Interviews « Black Clock

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John Haskell On, Below + Above the Surface

John Haskell is the author of the novels American Purgatorio and Out of My Skin, as well as a collection of short stories entitled I Am Not Jackson Pollock. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Bomb and The Believer, and he is a currently teaching writing and literature at Columbia University.

BLACK CLOCK: So you’re quite the rambling man – living in San Diego, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City. Has travel or living in such disparate environments changed the way you approach your writing?

JOHN HASKELL: Travel broadens the mind. Or, if it doesn’t, at least you see different places, and if you open your eyes, a different place can be a different world and seeing a different world does influence my work. Writing fiction is about creating worlds and yes, someone can write about one world and make that world real and believable and fantastic, but for me, seeing and being in “disparate” places has changed the way I see my own world, in that I see my reality as comprised of many worlds, some below the surface, some above the surface, some right on the surface, but still different, still amazing, still full of those things a rambling man can take in and live with.

In both American Purgatorio and Out of My Skin, the main characters seem to be interested in the malleability of reality – what is perceived or believed to be the truth, is in fact the truth. Was there any particular source, experience, or idea that you were inspired by which helped form the unique inner logic of these characters?:

All the sources and experiences and inspirations of mine (and my characters) get thrown into a blender and mixed up so completely that I can’t say where they come from, or even if they come from anywhere. Logic comes from life, and the experiences and thoughts and forms of that life and too complicated to be so clear about. Life is confusing if you try to make too much sense of it, and although I sometimes get confused, I try to react differently.

What really interests me about your characters is that they seem to have a public life which they present to everyone and a very different private life inside their heads. They have elaborate facades, which I guess we all do, or a layering of their personality that is visible to the reader. Even in I Am Not Jackson Pollock, the famous people that you write about already have a public persona or story that most of us are already aware of but in that particular collection we are suddenly privy to their fictionalized private life — which is voyeuristic and above all, very intriguing.

What excites you about creating characters like this? Or what excited you about particular real people such as Jackson Pollock, Janet Leigh, and others whom you have breathed new life into?

You talk about the private life that is inside the heads of the characters and the public life that these characters present to the world but for me it doesn’t seem like that. Not exactly. Maybe there’s the aware world and the unaware world, and I’m trying to get to the unaware world and shine some light on it. I agree that we all live with a certain amount of façade, and certainly in the Pollock stories, because the characters are usually famous, there is that dichotomy – we know the history of the people and the movies they made, and I was trying to get below that, but not to show a private side so much as to show the same side, or maybe the underside that everyone has. What excites me about that – it’s not excitement, although I like that you said that – but more like what interested me were the real people I wrote about, and I picked them for a variety of reasons: I saw the film in which Topsy was electrocuted, my aunt was a John Keats scholar, people used to tell me I looked like Tony Perkins, I saw a great painting about Paris, the Greek, and I like haikus and Basho is a fabulous haiku poet. When I try to write a story that doesn’t get to something I find interesting – I’m bored. All those people/characters got under my skin, or I let them burrow into my brain, and then by looking closely, I could begin to see that private side, or more accurately the real-life interior that meant something to me.

Some of the stories in I Am Not Jackson Pollock were originally monologues. Do you often keep performance in mind when writing? Do you think anything is gained or lost when these stories are silently read on the page?

I don’t think about performance, but I think about the sound of the voice. I hear the writing, and in fact, often read what I’ve written out loud. All writing is a kind of performance, but a performance for the reader, to read the text in a way that will mean the most to that reader. And yes, something is lost when the stories are read silently, but that’s up to the reader. Maybe something is gained, in terms of thoughtfulness, or stillness, or contemplation. I like the “out loud” aspect, but it’s certainly not the only way to go.

Could you explain a little about your Psycho website? What was the concept behind it?

Many, many years ago, I thought that the internet, that new invention filled with hypertext ideas and optimistic notions, could be a way to use and possibly transform writing. The website hasn’t changed since those optimistic and amateurish days.

You had thought the internet could transform writing — how did it not? What was the effect that was achieved (or non-effect)?

I was entranced by the idea of a new way of writing, a new way of thinking about stories. When the internet happened, and that included hypertext ideas, there was a kind of anything-is-possible feeling. So I put together that website from scratch by cutting and pasting other websites and finding pictures. I don’t think it “works,” but reading is old-fashioned, and although Kindles may take over, it’s still reading. Having said that, who knows what reading and writing will be like in fifty years?

Movies are brought up a lot in your writing. How do you see other mediums, like film, interacting with literature? Or even multi-media interacting (the combination of movies, internet, literature)?

