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Lie To Me, Mr. Keret

In a 2008 interview with the online magazine Words Without Borders, Etgar Keret explained that, “reality is what is in the back of your mind, it’s not what’s right in front of your eyes.” Even though many of the Israeli’s stories take place in his home country, he creates a fictional world, coming out of the hidden crannies of the mind, that sounds a lot like a slightly skewed description of our own neighborhoods and acquaintances. The fiction in Suddenly, A Knock on the Door (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the recent collection of works translated by Nathan Englander, Sondra Silverston, and Miriam Shlesinger, feels particularly global and fantastic: almost all the stories either exist in or jump into a fabulist world of the subconscious, though feel rooted in everyday life.

In the first collection of Keret’s stories translated for an English-speaking audience, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (The Toby Press, 2004), the stories were compiled from four different books published in Israel between 1992 and 2002; as in other books containing English translations of Keret’s stories like The Nimrod Flipout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and The Girl on the Fridge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), the arrangement of The Bus Driver is based not on the author’s creative decisions but simply as a chronological survey of his work (or as a way to market the work as thoroughly as possible). So, if talking about Suddenly as a step forward in Keret’s work feels a bit specious, there is still a discernable evolution in Keret’s thematic focus.

Most of the stories in Bus Driver focus on the particular views and anxieties of Israeli society—most notably men and women coming to terms with their mandatory military service. In Bus Driver we do get “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” a piece that could be termed a novella and was published in Hebrew under its own title together with a few other stories. The tale describes a world that is basically an afterlife for suicides, but even these suicides are people from the Middle East who still worry about crossing into others’ territories, and the tone is not all that different from that of a graphic novel—the experience is highly visual, with strong descriptions of the society at Kneller’s camp, but the language of the story is reluctant to delve into the real depths of human nature.

Suddenly contains the entirety of a 2010 book published in Israel. It has characters of multiple nationalities with whom we can identify simply in their quest to navigate the vicissitudes of reality. Keret’s earlier stories teemed with tension from the Middle East (described as a place predicated towards violence and domination of the human spirit), but in Suddenly he is dealing with more encompassing issues of divorce, death, family, and finances. Here, the 45-year-old, known in his home country as a writer for a popular sketch comedy T.V. series and as a main contributor to a number of films, comics, and graphic novels, displays his most mature and insightful literary work to date.

Keret, married and moving into middle age, has developed a more nuanced understanding of life in general. While, in Bus Driver, he wrote about such charming things as a young boy who, even though he wants to buy a Bart Simpson doll, hesitates to break a piggy bank that has become like a pet (“Breaking the Pig”), in Suddenly Keret’s characters and plotlines play off the serious and ironic in a way that feels more epic; like in the story “Cheesus Christ,” a description of a murder at a fast food restaurant in the United States and its “butterfly effect.”

The collection’s eponymous opening story sets the stage for the thirty-five tales to come. We see a narrator named Etgar describing a predicament in which three burly men invade his home—two holding him at gunpoint, a third using a cleaver—and demand to be entertained with a story. The narrator struggles to be creative under the pressure. In his nervousness all he can do is relay the details of the present situation, to which one gunman grumbles, “That’s an eyewitness report. It’s exactly what’s happening here right now. Exactly what we’re trying to avoid.” His captors essentially ask him to lie, and the narrator fails. The story’s the perfect jumping off point for the collection; a web of fables that mimic reality and emanate from a place deep in the human subconscious.

In Suddenly we get a particular metaphor for conveying the complexities of an adult life; the men, women, and children of his stories continually lie to each other and even more often to themselves, just so that they can survive the cruelties of their fates. For Etgar Keret it seems creating fiction is not all that different from telling a lie.

The strength of Keret’s stories is in his loyalty to nuance—which is, admittedly, a pretty hard concept to illustrate. But Keret exhibits this nuance in the stigma inherent to lying juxtaposed with the joy of storytelling, and this juxtaposition only points to the complexity of our existence—the non-duality of good and evil, of cynicism and hope; a non-duality to which Suddenly attests.

In “Lieland” Keret gives us a character named Robbie who lies so much he is eventually made privy to a secret dimension, where the people and things created through the world’s prevarications reside. In this alternate world, Robbie comes face to face with his lies; he meets a physical manifestation of a bully he once created in order to get out of losing his mother’s milk money and of a sick dog that at one point got him out of trouble at work. The experience ultimately results in Robbie’s realization of his mistakes. This story, by bending our expectations of reality, demonstrates one of the metaphors that make Keret’s stories so successful. If his characters can create believable characters, the author works on a level that cannot help but draw the reader in. Just like a good lie, the fiction is most believable in its precise details.

