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.
Fuck Twitter + Exploder
Hi, we’re on Twitter now.
Our bodies are changing. It is scary when our bodies start to change.
Like, your hair grows where before you just rubbed and rubbed
and ladies are more interested in you, and men,
and there is trouble brewing in the cistern
and you might bruise a knee if you cry too hard
yes, we are a changing
changing so hard everyday, it’s like pushups plus grease
i feel exploder
did you know i had a baby last year?
it’s what makes me angry and upset
i can sometimes do a post about how strong my back is
and sometimes i can post about Ricky Moody
to be honest, though, this website is just a hoax made of candy n paper,
designed to get Diane Wililams randy in her special spot
Diane Williams i think changes everyday too
though you never complained when she did that
Don’t fight! We came to make babies
and to eat those babies on crackers provided free of charge
by the goodwill of Cooper Renner and Lee Klein
and Restin Borstenseinsen
and Pimp C (RIP)
Crackerz! for Night Train Magazine!
Crackerz! for Ass Hi Books!
Crackerz! for Haypenny Magazine (RIP)!
Crackerz! for crackers like ya’ll bitches who all you wanna do is front
No really, tho. Let’s play Internet Publishing Mall Madness, n update what we eat on the Twitter, n buy a book sometime, with our monies
‘stead o’ just writin’ that shit all day n shit,
& like my friend Dave ‘future ex editor of NYer’ Shakur said, I get $$$ nigga
till I dead
** THIS POST SHOULD RECEIVE 200 COMMENTS, AS IT IS TRULY ABOUT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING **
There is a god
via USA Today:
NEW YORK (AP) — A long, unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace is scheduled for a posthumous release next year.The Pale King, excerpted in The New Yorker magazine edition coming out Monday, is set in an Internal Revenue Service office in Illinois in the 1980s.
Wallace’s longtime publisher, Little, Brown and Company, will release the novel. Little, Brown said in a statement Sunday that the novel runs “several hundred thousand words and will include notes, outlines, and other material.”
Wallace, best known for the 1,000-page novel Infinite Jest, was a longtime sufferer from depression who committed suicide last fall. He was 46 and had been working on The Pale King for several years.
Sure, it wasn’t finished. Sure, it might not be fully what it would have been if completed under David Wallace’s human eye. But it’s what we have left, and I for one can breathe a little easier now knowing I will have the experience of reading another brick from my brother, even in such light.
I seriously pumped my fist and grinned and shook a little when I read this. I am giddy.
Thank you thank you.
EDIT: The NYer excerpt piece, Wiggle Room, is now available on their site here!!! Which, holy fuck, the first sentence: Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month.
And holy fuck the whole rest…
BONUS: a few pages of the manuscript, with notes, etc, as well as accompanying art by his wife Karen Green.
God.
This should be, I think, seen as a celebration, regardless of the sadder angles. As one who could not have adored him more, it seems more vital now than ever.
Artistic expression is impossible under Barack Obama
This arrived in my email inbox this morning from a contributor who has asked to remain anonymous. I feel like posting it, so I will:
See what was happening was
See people were going to have the best hamburger yet, Puff Daddy had been sighted at the Anne’s Snack Shop in Pittsburgh for a ghetto burger
Dogs were having fun
See what was happening was there were no stop signs in any of the apartment complexes where anyone had grown up
Barack Obama brought the meat
Every morning in his cells, Bret Easton Ellis stands up and looks at the wall for 100 minutes before beginning on the sentences that will be deleted from his next novel
Someone is ready for hungry time
Today someone is ready for hungry time
When I say that ‘Artistic expression is impossible under Barack Obama’ I’m not any way trying to be funny
Though it will be easy to say I am
The best advice I ever got on writing was when the small woman full of blue blood stopped me in the street and asked me if I could help her tie her shoe
Which never happened
But was still the best advice I ever got on writing
People are getting afraid more often now, while eating waffles
At 4:04 am on 19th street in downtown Hemmings, a small child wriggles his fists in anticipation of the museum that will be built in the next 2-18 years over the ground where the room where he was going to one day cheat on his wife once stood
Today Barack Obama gets up in the morning and goes to the kitchen for a ham sandwich
But there is no longer any ham
There is an autographed replica of the first woman ever to be eaten alive, and there is a pack of Starburst gummies, and there is a lariat
But no ham
‘Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher’ by Adam Robinson, from ‘Adam Robison’
It’s not quite available for the masses yet, but to get you hype for the forthcoming release of Adam Robinson‘s debut book of poems, pleasantly titled ‘Adam Robison and Other Poems’ (and forthcoming in the next few months from Narrow House Press) we’ve got two special treats lined up.