I see movies as an extension of life. If I walk down a street and someone stops to talk with me, or I see someone bend down and pick up a guitar pick or someone in a movie refuses to light someone’s cigarette, it’s all part of the same canvas that I can use to transform what I experience into art, or at least into writing. True, life is what gives a person the experience, but that’s not wholly accurate because anything gives someone an experience. Maybe you have to, say, have been in love, to be affected by a love story, so they go hand-in-hand. Movies and literature (and the internet and games and dance and theater and puppet shows) walk hand-in-hand. Because we make literature doesn’t mean that’s the only place to look for inspiration.

by Ashley Tomeck
an MFA candidate at CalArts with an unearthly penchant for snow and a writer of short fiction that often incorporates elements of the fantastic and bizarre

BIRKENSNAKE: THE MUTANT LEFT-BEHIND COUSIN YOU ALWAYS WANTED

Birkensnake is precisely what you want in your lifeboat: good to read, fun to touch. This strange little fiction collection, edited by Brian Conn and Joanna Ruocco, operates somewhere between a literary adventure and art object. Although each issue is offered as a free download on-line, nothing compares to the physical object. Custom designed by artist Sarah McDermott aka Chemlawn, Birkensnake is one of the swankest journals out there.

Last Fall I asked Brian, Joanna, and Sarah to chat with me about Birkensnake. The interview is divided into two parts. Part one features a discussion with editors Brian and Joanna about the journal itself. In part two, Sarah discusses her design process.

THE MASTERMINDS: BRIAN AND JOANNA

BLACK CLOCK: Why did you set out to create Birkensnake? Did you look to other literary magazines for guidance or inspiration?

BRIAN CONN: In fact we started it to get out of coursework. We needed to take a class (we were in the MFA program at Brown) but didn’t want to take a class class, so we thought maybe we’d make up some kind of independent study together, but we couldn’t think of anything we wanted to read, so we thought maybe they will let us do something fun but also totally literary, such as publish a magazine. So we asked them and they let us. We keep doing it because neither of us is willing to be the first to suggest we stop.

We did look at various magazines we happened to have on our shelves. Also consulted with some people at Brown who publish things. Not for inspiration exactly, but just to answer very basic questions about how magazines are supposed to look.

The “look” of Birkensnake is almost as integral to the magazine as the writing. What motivated you to hand-make each issue?

BC: The basic decision was that it is all right to spend a lot of time but not all right to spend a lot of money. Of course we do end up spending a lot of money on acrylic ink, so that isn’t really a reason. But with screen printing you have the thrill of working in a friend’s basement studio day after day after day and late into the night listening to the same three tapes over and over again and wondering whether you will get a repetitive motion injury. Actually nobody knows why we screen print the covers. With laser printing you just put down some money and then all the covers come out of a machine and you, like, glue them or something.

Birkensnake is offered online for free or for $4.00. In a world driven by financial profit, Birkensnake is clearly not interested in “making money.” How important is accessibility and the idea of community to you as an editor and writer?

BC: The most important thing is finding the people who will love the magazine. Maybe that is the same as accessibility or community. Each copy seems like a personal object to us, because we made it by hand, and so we want it to find a good home. It hurts us to send out review copies (we do it anyway) knowing that they’ll end up on some weird shelf in some weird basement, mold for two years, and then get thrown away unread when the reviewer moves to Australia. It hurt just to type that. I sewed that thing! We assume that there are not many people out there who will love it the way it needs to be loved and so we need to make it easy for those people.

Also we both have self esteem problems and do not believe that anything we make could be worth more than four dollars.

Has running a literary magazine impacted your writing? Has your experience as a writer influenced how you operate and edit Birkensnake?

JOANNA RUOCCO: Reading submissions requires more attention than reading the normal stuff we read, like Anabasis and M.F.K. Fisher recipes, because we want to open ourselves up to each piece, to give each piece the chance to dazzle us and change us. In that way, editing Birkensnake requires an energetic commitment, like joining a dating service, and that impacts our writing, because going on lots of dates means you can’t write as much. But then the dates yield the demented baby Birkensnake, which makes us excited about writing again, and so even though we have little time that is not usurped by Birkensnake, we begin to write again, using a kind of shorthand to capture Birkensnake‘s various squawks and cries, and then making a few narrative bridges between them. This is different than the way we wrote before. We operate and edit Birkensnake with a great deal of enthusiasm, because, as writers, we like supporting other writers, and because, as writers, we feel strangely elated when we read a story that blocks the usual channels for interpreting sense-data, and we want to share the story so other people can feel skewed and excited too.

Birkensnake’s submission guidelines say, “We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.” Additionally, the magazine seems to publish a fair amount of speculative and slipstream fiction. To what extent, if at all, does the text inform the design?

JR: We’re interested in non-realist fiction, fiction where weird things happen and fiction where the language and structure unsettle expectations about what constitutes a world, or a person, or a story. As a genre, speculative fiction brings people into confrontation, or coexistence, with new worlds and new species, in order to change the way we think about the limits of our own world, species, or subjectivity. Because of speculative fiction’s concerns, many writers who are drawn to that genre are also drawn to writing styles that trouble the rules, or boundaries, of the genre, and we tend to like stylistically troublesome narrative probes. So we publish some writing that could be considered speculative, slipstream, or even straight-up science fiction. We don’t believe in policing the borders between literary and genre fiction, and we’re particularly drawn to texts that skip around in undecidable and potentially dangerous zones between categories.

Where would you like the magazine to head in the future?