The truth found in cynicism makes Keret’s writing even more enthralling. In “Lieland,” this tendency toward the negative is an essential aspect in creating a believable lie. As a character experiences, “It was much harder to make up positive lies. At least, if you wanted them to sound plausible. In general, if you tell people something bad, they buy right into it, because it strikes them as normal.” Keret understands that neither a lie nor a story can focus on either struggle or certainty, because reality is comprised of both.

Keret’s characters in Suddenly, though existing in a kind of dream world, often vacillate between morality (the truth) and poor decisions (the lie), so that the reader finishes a story with a strange feeling of melancholy coupled with an epiphany, as if, even though the world is tough and confrontational, at least we are all in it together. We find solace in the sort of world depicted in “Pick a Color,” where a disabled man meets God and discovers that He, too, is disabled, and the man realizes that our suffering can only make us feel blessed. Described in the engaging, colloquial voice of Keret, this world—even though it’s a funny, mixed-up place—contains our only hope for salvation.

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

The Anthony Miller Interview: Part One

Black Clock Editor-at-Large Anthony Miller is participating in Literary Death Match tonight, September 6th. If I were a betting man, and if there existed a sports book that released odds on semi-competitive literary events, my money would be on Miller. His contribution to the most recent issue of Black Clock, “A History of the Cinema 1920-2014,” is the sort of writing meant to pulverize the LDM competition. Each entry in the alternative timeline packs a sharp, nearly deadpan punch, like a Steven Wright one-liner. They are paraprosdokians that bend the dry rhetoric of most film histories into fantastically absurd contortions. Ronald Reagan stars in The Maltese Falcon; Alejandro Jodorowsky directs the megahit Dune; and John Cassavetes adapts Pynchon. As Miller explains below, in the first part of our two-part interview (part two can be found here), his timeline is “a love letter to timelines and the kinds of stories timelines tell.”

Besides Black Clock, he has written for Bookforum, LA Weekly, Los Angeles CityBeat, and Poets & Writers, and is currently at work on a novel and “a book about encyclopedic novels and secret histories.” The back of issue 15 enigmatically identifies him as its “conceptual progenitor.” In all of his Black Clock work, Miller uses short, mostly nonfictional essays to tell stories as strange and expansive as any novel. His pieces are punch-drunk valentines, heart-shaped capsules dedicated to preserving and celebrating obscure, beloved cultural flotsam and jetsam, both high and low. Safire’s Political Dictionary; David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing; Chris Farley’s Oscar-winning turn as Fatty Arbuckle (Black Clock issues 9, 12, and 15 respectively). What do these things all have in common? There’s an obvious through-line connecting everything Miller has written. But those connections aren’t really identifiable; they’re more intuitive or synaptic, like a game of black magic or Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of pornography. You can’t necessarily define it, but you just know an Anthony Miller subject – whether it’s an encyclopedia of political history, postmodern sports analysis, or an impossible pop-cultural moment – when you see it. You will see it when he reads tonight at Busby’s East.

As much as it’s a love letter to movies, the piece also feels like a send-up of the way people have written about movies, especially with its stern, wrought title, “A History of the Cinema: 1920-2014.” Why start at 1920, with Caligari, and end at 2014, with Nicole Holofcener’s post-feminist remake of The Maltese Falcon?

I appreciate that you read it as a love letter to cinema. It’s also a love letter to timelines and the kinds of stories timelines tell, whether it’s in the appendix of a book or on a museum wall. As for the title, it was the only thing I could have called it. The dates were simply where I began and ended in this particular version. Among the many film books on my shelf is A Concise History of the Cinema, Volume 1, edited by Peter Cowie (The Tantivy Press, 1971), which I consulted a few times during the writing of my chronology.

I considered creating not just an alternate timeline of the movies but an alternate timeline of science, one in which film stocks and cinema projection were invented in 1850. The resulting Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan films of the Civil War were so gruesome that they forever altered our consciousness about war and violence. Then I realized that was absurdly Pollyannaish and the whole concept of an entirely other universe was too complex and multifaceted for a mere timeline. Maybe I’ll do it in a novel—and throw in some vampires. That’s the ticket to writing a bestseller these days, isn’t it?

