THE LITERARY CITY
New journals are the latest proof that L.A. is a vital environment for writers
New journals are the latest proof that L.A. is a vital environment for writers
The guy with the hoarse voice is talking on his cell phone at the launch party of Swink magazine: "What? Oh, it's a party for some literary something or other," he yells before listing off all the food being served ("for free!"). "What? Oh, yeah, she's finishing a film, and then I'm gonna go to her place after this." Pause. "Yeah, it's night number five!" Grin. "Actually I slipped it in last night." Big laugh. "No, I used your trick: 'I'd like to introduce you to the Captain!'"
Considering this and other oddly familiar scenes like it, you might think anyone wanting to start up a literary magazine in Los Angeles would desperately need to be reminded of Sisyphus endlessly rolling his rock uphill or Don Quixote pointlessly charging windmills. "As judged by New York, we are not a literary city - we make the world's music and films. We're pointed at for the death of literature," says Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW-FM's Bookworm. "L.A. has always been a literary city: Steve Erickson, Alice Sebold [The Lovely Bones] and her husband Glen David Gold [Carter Beats the Devil], Suzan Lori-Parks [Topdog/Underdog], T.C. Boyle, Carol Muske Dukes, and David St. John have lived here for years. L.A. is now a place where writers actually come to live a literary life. The problem is just that no one's gathered these facts and presented them to Angelenos and said, 'See?'"
Two new journals, Black Clock and Swink, want to change this. Both arrive at a time when West Coast literary magazines have been seeing a lot more East Coast names on their contributors' pages; McSweeney's, ZYZZYVA, Zoetrope, and Tin House, most notably, allow authors to stretch their lit-legs away from the publishing Mecca of New York, where fiction is increasingly bought and marketed in an unsettling parallel to Hollywood blockbusters.
Black Clock, edited by the aforementioned novelist Steve Erickson (Rubicon Beach, Arc D'X) and published by California Institute of the Arts to promote its burgeoning M.F.A. writing program, takes its title from Erickson's 1989 novel, Tours of the Black Clock. Yet, Erickson - a meditative soul with a tousled, mad-scientist shock of gray locks whose own fiction can be as expansive and terrifying as L.A. itself - is quick to point out, "Black Clock is not my magazine." There's no front sheet with Erickson's smiling picture, breezy mission statement, and hand-scrawled signature. Instead, Black Clock has a sort of austere mystery - exhibited in the somewhat annoying policy of not listing page numbers for stories in the table of contents, which may have something to do with Erickson's desire for the first issue to read like "the chapters of a very strange novel."
The maiden issue includes Erickson's mind-blowing chat with visionary African-American sci-fi writer Samuel R. Delany, Rebecca Goldstein's detailing of her love affair with the philosopher William James (94 years dead), Bradford Morrow's domestic noir "Tsunami," and Mary Caponegro's devastating "Toyota Widow." Erickson maintains that each issue will have a theme, but it won't be announced on the cover. "I would like the work to speak for itself, ´´ without emblazoning a concept across it," he says. Black Clock #2, due in October, is (un)titled "Lost Music of the Imagination" and begins with a reprint of Greil Marcus's infamous 1969 "review" from Rolling Stone of a phony supergroup called the Masked Marauders. It also features Michael Ventura on Miles Davis's aborted collaboration with Jimi Hendrix ("before the Devil intervened and took Jimi away") and Rick Moody on the album Frank Zappa almost produced for Bob Dylan.
The bicoastal Swink, which aims to publish both emerging and established writers, has a less academic texture than Black Clock; its bold cover art and large pull-quotes dotted about the text evince a more accessible mass-market appeal. Still, there is much brain food to recommend: Recent It author Lisa Glatt's coming-of-age "Cream" manages to be simultaneously delicate and profane; Deirdre Shaw's "The Summertime Party" is a bittersweet tale of social terror, Hollywood-style; Etgar Keret's "Pride and Joy," which involves mysteriously shrinking Jewish parents, is pure goofy charm.
Swink means "labor" or "toil," and that definition gets to the heart of the problem of starting a literary journal, as well as writing for one. "I would never use the word 'need' and 'literary' in the same breath," says 33-year-old founding editor Leelila Strogov, who recently moved to L.A. from New York and interviews author Adam Haslett in the debut issue. "Nobody 'needs' a new literary magazine. It's a luxury. But so much toil goes into this luxury, and L.A. and New York writers are all toiling and suffering equally."
Jonathan Lethem, who contributes to Black Clock #1 and, along with Michael Chabon and Chris Offutt, contributes comics they drew as children to Swink #2, calls the somewhat sepulchral netherworld of literary journals "a brave, hopeless, beautiful flare in the darkness"; Strogov, formerly a Veep for Juno Online Services, sees it as "an ever-expanding pie." In the last year or so, Otis College of Art & Design launched its New Review of Literature, the University of Southern California relaunched its Three Rivers Review, local publishing house Red Hen Press debuted its Los Angeles Review, and Venice's Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center revived its eponymous magazine.
"It's a good time for them," says L.A. novelist Aimee Bender, who teaches creative writing at USC and contributed the short story "Debbieland" to Black Clock #1. "McSweeney's really kicked everything up a notch, there's lots of zines, and just a new energy around the whole field. I think the shift has been a movement away from schools, and into small groups of people putting together something they care about."
Black Clock is modeled after other academic journals like Bard College's Conjunctions and Emerson College's Ploughshares, and it shares their predilection for blue-chip writers over students from their own programs. (Erickson maintains that, over time, the journal, which has no open call for submissions, will begin to include "one or two outstanding students" from CalArts.) Strogov, who revived the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's lit journal Rune when she was a student there, has the harder task of beating the bushes for emerging talent (meaning: people who are actually "talented") who currently do not have access to the inner sanctums of the publishing establishment.
Despite their different approaches, Black Clock and Swink contain many of the same authors - Strogov calls it "camaraderie rather than competition." (Both plan to host local literary mixers and salons.) "It's kind of comical, in a way. I have other people coming up to me and saying" - hushed, urgent voice - "'Have you seen Black Clock? Is it good? Is it better than yours?'" Strogov laughs. "I'm happy for Black Clock. Especially after dealing with it myself, I have an inordinate amount of respect for people who start up these journals. It's a generous endeavor, finding a way to help other writers get published. There's something gratifying about giving encouragement and seeing a flicker of something special in return."
Published: 07/29/2004
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