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.

***

Henry Bean: “In Ingmar Bergman’s final film, Saraband, there’s a scene in which a angry old man, played by Erland Josephson, sits in his study, leaning forward in concentration, eyes closed, brow furrowed, listening with all his might to a recording of a Bruckner symphony.  His son enters the room; the man stops the music, begins to tell his son (who is 60) what, in fact, he thinks of him, a bitter, scathing denunciation that is one of the most terrible encounters between a parent and child ever depicted in film or literature, after which the son leaves, shattered, and the man picks up the symphony where he left off, burying himself in it with the same intensity as before.

This, I imagine, is how music ought to be listened to, as if it contained the secrets of the universe, and not a note is to be missed.  Unfortunately, I can’t do that, except on drugs, which I don’t take anymore.  To listen now, I need something else (driving, cooking, cleaning the house) to siphon off nervous energy so the rest of me can focus on the music.  Reading is not a good something else; it’s too complicated and demanding.  Usually, when I try to read and listen, I end up either turning off the music so I can follow the words, or getting so absorbed in the writing I don’t hear the music. 

But every now and then, for five minutes or half an hour, it works perfectly; the music and reading abet each other, each somehow clearing the way for the other kind of perception.  When this happens, it’s almost invariably one of two kinds of music that does the trick. 

The first is Bach, particularly Glenn Gould’s two recordings of The Goldberg Variations (1955 & 1980) which are both such mysterious blends of mathematics and “feeling” that either they don’t interfere with the decoding of printed words and the understanding of sentences, or they even facilitate that process.  It is as if the Bach expresses a truth, a universal constant, in the presence of which everything becomes logical.  The world makes sense.  This calms the mind and lets it focus on the words and their meaning because a deeper, foundational meaning is being attended to.

 The other kind of music that sometimes has this effect is a larger category, 20th Century classical. Not all of it works.  Stravinsky doesn’t; it’s too dramatic, it fights the words.  But Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Shostakovitch and especially Charles Ives sometimes do, though they are, in a way, as chaotic as the Bach is orderly.  I’m not sure how this happens, but the modern music’s abstraction, the scarcity of melody or conventional harmony, the atonality, the wavering between structure and chaos, somehow “support” or enable reading just as the Bach does, but from the opposite direction. 

 Ives is the 20th Century composer I know best, particularly his 2nd Symphony, in two different recordings by Bernstein, and maybe one of the reasons it works is that I know it so well.  Reading “to it’ is like sitting with a book in a familiar landscape; there are “events” in this landscape (especially the grave restatement of the main theme late in the symphony) that inevitably distract me, but they do so in a way that is predictable, and thus comforting.  And, when they’re past, I go back to the reading refreshed, restored.  Even if I’ve only ‘been away’ for half a second, it lets me see the text with new eyes. 

 Of course, Gould’s Bach is also very familiar, so maybe that’s the key as much as the music itself.  Music we know well does what we expect; that reassures us and leaves us free to fall through the hole of our reading into another reality, confident that the one we left behind is being attended to by the music.”

Following this wonderful continuation of our thoughts about the intertwining of music and reading, I wanted to dig further into the possible implications of music in “A Hole in The Sky.” So, I asked a few prying questions, to which Mr. Bean graciously replied with an honesty I’m sure Tyrell would appreciate.

Black Clock: I would venture a guess that the main character in your story shares a similar opinion about music. Would you say that?

Henry Bean: I imagine that Tyrell’s opinions about music are very different from mine. For one thing, he knows music much better than I do. As he observes in the story, he would “live inside it” if he could. The problem is, he can’t. I have no idea what kind of music he likes or listens to, but I suspect that a lot of it would be people I’ve never heard of. He might find the composers I mentioned (Ives, Stockhausen, Schoenberg, etc) formally interesting, but my guess is they’re too cerebral for him (though I could be wrong about that). He wants an expression of feeling that’s more direct, raw, deep, shattering; as I say in the story, he’s a romantic, and we share that. But, unlike me, he would have no trouble listening to music while he reads or writes (if he wrote) because music to him is the deepest reality. I agree with that, but I can’t feel it the way he does.

Black Clock: Does your character’s affinity for music play a role in the way he sees the world, and inevitably, in his fate?

Henry Bean: Music is the purist of the arts, and Tyrell is nothing if not a purist. It’s purism (an insistence on what should be in the face of what is) that gets him into trouble and that won’t let go even as it threatens to destroy him. It’s not so much that his affinity for music leads him to this fate as that it reveals the purist impulse that also produces the fate. They’re parallel not causative.

Black Clock: I’ve started incorporating certain music into the background while I write, though it only works about fifty-percent of the time. Did you listen to music while writing “A Hole in the Sky”? If yes, what?

Henry Bean: No. I can sometimes listen a little while writing a screenplay, but never with prose. It’s too hard; there’s no concentration left over for anything else.

Black Clock: As a fun question, any suggestions for what you might listen to while reading “A Hole in the Sky”?

Henry Bean: Frankly, I want the reader’s full attention on my story, not divided and shared with someone else’s music. However, if I had to pick one piece it would be Ives’s The Holidays Symphony. All the little musical fragments in that work, the patriotic tunes, traditional ditties, Stephen Foster, etc, help set the very American landscape where the story occurs. (The importance of which I never thought of until you asked this question.) And Ives is always working on the boundary between order and chaos; this is very much where Tyrell wants to be and must be and who he is; and I guess we share that, too.