Finally, not that I was thinking about this at the time, but Caligari is an expressionist movie about a mad somnambulist. What better way to usher us into a kind of cinematic dreamworld?

I feel like one of the pleasures of reading your piece is how it speculates on the idea of this secret, disappearing history becoming the dominant one–if Louise Brooks had become the biggest star of the thirties, if Uncle Boonmee became a Disneyland ride, etc. (It also feels in a way like this great, big inside joke.) How and why did you choose each of these events?

The real challenge was just how many directions I could have gone, just how many tentacles this beast had. I wanted to be authoritative, but eventually realized that would be a trap. My choices were definitely not random but they were, ultimately, utterly subjective. That’s the beauty of speculative histories: Everybody’s world would look completely different. Steve [Erickson, Black Clock Editor-in-Chief] really wanted me to make Idris Elba the star of Tarantino’s James Bond movie, and I refused. No disrespect to Stringer Bell—The Wire is one of the great TV shows—but even though he might have been 007 in Steve’s crypto-cinematic consciousness, this was my timeline and I didn’t envision it that way.

If the timeline can be read, as you say, as a “great, big inside joke,” it’s one that’s made up of little jokes, or at least knowing nods in certain directions. In my universe, it’s Manny Farber, not Pauline Kael, who picks up the first National Book Award for film criticism. (Kael becomes an actress in Altman’s Nashville and other seminal films of the 1970s.) Books such as The Dolly Dolly Spy, A Confederacy of Dunces, and Flicker have their moment on the big screen. I found places for obscure filmmakers like Joycelin Shrager, whom I borrowed from an entrancing Thomas M. Disch short story I read in a collection called Hollywood Unreel.

Steve wanted the timeline to serve as the introduction, the portal, the wormhole to this issue. It’s like Zack Snyder’s alternative-history credit sequence for Watchmen (unquestionably the best thing about that misbegotten film) where we see moments in twentieth-century history transformed by the presence of superheroes. The Louise Brooks entry was one of my first. Her decision to play the lead alongside James Cagney in The Public Enemy was one of the scenarios described to potential Black Clock 15 contributors to give them a sense of the issue we were imagining. It seemed like an easy way to alter an entire decade with one actress.

The Uncle Boonmee entry—one of the very last entries to find its way into the timeline—originated because I figured Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul shares a certain fanciful sensibility with Walt Disney. There’s a jungle setting, a talking catfish, a princess, and a monkey ghost—think of it as “The Wonderful World of Weerasethakul.” Wouldn’t you be far more curious to climb aboard an Uncle Boonmee ride than a Transformers ride?

All the entries feel like pieces in a giant, intricate puzzle; each date contingent on the next. What was the process of getting those pieces to fit together?

It demanded a basic curatorial sensibility that is demanded of all writers: not too many films from any one genre, not too many films from any particular decade. I edited for rhythm, sequencing short and long listings. With only a few exceptions, each director was assigned a single film. You wanted a more profound answer than that, didn’t you? Really, it was a practical problem—a jigsaw puzzle, like you said.

Initially, the timeline was MUCH longer. (I would like to find a home for the more extended timeline, one that would cast out beyond the cinema.) I tested a number of entries out on my very patient friends; the ones that got the best reactions, I kept. One reader later described the timeline as “fantasy football for film nerds.” It was great fun to contemplate how an invented film or a recasting of an existing one could alter the course of cinema, whether it was a minor shift or a seismic realignment. After a conversation with Bruce [Bauman, Black Clock Senior Editor] about recasting The Wizard of Oz, we decided it would be funny if Bill “Bojangles” Robinson played the Scarecrow to Shirley Temple’s Dorothy. In 1980, this would then convince Michael Jackson, who felt he hadn’t done enough in The Wiz to eradicate Robinson’s minstrelsy, to accept a role as a gay man in A Chorus Line. (His potential participation in A Chorus Line is mentioned in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s phenomenal essay “Michael” in Pulphead.) I also deliberately preserved a few real films within my timeline.

At first, I created entries as they came to me, with little regard for chronology. I had a number of different tracks running at once: The Movies That Might Have Been, The Sequels That Never Were, Movies From Novels and Movies, Movies About Richard Francis Burton (who makes an appearance in my essay in Black Clock 4). I worked in some entries based on some of the other stories in the issue including (with the author’s extremely kind permission) Geoff Nicholson’s truly brilliant inspiration of casting Buster Keaton to star in Andy Warhol’s Read. I had an inkling of what Mark Z. Danielewski was doing with “Clip 4” and incorporated and embellished details about the mysterious filmmaker Darc as I saw fit. On the flipside, a number of the films from my timeline make scattered appearances in “Clip 4.”

Which of these movies would you have most liked to have seen actually happen?

So many of them: Sergei Eisenstein’s Unterwelt, Orson Welles’s Heart of Darkness, Maya Deren’s Spellbound, Jean-Luc Godard’s Ubik, John Boorman’s The Third Policeman, Jacques Rivette’s Life A User’s Manual, the Wachowskis’s Invisibles trilogy, Terrence Malick’s Zoolander prequel Hansel. I shouldn’t forget Shaft in Space or any of the Matt Helm movies with Elvis Presley.

Of the ones that actually had the tiniest foothold in our reality, I have to go with Jodorowsky’s Dune. For one thing, you wouldn’t have to get high to enjoy it. I say this as an enormous David Lynch fan who back in 1984 saw a midnight preview of Dune where we received a double-sided glossary of “Dune Terminology.” (I still have it.) Lynch would have given us Ronnie Rocket instead. I think Jodorowsky would have made the ultimate psychedelic epic. His Dune would have been a work of genius or a crime against cinema. Either way, it would have been unforgettable.

By Sam Freilich
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Not Your Momma’s Demon Theater

I am often frightened in New York City. It might not appear so, but honestly, I’ve turned into a half-hearted hypochondriac who subsists on a white-collar diet of cute acronyms and frequent pings from beyond my cube walls. I am agitated when I excessively sweat or am sweated on, crushed when I think of the distance between myself and my parents’ bounty (read: their palm-treeed homestead and plentiful foodstuffs), and feel put-upon when the smell of fresh piss reaches my nostrils before 9 a.m.

Phantasmagoria, a New York-based, literary event series and the brainchild of one Leland Pitts-Gonzalez, is not reminiscent of the New York that, after more than two years of living here, still unsettles my bones – rather, it is the kind of assaulting experience that presses against my whole body, and upon quiet desistance, makes me want to say, “What the fuck just happened?”

“I like doing readings, but I often feel like they’re simply another vehicle to advertise the written text. I’d like to help elevate ‘the reading’ to a more engaging art-form,” says Pitts-Gonzalez, who read a selection from his novel, The Blood Poetry, and collaborated with others, including dancer and choreographer Belinda He, to create a two-part, theatrical piece involving a medical diagnostic and several psychosis induced “visions” contorting between the chairs of a tightly-packed audience.

Held on August 8th at KGB Bar, a literary watering hole and the type of place you’d expect to witness a bloodletting, Phantasmagoria began with the curtains drawn, a single desk light, and a microphone that may or may not have actually worked.

Nick Dillenburg, the event’s unofficial, official MC had me cringing for my Californian brethren, Natalie Mitchell delivered one meeeean, Margaret Hamilton-esque cackle, and Seth Michael May proved that he is anything but spotlight-adverse, enduring acupuncture needles straight to the dome for over thirty minutes. This is the same man who, while donning a hospital gown over his trousers, allowed me to share a neighboring booth, citing that he “has no friends,” before the reading. Thank you, again.

Rachel Sherman delivered a demure rendition of her novel in progress, Your House Without You In It, and was followed by a putrid, cacophonic selection from Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps.

So what can we expect from the players of subsequent installments of Phantasmagoria? “I always feel that what is normally considered literary or “serious” fiction has to follow certain conventions: generally tasteful, socially-conscious, and reality-based,” says Pitts-Gonzalez. “However, I want to support a variety of literary styles. Personally, I’m drawn to artists who can shock me into new a form of understanding whether it’s a type of character, voice, or an idea.”

Phantasmagoria: Language & Technology of Suffering, a newfangled series of happenings that integrates dark fiction, digital art and film, and performance, is next available for your most demented viewing and listening pleasure at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn on August 29.

By Ashley Tomeck
Ashley Tomeck is a working-class girl making her dreams come true in the ‘Big City’ — partly by throwing her tiny hat into the air at every possible moment

Literary Death Match: Bringing Bookish Cool to a City Near You

Todd Zuniga on stage with volunteers. Spot the Black Clock 15 contributor! (photo by Jason Gutierrez, courtesy of Literary Death Match)

On Tuesday, June 5, 2012, I felt cool.