JR: Birkensnake is not for everyone, but we want it to remain accessible to everyone (cheap). It’s the mutant, left-behind cousin of the glossy magazine and the mass-market paperback, and we want it to keep mutating. We want Birkensnake to incorporate different kinds of writers and writings and we want to let its form shift depending on both to the content of each issue and the particular resources we have on hand when we enter into production. We scavenge materials to make the physical object, and as editors, we have the mentality of gleaners, always looking for the stories that drop beneath the sights of contemporary literary and genre publishers, or that look slightly too misshapen or rotten to be picked. We hope people find out about Birkensnake and read it, and that people send us their stories, so that in the future Birkensnake can be as weirdly glorious as it is already, with a slightly wider dissemination. We are not ambitious. We want messy, awesome fiction bound together with Frankenstein stitches to be an option if you’re in that kind of mood.

THE VISIONARY: CHEMLAWN

How did you become acquainted with Birkensnake?

CHEMLAWN: Joanna is a friend of mine from college and she asked me to do the cover. We lived together for several years and found increasingly that our creative visions were complimentary. Birkensnake was our first real collaboration with a legit distributed product. I didn’t know Brian but I quickly knew we’d work well together too.

Issue 1 not only features the cover design but also, on the inside flaps, an “Index for Radiological Diagnoses.” Issue 2 is both beautiful to look at and fun to touch. Where did you get the idea for each design? Can you tell us a little about the basic construction for each issue? How many different designs, if any, were created before the final design was completed?

CL: Both Birkensnakes were easy to design because the writing in them is so visually rich. The designs are somewhat literal collages of images present in the text. Birkensnake One has the beefhead from Sam Roberts story and Birkensnake Two is a mash of different things- Blake Butler’s hive, Caren Gusoff’s semiconductors and capacitors, Matthew Pendleton’s cone, etc. Both issues were made under a lot of time pressure, especially the second issue, in which I traveled to Providence from Alabama, with 5 days for both the designing and printing. So we didn’t really have a lot of time for fiddling around- on both issues we used the first design I came up with. The construction is collaborative. I came up with the general structures (I study Book Arts- the first is a simple double pamphlet with wraparound covers, and the second is a long stitch style) but both Joanna and Brian have a good intuition for how materials work and a willingness to get into new things and figure them out, so we all worked on it together.

Providence has this awesome place where you can get left over industrial materials for 10 cents a pound, so we went there and found the radiology folders. They were too good to pass up so we decided to use them not knowing how they would react to the ink or fold or tear or wear over time. For the second issue Brian got very excited about branding or burning elements of the design, and then he found the flocked paper (at the above place). He and Joanna did a couple of test burns and mailed them to me so I could think about it, but we still really had no idea how the burning would interact with the ink until we took the printed covers to the park and blow torched them.

Birkensnake’s submission guidelines say: “We’d like to see narrative taken apart and then reassembled into something almost, but not quite, what it was before. If the story gets sort of broken in the process, that’s okay with us.” Additionally, the magazine seems to publish a fair amount of speculative and slipstream fiction. To what extent, if at all, does the text inform the design?

CL: As mentioned above, the text totally informs the design, at least the cover art. I think the stories really hold together as a unit. I interpret the above submission guideline to mean, in effect if not purpose, and from my non-writer’s standpoint, “almost normal, but kind of f***ed,” so I think the covers follow that- they are pretty obviously representational but hopefully have their own odd logic to them. For the structure, we knew we wanted to keep it simple. We didn’t have a ton of time to devote to binding, and we wanted to be able to sell them for very cheap. We wanted to make a visually and tactilely interesting object that is also accessible.

Brian Conn finished his MFA in the Literary Arts program at Brown University in 2008. His first novel, The Fixed Stars, came out from FC2 in Spring 2010. He teaches writing at the University of Rhode Island and co-edits Birkensnake with Joanna Ruocco.

Joanna Ruocco lives in Providence, RI, where she coedits Birkensnake, a fiction journal. She has published stories in Marginalia, Quick Fiction, Tarpaulin Sky, No Colony, Webconjunctions, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her short story collection, Man’s Companions, is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press. The Mothering Coven is her first novel.

Sarah aka Chemlawn McDermott lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where she makes books and prints as The Kidney Press. She is finishing her MFA thesis- a book arts edition of Joanna Ruocco’s Compendium of Domestic Incidents, which is being simultaneously published as a chapbook by Noemi Press. She is interested in collaboration, especially between experimental writing and the book arts.

by Elizabeth Hall
who was born in Louisana and raised in Georgia by two back-to-the-landers who got bored;
her website is fireflyoffice.org/coquetry

Claire Phillips is a Cyborg (Maybe)

Claire Phillips and I sip our morning cappuccinos at the ever-busy, ever-trendy Intelligentsia Café. I squint swollen-eyed over cappuccino steam and tell Claire how early 11 am feels to me. She laughs with the confidence of a woman who’s been wide-awake for hours. Her red lipstick is perfectly placed and her sleek, waved black hair does not frizz beneath the light February breeze. I suspect that she is the type who can stay up late, wake up early, and still look lively; possibly she is not human. Maybe she is a cyborg.

