Black Clock

After twenty-one hours of traveling, four different countries, three different planes, and three hundred and fifty pages, a litany kept repeating itself in my mind: my life, my time, my hope, my god, my faith, my love, my glory.
 

With his 2006 debut novel And The Word Was, Bruce Bauman has given us the gift of an honorable character and an honest man; a man who isn’t afraid to love. Neil Downs is an ER doctor from Queens who runs away from New York City after the tragic death of his son. He ends up in New Delhi, where a myriad of factors come together and blow up in front of the reader, ranging from the political to the philosophical to the hypocrisy that exists in our everyday lives. …

“Here again I don’t know what, in all of this, is wisdom, what is madness.” (No One, Gwenaëlle Aubry)

How do we write madness? What language can accurately encompass something as personal and unknowable as mental illness? In her latest book, No One, French philosopher and writer Gwenaëlle Aubry seeks to find that language. Piecing together her own fragile recollections with excerpts from the handwritten, autobiographical manuscript (titled The Melancholic Black Sheep) left behind by her late father with the note “to be novelized,” Aubry explores the life of a man who disappeared from view long before his death: Francois-Xavier Aubry, a once brilliant and distinguished Paris lawyer whose crippling bipolar disorder eventually left him a penniless drifter, in and out of mental institutions for most of his daughter’s life. At once lucid and mystifying, No One is Aubry’s beautifully wrought attempt at creating a portrait of someone whose internal reality she knew so little about, someone who, in the end, strived to be anyone but himself. …

CalArts MFA candidate Colleen Hur

I cannot handle cold weather and, apparently, neither can Los Angeles. It was 55 degrees on the second Saturday of April, and I begged for a heater. Having a reading outside with winds straight from the mouth of Satan was not ideal. A heater. That should work.

Next Words is a transition. A reading series that features new work from the CalArts MFA Writing program. It’s the moment where all of our innovation, ambition, and experimental spirits come together as they are introduced to the community outside of CalArts. We the editors-slash-curators call Next Words “an exposure, a nebula, a metamorphosis. A constellation of words in flux—cleaving, becoming. We exit and enter at the same time.” …

Photo by Deirdre Brinlee

Brace yourself, for the book I am about to discuss may be beneath Black Clock’s usual literary standards. Though Poppy Z. Brite’s 1992 novel Lost Souls may not be as high as the penciled brows of its many gothic readers, I feel that it deserves a bit of critical attention, even if only as a vehicle to sort out my own tenuous attraction to it.

I must begin by saying that I don’t get to do a lot of “frivolous” reading. One of my most influential professors in college, Dr. Rachel Crawford, put forth the motto: “read promiscuously.” While purposefully embracing its sexual connotations, she meant it in its most literal sense, to read indiscriminately, to absorb all that is available. …

A concrete clown head, mouth agape, tongue spilling out onto an astroturfed lawn. A crumbling relic. Krusty’s kid brother.

The putting green is littered with cigarette butts and beer cans. Amateur graffiti and petty vandalism designate adolescent rebellion at its finest: School Night stages the aftermath of an illicit late night game of Crazy Golf and is the spatially dominant centerpiece of Texan collective Okay Mountain’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition at Mark Moore Gallery in Culver City.
…

It seems there are no new ideas left in the world; only new arrangements of things.

I once saw this written on the wall of a gallery, but according to the poet Kenneth Goldsmith, I don’t need to admit so much, let alone put the thing in quotes.

According to Goldsmith, and a host of other forward-thinking literary figures–both writers and philosophers alike–nobody owns these words. Not the person who said them, not the wall, not the gallery, and not me using them here, now. Perhaps this could be a benefit of writing about pro-plagiaristic tendencies. That I–like Jonathan Lethem, in his own pro-plagiarism Harpers essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism”–might just cull some thoughts and phrases from the public domain and patchwork them together here. But, then: Lethem was brilliant with his curation of stolen words, using them to talk about stolen words to talk about stolen words, ad infinitum, matryoshka-style, et al. I am far less ambitious with what I want to say, which is that I am not so much bothered by literary pro-plagiarism–this has, and continues to seem as poor or good a term as any–as a kind of writing. It is, however, its own insistence of itself as a new vision for all writing that I find disconcerting. …

If I’m going to write about The Strand during February then I’m going to do it right. So “My Funny Valentine” starts to bleed into the shortest month with the carnival giving this red month an eerie air of celebration. Yet it is love and eros that resonates in peoples’ minds. And that is why I’m writing about The Strand—my darling, independent bookstore in New York City—where on the corner of 12th and Broadway I started to fall in love.

