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.

BLACK CLOCK: What is your process for writing the essay-like capsules for Black Clock?

ANTHONY MILLER: The capsules are actually the easiest and most fun things to write. They’re so small; I try not to take them too seriously or to overwork them.  (I do not always succeed.)  I think of them as barroom riffs. It’s as if you’re drinking with your friends and discussing the most influential first novels or weirdest cult movies or your favorite music or restaurant critics, tossing out just the right arresting detail or amusing insight, trying to make your case in a very narrow conversational window.

BLACK CLOCK: What was the process like writing those capsules with Steve Erickson for the “Noir” issue (Black Clock 10)?

ANTHONY MILLER: Steve thought our Noir issue ought to have a kind of primer that would run throughout the issue. I was flattered when he asked me to collaborate with him in compiling a list and writing capsules. We began by exchanging a series of lists about books, movies, music, and images that were swirling in our heads as we grappled with the question “What is noir?” At first it was intimidating because Steve was one of the people who first got me reading writers like Charles Willeford, which led to my discovery of The Burnt Orange Heresy (#32 on our list). There are about a dozen entries where we combined forces so that we could both weigh in on a particular “noirtifact.” We disagreed about some entries but we found that we each ranked The Long Goodbye and Double Indemnity exactly the same (#2 and #1, respectively).

BLACK CLOCK: Reading your alternative film timeline from issue 15, I kept feeling like I was watching a time-travel movie, as if a slight alteration to Cary Grant’s career in 1940 somehow offset Val Kilmer’s life some fifty years later. Did you write the timeline chronologically?

ANTHONY MILLER: I love the idea that Cary Grant’s portrayal of Hamlet in Hitchcock’s film is the butterfly that flaps its wings and causes the storm of Val Kilmer’s demise. I’m overjoyed to hear it felt like time travel. I love time-travel movies and universe (or multiverse)-jumping narratives like those on Fringe and in Matt Fraction’s comic book Casanova. I also relish Alan Moore’s exquisitely researched historical distortions in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century trilogy. As I’m discussing comic books, I should add that the very first alternate histories I encountered were in the pages of a Marvel comic book called What If.

As I mentioned before, I did not proceed chronologically. I had a bunch of ideas already in my mind but I also sat around riffing with my friends and they came up with ideas I could never have imagined. Some of their ideas set my mind spinning in altogether different and fascinating directions. Two influences outside my circle of movie-going friends were Patton Oswalt’s program of imaginary double-bills in his 2007 tribute post to the late Sherman Torgan, the proprietor and double-feature programmer at the New Beverly Cinema, “I Will Program A Month In Heaven For You, Sherman Torgan” and Sean Hartter’s fantastic and fantastical movie posters. I was thrilled when Sean agreed to share his magnificently divergent visions of the movies with us. His cover for Black Clock 15 is an absolutely ideal representation of the issue.

BLACK CLOCK: Is there a single entry in the timeline that feels most important? One that had the biggest impact on the rest of the timeline?

ANTHONY MILLER:

For Establishing a Divergent World…:

Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, the second successful film in the Buckaroo Banzai series.

For Charting A New Direction Not Only In Movies But Also In Music…:

Nicolas Roeg’s A Clockwork Orange, starring Mick Jagger as Alex, with the rest of the Rolling Stones as his fellow “droogs.”

For Imagining What Would Never Be…:

Chris Farley’s Oscar-winning role as “Fatty” Arbuckle.

BLACK CLOCK: Which is the better adaptation of a postmodern novel and why: Cassavetes’ version of The Crying of Lot 49 or Wes Anderson’s Pale Fire?

ANTHONY MILLER: Of course, Frederic Jameson examines Cassavetes’ Lot 49 in his analysis of Pynchon in his totemic Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Ray Carney says when Cassavetes discovered Pynchon’s book—which he felt had some affinities with his Shadows—he thought of the young girl he had worked with on Paul Mazursky’s Tempest. That was how Molly Ringwald came to be cast as Oedipa. As for the film version of that diamantine Nabokov book Mary McCarthy called “a creature of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality, and moral truth,” I recommend Wes Anderson’s essay in the Norton Critical Edition of Pale Fire and that magnificently erudite and weird collection Pale Fire ReasZembled.

I should probably say The Crying of Lot 49 because you Don’t Ever Antagonize The Horn.

