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Offbeat Generation

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Jennifer Cuddy, “Offbeat With Andrew Gallix,” Literary Kicks 2 June 2008:

Offbeat With Andrew Gallix

A self conscious ‘movement’ calling itself ‘the Offbeat Generation’ has been emerging in the blogosphere. This generation got its name from Brit-lit Andrew Gallix, founder and editor of 3:AM Magazine, who has been described by underground writer, artist and activist Stewart Home as “the Breton of the post-punk generation, the Rimbaud of the Net, Beckett to my Joyce, and Trocchi to my Beckett.”

Home also says: “Leaving myself aside (although I don’t really see why I should), there aren’t many writers I’d rate higher than Gallix” And who wouldn’t agree? This is from Gallix’s ‘Forty Tiddly Winks’:

Others can just doze off as soon as their heads hit the pillow. Not Tim, though. He needed knocking out flat by dint of drinking himself into a stupor. Otherwise, he was condemned to toss and turn till dawn at the thought of Time’s winged chariot hurrying near: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang you’re dead.

Instinctively, Tim would tune into the hypnotic ticking of his wristwatch on the bedside table. Like a clock in a crocodile, it grew closer by the minute with the implacable inevitability of tragedy until the din became truly deafening. Now, he just knocks back another stiff one and waits for the effect to kick in. The clockodial starts melting, Dali-style. The ticking gradually fades into a tiny, tinny background backbeat. Soon it is drowned out by Pomme’s sonorous snoring. Forty tiddly winks.

Another major author in the Offbeat scene, and possibly the most revered, is Tony O’Neill. His debut novel Digging the Vein is an accurate portrait of the life of heroin addiction, with its superficial relationships and endless searches for drugs. This book supports the idea that ‘addicts tend to befriend other addicts’, and the constant activity of the protagonist reflects someone desperately attempting to avoid introspection.

Mathew Coleman is another “Offbeat Generation” player who predominately writes erotic fiction. Yet his erotic stories are emotionless, misogynist and often downright vulgar (though he may take this to be a compliment). His stories are more interesting when not alluding to sex, and he shows more depth in his ‘Rants, to Self’:

My greatest challenge in life is to try and let go, to pull off the many masks that I wear and to try and be who I am, to not be afraid anymore. This is perhaps one of the hardest things to conquer — the self.

Joseph Ridgwell, the only true ‘East Ender’ of the Offbeat bunch, writes engaging stories that are strikingly real and down to earth. His stories manage to be edgy without straining to be so. Ridgwell’s stories take you down the dark alleys of the underground, as only someone who has quite literally ‘lived first and wrote later’. You can find Ridgwell’s stories on his blog.

Ben Myers is my personal favorite of the Offbeats. His debut novel The Book of Fuck is a pleasure to read, uproariously funny, story-driven, and remarkably sensitive for a book with such a hard-core title:

I locked up and left the flat dressed for war: knee length overcoat, beanie hat, scarf wrapped around my head PLO-style, hooded top and a couple of jumpers. I had decided that I wasn’t going to allow a British winter to get me this year, I was going to hoist up the portcullis, pull up the drawbridge and close myself off to the world and its cruel elements. No chinks in the armour, it’s all about layers.

Myers is a pugilist poet, novelist, biographer, and frequent journalist for The Guardian’. You can view his writings on his blog, Ben Myers, Man of Letters.

The Offbeats often delve into the unpleasant experiences of the lower middle to lower classes; engaging their characters in ‘street smart’ behavior that supports their struggles to survive. The stories are mostly commonplace and unheroic, the fate of the characters the necessary result of the controlling force of society. Drugs, poverty, alcoholism, alienation, anger and nonconformity are recurrent themes.

I recently asked Andrew Gallix a few questions about the Offbeats, beginning with the definition of the generation.

Andrew: Offbeat writers are nonconcomformists who (at least in their work) feel alienated from mainstream publishing, which is increasingly dominated by marketing people, and often draw inspiration from non-literary material. In some ways, it’s a continuation of the post-punk Blank Generation writers. Some Offbeats also have an offbeat, experimental style, but that’s certainly not the case of all of us. It’s not a movement with a manifesto. All of the Offbeats write in very different styles. What brought us together was our hostility to mainstream publishing.

Jennifer: Is there a criteria for inclusion or exclusion?

Andrew: It’s not a club, so in theory anybody can be an Offbeat writer. There are no criteria as such. There are webzines out there made by people we don’t know who claim to be Offbeat publications, which is great because it means that the movement is growing. In fact, some people who were very dismissive, and even hostile, at first, are now blowing the trumpet for the Offbeats. The original Offbeats coalesced around 3:AM Magazine, and in particular the events we organised in London. We started 3:AM in 2000. By 2003, we started organizing readings and concerts: the future Offbeats started coming along, but didn’t know one another. By 2006 I became aware of the fact that all of these people needed to be brought together. The first thing we needed was a name so I started speaking of the ‘Offbeat generation’.

Jennifer: I have to wonder if it is not the writers who reject the mainstream, and alienate themselves from society through their writing, rather then being rejected and alienated by it. Should we compare this movement to the Naturalist/Realist movement? Why are these periods being repeated in modern literature?

Andrew: Well, I would partially disagree. Some Offbeats like Tony O’Neill are writing in a naturalist tradition, but others like HP Tinker, Tom McCarthy, Steven Hall, or dare I say me, certainly aren’t. The Offbeat scene covers many genres and styles.

Jennifer: Why do you feel that the marketing departments are dictating what is being published?

Andrew: Publishing houses used to support authors simply because they were good or interesting; that’s almost unheard of these days. More and more books are being published, but a lot of them aren’t worth publishing (one thinks of Ecclesiastes: “Of the making of books there is no end”!). More and more books are being published, but there’s less and less choice in book stores.

Jennifer: If there is a large market out there of writers who want to read ( and buy) more literary type books, then why are the marketing departments not seeing this as reflected in sales?

Andrew: I think they are, when they’re ready to take a risk. Tom McCarthy’s extraordinary success is a good illustration of this. The good writers are not being drowned out by the dross; there’s just more choice out there. If a band creates its own label and releases a record, everybody applauds their sense of enterprise; when a writer does the same, some people cry out “vanity publishing”! However, writing is not all about marketing and money. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

I do sense some contradictions in Gallix’s responses. He proclaims that there are less and less choices out there due to the increase in books being published that are basically just crap; and then he says good writers are not being driven out by the dross! With this in mind, I have to wonder why the Offbeats are “feeling alienated from mainstream publishing, which is increasingly dominated by marketing people, and often draw inspiration from non-literary material.” Are good writers being published, but no one is buying? Or are the Offbeats just not adhering to golden rule of thumb of book publishing: you have to write stories that people want to read, not just stories that you want to write?

Uncrap Books

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My interview with Sam Jordison was published in 3:AM Magazine today:

“Being something of a klutz myself, always prone to dropping things — both of a physical and verbal clanger nature — I guess I sympathise with life’s losers. I share their pain and that makes it all the more piquant and funny for me. I also hope I show they often have some kind of dignity in defeat. And that there’s a much finer line between spectacular success and humiliation than is often supposed.”

Mr Writer

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I am interviewed by Kelly Buckley in the first issue of The Great Small Fishes (September-November 2007):

MR WRITER

Andrew Gallix is The Editor-in-Chief at the critically acclaimed literary magazine, 3:AM. Not only has he been hailed as a man who has championed underground writing for years, but his own delicious oeuvre, published via the internet or small press, is well worth checking out. His style has been described as if ‘he invented Warhol on Monday, punk rock on Tuesday and then took the rest of the week off after declaring the project a sodding mess’ by renowned author Jim Ruland. Among other literary-related side-projects of Andrew’s, the 42-year-old is also part of a music band called The Ungodly Hours, the members of which are all writers. Oh, and if that isn’t bohemian enough for you, Andrew is half-English and half-French and lives in Paris.

Q: How do you think your passion for literature began?
A: Sadness and madness is the short answer. I don’t want to turn this into a sob story, but I had a very unhappy childhood during which make-believe was my only refuge. I used to invent characters I literally lived with: not only did I draw their pictures and write stories about them, but — more worryingly perhaps — I would talk to them all the time in my head. Don’t get me wrong, I never thought for one minute that these characters were real, but their ‘presence’ was such a source of comfort that I came to view interaction with other human beings — especially of my age — as a distraction from my mind games. For instance, I would hold silent conversations with my imaginary friends at the same time as I was talking to real people. The result is that I perceived reality through the idealistic prism of fiction and, like Emma Bovary, found it sorely lacking. Tom McCarthy, the author of Remainder, was telling me about trauma victims’ feeling of unreality and compulsion to re-enact the traumatic experience — the only one that seems real to them. My relationship with books and writing is linked to something very similar. Anyway, those who knew me as a kid always say that I was always either reading or writing. Both activities went hand-in-hand: if I read a book I liked, I started trying to write something similar. Nothing much has changed.

Q: Who have been your main influences throughout life, personally, professionally, creatively etc?
A: I could quote many writers who have meant so much to me over the years, but if I had to single out one defining influence, I’d have to say: punk. The punk movement was my Dada, my Surrealism, my May 1968… Nothing comes close to the adrenaline rush of those days. The fact that I was a kid at the time also meant that I experienced the whole thing at one remove, so it remained untainted by the necessary disappointments of reality. Trying to recapture that excitement is one of my main goals as a writer.

Q: What made you start 3:AM Magazine?
A: The site already existed. It had been launched by an enterprising young American called Kent Wilson. I sent him one of my short stories, he published it, we exchanged ideas on how to transform 3:AM into a proper webzine and he immediately offered me the position of editor-in-chief. Why did I accept his offer? Because webzines were a new phenomenon and everything was yet to be invented. Because I had this clear vision of a magazine which would put cutting-edge fiction into a wider cultural context through literary news (“Buzzwords” was arguably the world’s very first literary blog), or music coverage (many of the authors we liked had been influenced by punk, indie or rave music). The last reason, which I wasn’t fully conscious of at the time, is that 3:AM would provide the perfect excuse not to focus on what was most important to me: my own writing!

Q: What drives you to continue with it and your other projects every day?
A: The main reason why I’ve never been able to pack it in is that we’ve been so damn successful. Lots of other similar webzines have appeared in our wake, but I still think there is something pretty unique about what we’re doing. 3:AM is also a collective endeavor whereas writing is a very solitary exercise. That collective element restores a little sanity in my life.

Q: Did you imagine 3:AM would take off in the way that it has? Did you have a goal in mind at the beginning or has it been a purely organic process?
A: I had a clear vision of a post-punk literary magazine, but I had no idea we would become so influential. The internet was still largely uncharted territory back in 2000. There were already many websites publishing poetry and fiction, but no online literary magazines as such. We pretty much created the template, not only with our blog, but also by embracing the digital age. Most of our contemporaries were secretly hoping to graduate from the Net to traditional paper organs. We didn’t, which is why we soon abandoned the monthly issue format and went ‘live’ with constant updates. Similarly, we were the first truly international webzine with editors located all over the world collaborating on a daily basis although none of us (at the time) had ever met.

Q: You have quite a team working with you now at 3:AM now. How did the team grow?
A: At first, it was just me, then people gradually started getting in touch. Whenever I received really interesting submissions I tried to bring the authors on board. Today, we have a pretty large team but most of the work is still done by two or three people.

Q: Please tell us about the 3:AM book, The Edgier Waters, how it came about, how it was funded, etc?
A: We’d been toying with the idea of an anthology for a while and 3:AM‘s fifth anniversary seemed the perfect opportunity. The main problem is that most anthologies don’t sell, so publishers were very reluctant, which is why I came to the conclusion that we were wasting our time. Andrew Stevens then met James Bridle who worked for a new cutting-edge publisher called Snowbooks and it turned out that they were willing to publish it. There were no funding issues as the book was released by a proper publisher. Had we not found Snowbooks, we may have gone down the self-publishing route.

Q: Please tell us how you make a living — do any of your independent projects make you money?
A: I have been teaching at the Sorbonne University in Paris for quite a while now. The day job funds all my other projects, none of which have ever made any money (apart from journalism). I’d love to be able to write full-time. Then again, having a day job means that I don’t have to make any compromises in my writing. Paradoxically, many ‘alternative’ writers spend their time trying to make money precisely because they have shunned a steady day job, although there is little demand for what they produce.

Q: Can you tell us more about The Ungodly Hours and what exactly your involvement is.
A: I’ve always liked writers in bands, so we decided to create a band composed solely of writers as a kind of art project. Vim Cortez, who edits Paris Bitter Hearts Pit, writes most of the music. Matthew Coleman, with whom I’m editing the forthcoming Offbeat Generation anthology, is the singer. I play bass, drums and manage the band. Film should be a big part of this project (Matthew is also a film director), but we haven’t got round to that yet.

Q: Would you like to get a big publishing deal?
A: I’d love to.

Q: What can we expect next from Andrew Gallix?
A: Well, there’s the Offbeat Generation anthology I’m co-editing, which will be published by Social Disease towards the end of the year. I have a couple of short stories in forthcoming anthologies. I’m also working on a series of interviews for 3:AM, as well as a non-fiction piece. The next big step will be the novel.