 ***

I think being on this boundary is something we can all sympathize with, even if the experience is different – especially if the experience is different – because in that space which only one person can truly know, lies a very good story.

Inspired? Intrigued? Perhaps you, like me, are staring at your record collection with a heavy tome in one hand, ready to bite into a new musically charged reading experience. I hope so, and I hope that if you’re interested, you’ll check out Henry Bean’s story “A Hole in the Sky” in the newly released Black Clock 16, and join us for the issue’s launch on Sunday February 17^th (4pm at The Last Bookstore, Downtown LA).

By Jessica Marie Felleman
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts.

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.

Patrick: So who were the other people in Milledgeville?

Tom: College students, locals. But actually Milledgeville is a really vibrant little town.

Patrick: Why do you think that is?

Tom: I think that rural culture there is intact. Rural culture there doesn’t feel like it’s dying.

Patrick: Much like Southern California’s might…?

Tom: I’m actually thinking more of the rural Midwest and rural Northeast. Rural parts of those places feel beleaguered to me, but the rural South went through its beleaguered phase like a century and a half ago. They got it down and the place is still intact so it feels, even, on the up and up. It’s an optimistic rural place. Like the worst is over. So yeah, it’s vibrant. It’s 18,000 people and it is rural, but because of Georgia College it had a handful of bars and restaurants.

The Trop was Metropolis Café, a Greek restaurant owned by an Indian guy named Deepak. He was at the time twenty-six. But before I met Roger and Stephan I knew maybe a few baristas, a couple of farmers, and then I started going to Metropolis because it’d just opened and Deepak was around my age and not from Georgia. We were fish out of water together. So I spent about six months hanging out there every night, just shootin’ the breeze with Deepak and the rest of the staff.

Then, one day Roger showed up. I was sitting at the bar at Metropolis. This was during the World Cup and I’m drinking beer and it’s 1:30PM, it’s 110 degrees out and there’s this guy sitting next to me and we start talking and he goes, “Where’re you from?” and I say, “San Francisco,” and he says, “Aw, yeah, I know a few people out in San Francisco.” And I’m thinking, “What the fuck?!?” I was holding myself back from pounding my fist on the bar. I’m thinking, “No one here knows anyone from San Francisco! Who the hell are you!?” So we talk for a while and the game ends at, whatever, 3PM and we make a date to meet up later. And by later I mean, like, 5:30PM that same day. (laughs) So I walked home, took a shower and kinda sat on the couch for a little bit and then walked back and Roger came back a few minutes later. It turned out we were both working on novels, and both sort of feeling marooned. At this point it’s the dead of summer in Milledgeville. The college has cleared out, there’s no one around. You see the same six people every day at Metropolis. So I was extremely glad to meet Roger. And then, sometime after that Metropolis installed a stage and we decided to start putting on shows.

Patrick: So Trop started as a performance collective.

Tom: Yeah. Our first show was an awards show. This would have been February of 2011. It was right around the Academy Awards and we put on a show where we gave ourselves absurd awards, just as an excuse to deliver absurd acceptance speeches.

Patrick: That would be the writing aspect?

Tom: Yes. Roger won “Most Culturally Sensitive Man.” He came up with his entourage and delivered this long speech about being a culturally sensitive man. But Stephan McCormick won for “Most Haggard Bastard Alive” and wrote a twenty-minute speech about the origins of haggardness in the French Revolution. We all said to him that if he delivered this twenty-minute speech it might kill the entire show, so he tore through it as fast as he could and scattered pages around him dramatically, and it wound up being an epic performance. It went over very well.

Patrick: It’s interesting that that was the first of Trop, but Trop is still doing that in a way, where you have this, not a new kind of non-fiction but maybe a skewed kind of non-fiction. This sort of “It could happen but it hasn’t happened.”

Tom: Fake non-fiction is one way to put it. It’s funny, especially now that we’ve started to take submissions, looking at what a short story is and what the fiction in The Weather section is, there’s a sensibility to that fiction. I think that… (pauses) Y’know, I don’t know how to describe it.

Maybe it’s that, when we started scheming, we all were going to have columns, and that’s all the site was going to be. It was just going to be a bunch of columns and these were essentially our silos for creative writing. Some were going to be pure fiction and some pure non-fiction. Mine was classic in-between and a couple others were in-between too. So we, rather than trying to categorize these columns, decided not to worry about it and call it quasi-fiction. These columns are not planned out. You have to figure things out on the fly. It’s like you’re improvising a novel in front of people, on stage. So for me as a writer, I needed the versatility to go in and out of both fiction and non-fiction. And Roger definitely did this too. At first he’s writing about a grocery store, then he catches a plotline and sees it out. He’s talking about this guy who lived near the grocery store and it became a short story. But I think embracing quasi-fiction was about giving us the versatility to let our columns be what they were going to be.

Patrick: If you want content weekly that sounds like a much more comfortable place to be.

Tom: For me that’s exactly how it was. At first I was writing one column post every two weeks and my life wasn’t eventful enough to supply a column with real information, so I would use really minor events and just fly off the chain to make them worthwhile. It wound up being about driving to Nevada, and once I discovered the Nevada thing, I didn’t want that discovery to end, so I made it about driving towards an eternally receding Nevada.

Patrick: Is that a way of filling in the gaps of where life could have been exciting?

Tom: It’s just a lot easier if you’re trying to draw on your own life in a recurring way, and frequently, you then need to be able to turn a story about walking into a dude’s kitchen into something. If you are confined to non-fiction that’s going to be hard.

Patrick: And boring.

Tom: And boring. Writing like this has become the case I make for fiction. When I’m talking to people and they’re telling me “Oh, I’m working on this and that, I don’t know if it should be creative non-fiction or not.” Well, to me, it’s about giving yourself the wider range of possibility that fiction makes available, so that you can make a story about walking into a dude’s kitchen worthwhile.

Patrick: Allowing yourself to be tangential. Even if that tangent is one where the thing never happened.

Tom: Yeah.

Patrick: Trop has a number of serialized novels going now. You have your own most recent one, Nightmares of Hell.

Tom: I have a couple of fake books going. The first one is My Bad Man Memoir, which is an idea that came up when we were doing our Trop retreat.

Patrick: What was that about?

Tom: Evan Allgood, Roger Sollenberger, Will Torrey and I spent a couple weeks in a house in Chincoteague, Virginia and wrote a lot and worked on the website. Will is from San Antonio and he has what became known as a “bumpkin voice,” which is a voice he uses not all the time but a lot. So we’re spending two and a half weeks straight in a little house with the same people writing a lot. And drinking a lot. And not doing much of anything else but those two things. And we slipped into one of those funny vortexes you only get in when you spend a lot of time with the same people in a confined space. And the soundtrack to that vortex was Will’s “bumpkin voice.” (laughs)

The way I would describe it is Will being incredulous at the modern world. Not knowing, for example, what “mocha” is and trying to order a “mo-cha” at Starbucks. Being really intent upon getting his free drink at the mini-golf place. Being certain that every drink he ordered came size large. In any case, the bad man memoir that I started to write was originally his idea. It was his “bad boy meth memoir” that he would recite into his voice-recorder. And I was the number one fan. We all asked him if he would actually write it. He talked about making it a Twitter feed at one point. We all really wanted him to do something with the bad boy memoir. He didn’t want to, though, so finally asked him if I could do it myself. I changed it so it seemed like my idea though, the “bad man memoir” instead of the “bad boy memoir.”

So I’ve got two excerpts from My Bad Man Memoir and more coming. But then I started getting into the idea of writing fake books, which is just fun. It just adds to the absurdity of it. If you’re just writing a four-hundred-word short story, that’s one thing. But if it’s four-hundred words, and it’s about something way, way less than walking into a dude’s kitchen, and the presumption is that it’s part of a one-hundred-thousand-word book, you’re giving yourself a lot more ammo to play with. So I started creating other fake books. I have My Bad Man Memoir, Nightmares of Hell, The Head and Neck Consultation Suite: A Bad Health Memoir, and then I also have Deleted Sex Scenes, which is a compilation of sex scenes that didn’t make it into any of those other memoirs. Both Sex Scenes and Head and Neck are forthcoming.

Patrick: One of the things that I think is really interesting about these fake books that if you were to write them enough how would they not become books? Wouldn’t they stop being fake at a point?

Tom: That’s a good question. Nightmares of Hell I could see myself going on with for a while. I’m not sure I could hold the attention of the reader (laughs) much beyond six or seven four-hundred-word excerpts. Fake books might have a shorter shelf life than real books.

Patrick: Speaking of keeping readers’ attention, being an online publication now, has that been difficult? You guys didn’t start that long ago.

Tom: Well yeah I’d say the whole project has been a challenge. Right now the main challenge is, at first we were all writing everything ourselves. We identified as a collective. But then, to keep the site growing, and to enable ourselves to have lives outside Trop, we had to expand, and find other writers, and open up a bit. So what I’m doing is looking around. Evan Allgood tends to approach people he’s seen at readings in Atlanta, but I look on Twitter. When I find something I like by someone who seems like a good fit, I reach out.

Patrick: Has that been successful?

Tom: We just started doing this two weeks ago, and we’ve gotten a few new people that way, and I think we’ll find more. I think that’s my new strategy. To canvas the other online literary magazines out there in search of people who would be a good match. I like that better than submissions because we do have such a specific sensibility and aesthetic, the sort-of fake non-fiction thing and kind of a we-don’t-do-that-much-pure-humor-writing-but-there’s-a-lot-of-humor-anyway thing

Patrick: I’ve noticed there’s humor all over the site.

Tom: There’s a good amount of it. I think part of that is from being performative. Part of it is just being who we are and who we’ve chosen to be friends with.

Patrick: If someone wanted to submit to Trop how would they do that?

Tom: Just reach out. There’s a general email address on the page and we accept submissions for The Weather. That’s [email protected].

Patrick: Trop’s reviews and interviews include people like Jesse Ball, Ben Marcus, and there are a few others from that camp. Do you guys have a focus for your criticism?

Tom: We just brought on a new reviews editor, so this could change. But before, most people who were writing reviews for us were writing more than one or are were going to write more than one for Trop. We were generally doing everything in-house, so we wound up reviewing people that we were individually interested in reading and thinking about. Though we did at one time have a mission statement for our criticism that we would review younger American writers. People who we saw occupying the tier that we were all trying to get to.

Patrick: What’s that tier?

Tom: Many of us are working on first novels. So we wanted to review the people who had a novel or two out. People who were where we wanted to be. Speaking for myself with my criticism, I just wanted to know the terrain. But that actually wound up being complicated because reviewing debuts of literary fiction is a more sensitive task than reviewing, say, Jonathan Franzen. You can say whatever the hell you want about Jonathan Franzen.

Patrick: There’s already a body of criticism.

Tom: Right. But if you’re writing about someone who just got his first book out you have to be more tactful. And so, if you’re reviewing a lot of debuts and second efforts you wind up with too much positive criticism. It started to feel like we weren’t really flexing our critical muscles. I know for me, after a few debuts, I was like, “I’m not doing this again.” Because I want to be able to write within an expanded frame and not have to be delicate.

Patrick: Do you feel like you’ve been too sweet? Too precious to debut novelists?

Tom: I believe what I write in my reviews. But if I were reviewing someone’s third or fourth book they would be different reviews, more like talking to a friend than to an elder.

Patrick: Which is interesting coming from someone who is involved in a really new publication. This is a new publication talking about new literature from new writers. It sounds like infants grabbing at infants.

Tom: You’re waking up in the morning and working on what you hope will become your first novel and you’re struggling and you want to pull your hair out and then you sit down to write your review of a first novel. (laughs) If you have any kind of self-awareness, you’ve gotta–

Patrick: Because it’s not just about being kind to the other writer. It’s also about being kind to yourself.

Tom: It’s respecting the effort. With someone with their fifth or sixth book out you’re still respecting the effort but you know they’re all right. And for you, the would-be debut novelist, a fifth or sixth novel is distant enough that there’s no sense that you’re secretly talking about yourself. If you’re an aspiring first-time novelist writing about Jonathan Franzen, there are just too many leaps involved. But if you’re sitting there talking a debut (puts on voice) “In first novels this this and this,” you’re immediately talking about yourself.

Patrick: Speaking of which. You have all these fake novels and tons of reviews and all this other stuff up but you do have a book you’re working on.

Tom: All of us do. This is another reason I think for the fake non-fiction, for the humor, and for the performative aspect. The original group of us that started with our columns, we all had novels going or short story collections we were working on. We all wanted to do this but we didn’t want our columns, our writing for Trop, to replace our books. We wanted it to be what at the time we naively called “low-pressure, complementary” writing. And it became… (laughs) It’s not low-pressure. We’re trying to make it good but let it maintain a more playful feeling.

I think for me doing a playful “fake book” is a way of compartmentalizing. I have a very specific Trop style that keeps my writing separate from what I do in the novel. I think that part of that is making sure my Trop writing doesn’t take away from my novel. Another part of that is that my novel is happening in private while my Trop writing is happening in public. From the time I finish a Trop piece to the time it goes live is a matter of days. It’s immediately public. It feels like there’s an audience sitting right there. I’m conscious in my Trop writing that I’m writing to that audience and writing in such a way where with my novel I know I have as much time as I want to sit with it by myself and make it right.

Patrick: One of my favorite columns is “Charlatans of Pop.” Where’s this Hesiod James? Where does he come from?

Tom: Hesiod James comes from his own universe. He’s from Virginia. I think he’s twenty-nine or so and as far as I know he’s been a professional musician for coming up on a decade. But he’s a sideman. Meaning he’s a bassist who plays for country stars that you’ve heard of and he rotates around. He was playing for one guy this year then I saw him a year ago play for another guy out here in Lancaster. But Hesiod James is interesting because he’s an autodidact. Can you tell that from the column?

Patrick: Sure.

Tom: Yeah. He is an at-the-top-of-his-game country bassist. And he’s also a front man for his own band too. Hellens. Hopefully they do well. I’ve listened to their music. It’s really good. But think about the normal course of events for a literary twenty-something who’s writing a book. Think about the normal kind of trajectory, you know when you’re a teenager you read Catcher In The Rye and Hermann Hesse then when you’re in college you maybe discover, I dunno, like, Pynchon and maybe Roland Barthes or something like that. And then maybe you have a David Foster Wallace phase and then you maybe decide you need to read a lot of “the great books” and then you want to read the contemporary fiction so you know what’s going on. Hesiod James, being an autodidact, is not like that. He has his own trajectory. He’s really reading the classic texts. Like Plato’s Dialogues is just the beginning. He’s referring to stuff that I don’t think anyone else on Trop could possibly pick up on. He’s dropping names of minor characters from minor tragedies that are barely even referred to on Wikipedia. (laughs)

Patrick: But also sometimes comparing those characters to The Beatles or The Beatles’ manager.

Tom: That’s him. He reads that shit while waiting to do sound-checks.

Patrick: What should we be reading right now?

Tom: I like The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers. It’s about Iraq. Powers is an Iraq vet. It’s such a good case for fiction. If you think of my case for fiction being that you can tell a story about walking through a guy’s door into his kitchen, and if you have fiction at your disposal you can possibly make that story good, Kevin Powers has a heightened case for fiction. He makes Iraq real through fiction. What happens is gruesome. It is extremely gruesome, heart wrenching, and sad. But the beauty of the book is that it makes the gruesomeness of the war, and what happens to the protagonist, through the way Powers sets up the plot so that you care so much about the character… he makes it real. What happens to the protagonist is something that you probably read about in the paper. But Powers makes all the shit about Iraq in the newspapers register. Just by tying it all to a plot. Having that gruesomeness happen to a character that you’re emotionally wrapped up in.

Patrick: And not to get too precious about this but that sounds like an argument for fiction is that you can take those things people would gloss over–

Tom: I think that’s exactly it. I think that’s exactly what Kevin Powers does. The Yellow Birds brought Iraq home for me. It’s what lodged the war in my consciousness as much as it could for someone who wasn’t there and has met a couple of people who have been but really is very much removed. That was a book that lodged Iraq in my consciousness.

Patrick: So fiction can matter.

Tom: I think Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds is a case in point for why fiction matters.

Patrick: As you know, Black Clock is a Los Angeles based publication, of course we have contributors from all over the place, but you’re here in Los Angeles. You have a number of Trop folk out in the world. Is there anything about Trop that is about Los Angeles?

Tom: The fact that we’re spread out is a reflection on Milledgeville more than anything. Milledgeville is the kind of place where if you’re in your mid- to late-twenties and you’re working on a novel you might want to hole up there for some time, to get a lot of writing done. But you might not want to live there forever. It’s good for a little while, but the people who pass through Milledgeville tend to disperse. And really half the point of the site, for me, was to be able to keep on working with friends I don’t live near anymore. We all dispersed, but we get to keep on collaborating.

As for LA, it’s been easier to start something here than elsewhere just because of how warmly received we were. The literary community in LA, my experience has been that when I meet a literary person, whether that’s someone who’s got a couple books out or someone who’s trying to get their first going, they’re just glad to meet another literary person. You’ve got the resources of a huge city, but the literary subsection is small enough that everyone’s welcoming and glad to meet you right off the bat. I barely realized Trop was real until I mentioned it to people and I was really encouraged and heartened by how the literary community here, just upon catching wind of a new online literary magazine from someone they’ve never heard of, just how happy they were that that was happening. That it existed. That something literary was coming out of LA. And it put pressure on me though. Like, people were happy to hear about Trop, and I’m thinking, “We better make this thing good!”

By Patrick Benjamin
an Associate Editor for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

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.

BLACK CLOCK: You wrote rock criticism on and off for thirty years and have spoken before about the leakage between fiction and music writing. Can you explain what you mean by that? What role has music played in your fiction?

CAROLA DIBBELL: In the early seventies, I was surprised and impressed by the rock writing in Dave Marsh’s and Lester Bangs’ Creem, and a little later in the Village Voice music section, edited by Robert Christgau, my husband. In this fledgling and disreputable form, you could be vulgar, personal, amateurish and formally ambitious all at once and actually be read. It gave me a chance to do things with the voice and tone and disorder I was already exploring in fiction that was not actually read. It took longer for me to bring those rock critic elements into my fiction except, I suppose, that writing about pop led me to contemplate genre fiction. Then, in the late nineties, when my fiction was going nowhere, I made a conscious decision to let the rock critic write the fiction, sort of, and the fiction changed a lot. Music itself is a different question, which I will get to later.

BLACK CLOCK: Do you think that music critics approach writing much differently than other writers?

CAROLA DIBBELL: I suppose I’ve read jazz or rock reviews that evoke rather than analyze their subject in a way book or film criticism is less likely to, but I wouldn’t want to generalize. It’s also true that describing a sound is a special kind of challenge. And reviewers of beat-driven music sometimes need to deal with the critical question of whether the piece under discussion makes you want to get up and move, which might not come up so much in other kinds of critical disciplines. Though it could.

BLACK CLOCK: In your latest story, “Rini’s Child,” the narrator, Inez, has a unique speech pattern. What particular genre of music, if any, did Inez’s speech develop from, and how has that music been specifically emulated within the story’s prose? Did you plan this in advance, or did it happen naturally while you were writing?

CAROLA DIBBELL: I invented Inez for the novel “Rini’s Child” is adapted from, The Only Ones. I wanted a character who would work interestingly inside the premise, which is, briefly, reproductive experimentation in a dystopic setting, with the narrator a “donor” who ends up an unplanned mother. As a writer, I was getting sick of my arty bohemian protagonists, and as a parent dealing with onslaughts of standardized tests, I was also pondering intelligence. Inez’s voice is mainly about her as a character—apparently ignorant, possibly damaged, but extremely observant for all she expresses herself so awkwardly. I spent years loving punk, where stiffness was often a positive thing, so perhaps that influenced my vision of her stiffness and jerky rhythms, but my distaste for literary smoothness goes way back, and I am always messing with rhythms and rhythmic logic. While I was getting into the voice, one hip hop line kept rolling around my head: “My mind is playin tricks on me,” from the Geto Boys. Not sure it gets across written out, but spoken it has an almost but not quite conversational beat I wished I could incorporate into Inez’s flow. Don’t think I ever did, though. There was really a lot of trial and error while I figured out what I was doing, especially with the grammatical quirks.

When I was extracting “Rini’s Child” from a chapter in the novel, I did think about how songs work, especially the kind where the volume cranks way up in the last verse. But that build is also a convention in some science fiction stories—and, just to be clear, I thought more about Bruce Sterling and Ursula Le Guin than any kind of music as I conceived this project. Sometimes it’s more about the vision and ideas than the sound. Theodore Dreiser’s masterful gaffes and epic outsiderness. Doris Lessing’s courage. I actually think about her all the time.

BLACK CLOCK: Did any other genres of music influence the way you construct your narratives? Any specific artists or groups that you’ve spent a lot of time listening to over the years?

CAROLA DIBBELL: There was a point in my life when I thought my literary voice was related to what female groups like the McGarrigles or the Roches were doing. These days, as my writing voice gets odder, I feel more affinities with Brazilian Tom Zé’s wavery, scratchy vocals, or possibly the Velvets’ offkeys and bluntness, but that’s pretty subjective if not totally out to lunch, and I’d be surprised if anyone even knew what I meant by it. I often like projects that use or simulate ambient sound, like Los Lobos’ work with Tchad Blake, or Cornershop, and I sometimes try to bring that feeling or flavor into my writing. I’m currently smitten with the great unknown Cincinnati band Wussy, who have almost nothing in common with what I do, except maybe low-rent settings.

BLACK CLOCK: How about the other way around: has any literature affected the way you listen to music?

CAROLA DIBBELL: There is a lot of chicken and egg in the influence question—and we haven’t even talked about cartoons and movies—but it’s possible my love of Dickens affected my taste for cockney punks.

BLACK CLOCK: When the word “prose” is used to describe fiction writing it might generally be assumed that the language is not particularly metrical, lyrical, or musical. However, your writing is obviously very sound conscious. Should we call it something other than “prose”?

CAROLA DIBBELL: I think almost all prose has some music in it. I tend to prefer less obviously musical prose—Defoe over Fielding, Hammett over Chandler. Lists, facts. Detective procedurals. With some exceptions, if it’s not verse and has a plot, I call it fiction, and I hope that’s what I wrote in “Rini’s Child.” But I’m glad if readers notice and care about the rhythms, which I put so much work into. On the other hand, if they didn’t notice and liked the story for some other reason, I’m glad, too.

BLACK CLOCK: Do you actively listen to music while writing?

CAROLA DIBBELL: I never listen to music while writing and rarely while reading. In my daily life, though, it’s on pretty much all the time.

BLACK CLOCK: Are there any specific songs, artists, or albums that you think produce the same mood as the story’s language?

CAROLA DIBBELL: There are certainly artists who make sounds that remind me of some of what I try to do. MIA using young aboriginal voices on Kala. Cornershop—say, Handcream for a Generation, and Los Lobos spinoff Latin Playboys as well as their Colossal Head. Pere Ubu’s dissonant and jerky Dub Housing. In spirit, the scuzz and scrappiness of Maureen Tucker’s solo work is on some kind of wavelength, and “Babydog,” from the Raincoats’ Looking in the Shadows, is a great song about infertility. But look. Why not just give Wussy’s Funeral Dress II a listen? What’s to lose?

BLACK CLOCK: What are you working on now and where can we look for your writing in the future?

CAROLA DIBBELL: My agent is currently shopping The Only Ones. I’m feeling around a few new ideas but not sure what I’ll do next. It could be something quite different.

Carola Dibbell lives in the East Village with her husband, the critic Robert Christgau, and their daughter, Nina.

By Adriana Widdoes
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Claire Phillips, author of the novella Black Market Babies (11th Hour), presently teaches writing at UC Irvine, and is Visiting Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts. Her fiction can be heard at the KQED Writers’ Block, and her novel, The Story of Dora, is due out in June, 2013 (Paradox).

In this interview, Phillips discusses the experience of taking on the voice of Valerie Solanas for Black Clock 15, the influence of Second Wave feminism, and the pleasures of “drecky TV.”

BLACK CLOCK: In your piece, Invisible Woman, you write from the perspective of Valerie Solanas, best known for her SCUM Manifesto, as well as for shooting Andy Warhol. What prompted you to take on her voice?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I have been a fan of the SCUM Manifesto since my first introduction to this seminal radical text when I was seventeen years old and attending my first Women’s Studies course at San Francisco State University. Later on, when I self-published Black Market Babies and sold my first 250 copies to Ron Turner of Last Gasp Books (distributor of R. Crumb), I was given the option of turning some of the cash into credit for books they distributed. Excited to have found myself in the clutches of this purveyor of low-brow art, I browsed their warehouse shelves looking for excitement. The SCUM Manifesto, published by AK Press, was one such find.  I had kept it through several moves, rereading it, noting the excellent acerbic wit and continuing relevance of this satiric tract. Wishing I, too, could string together words with such dynamism and force.

When Steve Erickson invited me to participate in this genius issue, I knew I needed to conceive of something singular because of the roster of writers who would inevitably be asked to participate. Solanas’s story immediately came to mind. Tragic and violent, yet perversely brave in her observations, she suited me fine. Having grown up in the ’70s in suburban New Jersey, where every woman was a stay-at-home housewife and dull, dull, dull, I found Solanas’s salvo a necessary voice in the dark.