The Strand first opened its doors to book lovers in 1927 on Fourth Avenue as yet another bookstore on the legendary Book Row. Now, in 2013, it’s the only Book Row survivor, and can be found on 12th and Broadway covering 55,000 square feet with over 200 employees and more than 2.5 million used, new, and rare books. The owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, speaks of The Strand’s “18 Miles of Books” with great pride, something that is quite remarkable for a business that was, is, and probably always will be, family owned. …

Last Sunday, writers and readers alike convened at downtown L.A.’s The Last Bookstore to celebrate the much-anticipated release of Black Clock 16. Located in an old bank building fit with tall columns, dim lighting and an arched ceiling, the cathedral-like Last Bookstore hosts a massive collection of new and used books and vinyl records (many for as cheap as $1!) that requires seriously superhuman strength not to peruse for hours on end. What’s more, with such artful installations as its eerie flying typewriter sculpture and a walk-through tunnel made of books, The Last Bookstore offered Black Clock the perfect setting in which to launch its dystopic Issue No. 16. As KCRW’s Michael Silverblatt put it to the crowd on Sunday: “This is an entire issue of how we’re falling apart. Here at The Last Bookstore we can come together and not fall apart.” …

Back in November, Black Clock Associate Editor Patrick Benjamin started a train of thought on the union of music and reading. I found his insight into this experience quite astounding, as I had never given it even a bit of thought before. This is because when I read I block out the rest of reality, so listening to music isn’t important to me as a reader. I’m sure if I could remember them, there have been times when the feeling of the music in the room mingled with the reading world I was in, but it’s not something I seek out, and I especially avoid listening to anything I know the lyrics to because I’ll just end up singing – leaving the book unceremoniously abandoned on my lap. More often then not, the world of the book is all I can hear, and all I care to hear.

But, maybe the truth is that I’m just not listening to the right music. So, I turned to one of our Black Clock 16 contributors, Henry Bean, to see what his thoughts were on this matter. Mr. Bean’s story in the newest issue of Black Clock, “A Hole in the Sky,” follows Tyrell, a man with strong ties to music, as he struggles through the special chaos of a certain moment in his life. Without giving anything away, I think between my associate and Mr. Bean I’ve been inspired to give the combination of music and reading an actual chance. …

The first part of this interview with Anthony Miller, Black Clock’s Editor-at-Large, appeared on this blog way back in September 2012. The promised sequel to the interview was starting to look as apocryphal as one of the movies Miller wrote about in Black Clock 15. In the second part of the interview, we continued our conversation about his “Alternative Film History,” as well as his larger role in the shaping of Black Clock.

BLACK CLOCK: What does it mean to be Editor-at-Large of Black Clock?

ANTHONY MILLER: I’m still not entirely sure. After being a contributor who sat in on more than a few editorial meetings, Steve christened me “Editor-at-Large” starting with issue 7.  In that issue, I had the privilege of working with Samuel R. Delany on his story “In the Valley of the Nest of Spiders,” which eventually became his 600-plus-page novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Since then, I’ve been a roving resource, soundboard, and consultant, engaged in some combination of brainstorming, contributing, and editing. My responsibilities have differed with every issue. Brian Eno once described himself as a “drifting clarifier.” That’s how I fancy myself as an editor-at-large. It’s also one of those masthead monikers that confer instant gravitas upon you. …

A few weeks back I met up with Tom Dibblee, editor for the relatively new online publication Trop. He was kind enough to sit down at a posh little place in Glendale, Capri Jimmie Maddin’s Lounge, have a few drinks, and answer some questions.  

Patrick: So you got this Trop thing. How did this come together?

Tom: (laughs) It’s funny. I’m hesitating here because I’ve told this story so many times that I have this easily accessible, streamlined, one paragraph answer. And that answer is: Roger Sollenberger, Stephan McCormick and I were all living in Milledgeville, Georgia, a small college town about a hundred miles southeast of Atlanta. There it is: We were living there and we became friends. (laughs) We were the only people in town who were older than twenty-two, not local, and especially who were writers. …

Some of fiction writer Carola Dibbell’s earliest work includes short stories in The Paris Review and The New Yorker. However, for those of us who cherish a smooth beat equally as expertly navigated syntax, Dibbell’s name might be most recognizable for the music writing that she published for years in The Village Voice, including essays reviewing several New York super-acts in their prime, such as Blondie, Run DMC, Lou Reed and Patti Smith. Now, in her latest piece of short fiction “Rini’s Child” (published in Black Clock 16, on shelves in February 2013), Dibbell has created the narrator Inez, whose unforgettable voice and unique dialect guides readers through a catastrophic near-future riddled with infertility, distrust and pandemic. Recently, Dibbell let us pick her brain about “Rini’s Child,” the subject of music and books and how these two favorite interests of ours might (or might not) influence each other. …

On his way home from a long day of teaching high-school English in North Hollywood, he decided to stop at the comic-book store. He picked up a comic called Snakes & Ladders, Eddie Campbell’s illustrated adaptation of a spoken-word performance by Alan Moore. (Later, he discovered there was a Snakes & Ladders CD.) Moore had presented his intricate and delirious historical-cosmological monologue in London’s Red Lion Square on April 10. April 10 was his birthday. He took it as an omen and purchased the comic book. Snakes & Ladders may have been obscure, but the name Alan Moore certainly wasn’t. Along with Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison, he was one of the triumvirate of comic-book visionaries whose writing had been vital to his late teens and twenties. …