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.

Live Giants 10: Amelia Gray

Thanks to everyone for watching, to Amelia Gray for reading, and to Mary Hamilton for handling the internet questions.

At any point you can pick up a copy of Amelia’s brand new Museum of the Weird here.

Web Hype / 12 Comments
October 28th, 2010 / 8:55 pm

Obituary: Third Face

Third Face (May 22, 2010 – October 28, 2010) This freewrite fart joke 420 rated-NR-because-we-want-to group “lit” (as in “to’e up”) blog lived so briefly it never was able to pass its oral and anal stages, thus there’s really not much to say about them in the way of remembrance beyond, “Who?” They are survived by none, and there will be no services, no corpse. I can’t even remember the URL. All that remains are some Fritos, a couple miles of lubey cellophane and Kleenex, some ICP gear, a couple of crusty one hitters, the mystery of how they were ever able to get women involved, a whole hell of a lot of mental cringing, and this photograph taken of the death gasp of two of Third Face’s longest standing (crawling?) members in the extra-social throes of what they did best, their very very own best, while they still could:

Mean / 6 Comments
October 28th, 2010 / 3:06 pm

2 Obituaries: One Story & Failbetter

One Story (June 24, 2002 to October 25, 2010) The offices of long handed and literary-Illuminati-color-coded One Story collapsed this week in a grand gesture of at last fully defining in unwavering lifelike syntax their own definitive time, setting, and central theme. Long teased and haunted by their authors’ knack and exuberance in the construction of sentences that end the story as exploration before it can begin, the corpus of long story has whispered in its ruffling thin pages a yearning for at last the transcendence of the human spirit into the beyond, at last concretely demonstrating that yes, we all die, and yes the human heart is large, and yes, A really does lead to B if you line it up right. Survived by a collection of sentences clearly of a reputable but closely related bloodline, a brief but heartwarming reflection on One Story’s days and times will be issued to all past subscribers as well as anyone who has serially submitted to their enterprise every single open reading period since their inception, which notably and privately led to their development of the now ubiquitous Submission Manager (since bastardized incessantly by at least three anarchistic, freely sharing knockoffs), which affords self-hating pencil pushers across the globe the right to realize just how ridiculous this whole submit-then-wait-then-hate-then-submit-again thing is. Meanwhile, the spirit of the One Story lives on: truly, by now, a single story in our minds, espousing all. Friends and relatives remain hopeful that the termination of the ephemeral notion of the singular short story proves to extend beyond its time into a one to three book contract for those involved on the merit of this leap of faith into the demonstrable prowess of details that is the narrative short prose masterwork, more evidence that even if Raymond Carver is dead he isn’t dead and neither (for real this time) is Michael Chabon.

*

Failbetter (May 10, 2000 to October 25, 2010) At last deciding to put their money where their browser is, longtime publishers of romantically edgy online lit Failbetter succumbed to their own moniker and failed as hard as they could, driving their proverbial website animus into the proverbial nowhere of even this special little world called the online. Originators of the insanely-long-submission-response-time-even-if-you’re-just-a-website rule of thumb, Failbetter will surely be preserved only as we all remember them, if we remember anything, which in my case is that year when AWP was in Atlanta and these dudes showed up in suits standing next to a laptop on a table telling you to check out their website right there in the Hilton so that you might remember to do the same again when you got home, though as I recall again the web connection in the Hilton’s basement sucked and you couldn’t even do that, a pretty decent failure on the part of online literature perhaps in some way predicting this biggest and baddest of all failures, again ahead of the curve of all of us in publishing or elsewhere still supposedly extant, like gash marks on the wrists in a vertical fashion years before the gun goes in the mouth.