BLACK CLOCK: Was there a point where you decided to switch from Solanas’ make-believe letters addressed to Warhol to allowing the reader to read the script she sends him?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I wanted to start with letters to Andy Warhol because I’d been sort of annoyed by The Andy Warhol Diaries when they appeared excerpted in the New York Times in the mid ’90s. I was living in New York at the time and was pained by how enthralled with money and class Warhol appeared in these diary entries. Solanas’s letters would be a rebuttal of sorts. Prior to this I had been musing on rewriting Invisible Man. Steve mentioned in his email request to the writers that we could include any medium – letters, reviews, scripts, etc.  Naturally I wanted to cover as much ground as possible. I had written a couple of scripts during my post-graduate haze and deemed it time to employ these chops. Once I researched Warhol’s diaries, I discovered that they were not as unwholesome as made out by the NYT. In fact, I was hard pressed to find, among the thousands of entries, Warhol’s sad and fawning musings on Jackie O’s every non-gesture. The rancor wore off, and I veered naturally in other directions. First in the Open Letter to SCUM Participants, based on such a letter. Then, happily, onto the script of The Invisible Woman. Luckily Steve suggested that Invisible Woman be the title instead of my original choice, “The Solanas Letters,” which didn’t make sense beyond the story’s originating point.

BLACK CLOCK: The third person narratorial voice in your book Black Market Babies is clearly having fun telling the book’s story. In Invisible Woman, as Solanas, you seem to employ a connected method. Both seem to be pulling from dark but amusing places. Was Invisible Woman a departure from your other works as far as perspective and research?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Yes, I shocked myself with this voice. Early on, when my writing progressed from poetry to fiction, I vowed not to write in first person. I didn’t want to write a coming-of-age story (not exactly) and I didn’t trust my “I”. Didn’t think it was strong enough, or something. Writing inevitably holds these surprises. You limit yourself, and then suddenly, you find buried treasure. In Black Market Babies the story is strongly voiced through an ironic over-the-shoulder narrator until you get to the final sections of the book, when Helvetica Thistle-Brun tells the story of selling her baby on the black market in order to pay for her PhD (ha!) A critic for The Village Voice declared this the best part of the book–the best writing stylistically–and I would have to agree.  That I found myself once again working unwittingly in the first person inspired in me feelings of both ecstasy and dread. Ecstatic to be working in uncharted territories, uneasy to discover previous limits rendered null and void. As far as connected narration goes, yes, I think I work more linearly than I first did. But this isn’t to say I may not once again employ a more circular or purposely disjunctive form. I’ve told myself I won’t do it again, won’t work so explosively–which means it’s out there somewhere.

BLACK CLOCK: In a previous exchange, you mentioned the influence of Second Wave feminism. What of that period made its way into this story?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Probably one of the most exciting parts of writing this story was doing the research. I picked up Alice Echols’s seminal work, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975. Echols is a fantastic, clear-eyed historian. What I discovered, revisiting this time period, was the rich variety of radical activist groups of slightly differing philosophies and agendas. The New York Radical Feminists. Cell 16. The Red Stockings. The Feminists. The names alone give reason to pause. After her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968, Solanas became the cause célèbre of these vanguard groups. According to Sara Evans, reading the SCUM Manifesto was “the first order of business” for celibates and karate aficionados of the radical group Cell 16. She wasn’t just the “slightly mad and kooky, well-meaning but inevitably misguided” version of Solanas portrayed in I Shot Andy Warhol. (Don’t get me wrong: I love that movie.) What I mean is: Solanas wasn’t a lone voice of misandry. She was an activist whose parodic manifesto sparked change on the national stage. A fire had been lit. I tried to incorporate this when Valerie writes her Open Letter to SCUM Participants in The Village Voice. In this alternate timeline, by remaining “underground” at a private psychiatric hospital in a bid to win over Hollywood (Warhol’s unrealized dream), she’s missing out on some pretty groundbreaking radical protests: most notably the NYRW Miss America Protest. She should be out there leading the revolution against institutionalized “sexism,” working for the “degendering of society.” Not sucking down tranqs and lithium in mind-numbing amounts. This should have been her moment. Hence, the letter involving her coterie Hollywood-style in the revising of her film script: she’s got the feeling she better not go solo, that she had better branch out if she is to remain relevant.

BLACK CLOCK: As a satirist and a fictionalist, how do you feel Invisible Woman speaks to feminism both on the whole and to whatever anyone might call modern feminism?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I began this piece like practically everything I write: focused on the budget crisis in education in California. The loss of access to Women Studies classes in this era is inevitable, as are the losses for many of the gains fought for in the early ’70s. Last year, California turned away 250,000 people from the state college system. 250,000 people. I can’t even fathom this. Without my first classes in Women Studies, in Experimental Writing and Poetry, I don’t know where I would be. And perhaps this speaks to modern feminism, where women’s rights become, more broadly speaking, integrated into the struggle for economic and social equality, access to education, to health care, and other basic rights.

More prosaically, women still struggle with issues of identity, work and power, almost in the same way they did in the ’70s. Whether they are bartering back-seat mothering for stay-at-home bourgeois privileges or struggling with ambivalence over inclusion in “the world-at-large.”  So I guess this kind of aggression undergirds certain privileged “female trouble.”

Teaching Joanna Russ’s 1970s feminist SF novel The Female Man this semester, I was surprised and also relieved to discover that my female students found the themes of female actualization and independence still pertinent. In fact, I was very careful to suggest that perhaps it wasn’t so relevant anymore, in order not to color my students’ sensibility with my own. It was revelatory. I expected the women to find the motifs to be outdated and the men to be slightly put-off. This was not the case. Just the opposite.

