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March 19, 2004

FROM THE FRONT LINES: A BLACK CLOCK REPORT

One of my readers has sent me this account of the recent Black Clock shindig at REDCAT. Since we couldn't attend, we pass it along for your enjoyment.

The Black Clock reading took place at REDCAT at the Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA. REDCAT stands for Roy and Edna Disney Cal Arts Theater. You know you're in academia's cold embrace when it takes three introductions to get a reading underway. Ben Marcus read a simple but stunningly strange piece about bones. Aimee Bender, who seems to be going for realism these days, read a very short story about teenage girls. Geoff Nicholson read a brief excerpt from a forthcoming novel about Hollywood (big sigh). Heidi Julavits read a delightful excerpt of a story featured in Black Clock called "The Eternal Ellen" and Michael Ventura read something Biblical. Ventura stole the show by looking, acting, and dressing like a complete tool. His declaration, "The best writer in the joint isn't reading tonight"--a reference to Black Clock editor Steve Erickson--was shockingly gauche. Ventura, who wore a cowboy hat, seems to be taking the western writer thing a bit too far. Someone needs to take him to see The Royal Tenenbaums so he can understand that it's probably not a good idea to dress like Eli Cash (Owen Wilson's character) in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Although Bender, who embodies LA fiction better than just about anyone, was the right choice to share the podium with Marcus and Julavits, Nicholson, who is British, and Ventura, who might as well have "old hippie" stamped on his forehead (did I mention the hat?), confirmed the virtual nonexistence of a legitimate fiction scene in Los Angeles. Everyone who attended was given a free copy of the first edition of Black Clock. The roster of writers is impressive (Jonathan Lethem, Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, who lives in Pomona) and the design even more so. With the support of Cal Arts (Cal Arts has a MFA program? Who knew?) to ensure its perpetuity, Black Clock vaults into the upper echelon of literary magazines. And for you writers hyperventilating at the prospect of a new journal to break into, take a deep breath. Black Clock isn't taking submissions and has all the earmarks of a closed shop.

As it happens, the LA Weekly runs their take on Black Clock, and adds the news that it appears future issues will draw from the Cal Arts student population.

Black Clock’s reliance on literary “stars” will change over time, Erickson says. Starting around the third or fourth issue — make-or-break time for such ventures — he plans to include students from CalArts’ MFA writing program, which over the last 10 years has gotten its act together enough to be seriously competitive with those at Irvine or Stanford. “I would like to think that this magazine will reflect a bit of a West Coast sensibility, and if you ask me the logical next question of what that is, I’m not sure I know at all,” says Erickson. “But I kind of know when I see it.”

Whether Black Clock opens to contributors beyond the Cal Arts pool remains to be seen. Elsewhere, it appears the Weekly heard my cry of outrage because this issue actually has a whole two book-related pieces, the other being a Vollman review. Boring and safe, perhaps, but you gotta start somewhere.

Posted at 12:28 AM |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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