Mean / 6 Comments
October 28th, 2010 / 9:38 am

Shit I Don’t Like About Writers & Writing

– Hearing the words “writer,” “reading,” “poem,” “poet,” “the author of,” etc. more frequently than should any human regardless of his or her particular fondness, hobby, or paid work
– Ego, and reflection of ego onto others’ actions because the nature of ego is often that one can only see one’s self in another self
– The absence of self identity that seems to come along with so many of the more flagrant perpetrators of said ego, giving them even more excessive ability to flaunt said ego without losing any sleep
– Twitter and facebook feeds of writers who think about these “tools of social media” as personal sales pitches aimed at you, the “friend,” often unrelenting in their use of the terms of the 1st list item and w/o any form of layering of else that might lead you to believe they are an actual person
– “Tortured” updates on same social networks over how “crazy” today or tomorrow is going to be while editing or writing
– People who retweet Kanye West
– Kickstarter and other similar fundraising systems, which somehow have quickly become the means for acquisition of literary food stamps, even if a lot of people I like have used it to do some cool shit
– The simultaneous bent of many personalities or commentmakers to go on about how evil, ugly, mean, nasty, etc. in general negative or shitty a certain outlet is, matched with an equal to less bent of also complaining that things are “too positive” or “you forgot to include me” when said person or entity has made little to no effort to “get involved” on their own end
– How almost no writer ever has done a good job writing about what it is like to be obese
– How many writers are atheists and yet are proud of themselves as creators
– How the writers who are christian usually suck at writing
– How there are so many books now I can’t think
– How I’ve been reading so many of those books that I seriously am finally starting to get carpal tunnel from holding them up while on the stationary bike and from all this silly typing
– How I don’t quite have enough books now to build a new house out of them so I can sell the place I live in now and get out of this loft complex and live somewhere quieter
– When people don’t mention that their ‘is the author of’ refers to a chapbook, or call chapbooks books, or say chapbook out loud near me at all really
– When chapbooks cost $10 even though they might cost $2 to make most of the time
– People who “won’t read” chapbooks even tho some of them do some amazing shit a full book couldn’t really ever do
– Web magazines who have so little design skill that it actually hurts me more to not look at them than to look at them because I know the damage they are doing to all aura and yet people still submit to them and bitch about their slow response times
– Print magazines that look like they were designed in 1991 by someone who had bad taste even then
– Anyone who bitches about response times ever, usually signifying that they’ve never worked a day on the side of the editing table or even volunteering or trying to pay for the books that sit on the tables often unselling and just trying to break even and hardly reading anyway
– How proud people are of celebrities who talk about a book, like it’s some winged beast descending to kiss their face
– How at least a handful of people will hold this against me at least in a comment and think I think my shit doesn’t stink because I said any of this or that I hold myself to some other standard or that I think I’m special when really I’m just hanging out like anybody else I just sometimes will run my mouth and I like to think I have a lot of faith even when I bitch and this is all a big try
– People who pimp their social state of having or not having on either end, trying to justify lack thereof or surplus because someone has this or that or doesn’t have this or that or went here or there or didn’t or wanted to and didn’t and etc., as if anyone needs to or doesn’t need to experience anything or not anything to write a word down on paper and have it be something, as if those with money can’t think, as if those without money can’t think, as if everyone’s out to kill you because you are male female black white red candy sugar sandwich
– Gmail chat status updates that change every few hours
– Gmail chat’s winking box that goes back and forth until you click it and look at who said what even if you are on invisible and were trying to ignore the thing entirely but don’t have the balls to just log the fuck out
– People who don’t mind saying flagrant things about what other people say or do but won’t do anything flagrant on their own or outside the realm of people who will back them up
– People who think that because you made something that must mean you have to have it or you worship it or yourself for having had it or that you are out for glory in every move
– People who only ‘Like’ or comment on things when it involves something about them
– People with no sense of humor and/or who can’t laugh at themselves
– People who never get crunk READ MORE >

Mean / 206 Comments
October 27th, 2010 / 10:20 am

This is pretty wicked: Why Doc Brown is the real villain of Back to the Future [via Matt Bell]

Learning to recognize the human is the job of Dr. Phil. The job of literature is not a job, and has nothing to do with recognition.

All pigshit is writing.

All pigshit is writing. READ MORE >

Mean / 20 Comments
October 25th, 2010 / 2:33 pm

HTMLGIANT suggests you become a fan of not creating a fan page for yourself on Facebook and inviting people to come become a fan of you via an autoemail that doesn’t even have enough self respect to pretend like someone else did it for you. Anyway, people often mostly only like the things they find on their own time. The best ads are smart enough to not be ads.