The first is said book’s publisher’s new blog: Narrow House press blog, which is a pleasant introduction to the group and their releases, which span from records to full length poetry books.
Secondly, culled from what might be quite a length of dirty video recordings captured this weekend at the post-510 Reading Series bar assault (in which your current blogger and said ‘Adam Robison’ aka ‘Magic Acorn’ were asked to ‘stop wrestling in the bar or leave’), is Adam Robinson’s fine drunken performance of his poem ‘Steve Reich Hears a Pentecostal Preacher.’
Please enjoy (and thanks to Michael Kimball for the sweet capture).
You should have seen him breakdancing a few minutes later. It was a poem in itself. Though the guys at the pizza shop were less thrilled with Adam and some other weird dude screaming about dick and pouring water on each other in a beer haze. Poem video life.
Also, for your consumption, the brilliant introduction to ‘Adam Robison,’ published here at Otoliths, which contains the paragraph:
So what’s the story, Anne Carson? I mean, what’s my story? I’m riding my bike home with a video camera strapped to the handlebars, through the glittering downtown into the crumbling neighborhoods of Baltimore’s east side.
I, for one, am quite excited.
Ken Baumann on Shane Jones’s LIGHT BOXES
A review submitted by national heartthrob Ken Baumann, for Shane Jones’s just released novel LIGHT BOXES from Publishing Genius Press.
I feel it’s hard today to find a work of art that is earnest, that is compassionate. (Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody comes to mind). I was startled by Shane Jones’s novel because it is so painfully both; it bleeds itself, and bleeds for others.
Light Boxes is a story about a community, about a man’s quest to rid his community of February, a bitter and long spell of cold that haunts the the town and its people. I don’t want to speak explicitly of the ‘narrative’ here, only because I think there is magic in discovery; it’s a sensual work. Many of the images affected me viscerally, and will stay with me for a long time. Dead bees pour from the sky, a broken father sits in the middle of a snow-covered street, a body surfaces in a river covered in text… I could list all the beautiful, and often tragic, images contained within for awhile.
Uncategorized / 12 Comments
February 25th, 2009 / 1:00 am
February 25th, 2009 / 1:00 am
Word Spaces (7): Peter Davis
This week in the triumphant return of HTML Giant Word Spaces, we have the kindly and brilliant Mr. Peter Davis, author of the quite hilarious and smart and new-voiced Hitler’s Mustache, (which, with such a great cover, how could you pass up? though the poems are just as awesome: you can read examples of them here) and much else, including, most recently, a series of beguilingly ultra honest poems such as these here. Peter Davis lives, teaches poetry, writes, and raises a family in Muncie, Indiana, where he has so kindly taken the time to tour for us the spot where his words do the make.
Narrative Magazine (‘the gold standard of online publications’) wants $20 to read your short-short
Reporting live from the Narrative Magazine offices, my man Russell Jones, AKA ‘The Only Black God’ AKA Osiris AKA Big Baby Jesus:
WalMart’s down the street, son.
But I mean really…
Amelia Gray’s AM/PM
Out this month from Featherproof, as a kickoff to their brand new and already brain-changing Paper Egg Books: Amelia Gray’s fabulous AM/PM, a short novel that follows “23 characters across 120 stories full of lizard tails, Schrödinger boxes and volcano love.”
I was already really excited about this before I saw how beautiful the book is (as is to be expected in the nimble hands of designer Zach Dodson), having continually been wowed and had my skirt blown up by Amelia’s work in the past, such as this amazing story in the Diagram Innovative Fiction finalists, and Caketrain, American Short Fiction, etc.
Last night, though, reading AM/PM from cover to cover before bed, I could not stop rotating between the sharp, quick gut giggles that Amelia’s layered one liners continually deliver, and awe at her unmatched ability to meld the everyday minutiae of houses and people-talk with moments of pure existential terror and sublime gloaming.
What to Wear During an Orange Alert?
One of my long-time favorite media-blogs Orange Alert has just relaunched with a new full on website, which makes me happy in the way of reading pleasure.
Orange Alert is unique in that they focus heavily not only on independent lit (with a weekley ‘Reader Meet Author’ feature that focuses specifically on small press peeps, including Giant folks like Sam Pink, Conor Madigan, Amelia Gray, Brandon Gorrell, and tons more), as well as weekly features on independent musicians, artists, and everything else all in one place. It’s a wonderful daily mishmash of new media, and in particular their ‘Watch List’ of things reading, watching, wanting, etc., is a good way to keep up with their favorite stories from online journals and new releases from small presses. It’s one of the things I look forward to reading each week.