I was in the company of some amazing writers at Busby’s East: Trinie Dalton, Dylan Hicks, Moshe Kasher, and Black Clock‘s own Anne-Marie Kinney.

But that’s not really why I felt cool.

I’ve always been aware and embraced the fact that I’ve never been, and probably will never be, what some would label as “mainstream cool” in Los Angeles.

As a child growing up in L.A., I wasn’t athletic or popular. I started wearing glasses in 2nd grade, and I prided myself on borrowing the maximum number of books possible from my local public library. As an undergrad not much changed: I didn’t like drinking games and felt out of place at Hollywood clubs. Even now, as an MFA student, the Writing department is in an area set apart from the main building. Event bartenders comment that writers are tame in comparison with the rowdier art students.

As I’ve begun to integrate myself into the writing community, I’ve noticed that there’s an expectation of how readings are commonly run. Literary aficionados will gather together to listen to writers read from their work. The event takes place in a lecture hall, museum, bookstore–or even a bar. The writers read, the guests listen, there’s applause, sometimes libations, maybe some book signage, followed by departure.

But then, Literary Death Match (LDM) happened.

A NERF gun, people talking about panties, guests clearly drunk, a judge mentions LSD, and ohmydeargod is that Michael C. Hall from Dexter?

It seemed that, in the midst of my first year of grad school, where I rarely spent evenings doing much other than homework, I’d somehow stumbled into the cool club, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.

According to their website, “Literary Death Match, co-created by Todd Zuniga, marries the literary and performative aspects of Def Poetry Jam, rapier-witted quips of American Idol‘s judging (without any meanness), and the ridiculousness and hilarity of Double Dare.”

A standard LDM evening: four writers, each representing a literary publication or organization, read for seven minutes in front of an audience, as well as three judges of varying fame and funniness. Each round consists of two writers reading their work, and the winner of each round gets to go on to the final where the champ of the evening is decided by a battle of wits, know-how, brute strength–basically, a feat that would very loosely fall under the title of “literary.” I’m unsure if it’s protocol for fame-inclined members of society, like perhaps Michael C. Hall, to wander through LDM of their own accord. I’ll get back to you on that one.

The event’s name points to the hybrid entertainmentbeast attendees are about to experience. “Literary” and “Death Match” aren’t words many would immediately think to mash up.

I love that Zuniga helps create an event in which writers, literature fans, and non-literature fans alike are reminded of a seemingly obvious but oft-forgotten fact: words can be fun, yo. And he does this while wearing a tie and shooting NERF darts at four talented writers, ranging from the up-and-coming to the well-established.

Literature can be beautiful and inspiring, but it can also be absurd and pointless and just pure unadulterated fun. The writers who participated in this round of LDM enjoyed being able to entertain, interact with the audience, and be silly as well.

When Kinney–runner-up to LDM’s champion of the evening, Kasher–was asked what the match meant to her literary career, she responded with the apropos, “You know…nothing.” When Kasher was asked the same question, he commented, “I started writing to crush other writers.” On the sidelines, Michael C. Hall gently threw back his head in laughter, and I marveled at his strong jawline while munching on curly fries.

The three guest comedian judges were having just as much fun as the writers and audience members. Eliza Skinner, who was judging on Literary Merit, responded many times with a succinct and at times perplexed, “Good. Good job.” Eliza Coupe, judge of Performance, had a thing for the writers’ hands. Justin Ian Daniels, judging on Intangibles, let it be known outright that he had “no business being here,” as he sipped from his glass of red wine.

That was the great thing: it was okay. It was all okay. The judges didn’t know exactly how they should judge, and the writers didn’t seem to care how they were being judged.

But it was still so absurdly fun!

Whether guests want to focus on symbolism or tone in the readings or just drink themselves into a stupor and marvel at the fact that Michael C. Hall isn’t as tall as he seems when he’s hacking at bad guys on Dexter–well, both options are available.

For a moment, I caught a glimpse into another world: a world in which I could invite my non-writing friends to a literary event and not have them quickly decline. A world where guys who look like they auditioned to be on Jersey Shore could rub elbows with guys who decline invitations to go out so they can write. A world in which celebrities actually choose to hang out with writers instead of going to Chateau Marmont.

So, Michael C. Hall, call me. We can carpool to the next Literary Death Match in my VW Golf. I’ll pick you up, and I promise you won’t have to help pay for gas.

By Bel Poblador
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts. She is a Los Angeles native, a lover of San Francisco, and an advocate of all things dog-related

LAist on Black Clock 15 Reading at Mandrake (with photos!)

If you couldn’t make it to Sunday’s reading, find out what you missed at LAist.

Photos above courtesy of Katie Manderfield and LAist.

Black Clock 15 OST

Black Clock contributor Howard Hampton (issues 4 and 15) has compiled a soundtrack for the sweeping epic (during which no one will be seated!) that is our latest issue. Fire up your Maxwellian demon or tune into your imagination and viddy what scenes may come.

Black Clock 15
The soundtrack album that never was!

Compiled by Howard Hampton*

1. “Waiting for My Man,” The Yardbirds [from the film Kaleidoscope]

2. “Hankuri,” Mad Man Jaga [from the film A Clockwork Orange]

3. “America (She Can’t Say No),” Throwing Muses [from the film The Crying of Lot 49]

4. “Indifference,” Robert Plant [from the film The Monkey Wrench Gang]

5. “The Shadow World,” Sun Ra [from the film Elvis vs. Cthulhu]

6. “Stranger in My Home Town,” Elvis Presley [from the film Elvis vs. Cthulhu]

7. “Katrina,” James Blood Ulmer [from the film Katrina, Academy Award winner Best Picture, Song, and Director, Charles Burnett, 2009]

8. “Mother,” Lou Reed [from the film Baz Luhrmann’s Intolerance]

9. “Who Killed Marilyn?” The Misfits [from the film Hollywood Babylon]

10. “Stagger Lee,” Joan Baez [from the film Shaft in Space]

11. “Darktown Strutter’s Ball” / ”I’ve Got a Feeling,” Maria McKee [from the film A Confederacy of Dunces]

12. “A Cottage for Sale,” James Brown [from the film The Honeymoon Killers]

13. “War with My Soul,” Raven [from the film Ronnie Rocket]

14. “A Minute and Two Seconds,” John Cage [from the film Uncanny X-Men]

15. “See No Evil,” Wild Flag [from the film Angel Archer]

16. “Dead Flowers,” Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance [from the film Maximum Dogbreath]

17. “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad,” The Carolina Chocolate Drops [from the film The Life of the Party]

18. “Pale Blue Eyes,” Laurie Anderson with Lou Reed [from the film The Lovely Bones]

19. “Tea for Two,” The Comedian Harmonists [from the film Kill Bill vol. 1]

20. “Face Place,” The Slits [from the film Who Killed Bambi]

21. “Let’s Submerge,” X-Ray Spex [from the film The Invisibles: Entropy in the UK]

22. “Year One,” X [from the film Footloose]

23. “I’m a Robot,” Miles Davis [from the film Tron]

*Almost all songs are from concert bootlegs or out-of-print albums that can be found on the internet by anyone with a modicum of ingenuity, a search engine, and a bit-torrent client.

Claire Phillips on Channeling Valerie Solanas

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

Book Soup: “Bookseller to The Great and Infamous”

There are some places in the world whose lore and history spark our imaginations and minds before we ever have a chance to see and experience them for ourselves. Yes, there is the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum. But for those of us who love the written word, there are also bookstores that glow with a magical lure rivaling that of the Statue of Liberty or the Great Wall of China.

Editorial assistants Eleni Demetriou and Chris Black unequivocally agree that L.A.’s Book Soup is one of these literary meccas. For Eleni, it was an online find better than the ideal Match.com profile; for Chris, the homing beacon to his road trip from New York City. Their separate accounts on their first encounters with Book Soup read almost like love letters; fortunately for all of us, it’s a love that’s meant to be shared.

-Kyoung Kim

A Book Soup in West Hollywood

There isn’t much that you can do from approximately seven thousand miles away from West Hollywood – except maybe close your eyes and pretend that you’re there.

My fingers danced over the keyboard as I tangoed my way through the different bookstore websites, each one promising a neighbourhood bookshop that “fulfills your inner bookworm.” I’ll admit to rolling my eyes each time I read those words but mostly I just frowned at the amount of independent bookshops that had closed down due to the inability to compete with mega-monsters such as Barnes & Noble. Although I don’t usually discriminate against big chains, something clicked inside of me, and my loyalty was going to lie with a small independent bookshop.

Whichever one that might be.

And that’s when I clicked on Book Soup and its homepage stared at me from my laptop screen.

When certain things are meant to be, you can feel it. When you see something or enter a place, you can tell from the way that your heart will miss a beat or your mouth will twitch, that you are exactly where you’re supposed to be. That’s kind of how I felt and that’s when I knew I had found my bookshop.

Boasting existence since 1975, it’s still one of the leading independent (and last surviving) bookshops, its location being at the heart of (and I quote) “the infamous Sunset Strip.” As soon as I read the website’s About Me section, my mind began the scenario creation that it is known for. Truth be told, Book Soup was already high on badass points on my list. Especially as they stock “controversial non-fiction” books too – oh la la!

I took a minute and opened my iTunes – independent bookshops call for indie playlists – and click on Bon Iver to provide me with a soundtrack as I continue my virtual tour of Book Soup. Maybe if I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, the back of my eyelids would be my best friend and show me a Book Soup trailer. Maybe if I held my breath instead, I’d feel the different spines underneath my fingertips and smell the books, especially the ones that have yellow pages (and maybe Tom Waits suits Book Soup better anyway).

With floor to ceiling bookcases, signed titles and rare gems, I could feel myself getting giddy – my inner geek was already anticipating our first visit. Nodding to myself, I took a look at their promise of high profile author events. It was a rather impressive lineup and that was only for the next 10 days – and I kind of wished I’d be there for the Marc Wanamaker presentation – so I could only imagine what their monthly calendar looked like. I made a mental note to get to events early as reviews portrayed parking as a nightmare. To be honest, this was West Hollywood and even if I were to take everything that I heard with a pinch of salt, I’d still think of L.A. as a city where everyone drives everywhere.

Kind of like my hometown – sans the Hollywood celebrities.

I pursed my lips as I realised that I may seem a bit star-struck (have you seen Book Soup’s photographs that show off their celebrity clientele?) but there really are so many other books that people read that don’t have Hollywood celebrities as their author. To prove my point, I just used their search engine and stumbled upon a myriad of writers such as Seth Greenland, Mark Z. Danielewski, and Matthew Specktor (to name a few).

I switched between tabs on my internet browser, reading reviews about Book Soup and going on Google maps to find the nearest Starbucks (a mere 300 feet away) and I quickly realised that this was one of the best bookshops I’d never been to. It really did look like a friendly neighbourhood bookshop – just like the ones I had scoffed at minutes before – that looked like a safe haven in the middle of a very busy street. I guess Thomas Jefferson got it right when he said “I cannot live without books,” and this quote can be found on Book Soup’s blog.

Yes, Book Soup really was the best bookshop that I never had the privilege of visiting but it was something I’d look to rectify as soon as I touched down at Los Angeles International.

And I did. The smell, the floor to ceiling bookshelves, the great staff, and its amazing location makes Book Soup one of my favourite independent bookstores in Los Angeles.

It’s sometimes the smallest things in life that makes everything worthwhile, and knowing that I have a small escape in the middle of the hustle and bustle of the city makes me one happy girl. Book Soup, I’m yours.

Take it away Mr. Waits.

By Eleni Demetriou
an Editorial Assistant for Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts

Recipes in Hollywood Longevity

Book Soup has existed here on the Sunset Strip since 1975. It claims to be one of the few independent bookstores left in the L.A. area and has out-survived, among many things, a large Tower Records that once sat across the street and an entire chain of Borders Bookstores. On this, my first visit to Book Soup, I discover the charm that has kept customers swinging through the front door for 36 years.

Perhaps part of Book Soup’s longevity is due to its place among Hollywood institutions. Hollywood and the Sunset Strip figure prominently in my vision of L.A. as I leave New York, and start through the Rocky Mountain gateway town of Denver and into Phoenix. I drive west along Interstate 10, a straight shot through 115 degree heat, envisioning the longest straightaway in American interstate culture since the Okies caravanning along Route 66, until I wind through downtown on the 110 and exit the 101 at Vermont to end up in Hollywood for a new life in the driven metropolis of L.A.

My path takes me west down Sunset Boulevard, past the vintage aesthetics of Amoeba Music and the Cinerama Dome. The Laugh Factory. The Chateau Marmont – RIP John Belushi – until the Chateau fades away into the theme park appearance of Saddle Ranch. The Comedy Store. Mel’s Drive-In. Book Soup. The Viper Room – images of River Phoenix laying on the curb out front.

I take a cartoonish pan back to the crimped red letters spelling Book Soup, the place I’d been searching for since my final visit to the Strand Bookstore, which in turn claims to be the largest independent bookstore in the world, on Broadway in New York. But the shop on Sunset has a quaint front window, in which I initially see a display of cookbooks, all of which try to tell me a little more about Hollywood. In the window are On Booze, a collection of pieces by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2000’s Kitchen Confidential by Mr. Anthony Bourdain, the hippest of all traveling chefs, and something called The Hungover Cookbook.

I finally enter. Judging by the name, I had imagined Book Soup to be just as big, just as confusing, and just as unwieldy as the Strand. And in some ways Book Soup does live up to its name. There are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves housing a hodgepodge of seemingly unorganized–at least at first glance–stacks of huge art books for a “really big coffee table,” travel books, “controversial” non-fiction, literary fiction, and the usual paper products such as cards and journals. There are no true paperback novels in Book Soup, and their bestseller list has very little in common with that of the New York Times. The closest thing I saw to a mainstream piece of fiction was George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. A piece of paper taped to the shelf reads, “It’s not TV, it’s Book Soup.”

But after circling the aisles a few times, I begin to see the organization, highlighted with a tremendous amount of handwritten notes – “HEY! Look at all this stuff!” – pointing in recommended directions. Sandwiched between sections on WWII and sports, a staff recommendation reads, “Check out this section for all you need to know about Marijuana.”

After such a long journey, it would be a crime to enter such a place and leave empty-handed, so I decide on a recent Chris Andrews translation of Roberto Bolaño titled The Skating Rink and a book by a French author named Boris Vian. This second translation, titled To Hell with the Ugly, is in the travel section, ironically filed under City of Angels. When I finally reach the register and hand the books to the blonde woman behind the counter, she seems genuinely impressed with my selections and actually talks to me about them. This certainly never happened at the Strand, and I realize there still exists a bookstore where the staff is not only as in love with books as their customers are, but actually pride themselves on being helpful – how wonderful to see an example of why Borders got too big for its britches.

As if I weren’t already smitten by her conversation, according to this elegant bookseller I had found a diamond in the rough. Although there are further stacks of the Vian book on a front table, as if the store is pushing it, I think, so what if they are? It’s just another reason the store is special. The woman points to the back offices and tells me that another Book Soup employee, Tosh Berman, the book buyer/ publisher of TamTam books, has an exclusive to sell this French, Hollywood, Noir book. And again I get the feeling that I am experiencing something unique. The woman asks me if I have a Bolaño recommendation, and when I tell her I think Amulet is a good place to start, she actually seems to take me seriously. I get the impression she will tell her next customer what I have said. And how cool is that? Very cool.

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

Look for Black Clock Contributors at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

Black Clock contributors past and present will be speaking on panels ranging from “Fiction: California Dreamin’” to “Narrative in a Digital Age” at this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. See the official Program Guide for details.

Aimee Bender (Issues 1, 7, 13)
Samantha Dunn (Issues 2, 4 12)
Ben Ehrenreich (Issues 3, 9)
Steve Erickson (Editor-in-Chief)
Janet Fitch (Issues 7, 13)
Tod Goldberg (Issue 12)
Seth Greenland (Issues 7, 9, 14)
Denise Hamilton (Issue 10)
Tara Ison (Issues 7, 14)
Carolyn Kellogg (Issue 12)
Anne-Marie Kinney (Production Editor; Issue 12)
Orli Low (Managing Editor)
Tom Lutz (Issue 11)
Brighde Mullins (Issue 6)
Richard Rayner (Issue 12)
Rachel Resnick (Issues 3, 5 ,7)
Nina Revoyr (Issues 12, 13)
Rob Roberge (Issue 11)
Matthew Specktor (Issue 15)
Dana Spiotta (Issue 10)
Susan Straight (Issues 5, 8, 11, 13)
Kenneth Turan (Issue 4)
David L. Ulin (Editor-at-Large; Issues 2, 4, 9, 12)
Oscar Villalon (Issue 12)
Diana Wagman (Issues 10, 13)
Margaret Wappler (Issue 7)
Matthew Zapruder (Issue 12)