Obituary: AWP (1967-2010)

AWP (The Association of Writers and Writing Programs) – (1967 to October 25, 2010) One of the longest standing and thereby most-oft-cited-like-prom-in-relation-to-the-space-where-act-is-not-act-but-goober-city events in the lexicon of rising and extending the social life of the author passed away just before someone’s lunch break this afternoon when a mangy maned and business suit clad middle aged man stormed into the AWP offices in Fairfax, Virginia and released an airborne toxin that immediately brought to their knees said officeholders and those in an outlying .5 mile radius of the building. Authorities are still working in their off hours of other atrocities to identify the corpse of the perpetrator despite his wearing a laminated ID tag suspended from a necklanyard relic of the 2010 convention of the AWP faculties and associates in Denver, Colorado, as they quickly found that the name printed on the tag, Alice Munro, was not the perp at all but someone authorities believe may purportedly be a “writer” herself, though not a “writer” capable of such will. A manifesto found on the perp’s body, which was mostly eaten alive by the angry bees attracted by the scent of writer toxin, like sandwich musk and want, while the numerable “highest level” AWP employees, whom no one has ever met, escaped through an unidentified aircraft toward the blinker of the sun never to return, stated the motive for the destruction as such: “I’M FUCKIN SICK O THIS SECRET HANDSHAKE HIPPIE WANKER ASS SHIT WHERE YOU HANDY DANDIES COME AROUND SELLIN YR POETRIES AND YR MAGASHITZINES TO EACH OTHER WHILE WHEN ANYTIME I BRING AROUND MY OWN REALER MAGAZINES AND TALK ABOUT TO TELL YOU WHERE MY LAUNCH PARTY IS AT TONIGHT YOU LOOK AT ME LIKE I’M TREVOR MCDUNNAWAY, WHICH I AM, WHICH TO YOU MEANS SHITZIP AND I’M FUCKIN SICK OF TYPING AND I MISS MY DAD MOTHERFUCKER FUCK WRITING BITTCH YR SERVICES ARE VOID.” Eighteen copies of the remainder of the manifesto, which the perp, who has since been identified not as the aforementioned “TREVOR MCDUNNAWAY” carried on his person extended in one long armreach with a pricetag of $24.95 in softcover with “discount sale!” stickers reducing said price to $22.90, were still held tightly by the author’s corpse against his sternum so well infused that his remains will be cremated, along with the lanyards and programs and attendance roster of the previously planned 2011 convention of AWP to be held in Washington D.C., a fire that burned purple for six hours in the light of the other ashes in our special government atrocity cremation center before finally muttering out into another pile. Subsequent strains of the airborne toxin, briefly considered deadly to all nations, have been found to only affect those of the weakest temperament to sick, via skins of thin mettle and minds of weak acumen predetermined to attend panels on Life Poetics in the Work of Cracker Barrel Anthologies and Nature as Conduit for Metaphor, and even in those few sadly exposed bodies only inducing mild conditions of pasty foreskin/labia, heavy breathing, and sometimes a hunger for flamebroiled meat. Book objects and chapbooks remaining unsold and thereafter abandoned at AWP locations of the past 40 years will be donated to a new, more vital writing services program, where the corpus of such paper will be burned to heat the homes of indigent but still somehow willful writers. Anyone not already involved in publishing their own magazine had no comment on the logically pragmatic death, though remembrance services for Mr. “MCDUNNAWAY” will be held at Shortback Books in downtown Presererancese, Wisconsin featuring readings by Bob Hicok and Steve Almond. Remembrance services for AWP will take place over the next two to seven years as longtime members, attendants, would-that-I-were-not-married-I-could-have-gotten-out-there-cuz-I-hear-sometimes-there-are-people-there-who-both-like-books-and-will-fuck persons, and please-emblazon-my-name-on-your-paper-I’ll-do-anything-even-though-there’s-nothing-to-do-but-keep-pretending-I’m-listening-and-shake-some-hands-with-eyes-averted-and-keep-drinking hucksters spread the flame of memory from one to another via the age-old echo party celebration cue, “Are you going to you AWP?,” which regrettably this year must be answered by one and all, “I can’t.”

Mean / 35 Comments
October 25th, 2010 / 10:38 am

Mean Week is This Week What Does that Mean

All writing is pigshit.
Mean / 30 Comments
October 25th, 2010 / 1:24 am