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.
Arsenic Childhood Food
One of the most seminal bits from Bill Hicks’s seminal ‘Relentless’ performance seems to have something to say about something bookwise also, but instead of trying to rummage that, let’s just relive the Bill:
On the other hand, I enjoy creative marketing. Creative marketing is fun, if the product is actually worth having. Or if it’s not. People are trying to ‘learn to use the internet’ or are accidentally ‘having fun with the internet.’ I have found myself thinking about this a lot lately: promotional tools that do not feel like promotional tools.
I have had little to zero palpable results.
Mostly things just happen.
This blog post is apropos of nothing. Jimmy just deleted a post about Tao selling his myspace, after I commented saying it seemed obviously fake, I felt bad after that. I like ideas and thinking. I like thinking. ‘Hmmm.’
I remember the first thing I ever searched in a search engine when we finally got internet at my parents house on a computer in my room by myself: ‘jenny mccarthy nude.’ It was one of the best days of my life.
You didn’t have to market Jenny McCarthy’s tits to me. They were. [Subliminal shoutout to Ryan Downey.]
What is a book? Where is blood? I miss the TV show Hee-Haw, even though I never watched it when it was on. I like the band the Birthday Party, and that is one of my favorite band names for some reason.
None of the statements in this post have had any direct application or intent behind them, and that’s because they are genuine thoughts. Chew on that.
I’m going to bed.
Amelia Gray !!! FC2 !!!
Mad congrats to the firestorm known as Amelia Gray, who has just been announced as the winner of 2008 FC2 Ronald Sukenik / American Book Review contest:
Lidia Yuknavitch, our final judge chose Amelia Gray’s manuscript titled Museum of the Weird as this year’s winner. A complex and piercing collection, as poetic as it is poignant, Museum of the Weird features twenty four short stories that collectively expose both the hilarity and heartbreak of life in the twenty first century. Congratulations again, to our winner, Amelia Gray!
Like T.I. said: what you know about dat?
Mega congratulations to Amelia. I am super excited for her. I hope it includes two of my favorites, There Will Be Sense from DIAGRAM, and ‘Diary of the Blockage’ from Caketrain.
If you have not already picked up her first collection AM/PM from Featherproof/Paper Egg, now’s the time, kid.
DFW Praise Compendium
At the height of my obsession with David Foster Wallace, garnered after reading ‘Infinite Jest’ over several weeks in 2001, an act which literally changed my life, I began going after any and every piece of writing not only of his, but that he had recommended, blurbed, mentioned in interviews, taught, etc. Many of these books also had a profound influence on my brain, including Gass’s ‘Omensetter’s Luck,’ McCarthy’s ‘Blood Meridian’ and ‘Suttree,’ Donald Barthelme, and countless others.
During this period I began constructing a list of these texts as I found them. The list, which I remember as being several pages long, is now likely floating somewhere in one of my many expired computers. I was able, though, to find at least what makes up part of the list in an old email folder, and as such it appears below.
I know this is not an exhaustive list at this point, and if I find a later draft of it I will repost: in the meantime, however, if you have any other knowledge of blurbs or etc. (and any that might have occurred later in his life, after I stopped making the list, will obviously be absent) please comment them. Where I could, I tried to include the actual blurbs and/or comments, and in other places just included the names of authors mentioned in passing or other ways.
(It likely should be noted that many of these refs came from the amazing and wonderful interview conducted with Wallace by Larry McCaffery for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, which if you have not yet, you should read.)
Also included is a Reading List from a class Wallace taught on postmodern fiction (I believe), which is a pretty fantastic collection of texts.
Incomplete list is after the break:
‘A Jello Horse’ Contest
True HTML Giant Matthew Simmons will release his first book, a novella, in May from Publishing Genius, fantastically titled ‘A Jello Horse,’ the inversion-politics of which already have me bubbling.
In the spirit of this soon forthcoming title, Matthew is running a contest at his blog: The Man Who Couldn’t Blog, in which you can one of a very limited run of hardback copies of the book.
Please do indeed:
2 Rad Scandinavian Lit Journals: GUSTAF & JEG!
Happy lately to have eaten into the Scandinavian lit world somewhat by the magical properties of the amazingly and independently produced Gustaf, which in its first two issues featuring work by many HTML Giant contributors and favorites such as Sam Pink, Tao Lin, Claire Donato, myself, Nathan Tyree, and several Scandinavian authors and artists, all beautiful produced with really killer design inside and out. At $7 for an issue, you can’t really ask for much more.
Editor and all around sweetheart Audun Mortensen sent me a link today to a promo video for both the Gustaf and their brother mag Jeg!, which features them at an indie crafts fair and reading, basically just hanging out. Following the camera around and hearing the other voices in translation made me really happy and giddy somehow.
