Featuring political allegory, subversive satire and secret presidential histories by Jonathan Lethem, Lynne Tillman, Brian Evenson, Jeff VanderMeer, Ben Ehrenreich, Stanley Crawford, Seth Greenland and Janet Sarbanes, among others, including Rick Moody’s log of the Republican primary race earlier this year, an email debate between Michael Ventura and Black Clock editor Steve Erickson on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and a mysterious, unsigned missive written at the end of the world by Marilyn Monroe’s former bodyguard.

For more information about purchasing a copy, visit the Black Clock website.

]]> http://www.blackclock.org/blog/2008/08/14/black-clock-9-now-available/feed/ http://www.blackclock.org/blog/2008/07/22/interview-rick-moody-07042008/ http://www.blackclock.org/blog/2008/07/22/interview-rick-moody-07042008/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:00:51 +0000 am-kinney http://www.blackclock.org/blog/?p=43

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.

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”?

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…

Anne-Marie Kinney is a writer and recent graduate of the MFA Writing program at the California Institute of the Arts.  She lives and works in the San Fernando valley, and has just completed her first novel.

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 can’t 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.

Laura Vena is 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.

Proceeds from the fair will help fund CLMP and its ongoing initiatives in support of independent literary publishers.

Black Clock is published semi-annually by the CalArts MFA Writing Program.

In addition to helping fund CLMP and its ongoing initiatives in support of independent literary publishers, proceeds from the event will be donated to Housing Works, a nonprofit organization offering assistance to homeless individuals living with HIV / AIDS.

Additional information about the 9th Annual Literary Magazine Fair is available at: http://www.livefromhome.org/events/.

Celebrate Los Angeles Literature with Black Clock and Los Angeles magazines

In conjunction with BookExpo America
Friday, May 30th 2008
7 PM - 10PM
The William Turner Gallery
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

• Open bar sponsored by Krol Vodka, Malibu Family Wines and Fiji Water
• Hors d’oeurves
• Music
• Sneak preview of Greg Miller’s show “Unforeseen Frontier”

Please RSVP to events@blackclock.org by Thursday, May 29th.

(For directions to Bergamot station, please follow the “Read More” link below.)

Singular, idiosyncratic, and a little mysterious, Black Clock has become one of America’s foremost literary journals since its inception in 2004.

Los Angeles magazine is the leading authority and indispensable guide to Southern California.

William Turner Gallery has represented mid-career and emerging artists since its inception in 1991. William Turner Gallery began on the historical “Market Street” in Venice, California. The gallery now occupies an impressive 5000 sq. foot space at the Bergamot Station arts Center in Santa Monca, California.

Bergamot Station is Southern California’s largest art gallery complex and cultural center, located on eight acres in the heart of Santa Monica featuring contemporary art galleries, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, Architecture and design firms, a cafe and shops.

BookExpo America (BEA) is the book publishing industry’s premier trade show. BEA 2007 saw over 37,000 registered attendees representing over 80 international countries. Media attendance was approximately 1,000 and included all major national news outlets.

DIRECTIONS
Bergamot Station
2525 Michigan Ave.
Santa Monica, CA 90404

• Ample & free parking
• No admission charge
• Wheelchair accessible

The Bergamot Station Arts Center is accessible by the City of Santa Monica’s Big Blue Bus, routes 11 or 7.

Directions from LA Airport
Follow signs from airport to 405 Freeway North. Take the 405 North to the 10 Freeway West. Take the 10 Freeway West to the Cloverfield/26th Street exit. When getting off at this exit, make a right onto Cloverfield Boulevard Then make a right turn at the first light which is Michigan Avenue. Take Michigan Avenue till the road ends (about a quarter mile). At the end of the road there’s a black fence on your left marked Bergamot Station. Enter and park.

Directions from the 10 Freeway West
Take the 10 Freeway West to the Cloverfield/26th Street exit. When getting off at this exit, make a right onto Cloverfield Boulevard. Then make a right turn at the first light which is Michigan Avenue. Take Michigan Avenue till the road ends (about a quarter mile). At the end of the road there’s a black fence on your left marked Bergamot Station. Enter and park.

Directions from Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood areas
Take Olympic Boulevard west to Cloverfield Boulevard Make a left on Cloverfield Boulevard. Take a left on Michigan Avenue (the first traffic light after making the left on Cloverfield). Take Michigan Avenue till the road ends (about a quarter mile). At the end of the road there’s a black fence on your left marked Bergamot Station. Enter and park.

Directions from Santa Monica and Venice beach areas
Take Pico Boulevard to Cloverfield Boulevard and make a left. Take Cloverfield a mile or so (you’ll go over the 10 Freeway). Immediately after the 10 Freeway make a right on Michigan Avenue. Take Michigan Avenue till the road ends (about a quarter mile). At the end of the road there’s a black fence on your left marked Bergamot Station. Enter and park.

For for information about the funding opportunities and programs sponsored by the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs, see: http://www.culturela.org/grants/grantsorg.html.

• take $15 off a 2-year subscription (list price: $35 USD)

OR

• give a friend a free 1-year subscription (value: $20 USD) with the purchase of one 2-year subscription at list price.

To act on this offer, please visit Black Clock at Fiction On Demand and enter the coupon code bcfreeyr when completing your order. If you choose the second option, please also enter your recipient’s name in the “Notes” field when completing your order.

Black Clock and CalArts will be among the exhibitors at the 13th Annual Los Angeles Times Festival Of Books. Drop by booth #661 (Zone F - Dickson Court North) to meet our editorial staff, purchase issues of Black Clock, and learn more about The CalArts MFA Writing Program. Additionally, Black Clock Editor Steve Erickson and Senior Editor Bruce Bauman will be participating in the following Festival panels:

• “Fiction: Grace Under Pressure” (11:30 AM Saturday, April 26 2008; Moore 100)
  Bruce Bauman / Barbara Isenberg (Moderator) / Gina Nahai / Andrew O’Hagan / Arthur Phillips
• “Fiction: Alternative Visions” (1 PM Sunday, April 27 2008; Korn Hall)
  Steve Erickson / Shelley Jackson / Zachary Lazar / Nina Revoyr / David L. Ulin (Moderator)

Please consult the Festival website for further information about admission, parking, schedules, etc.