BLACK CLOCK: Since your interests and taste plays such a big part in your work, I’d like to ask for just a list of the various things you like, but in lieu of that, What are your favorite books? What has affected or influenced your writing the most?

ANTHONY MILLER: Some books I love: Gravity’s Rainbow, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, Labyrinths, Pale Fire, The Phantom Tollbooth.

A number of other things of which I am fond: Thelonious Sphere Monk, Charles Mingus, Anthony Braxton, Van Morrison, David Bowie, Robert Wyatt, the Mekons, Ken Nordine, Gil Scott-Heron, Robyn Hitchcock, PJ Harvey, The Handsome Family, The Firesign Theatre, Marc Maron, Joseph Cornell boxes, Rosamond Purcell photographs, poems by Yeats, Eliot, Berryman, and Paul Muldoon, Flann O’Brien and Italo Calvino on living inside stories, Alberto Manguel on readers and libraries, comic books by Grant Morrison, cultural musings by Luc Sante, bewildering and bewitching ephemera from Ben Schott and John Hodgman, plays by Wallace Shawn, films with Tilda Swinton, Bookworm, Dangerous Minds, HiLobrow, BLDGBLOG, The Venture Bros., Utopia (the Channel 4 series), arcane words, obscure museums, strong coffee, reading aloud to women, annotations, aphorisms, epigraphs, digressions, lists, trivia, the year 1973, the Reino de Redonda prize, a properly pulled pint of Guinness, well-aged whiskey, midnight movie screenings, Scrabble, cats, psychogeography, pogonotrophy, mythology (ancient and modern), curiosity, passion, originality, affection.

I love the maximalist novel, the concept album, the epic movie. I adore artists who attempt to encompass entire worlds in their work, who are unapologetically inclusive and ultra-referential, who work on everything-but-the-kitchen-sink canvases. Some of these artists—Pynchon, Bowie, Kubrick—have also affected me by being as emblematically enigmatic as any of their works of art.

BLACK CLOCK: What is the one “secret” book or movie that you think should get more attention?

ANTHONY MILLER: There are so many books that deserve more attention. Anything by Anna Kavan, Russell Hoban, Alasdair Gray, Alexander Theroux, Bruce Olds, Siri Hustvedt, and fellow Black Clock 15 contributor Geoffrey O’Brien. I have always believed J.G. Ballard’s writing tells us more about the time in which we live than Jonathan Franzen’s. Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets and Gothicka should both be read by anyone who is at all curious about the role of the supernatural in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Another recent book which impressed me with its scope and obsessiveness was Dave Tomkins’s absolutely alluring history of the vocoder, How to Wreck a Nice Beach. Not long ago, I recommended Wanderer by the actor Sterling Hayden to an adventuresome friend of mine, an autobiography of a flinty yet thoughtful Hollywood nomad that makes a bracing antidote to an age when people don’t seem to have to have accomplished very much before penning a memoir.

A truly secret film is David Blair’s Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees, a bizarre amalgamation of apiology, military history, and conspiracy theory, which I read and heard about before I tracked it down on video. It can also be watched on the Internet. You’ll never get the bees out of your head again.

BLACK CLOCK: How does Los Angeles fit into your writing? How has it influenced your writing?

ANTHONY MILLER: I was born and raised in Chicago and lived for a few years in Dublin. Both of those cities have had as much impact on me and on my imagination as Los Angeles has. Some days, after more than a decade, I’m still not sure I live here. I think L.A. is simultaneously the most exhilarating and confounding place I’ve ever lived, but my writing isn’t rooted in any of its well-worn literary tropes: fame, noir, self-invention, oblivion, apocalypse, decay, the shimmer of fool’s gold. I have learned about this city from the work of Reyner Banham, Mike Davis, Thom Andersen, and Steve Erickson, among others, but I’ve learned just as much from driving around and getting incredibly lost.

BLACK CLOCK: If you were to write an entry for “Black Clock” in an encyclopedia of literary journals, what would that entry say?

ANTHONY MILLER: Established in 2004, this journal of the mercurial and the magnificent, of the evanescent and the intransigent, of the profound and the profane, remains known for its sinuous wordplay and scintillating design, its dedication to its stable of brilliant and wildly successful contributors, and its complete absence of page numbers in its Table of Contents.

By Sam Freilich
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts