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Frank 18, The Explosion of the Literary Journal
by Lucas Klein
Jan 14, 2002
The explosion of our world is, by now, more than a mere metaphor. The great writers have been warning us for some time, too. Blaise Cendrars, the consummate modernist, wrote "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian" as a sprawling, spiraling text/abstract-painting accompaniment with lines like this, both specific and emblematic: "An overheated madness bellows in the locomotive / Plague and cholera rise like burning embers around us / We disappear right into a tunnel of war" (trans. from the French by Ron Padgett).
So how do the arts survive in this tunnel of war? For most of the 20th century, art has been as much arrangement as creation. The Modernist collage, whether in visual art or literature, began the trend now followed by the pastiche of hip-hop and rave DJs literally putting their spin on old beats. The artist is an archivist, or more aptly, an editor, presenting a range of texts in one body of work (I almost wrote unified body of work, but who can have any real faith in unification today?).
And when the artist is an editor, the editor is an artist. The extent to which he lets himself be known is a matter of style and, moreover, necessity. David Applefield, editor of Frank An International Journal of Contemporary Writing & Art, recently in its 18th edition, is not afraid to show his hand.
The opening piece of Frank 18 is unprecedented in the world of literary journals, a genre whose more creative edges are known to revel in the new: a literary conference call, between two authors you probably don't know but should, and Applefield himself. If a book teaches you how to read, this reinvigorated interview prepares you for the method of Frank's madness: when Duff Brenna and Thomas E. Kennedy's conversation turns to craft and consideration of Samuel Beckett's work, Applefield both surprises and fulfills hopes: he calls Beckett's former publisher and asks him how Beckett thought.
Throughout the discussion, Applefield knows when to let these authors talk and when to make them listen, either to his own questions or to an unexpected outside voice. His mixture of restraint and control extend beyond steering conversation, providing his magazine with a successful tension: after Brenna and Kennedy have been in actual dialogue, Applefield lets them confer metaphorically by placing excerpts of their forthcoming novels back to back. This section, boldly titled "Fiction & America," is sign-of-the-times publishing, with authors, editors, stories, and readers all in on the call. And the connection is, indicatively, startling and clear.
Frank's use of technology doesn't stop at the conference call, however. Now that it has reached 18, the magazine has its own website, www.ReadFrank.com, a newborn monster of a site that changes every day. A swirl using the current issue as a hub, readers can even print editions on their own computers with "Foldable Frank," a weekly literary update including a global events calendar. For all the surprises in the Frank available in bookstores, Frank online ups the ante and should prove to be a leader in online and print literary journals.
After two years of hiatus, where more than a few readers who knew it to be one of the best journals around were wondering if it had collapsed, Frank is back. Run by Boston native Applegate and a handful of Americans and Canadians, Frank is published in Paris, with offices in the culturally vivacious suburb of Montreuil, a banlieue so French it has a communist local government. The local government has not had an adverse affect on Frank's business skills, however: the magazine is funded in part by "Lawyers for Literature," a tax-deductible service where lawyers annually donate the dollar-equivalent of one billable hour and attend a yearly wine-tasting party in Burgundy.
Frank has long attempted to cover as much of the readers' globe as possible. In this issue, literary wanderlust runs between San Diego and Copenhagen in the aforementioned conference call, to Mali with president Alpha Oumar Konaré, to the cosmos in an interview with Deepak Chopra, and then to each of the four linguistic corners of mountain-filled and snow-covered Switzerland.
Switzerland? My watch comes from Switzerland, but what else? Frank has, from the beginning, been doing its work to fight cultural narrow-mindedness and employ translators in its hundred-page section called "Foreign Dossier." For this issue, guest edited by Kristin T. Schnider, Switzerland gets representation in previously unavailable English versions of poems, stories, and essays originally written in French, Italian, German, or Romansch (by far the hardest of the four for which to find adequate translators).
If the brilliance of two under-appreciated American novelists talking on the phone to each other, or of an avant-garde Polish artist, is a pleasant surprise, take a look at the pieces in the Swiss Dossier section: each piece stranger than the next, we are dragged to a world of ambiguous identity and held there through tormented circus children's soliloquies, mystery murder stories, an old peasant who believes in nothing, or poems with lines such as:
Some houses are not just houses:
emergent wrecks, on reefs
where the wind blows implacable, strong,
and the cry of pain mingles
with the roar of the ocean.
The shark that grazes them,
careless, with its dorsal fin,
does not even notice. But they are there.
(Fabio Pusterla, trans. from the Italian by Simon Knight)
The ambiguous identity extends throughout, where even the essayist must equivocate. Writing about the crises inherent in coming from a linguistically diverse country and one where the German is not understood in Berlin Hugo Loetscher is compelled to ask: "Do we want to complain to African writers, faced with the dilemma of whether, in order to reach a larger public, they should write in English, French or Portuguese?" (trans. from the German by Alan J. Bridgman).
The uncertain standing Swiss writers face is again the result of an explosion, though this time a more ancient one, wherein art is almost necessarily fragmentary, equivalent to an Op-art piece continually moving outward as well as inward. And yet the Swiss have managed, and will continue to manage, to live with their eclecticism and use it to their own advantage. A magazine's duty is likewise to make peace with the miscellany, to glue against the chaos implied in Swiss born Cendrars's quotation above. Swiss writing has found a good match with Frank 18, reaching into the clutter to pull out a shining collection. One hopes and I get the feeling this hope is not in vain for an equal match in Foreign Dossier sections in upcoming
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