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.
‘The Rough South of Larry Brown’
Thanks to Aaron Manning for sending over this wonderful clip from a feature length documentary on Larry Brown, including commentary on how he got started writing, and his early submission/rejection process: how can you not love this man?
Damn I want the rest of this.
God damn it: ‘The Road’ trailer
I mean, I knew they were going to fuck it, but… really? This hard in the A?
Sigh. Next they’ll be making ‘Suttree’ into a romantic comedy starring Luke Wilson and featuring Verne Troyer as the watermelon.
Eating, Kafka II: Rauan Klassnik interviews CAConrad
Rauan Klassnik recently lived through and posted up an interview with http://rauanklassnik.blogspot.com/2009/05/eating-kafka-etc-interview-with-ca.htmlCAConrad re his wonderful book of poems The Book of Frank. http://BOOKofFRANK.blogspot.com
After all the dust had settled and all the fluids dried (blood, cum, sweat, disgust and hate, etc, etc) they went at it again.
Here, then, is the 2nd interview : Eating, Kafka II
This is the Bio that CAConrad provided:
CAConrad is the recipient of THE GIL OTT BOOK AWARD for The Book of Frank (Chax Press, 2009). He is also the author of Advanced Elvis Course (Soft Skull Press, 2009), (Soma)tic Midge (Faux Press, 2008), Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and a forthcoming collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Books, 2010). CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He invites you to visit him online at http://CAConrad.blogspot.comand also with his friends at http://PhillySound.blogspot.com
How design concept alone can sell a book
New on many levels: Opium 8 (not to mention that the line up inside promises to be just as good as the body).
Uncategorized / 24 Comments
May 11th, 2009 / 12:22 pm
May 11th, 2009 / 12:22 pm
Paragraphs I Admire So Much I Can’t Believe I Get To Type Them Out (4): Lynne Tillman
Some of the acts I’ve committed have been illegal. When I was five, I stole candy inadvertently from the candy store several blocks from my house, on a main road, in the suburb where I grew up, because its sign said, Take One, and later I stole lipstick from the town five and dime, and then shoplifted clothes from department stores, packing a skirt into the voluminous shoulder of a ratty fur coat, and purchased small amounts of cocaine, all relatively mild infractions of the law. Other people, who have scant education, less economic or skin privilege, might have been arrested, convicted, and sent upstate for the same relatively harmless but illegal acts, and other people have records against them that are public, so that anyone can find out what these people have done wrong, and while I have no record of crimes against property or person, nothing that would show up on police blotters or computers, nothing that I am aware of, or that might hurt me, though I am not aware of everything that might hurt me, I have committed illegal acts that have gone undetected, but I know what I have done, and I know what was wrong and illegal. Legally, I am sane.
* from American Genius, pg. 42
** (I could pick literally almost any graph from this book and feel just as happy sharing it. In my top 20 books of all time, I think. Just too fucking good.)
Prurient’s ‘Rose Pillar’
Goddamn, I want this:
After two years in the making, Heartworm Press is proud to present Rose Pillar by Prurient.
The Rose Pillar in traditional Roman culture is used to mark the graveyard or mosualueam, as a signpost of death. Usually they contained carvings of birds and plants signifying rebirth. Taking inspiration from authors like Whitman, Lechev and Rumi, Prurient delivers its first major literary endeavor in Rose Pillar. Prurient combines text, image and sound in this uniquely packaged and presented release by the Heartworm Press.
What separates Dominick Fernow’s Prurient project from the rest of the contemporary underground cannon is its unyielding personal subject matter. From the inception of Prurient the concept has always utilized intimate details, photographs, letters and other ephemera culled from places where most artists would choose to obscure. Prurient draws these details into focus more than ever on Rose Pillar, a 180-page hardbound book of Fernow’s collage work and text supplied by his mother Jean Feraca from her previously published memoir I Hear Voices. Feraca tells the story of the death of Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist who was adopted into a Sioux tribe.
Friday ‘Fuck Books Let’s Dance’ Thang
In case you never caught this’n, one of the earliest virals around, of a dude totally ripping new-brain dance shit in a youngins contest, well, please enjoy (the first two dancers are not the highlight: you will know when the One to See begins):
The strobe moves at the end is enough to make me say Barry Hannah who?
OK not really. But that kid rips. Let’s have a Friday night evening or something.
Odds are I’ll stay home. :)
Literary Cover Songs
Cover songs are fun, when bands you like do them, of bands you also like, or of bands you do not like that then become songs you like by bands you don’t like as interpreted by bands you like.
Here’s Fantomas doing Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’ from their album ‘The Director’s Cut,’ a record which I think was all I listened to for 6 months straight the year it came out, and is still one of the best ‘cover song’ explorations, using source to create something truly new, that I can think of.
It seems like the theory of a ‘cover song’ has been approached in fiction, though in a less on-your-face kind of way, more as a series of influences mostly, though there are certainly subjects that approach the more literal ‘cover song’ idea.
One that springs immediately to mind is Gordon Lish’s ‘For Rupert–With No Promises’ in the February 1977 issue of Esquire, which so successfully parodied J.D. Salinger that many thought it was Salinger himself.
So other than via methods of pure imitation or copying (as part of the great thing about covers is the reinterpretation), what are some other great examples that could reveal a ‘cover song’ in text form, or perhaps thoughts on ways that might not quite yet have been explored? Hra?
Stephen Elliott’s ‘The Adderall Diaries’
Head prognosticator of the ever-lovely Rumpus, one Mr. Stephen Elliott, author of, among other things, the amazing ‘Happy Baby’ that remains in my mind as one of the most brutal and visceral autobiographical novels I’ve read in the last 5 years, is offering folks potentially interested in checking out his new memoir forthcoming from Graywolf:
I have a few advance copies of my forthcoming true-crime/memoir The Adderall Diaries, to give out.
The book will be published in September, but if you send an email to adderall@therumpus.net I might send you an advance copy (I also might not, we’ll have to see how this goes, I’ve only got a couple). Here’s the hitch, if I mail you a book I’ll also email you the address of the next person to send it to. You have a week to read it, then you have to send your copy to the next address. First class postage is $3.04. So this is not totally free.
In your email please include your address and a little bit about yourself. Priority given to people who are verifiably real.
Anybody interested in taking Mr. Elliott’s fine offer up and reviewing the book for us here at the Giant, please contact Stephen and see if you can wrangle a copy, and let me know. :)
Either way, this is one to get excited about.
5 Comments
May 6th, 2009 / 12:58 pm
May 6th, 2009 / 12:58 pm
Books I was assigned during my MFA that I actually still like: Donald Antrim
At Bennington, one of the many excellent books that Amy Hempel put on my list for which I am now thankful was Donald Antrim’s ‘Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World.’ At the time, I’d already read Antrim’s two other novels, the amazing ‘The Hundred Brothers’ (literally about one hundred brothers at a reunion) and ‘The Verificationist’ (an amazing piece of work, all of which is narrated by a man having an out of body experience at a pancake restaurant), but for some reason I’d skipped the first one. Amy made me go back and read it: it was still her favorite.
Among other things, Antrim’s first novel is a bit more raw around the edges, more wild and fucked and no-world made than the other two (which are both also pretty fucked). For all that there is to admire about the novel, the two things that still stand out most in my mind are among two of the most unusually narratively rendered scenes in contemporary fiction of the past 10 or so years. Antrim has a pretty amazing ability to tell stories that others would write off as ‘bonkers,’ and make them seem not only plausible, but plausible in a way that makes people who hate entirely plausible stories still down and like ‘I’m in.’
More after the jump.