Blake Butler
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
Demon Brother: 6 Thoughts on Heart in Fiction
I’ve heard / been asked a lot about the concept of ‘heart’ lately, and last night I couldn’t sleep. So here:
1. Writing your heart out to me does not express heart. What expresses heart is the well wrought idea, sentence, conception. I, a reader, care because you care, and how the saying is said shows. If you could not take the time to say something to me in a way I might remember, I will not remember. Misconstruing a subject matter as ‘human’ only goes so far, which is, often, not far at all. I can always go outside.
2. The reader can always go outside. The question is not ‘Why are you telling me this?’ but ‘In what way are you saying this that would make me extricate this now from anything anyone before or after you has ever said?’
But when will David Lynch eat Peaches’s panties?
These two remix videos for Sunday today gave me a nice one, thus:
Miss Piggy singing Peaches ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ (via clusterflock)
David Lynch eats panties
Power Quote: David Markson
I want to wash when I meet a poet.
– Reader’s Block, p. 45
Blake Butler—
Good lord man! New ‘abstract comic’ themed Action Yes; new Harp & Altar (w/ Kate Greenstreet, Joanna Ruocco, Lisa Jarnot, Eileen Myles); new Memorious (w/ Aaron Burch, Thomas Cooper, Xu Xi). We’ve got some reading to do.
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The Grand Gesture & Other Thoughts About Graduation: An HTMLGiant/Rumpus Joint Publication
A guest post cross published with the Rumpus by Eric Hanson (author of A Book of Ages) http://abookofages.com http://abookofages.blogspot.com
When he was 21 Langston Hughes quit Columbia University. He’d been there only a year. He signed on as a member of the crew on a steamship bound for the Canary Islands and Africa. When the boat was off Sandy Hook, Hughes took his college books on deck and threw them into the ocean.
The grand gesture impressed no one at Columbia University. But grand gestures never impress an audience as much as they impress the person making the gesture. We make some of our grandest gestures when we are young and nobody is paying attention to us. Everybody else is too busy working and we don’t know yet what work is. We are like the guy on the first tee who takes five practice swings and waggles his club around and looks repeatedly up the fairway with a serious expression, and then tops it thirty yards into the deep rough. We are novices, and novices are all about gesture and large ideas.
Dickface Compound Sentence Values Question
Which would be more valuable to you: 100 publications of pieces you liked a lot and were pretty proud of in various journals of small to medium-small circulation and of various reknown (from blogs up to occasional print journals that likely have a print run of 300 or 400 or less) or 1 publication of a story you are very happy with to very proud of in a journal of not megaalien level (ie: not the NYer or Paris Review) but of very well regarded and circulated in stores like Barnes and Noble (ie: Tin House or Ploughshares)? Why?
Blake Butler—
For those interested in book object art/design, if you haven’t already explored the archives at A Journey Round My Skull, I hope you have a couple hours…
Blake Butler—
HTMLGiant gets kind props from Dennis Cooper’s Candidates for Best of 2009 Top 10 List: Internet. Many other Giant favorites are all mentioned including Ellen Kennedy, Brian Evenson, Vanessa Place, Dalkey Archive, and my gracious gracious self. Thanks Dennis! Check it out and share your own.
Blake Butler—
Ken showed me this: Electric Literature. Looks amazing. $1000 for contributors, beautiful design, various mediums, etc. Nice’ns. Enjoy the weekend fellas and fellettes.
Blake Butler—
Check out the winner of the Lamination Colony ‘This is not not a Contest’ contest, chosen from over 200 entries, Bobby Alter from Portland OR. Bonus author interview here.