The second half also features brief excerpts of readings of readings of folks like Kathryn Regina, a Sam Pink play performance, Brandon Gorrell, and yrs truly:
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
April 28th, 2009 / 2:03 pm
April 28th, 2009 / 2:03 pm
Paragraphs I would sleep better and with more pleasant breathing having written (3): Rikki Ducornet
My room overlooked the cemetery. It was sunny and peaceful. In summer the paths twinkled like brooks of milk. In the fall they were thickly bricked with gold leaves. All winter grackles quarreled among the tombstones. Beyond, low hills and copses dissolved into country roads, a chicken farm, a highway. Kate and I visited the farm; we admired the two-headed chicks suspended in alcohol and carried home double-yolked eggs. We walked the forbidden highway all the way to the gas station café where we savored the thick exhaust of trucks and like the logger in the song stirred coffee with our thumbs. But the place we especially loved was in the woods behind Kate’s house, a cluster of elms felled by lightning, a clutter of naked trunks sprawling like lovers shipwrecked in sleep. The dead trees were our treasure hunts, our highways to planets haunted with the moonmen of our minds. Even now I dream of trees carved into the painted likenesses of our games, the totems of childhood. Even now I recall a crystal gazebo and the smooth walls of a fictive corridor better than the room I slept in last night, the face of the man I slept with.
– from The Smallest Muttonbird Island in ‘The Complete Butcher’s Tales,’ pg. 107
Massive People (10): Vanessa Place
At the end of last year, I read Vanessa Place’s mammoth novel of forms recently out from FC2, LA MEDUSA (linking Amazon because FC2 site is down, but buy from the press).
Though it is a monster of a book, in size in mind, I found I could not stop reading it once I started, blasting through all 616 pages in 4-5 days of continuous reading. Among its many forms and voices, it contains one of the most vivid scenes I think I’ve ever read: simply consisting of one of the main characters eating at a Mexican restaurant by himself, getting more and more drunk, and eating among a kind of mental fury, almost as if over the other pages of the book encasing him. It is truly a definition of how words can capture moments in a way no other art form is equipped for.
LA MEDUSA, I think, is a book of appetites, and cataloguing. There is something post-Beat in it in that way: lists (a list of strange barbies, a list of synonyms for vagina, though worked into the narrative thread somehow, a kind of shapeshifting that continually occurs in midst of the reading without managing to interrupt), and hyper consciousnesses, and combining the high with the low in these really rhythmic and syllabic and smart sentences. LA MEDUSA reminds me a lot of Lynne Tillman’s AMERICAN GENIUS, which is another of my all time recent favorites.
Anyhow, in the wake of my admiration, I spoke to Vanessa some about the ideas in the book, and her creative process, including ekphrasis, managing many voices, and craft.
Vanessa is also the author of DIES: A Sentence, which is literally a 50k+ word sentence, out from Les Figues Press (and is also a massive presence for innovative lit), which she co-directs. Her nonfiction book about sex-offenders and the morality of guilt will be published in 2008 by Other Press.
Do yourself a favor and check out her work: it is incomparable.
Interview after the jump.
Dewclaw
Dewclaw is a new print journal edited by Evelyn Hampton, and one I am quite excited about. New independently compiled and edited magazines. That’s what we need.
This one indeed includes a few HTML Giant writers including myself, but surely the other fantastic presences exhibited below can allow to forgive this nasty error on the part of Ms. Hampton. :)
You can also now submit for issue 2: information below!
ISSUE 1 is now pre-orderable. $9 plus $1 for shipping. Click the Pay Pal button or email me if you’d like to pay some other way.
Contributors to issue 1!
Claire Donato
Matthew Simmons & Amy Minton
Mike Young
Blake Butler
Rachel B. Glaser
Claire Becker
Shya Scanlon
Cherri Wood
Amina Cain
Kathryn Regina
Matthew Salesses
Scott Garson
Jessica Treat
Leslie Patron
Isadora Bey
Stephanie BrachmanProse submissions may be between one and ten word-processor pages, poetry submissions may be up to six poems,and illustrators may submit up to four illustrations.
Send submissions to dewclaw.mag at gmail.com
Issue one will be perfect-bound and will be available in summer 2009. Check back here for ordering info.
Published contributors will receive a copy of the magazine.
Please check it out and show some love.
Uncategorized / 18 Comments
April 21st, 2009 / 8:33 pm
April 21st, 2009 / 8:33 pm
Please help me destroy $75
I have a $75 gift certificate to Target that I got as a suprise bonus gift for judging some middle schoolers’ creative writing. It was mostly all entires about Michael Phelps, 9-11, and Barack Obama, but there were some nice surprises, like the one about the dude made out of hashbrowns. One kid had written a rap about candy and money and girls; I gave him second place in his grade. Two of my picks won state also, I am wondering if he was one of them? And will soon have a record coming out about candy and money and girls? Anyway, now I have no idea what to buy and it is burning my hand to hold. Their website actually has a pretty great selection of books, and plus all that other booshit that I never think about looking at. Any suggestions on how to spend this playa bankroll?
Paragraphs I’d Chew My Way Through a Mold Barn To Have Written (2): Matthew Derby
Super Flat Times, pg. 156, from ‘Instructions’
Before I lost my wife I had only ever hit one other person, and that was in junior high. His face is like a cotton swab in my memory now–he floats there in slow motion, holding a black book bag over his groin outside the locker room. It’s the Sesquicentennial and we’re getting out early to see the tall robots. I remember the scent of a person, the way it changes the air in a room. Louis Burney smelled like hair and lighter fluid–he came from the developments, where kids pissed out their territory and traveled in herds. I hit him in the gut–the reason isn’t so important anymore. The sound, though, is the thing. Like two sounds at once–and one of them is like the whole world just lifting up and folding over.