I’ve wanted to interview Claire since I first took her Science Fiction writing class at CalArts. Her syllabus offered a wide array of sci-fi names I’d seen, as well as many names I hadn’t. Claire opened the door to galaxies of fantastic worlds that any budding fantastical writer should have the opportunity to experience.

Now that I’ve sampled her brilliant reading list, I have the mastermind here in my presence, flocked by glancing hipsters who vacantly browse the web on their laptops. I wonder if they feel the telepathic vibrations of a genius among their ranks.

BLACK CLOCK: Are there any projects you’re currently working on? Are they science fiction related?

CLAIRE PHILLIPS: I’m finishing a novel called The Story of Dora that will appear in conjunction with the photographs of the Dutch artist Monica Nouwens. I’d call it a satire with science fiction tinges. I don’t think of myself as a straight science fiction writer because it’s not a mainstream work. It’s about a cyborg who predicts the stock market with her orgasms, and I based this on [international investment firm] D. E. Shaw’s stock market prediction machine from the ‘90’s.

I wrote the text on my own and Nouwens’ photographs interact with the text. It’s very much an artists’ book. We decided to collaborate because both my writing and her photography centered on Los Angeles. The Netherlands Architecture Institute picked it up and [the] publishing grants are still in the works.

Are you working on any science fiction related shorts?

I’m working on a couple of short pieces. I became very interested in some of the themes from the course I’m teaching at CalArts. One piece I’m writing is vampire-themed, another is sci-fi based, an homage to and mad rendering of James Tiptree*, you could say.

*James Tiptree, Jr. being one of the pseudonyms employed by author Alice Bradley Sheldon, who published speculative fiction via this male persona for nearly two decades. (eds.)

What initially sparked your interest in works of science fiction and “slipstream” fiction? Who inspires you?

My dad is a scientist, so I would read everything he had in his closet, namely Vonnegut and Asimov, all books he collected at airports in the ‘70’s. At age 16 I was sucked up into this sort of technocratic hysteria, the belief that you could predict the future with psychohistory and then save mankind, sort of messianic and elitist. I was really interested in Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy. Maybe that’s something I needed to do, save the world, learn everything there was to know. Later on I became much more cynical, of course.

The Foundation Trilogy is actually related to The Story of Dora. Lots of physicists have entered Wall Street; they took their science and put it into predicting the market. If one scientist can own that, what does it mean for everyone else? Who would you want to give that power of prediction to, if it were possible? In the interview I read with one of the computer scientist’s working on the stock market black box, I sensed he knew it wasn’t morally right, but rationalized it, using Asimov’s “psychohistory”, which I found interesting and disturbing. It took me ten years to find my way into that story. Dora the cyborg is born of an interest in what is happening for physicists today, and my concern and interest is in how capitalist markets are run, and of course, the female orgasm. That dovetailed into teaching science fiction and slipstream.

On that note, how do you define “slipstream” fiction?

Well it’s not technically a sub-genre. Bruce Sterling coined the phrase to define what was happening in 1989 within the science fiction genre. Sci-fi is now moving into the mainstream, so in magazines there is still hard sci-fi, but the fantasy elements are taking center stage. I don’t know if that term will be very dated two years from now. People are trying to sell their anthologies and books, which I understand, it’s hard to sell books, but I think that students are interested in the tropes of the horror genre, fantasy.

I think everyone likes to write science fiction now. There is no such thing as sci-fi. We are no longer Future Shocked like in the ‘70’s when there was surprise over how quickly things were changing. Now people anticipate fast, technological change. If we start terraforming, then there will be nothing we haven’t done. Maybe we’ll get back to [Russell Hoban’s] Riddley Walker eventually, back to where it’s post-apocalyptic, to the Stone Age and nature and reinventing the wheel. I think sci-fi is an important vehicle for our study in history in America of genius inventors, rags-to-riches tales, part of the American fabric that will always be interesting to study. I think that we’ve moved out of seeing scientists in the same god-fearing way, and they are not the giants in charge of the culture’s focus or progress. It’s more diluted than that and I’m still trying to figure out why. Maybe technology has been more democratized.

Your novella Black Market Babies is a staggering piece of work. It tweaks the reader’s sense of reality in sly, artful ways, so that when one finishes the novella, she realizes she’s been on a tumultuous journey. Who is your ideal reader?

That book was written at a very different time for me and I no longer have the same goals as a writer. An improvisational work. I began as a poet. That is more a part of that work than what I write now. What I write now is more dialogue- and plot-driven. I would never put the reader through such hair-raising turns ever again. I don’t think I could do it, so, Black Market Babies would have a very different reader than I want, maybe. My ideal reader would be all readers. If it’s a good book, it has that potential to be read by everyone. Not my father, though [laughs].

Tell me more about your publisher for Black Market Babies, 11th Hour Press. Do they have a history of publishing works that dance around the science fiction genre?

They’re really a group of people who decided they would support me. Artist and illustrator Jonathon Rosen designed the book and did the cover illustration. I was living in the Bay Area at that time, which is a great area for small presses. Small Press Traffic helped. Ron Turner, who runs Last Gasp [Books], he discovered R. Crumb. Ron Turner publishes transgressive stuff, cartoons, low-brow art. I called him up and said, “I have this book and I really wanted to be included on the table at Virgin Books”. He said, why don’t you come with me to the Chicago Book Expo and I’ll give you a badge, so I went to the big book expo and we did business there. By the end of that weekend he bought 250 of my books off the bat, which was exciting, because most distributors don’t pay upfront. I got a lot of distributors and then it went from there. He was really instrumental.

Which literary journals, in your opinion, are most receptive to works of fantastical fiction?

I don’t write short fiction very much, and it’s all so experimental, so I don’t usually submit to these magazines. But I’d say Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons.

Do you like cats?

As much as Cordwainer Smith, maybe more.

Claire Phillips teaches writing and science fiction at the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc) and CalArts. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Poets Award. A podcast of her recent fiction can be found on the Writer’s Block at KQED.org.

by Courtney Johnson
a writer and an Associate Editor of Black Clock

photography by Monica Nouwens

Chris Ziegler’s business card is bigger than yours

Chris Ziegler is the former music editor at the Orange County Weekly and staff writer at now defunct legendary, Punk Planet. His freelance work has appeared in Paper Magazine, Arthur and Spin, among others. He is one of two co-founders of Los Angeles music paper the LA Record, a free alternative weekly that is distributed on street corners. Along with the brand’s website and other cross-promotional events, the Record tries to promote local Los Angeles music. We recently spoke with Ziegler (via phone) about the internet’s continued impact on the future of literary publishing, and some ideas to stay afloat.

BLACK CLOCK: Do you think what’s happened in the music industry this past decade because of the internet will happen to the literary, publishing industry?

CHRIS ZIEGLER: What’s happened to music is going to come to publishing. People are getting freaked out about e-books and a similar thing is happening with comic books but it’s not as mainstream yet. What’s happening is a total reconstruction of the entire industry and the information is incidental. To retool something so that it can reproduce to make a profit.

How has the LA Record dealt with these challenges?

We planned for it. The whole point is to reinforce and promote the LA music community and we don’t rely solely on the physical format to do that, we can do it through the site, we can do it with the publication and through events. We just need the physical product in the beginning to establish ourselves, basically what we wanted to be to people, so they would know what we are about. We do the physical publication but it’s marketing for the brand, the national newspapers produce the brand to sell the physical product. The LA Record produces the magazine to promote the brand. We also do parties, put out music, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in print, it’s a format that fit[s]. It’s a giant business card.

Do you see any way of salvaging these industries?

I don’t think there is any way to save them the way they are now. There is no way a literary journal is going to turn a profit, maybe if you add DVD’s like Oxford American did. The only way you could do that is to make a physical artifact. I know that sounds like a contradiction but make an artifact that is completely unique that can’t be replicated on the internet. Since everything you can put in a magazine can be replicated online, you have to be super creative and smart at marketing. Point being you can’t just put a bunch of pictures and words on the internet. It needs to be unique.

Do you think reading physical books and magazines will become an artifact of the past?

It’s kind of already an artifact. It’s not like a 150 years when there was a King James Bible in every house. I think Dos Passos said that, don’t quote me.

As soon as there is an effective e-book reader it will kill books. Last night I literally tried to read a Kobo Abe book on my laptop for free but the site format was total crap so I opted not to. Its just physically hard to do, music isn’t so difficult. So as soon as they find some easy replacement that works, they will.

by Nikki Darling
who writes fiction and non-fiction, and graduated from CalArts in May 2010 with an MFA in Critical Studies

Herman Melville Tells All!

“Old age is always wakeful;” Herman Melville once said, “as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.” And indeed, for a man of his age, Melville keeps to a surprisingly energetic routine. When I managed to catch up with him in Venice last week, he was enjoying a hearty lunch off the boardwalk between his daily muscle-beach workout and his weekly Thai massage (“it is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation,” he explained, passing me a card). Nevertheless, he was gracious in accommodating a young writer all too thrilled to have landed an interview with one of America’s greatest (if not, of late, most prolific) writers.

Dressed in his customary black overcoat and bilious beard, he stands out against the distinctly bo-ho crowd at the shabby-chic, side-street oyster bar, Essex where he is a fixture and cantankerous local favorite. He hails me from his customary seat at the end of the polished-steel counter, and before I manage to sit down he has already ordered me two kinds of chowder—the house specialty. Melville has apparently already polished off a large bowl, but another soon arrives, and he bends over it happily, his face reddening slightly from the steam. “Chowder for breakfast, chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you begin to look for fishbones coming through your clothes,” he intones—apparently a private joke with the waiter, who smiles either in appreciation or indulgence.

A New Englander by extraction and temperament, Melville seems to have made himself at home in Southern California—even becoming so much a local as to decry the changing face of the beach towns.

“But look!” he exclaims, gesturing to a group of sarong-and-flip-flop-clad young women strutting out of the Starbuck’s next door and pastthe restaurant’s front window. “Here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite.”

All bitterness is expelled, however, by a mention of the legendary New England winter, which Melville, for all his tough-as-nails old-sailor’s demeanor, seems not to much miss.

“Such dreary streets!” he laughs, remembering Massachusetts. “Blocks of blackness, not houses, on either hand, and here and there a candle, like a candle moving about in a tomb.”

Melville is attacking his chowder with obvious gusto, but between spoonfuls , the conversation turns to the writing life—and to the illustrious author’s ongoing dry-period. Since the 1860’s— and on the heels of the critical lambasting that met the release of Pierre—Melville’s publishing has slowed to a trickle. Indeed, excepting the unauthorized, 1924 publication of Billy Budd, the great author has given his public not a word since before the turn of the last century. Guessing that Melville might be sensitive about his lack of new works, I try to introduce the subject carefully, expressing my appreciation of his 1891 collection Timoleon and wondering aloud if there might be others like it in the works.

“It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open,” he says, growing suddenly pensive and scraping his spoon against the last scraps of clam adhering to his bowl. dismissive“I abandon the glory and distinction of such offices to those who like them. For my part, I abominate all honorable respectable toils, trials, and tribulations of every kind whatsoever.”

Sensing that I may inadvertently have touched upon a sore subject, I assure Melville that even if he never writes another word, his legacy is ensured. That, he assures me, is not a thing he thinks much about.

“I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.”

And all too soon, our time together is up. Melville is polite in excusing himself—if you find a good masseuse in this town, it’s inadvisable to keep her waiting. But seeing me gathering my things with half a bowl of clam chowder still cooling in front of me, Melville all but orders me to stay until my plate is clean.

“If you can get nothing better out of the world,” he says, by way of parting advice, “get a good dinner out of it, at least.”

by Emily Kiernan
a native of the decaying Pennsylvania steel town from the Billy Joel song, who writes about islands, vaudeville, implacable but unjustified feelings of abandonment, the West, and places that aren’t the way she remembered them

EMBARRASSING RICK MOODY

Rick Moody is the author of eight books including The Ice Storm, The Black Veil and most recently, Right Livelihoods, and his fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and elsewhere. His band, the Wingdale Community Singers, released their first album on Plain Recordings in 2005. Moody’s “Primary Notes 2008: The Republican Diaries,” appearing in issue 9, marks his fourth contribution to Black Clock.

In this interview, conducted via email over the course of our nation’s birthday week, Moody gives some further thoughts on the Republican party, the “Third Way,” embarrassment, and prog rock.

BLACK CLOCK: In “Primary Notes 2008: The Republican Diaries,” you discuss all the characters who became major players in the Republican primaries, from the unelectable but “witty” Huckabee to the “what the fuck” Fred Thompson. Now that McCain is the Republican candidate, the new crop of characters are the possible running mates. Do you have any thoughts on these hopefuls, such as the erstwhile exorcist Bobby Jindal? How does Tim Pawlenty’s mullet play into your theory of “Republican hair”?

RICK MOODY: Pawlenty reminds me of that SNL skit from long ago that was meant to be at the expense of Canadians: The Great White North. Pawlenty is like Bob or Doug McKenzie. He actually played hockey as a kid. I bet his favorite band was Rush, before he realized that he should simply avoid talking about his favorite band. I don’t actually believe Pawlenty is in play as a running mate, because I don’t see what he gets McCain. He’s a Republican governor in a pretty moderate state, not one that is normally a swing state. I suppose having converted from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism is pretty attractive, but what about OH or PA or FL? Pawlenty’s mullet, which is really an ersatz mullet, unfortunately, is probably a reflection of his provinciality. He wouldn’t trigger McCain’s temper, because he doesn’t trigger anything. He makes insufficient waves. But I still don’t think he’s really under consideration, and I think the same is true of Jindal. Jindal comes out of Louisiana, and that is the center of a nullity where rules of politics do not prevail. Interestingly, he attended my alma mater, Brown University, and seems to have emerged without any of the intellectual hallmarks thereof. Meanwhile, he’s 36! We don’t know enough about him! McCain won’t pick him, because, again, there’s just not enough benefit. Amazingly, Mitt Romney is back in the running mate discussion. I suspect someone of that kind of stature is inevitable. McCain is behind in the polls, and he has to veer to the center, but he’s already functioning without the Republican base. He needs a real conservative icon. Mitt gives him some of that. Plus the hair.

Speaking of Mitt Romney, you mention that part of Romney’s lack of appeal for you is a “resistance to aspects of the L.D.S. church. “ Do you think that enough people have that same wariness about the L.D.S. church as to make Romney a liability to McCain? And, just on a ticket chemistry level, how would you imagine McCain and Romney getting along?

I’m not sure it matters how they get along. Look at Nixon and Eisenhower or Kennedy and Johnson. People do what they have to do to get elected, and if that means sharing the ticket with a stuffed shirt, so be it. I assume McCain would expect total loyalty from Romney, of a sort that Bush, because of his weakness, was never able to expect from Cheney, who imagined and has even argued that he was not part of the executive branch. Romney’s adherence to the Mormon faith probably would be a campaign issue, but I’m willing to bet it’s less of an issue in a vice presidential candidate than in the top slot. If you look at his concession speech as I quote from it in the diary, it’s clear that he is positioning himself as true blue, and it’s on that basis that he would serve as v.p. With an eye on getting his chance if McCain for some reason cannot serve out two terms.

Huckabee seems to want to be v.p. too. But please.

Although McCain has drifted toward the center on some issues, you say that a McCain White House would still be disastrous given the fact that he will have to sway Republican Party loyalists to his side, a party that you argue is defined by its “deficit in the department of sympathy. “ Do you think McCain is a true Republican by your definition, or simply needs to appeal to the “sympathy deficit crowd ” in order to have a hope of winning?

Well, he might have a pustulating bit of cardiological tissue in there somewhere, but it has long since been layered over with scar tissue, enough so that he now, especially now, resembles a Republican in full.

In the opening of “The Republican Diaries, ” you say that you have insight into the Republican mindset because you are related to so many of them. Do you think this insight has come in handy in other areas of your life and/or work?

On the contrary. Often I know what needs to be done, or can imagine it, when thinking like a heartless person, if by “what needs to be done” we are speaking of the imperialist impulse, but then I am unable to do it, the unilateralist thing, and this just creates great cognitive dissonance. When younger, I thought I was supposed to yield to the impulse to behave like a cad in order to get what I wanted, and when I was unable to do so, I felt like I was letting someone down. But then I lurched into middle age and I stopped caring. I became good at repression, or suppression, or maybe I just got soft. It is good for a novelist to understand all the opposing viewpoints and then to attempt to render this complexity. Republicans are unable to do so, to understand the other side of the aisle, because the “liberal” impulse is mystifying, embarrassing to them. It’s like dogshit on the soles of their cordovans. They just want to rub it off and are unable to suffer it long enough even to feel what is to be felt.

So, do you think that liberals are more able to understand conservatives than vice versa, or only those liberals who have close contact with conservatives? Where does that leave us in terms of transcending our divisiveness and getting to what you call the “Third Way, ” which “circumnavigates the partisanship of the last eight years “?

I suspect that there are liberals who are just as divisive and malevolent as some of the conservatives. I sort of dislike the word “liberals,” because I don’t really know what it means, and the same, actually, holds true for “conservatives.” For example: the word “conservationist” is often used to denote a certain kind of environmental regulation that is, actually, “conservative.” Whereas the far right “conservative” point of view collides with “libertarian” principles, which are clearly “liberal” principles gone dangerously awry. There are always these spots where the yin and yang seem to be admixed. The third way recognizes this. But the rigors of the general election, while they demand the third way, also require a dangerous adherence to party loyalty — which amounts to the converse of the third way, a repudiation. My hope and wish is that a candidate like Obama (though there is some potential with McCain, if one is feeling charitable about him) will do the old infiltrate-and-double-cross dance and, upon assuming the presidency, will govern from the more fertile middle. If he does so, I hope he nonetheless avoids the pitfalls of Clintonian triangulation: which, after all, gave us welfare reform and the Defense of Marriage Act.

“The Republican Diaries ” is your first contribution to Black Clock since “Prog Rock Confessional ” from issue 4 (“Guilty Pleasures And Lost Causes”). Is the Brooklyn Record Club still meeting, and have you had any more chances to dig into embarrassing territory with your selections?

Brooklyn Record Club is alive and well. I don’t think I have played anything nearly as embarrassing as the Jethro Tull song I wrote about in “Prog Rock Confessional,” but I have since investigated some other prog rock bands from the period that I could have included in that piece — in the spirit of writing about deeply embarrassing things. Gentle Giant and Gryphon. They were both really interesting bands, bands in which the movement in and out of medieval music is essential to the sound. Gryphon played a lot of contrabassoon and instruments like that. Gentle Giant favored recorders. I actually have a little piece about Gentle Giant coming out in another magazine next month. The Record Club, meanwhile, convened in May and I brought a song by Robin Williamson, another current favorite, whose work in the somewhat neglected Incredible String Band I also find very, very interesting. And just in case people think I am a total geek, I am also into Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Trio Is My Life and Michael Harrison’s album of piano solos in just intonation: Revelation.

Do you get a certain enjoyment out of writing about deeply embarrassing things?

In most cases, I find embarrassing things deeply embarrassing, and I’m not sure there is any kind of enjoyment in that. I do, however, like the truth. I feel like when you observe something correctly, some phenomenon, or some thing in the world, that you are doing a good deed. That the world is mainly layered over with bullshit and imprecision seems to be undeniable. When language peels back that layers of imprecision to see things as they are, there’s a kind of a revelatory feeling for me, as a reader thereof. Personally, I am not as good at this as I wish I were. Nabokov, for example, could describe things, and get at their essences, like no one else. Nicholson Baker is also very good at it. I wish I were better. But that attempt at precision seems to me part of my job, and the deeply embarrassing stuff is a subset of observations of the precise sort. I hope.

What has been your experience as a frequent contributor to Black Clock? Does the limited editorial interference make a difference in your process?

