Black Clock 19

Black Clock #19

by Steve Erickson (Editor), Ophelia Chong (Design)

Randy Newman once sang, "I'll talk to strangers if I want to, 'cause I'm a stranger too." Pondering whether the madness that drives families, friends and lovers apart is really greater than the madness that holds them together, Black Clock 19 is full of mad strangers: the one in the neighborhood in Susan Straight's "Closing the Gate," the one in the house in Janet Sternburg's "White Matter," the one bringing a message in Joseph McElroy's "Plea."

http://blackclock.org/issues/2014/iss...

210 pages, Paperback

First published September 24, 2014

About the author

Steve Erickson is a distinguished American novelist known for a visionary, dream-fueled style that blends European modernism with American pulp and postmodernism. Raised in Los Angeles, he studied film and political philosophy at UCLA, influences that permeate celebrated works such as Days Between Stations, Tours of the Black Clock, and Zeroville. Critics, including Greil Marcus, have labeled him "the only authentic American surrealist," placing him in the lineage of Pynchon and DeLillo. His most acclaimed novel, Shadowbahn, was hailed as a masterpiece even prior to its release and was later adapted for BBC Radio. A "writer’s writer," Erickson has published ten novels translated into over a dozen languages, consistently appearing on best-of-the-year lists for The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He is the recipient of the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Erickson served for fourteen years as the founding editor of the journal Black Clock and is currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside.

Reviews

[Jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Graphic design is essential to the reading experience. Say what you will, but it's true. How many books have you judged by their cover or put down in frustration because the print was too small, the font just wasn't quite right? Maybe you steeled your eyes and plodded on. But take a moment to imagine if Shakespeare was published in Comic Sans.

This issue of Black Clock (a literary journal edited by the great, the inimitable, Steve Erickson) is shot through with pink. "Drunk tank pink," to be precise: we're told in tiny grey letters at the bottom of page 7 that this colour "has been used to calm violent prisoners in jail." Well, well -- what's to come, here? How violent are these stories going to make us?

Well. Well.

The stories collected here are about madness. There is no introduction explaining this, only an acronym made of drunk-tank pink letters from the authors' names on the back cover. You are plunged, heart-first, into a seething, writhing exploration of what it means to be abnormal -- chemically, physically, emotionally, psychologically. Some accounts are firsthand, some are biographical, some are fiction -- almost all are devastating in effect. This is the kind of book where you'll need to pause after each story, breathe, touch something to be sure you're still real, and only then can you continue.

Quality stories are prevalent: Susan Daitch, Dylan Landis, Jay Neugeboren, Colin Fleming, Brandon Williams and Jeffrey Moskowitz's offerings are notable; only a few (Alan Rifkin, Lynne Tillman, and Joseph McElroy's) don't live up to the rest. But there are also some highs that absolutely blew my damn mind, some pieces of spinning magic:
Janet Sternburg's memoir excerpt, where she traces a family history of mental illness and female submission.
Alex Austin's "Nakamura Reality" -- perhaps the most Erickson-esque of the lot -- where fiction and reality blend in a father's grief.
Joanna Scott's "Principles of Uncertainty", which answers no questions and does beautiful things for the study of narrative voice and unreliability.
Amanda Ruud's exceptionally engaging "Vernix Caseosa", an epistle from mother to no-longer-a-child-star-daughter, chronicling maternal and personal fallibility alongside what we can only imagine Miley Cyrus or Lindsay Lohan's mothers may feel.

I listened to a few things while reading this (TOTEM's Echoes EP; Nite Fields' Depersonalization album), but one was St. Lucia's track 'Dancing on Glass' -- a good one, if significantly more upbeat than the rest -- and this line kept sticking out:
"We all have our secrets / our secrets know
Our violence / mistaken for silence."

Well.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Black Clock #19
Steve Erickson, editor

NEW --
Joseph McElroy story, "Plea"

pdf available for US$3.
http://blackclock.org/issues/2014/iss...