exploration of my utter impotence.

Butor, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Thomas Bernhard, Phillip Roth, Updike, David Foster Wallace, James Kelman, Alison Kennedy, Will Self, Sandro Veronesi, and scores upon scores of others all find new ways of exasperating and savouring this mental chatter: minds crawling through mud in the dark, minds trapped in lattices of light and shade, minds dividing into many voices, minds talking to themselves in second person, minds enthralled in sexual obsession, minds inflaming themselves with every kind of intoxicant, minds searching for oblivion, but not finding it, fearing they may not find it even in death.

[…] I suspect our destiny is to pursue our literary sickness for years to come. It is hard not to congratulate oneself on the quality of one’s unhappiness. “Every word,” Beckett told us “is an unnecessary stain on silence”…

Aiming for Perfection

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Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.

Banville once said of his books that “I hate them all”. Is that affectation? “They embarrass me because they’re all failures. We’re aiming for perfection and never attain it. It’s become a cliché but, as Beckett wrote, ‘Fail again. Fail better.’ What one does is so little compared to one’s ambitions for it.”

The Person Who Wrote the Story

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Stuart Jeffries, “John Banville: A Life in Writing,” The Guardian (Guardian Review p. 12), 30 June 2012.

The problem with doing an interview is that the person who wrote the story ceased to exist every day I got up from the desk. When you’re writing there’s a deep deep level of concentration way below your normal self. This strange voice, these strange sentences come out of you. When I was young I thought I was in control of everything. Now I realise it’s much more a process of dreaming.

Ruins in Reverse

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Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey 1967,” Ruins, Ed. Brian Dillon (MIT Press / Whitechapel Gallery, 2011)

That zero panorama seemed to contain ruins in reverse, that is — all the new construction that would eventually be built. This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.