Limited editorial interference is always very, very satisfying. I also like that there is usually a specific assignment: write on music, write on politics, etc. I do well with assignments. In Erickson’s regime we find a perfect alignment of approaches designed to make it impossible for me to refuse. Most of the time. I guess I failed on the sexuality issue. But one day…

by Anne-Marie Kinney
a writer and graduate of the MFA Writing Program at CalArts,
who lives and works in the San Fernando Valley and has just completed her first novel

Lisa Teasley

Date: March 12, 2008

Location: Seminar Room, Butler Building, CalArts Visiting Writers Series

Los Angeles-born and -based writer Lisa Teasley is fearless. A risk-taker, at least. Or so it would seem. She skateboards, she paints (“a physical working out of the imagination through color”), and she writes about subject matter that many might think of as taboo. An audacious spirit tempered by an amiable nature, Teasley is a profoundly engaging performer, able, almost effortlessly, to command the attention of her audience.

On this particular March evening, Teasley is sharing her work and her magnetic presence with a rapt audience of CalArts students, teachers, and friends. She flashes a warm smile at them, and then gets to work. She immerses herself and her audience in a gripping story whose main character is a less than savory type: a not quite reformed offender who will become disconcertingly familiar by the end of the evening. Teasley reads with a calm that is nothing short of hypnotic. From the audience, there is none of the usual restless shifting in seats or fumbling through bags. The room is a collective hush, all eyes on Teasley.

There is a kind of intimacy to Teasley’s delivery, as if she’s looking into the cards to read each audience member’s fortune. But it is an intimacy marked by a unique maturity and complexity; these are not bedtime stories. They are enacting, disturbing, surprising in their quiet way of drawing you into ethical dilemmas and philosophical considerations. And Teasley accomplishes this all through a measured, steady delivery.

Ascending the road through the desert hills past the windmills, approaching the first peak, Jay pictures the arrogant young head of Kayla, Abel’s girlfriend, her hair platted tight to her scalp, making her look like a basketball star or boy hoodlum. It could be that her hairdo’s name also recalled for Abel, as it does for Jay, the cornfields of the kibbutz. Abel got food poisoning there that left him bed-ridden for two weeks. Something must have happened to Abel’s brain then. Some measure of the illness: their mother’s disagreeable blood, their father’s closet proclivities, and all that Paganini he’d listened to as a child. Like the fabled three hundred hospitalized after Paganini’s Paris concert, all diagnosed with “over-enchantment,” Abel escaped sanity.

— From “Heathen” by Lisa Teasley

When Teasley first started reading her work in public, she “was in the piece, but very aware of the audience. Now, I enjoy the story and get into it — inside the story — the way I was when I was writing it. I need to concentrate on whose skin I’m in.” This embodied way of reading translates to the listeners, who experience the story as if the words are absorbed through the skin. Mediation between audience and text seems to disappear as the listeners enter the story.

Writer Wanda Coleman has long been a source of inspiration for Teasley when it comes to performance. When Coleman reads, “it’s song. It’s all primal. She’s not reading. She’s channeling. She’s such a goddess of poetry and song. I feel like I’m hearing opera — a siren.” Teasley seems to channel as well, but in a profoundly disarming manner.

Teasley’s work has been dubbed sensual but gritty: a body of psychological noir that examines crimes of passion, violence, and vengeance. Her narratives approach and rub shoulders with characters impossible to like, but just as impossible not to view with fascination and consider with, is it.. empathy? Teasley’s characters are damaged goods, and yet she manages to treat them with an even hand, incredible humanity, and a complete absence of idealization.

After coming into contact with Teasley’s characters, one cannot help but leave the encounter feeling a little uncomfortable, a little thoughtful, and a little more open-minded. She often creates narratives that enter the consciousness of a perpetrator to explore his or her “raw interior state of mind.” In the process, Teasley’s work, while deeply concerned with revealing, creates genuine mystery. And one of the most generative mysteries this author’s work provokes is: “how did she do that?”

Whose mind wouldn’t wizen to a weed here in this blasted terrain of faults and folds under foot? Jay asks himself driving between hills of sand. Soon enough it would be the desertification of the whole world, anyway. A global warming into one dust bowl.

— From “Heathen” by Lisa Teasley

Teasley’s characters display the nuances of real-life individuals, with a wide and often contradictory scope of human characteristics, from frailty to monstrosity. One suspends judgment for the sake of story, following Teasley into a closet of horrors, trusting the hand of the author to guide him or her through the sometimes murky and unkempt recesses of the human psyche.

On this March evening, Teasley’s deliberate, blunted rhythm, with its offbeat syncopations and resonances does not betray the sins of her characters, but instead probes the depth of the human condition. As much of her work does so evocatively, this material dwells in that vulnerable, extraordinary, and sometimes frightening territory that is the landscape of being.

by Laura Vena
a writer, photographer and translator from Long Beach, California. An avid research junkie and literary cartographer, Vena is currently working on a hybrid manuscript that incorporates maps, original art, poetic fragments, disastrous prose and found text

photograph by Austin Young

Archive for the ‘Interviews’ Category—

John Haskell On, Below + Above the Surface

BIRKENSNAKE: THE MUTANT LEFT-BEHIND COUSIN YOU ALWAYS WANTED

Claire Phillips is a Cyborg (Maybe)

Chris Ziegler’s business card is bigger than yours

Herman Melville Tells All!

EMBARRASSING RICK MOODY

Lisa Teasley

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