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.
“C, Clown”: An Excerpt from Gwenaelle Aubry’s No One
I’m five or six, on holiday with my father at his parents’ place in Soissons. My grandfather is seeing patients in his surgery at the end of the garden, my grandmother is busy doing I don’t know what, I’m alone, I’m bored. Suddenly I have an idea. I get my grandmother’s lipstick from the bathroom and I set about painting my father: two circles on his cheeks, another on the end of his nose. I take him by the hand and say, “You’re a clown, Dad, come on, I want to show everyone.” Together we go out into the street and sit down on the doorstep in the blazing sunlight of a summer afternoon. He’s in profile. With my finger I spread the color over his left cheek. He lets me do it with a weary, nasty smile. Seeing him like this I’m filled with shame, sorrow, and pleasure. My grandmother suddenly appears from nowhere, a small, elegant, measured woman, her dress, makeup, and hair always just so. For the first time I hear her raise her voice. In a tone that brooks no answer she orders me to stop it at once, to go back inside.
Twenty-five years later, when my grandmother was long dead, my father went back to live, or rather to stop living, in Soissons. He moved into an apartment with his father. After my grandfather’s departure and subsequent death a few months later, my father was hospitalized in a clinic right opposite the house he grew up in. It was then that he really went downhill. READ MORE >
2 Comments
January 12th, 2012 / 12:01 pm
January 12th, 2012 / 12:01 pm
Blake Butler—
Issue 2 of Aesthetix, a journal that asks poets to submit poems of a specific title each issue, is live for “Arrow,” including new work from Melissa Broder, Mark Leidner, Emily Kendal Frey, Nick Sturm, Seth Landman, Bruce Covey, Ben Mirov, Noelle Kocot, Noah Falck, more.
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Blake Butler—
Q: How much distance is there between David Foster Wallace–the narrator–and yourself?
DFW: I don’t understand the question?
Blake Butler—
As of yesterday, Ulysses is officially a work of public domain. Now what? [UPDATE: Or not... at least in America. (via Edward Champion)]
ALT LIT GOSSIP Ohio Watching Party
Here’s a bunch of people in Ohio at Noah Cicero’s house watching the ALT LIT GOSSIP awards talking shit, doing drugs, and other things people here can bitch about being a ‘waste of [your internet time].’ Enjoi.
Blake Butler—
For the New Yorker podcast, A.M. Homes reads & discusses Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”
RiFF RAFF SODMG recommends NY TYRANT
“Guess what we got here… new book.”
Blake Butler—
The newest edition of Brad Listi’s Other People podcast features an hourlong & particularly wonderfully personal interview with Dennis Cooper.
John Ashbery is a chill bro
Cool questions!
2011 Tournament of Bookshit Brackets & Prizes
Bracket predictions for the 2011 Tournament of Bookshit will close tomorrow at noon eastern time, at which point the tourney will begin.
You can fill out & submit your bracket here.
The current prize pool, to be given to the highest bracket score or scores (to be determined soon), includes the following list. Thanks to everyone so generous so far. Anyone else wanting to contribute, please comment. READ MORE >
HTMLGIANT’s Tournament of Bookshit
This year in place of our regular “Mean Week,” HTMLGIANT will be running something we’d like to call our Tournament of Bookshit, in which 64 book related shits will be placed into an NCAA style bracket to square off and determine, by the most arbitrary means possible, [something]. What that [something] is I have no idea, but I do know that our tournament will operate by the same wily-nily sure let’s do it this way found in most any literary competition, whether it be list making, book jousting, or whatever else you’ve got.
Below you’ll find a list of the 64 entities selected pretty much on a whim to be our contestants. They’re silly. For each round a guest judge of various description and sensibilities will analyze each in light of each other and then select one by whatever terms they like to go forward, with perhaps a Mean Week attitude in mind. In the end, we’ll crown a very special winner the King Shit Mountain of Super Bookshit.
We’ve also set up, for those taking score at home, a bracket system where you can fill out your predictions if you want. It requires you to sign up but only takes a second. At the end we’ll have a prize pool of literary stuff to give to whoever somehow pulls that magic high score out of the hat of darkness.
Any authors/publishers/etc interesting in throwing in on the prizes, please leave a comment with what you’d like to give away and we’ll include it in the winnings and link it in a round up of Kind Souls.
Registration and prediction is free and will be open until the first decisions begin posting on Wednesday around Noon. Playoffs will continue at whatever pace they continue at.
The contestants: READ MORE >
115 Comments
November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
November 28th, 2011 / 11:04 am
Blake Butler—
This is the only Christmas record allowed in my house: Agoraphobic Nosebleed “Make a Joyful Noise”. Eat.
Blake Butler—
I’m sure I’ll regret asking, but I’m curious as to what people think/thought of the idea of the Occupy Wall Street Library?
Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee out today
Officially released today from Muumuu House, $12.
Beautiful logics, awkward brains, fun sentences, fresh new shitt!
Blake Butler—
I usually like seeing text and ideas stolen and incorporated in new texts. Often there is a clear intent, or the layering makes it interesting, even if more often you maybe don’t realize it was stolen. Though when students do it for papers it can seem like laziness, and often really is. Little, Brown just killed a “suspense” novel that they realized stole direct language from lots of classic mysteries, unacknowledged, including major stuff like Bond. Are there limits to acceptable “plagiarism”? What are they?