BLACK CLOCK: The almost preschool-esque scatological language found in Invisible Woman seems to push the boundaries of what Solanas might write. What inspired the use of this puerile vocabulary?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: The puerile language is strictly a response to Solanas’s writing. Her play Up Your Ass, which Warhol famously refused to produce or return to her, incorporated many scatological remarks. Solanas engaged in this speak, I believe, in order to don the swagger and agency of the male writer/artist whom ironically she held in great contempt. As we all know, the scatological holds particular sway over young boys obsessed by poopy talk. “South Park,” for instance. In garnering the respect of a phallocentric world, how could she resist? This was undoubtedly an essential part of her satire. As it would be mine if I had the guts!

The toughest decision writing this was how much to cop Valerie Solanas’s voice. The superlative, incandescent writing of SCUM was beyond my reach. But not her poopy quips. I could manage that. Also, don’t forget that great scene in I Shot Andy Warhol in which she is accused by Warhol and Factory hangers-on of being an undercover cop, to which she unzips her fly, framing her bared pubes with her hands and remarks witheringly: “Yeah, and this is my badge.” Utterly fearless and funny. I don’t think any part of the body was off limits for Valerie.

BLACK CLOCK: This may be an unfair question, which is maybe why I’ll ask it: What do you think Solanas would think of Invisible Woman if she were alive to experience it?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: Very fair. She might have been pleased I gave her a lecturer position at SFSU. I think this might have made up for those feelings of invisibility–but, of course, not enough to truly take the edge off. The hardest thing for Solanas would be to confront her mental illness. Even before you’ve read her post-Warhol interviews with The Village Voice, it’s pretty clear Valerie was suffering from some kind of paranoid psychosis. She was undoubtedly psychotic when she chose to shoot Warhol and associates.  When I wrote this, I wanted to incorporate the horror of this affliction. I felt it was expressly important, particularly when making jokes at her expense–going underground as a paranoid schizophrenic for instance. I don’t know if she would read through the lines of this story and get this. In truth, Valerie Solanas died in a hotel in the Tenderloin poor and alone, and no doubt psychotic. This is a terrible fate. I don’t know if she had consistent access to medication. Perhaps it wouldn’t have helped. Those weren’t great times for the treatment of chemical imbalances. Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is perfect confirmation.

BLACK CLOCK: I’ve heard you have a book coming out next year. What’s that all about?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: The Story of Dora is about a cyborg whose orgasms predict the stock market for her financier husband, Wade Park.  It’s basically my response to the prediction machines engineered by physicists for Wall Street, and was written mostly prior to the Subprime Debacle. The novel is due out in June 2013, in collaboration with Dutch photographer Monica Nouwens to be part of an exhibition at FOAM Museum in Amsterdam. This project has been in the works for several years. We think we’ve got it sewn up now. We’ll see. The collaboration itself is loose. Based on years of creative dialog between Nouwens and myself. About the thrills and spills of living in Los Angeles. Bohemia. Economic insecurity. And architecture.

BLACK CLOCK: What are some of your favorite films and why?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: When Steve asked us to include our favorite film as part of our biographical notes to this issue, I decided to include The Highway Patrolman (El Patrullero) directed by Alex Cox because I thought it captured the spirit of my favorite type of writing/drama, and perhaps the spirit of Invisible Woman. It’s also underrated and underexposed, and just out on DVD finally since it’s 1991 film debut.

El Patrullero is about a highway patrolman living and working in rural Mexico, where corruption is systemic and there is little to no hope of creating a just and ordered society, or of having an economic future beyond the deep tentacle reach of crime. The protagonist of the movie, played by Roberto Sosa, is a petite man whose woes are some of the most tragic ever committed to celluloid barring flicks of war and genocide. Even so, this petite man with accumulating troubles is unbearably funny to watch, and just as tender. This is what I relish most. When a story is unbearably sad yet funny, and true to a political reality. The Assassination of Richard Nixon was also a brave work that didn’t receive much attention. Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, written and filmed during the latest Wall Street debacle, is also a recent stand-out film. Through the latest digital technologies, he catalogs our Gilded Age redux with the thrilling immediacy of a documentary. Big. Beautiful. And bad.

That said I don’t get out to see many films these days–I drive so much. Instead I end up staying home, watching lots of drecky TV. Like Revenge, Downton Abbey, Head Case, reruns of Absolutely Fabulous in order not to lose my mind. If I don’t laugh, I’m miserable. Oh, and the science fiction show Fringe. I adore the updated character of the “mad scientist” who is literally mad, a schizophrenic who has engineered his own insanity (and cure), who is brilliant and able to solve the latest biotech mysteries. Wish I’d thought of that.

BLACK CLOCK: Are you working on a piece of fiction? What’s next?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I’m finishing a book of satire based on the recession, oil spills, and fantasy. If all goes right, I should get time to finish this summer.

After that I think I’ll go back to angry women.

Phillips joins fellow Black Clock 15 contributors Anthony Miller, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jonathan Lethem, Geoff Nicholson and Matthew Specktor for a reading at Mandrake this Sunday, April 29th at 2:00pm.

By Patrick Benjamin
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts