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.
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
“I got too much cake, plus bitch I’m on parole, plus bitch I pimp dis microphone my mouthpiece is too cold to be stuntin bout some small change, bitch do ya see dis chain, cant ya see I got ya life in my pinky ring?”
“My Stepfather comes to me one day and he say “You know the problem with that rap shit? The problem with that shit is that it’s noise.” So I got defensive, because that’s what we do. “What you mean it’s noise?” He say “Naw… listen to what I’m telling you boy, that shit is noise, ain’t no music in that shit. You put some music in that shit and you might be able to get paid.””
“I never got no training ‘til I went to school. I was playing by ear. I had a drum set and I had the organ and I used to bang out. I learned early on that the white keys was, in my opinion, the “happy” keys and the black keys was the “sad keys.” That’s what I called them. Later on I would describe the black keys as the more funky keys than the white ones. I like minor notes, I like playing in that register, I enjoy the black keys. [But] I feared music at that time so I would stay away from the black keys ‘cause they were sad to me.”
“We didn’t consciously shape a certain sound. When I took a handclap out of my 808 and made it into the snare drum and played the hi-hat double time for the first time and shaped the sound that all these motherfuckers is calling all these different names; crunk an all this other shit, I wasn’t settin out to make no statement. I was trying to make a good record for Master P that day, when I made “Break ‘em off Something.” That’s all we ever set out to do is the best we could do that date and be a little bit better than we was the day before. I figured out a long time ago I couldn’t talk like New York, so I stopped trying to do it and I stopped trying to rap like them. This not an act—this is how I towk. This how we talk down here, some of us got a little deeper accent then others but this how we towk, so I said fuck it we gonna talk like this on a record. We sound different, my voice was high-pitched, I was different than the rest, you know, fuck it.”
“You magazine muthafuckas need to have more responsibility for what you write and put on your goddamn covers. I couldn’t get on a Source cover ’til I went to prison. I had to go to prison to get on the cover of yo funky-ass magazine?”
“I tell the truth even when I lie. I’ll pay a mothafucka to try me, bitch.”
“We didn’t have sense enough to know that they had people called producers that actually make the music, so we made our own music because we didn’t know no better.. Shit we thought everybody made their own beats, ya dig?”
“Every year for Christmas I’d get another piece of equipment – a drum machine, a four track here, a keyboard there.”
“Our thing is this, if it ain’t ready we don’t put it out, we put it on the side and come back to it. Some songs come together real fast, in one or two nights. Some songs take two years. Some take six years. It depends on the song and what’s going on.”
“All y’all niggas talking about selling dope? If y’all niggas was some d-boys, guess what, man? I don’t believe you niggas no more cause I’m seeing you niggas in button up shirts getting cute and pretty trying to look sexy. Nigga, fuck you. Nigga, and I ain’t gotta say your name. Play with me and I’ll expose the niggas that was wearing backpacks with their pant leg rolled up back then in Atlanta when me and Big Meech used to be off in the club kickin’ it buying each other champagne.”
“You aint a gangsta because you platinum or you drive a coupe, truth of the matter you’s a high dollar prostitute. You aint from ATL, you from Macon.”
“What causes a motherfucker to just straight up be a hater on these streets? What causes a motherfucker that you went to school with your whole life to want to shoot you and rob you? Jealous, envy, greed, wicked men, deceitful hearts, females with penises. Bitch ass niggas is what causes this shit.”
“You remember the pictures of Eric B & Rakim? Them niggas was cool motherfuckers. You had to be to get on a record. Just to touch the microphone you had to be a cold motherfucker. Now a person say “rapper” they think of a fugazi motherfucker, a fraud. A motherfucker that lies and talks about shit he ain’t never done. We done let so many fake motherfuckers come into this game and have embraced so much fraud shit and have gave awards and put crowns on so many pussy motherfuckers that to be a rapper now it ain’t even the thing to be. A rapper ain’t no upstanding citizen, a nigga gotta check your credibility.”
“The only nigga I see [in Houston] goin’ to the mall by himself is Slim Thug. Other niggas, when I see ’em, they got bodyguards around ’em. How you gonna be scared of the neighborhood you supposed to be reppin’? All them [Houston rappers] that think they stars, guess what, bitch? Ain’t no stars down here. Only stars is in the muthafuckin’ sky!”
“I want to use my influence to bring some positive things to this game. We’ve done enough tearing down on our own, let’s bring something positive to this shit. Let’s get back to the music instead of all the bickering and arguing about where a motherfucker is from. Just represent your hood to the fullest and everything gonna be alright.”
“See, real niggas don’t swap it out.”
So, writers, now that TATTOOS are protected speech, what about GRAFFITI? Is GRAFFITI (i.e. nonsense scribbling, political messages, tags, excerpts from your favorite novels, etc.) on public or private surfaces (i.e. walls, sidewalks, garage doors, sides of cars, etc.) protected speech? Why? Why not? If so, then why are we submitting our works to magazines and journals when entire cities lie before us?
Here are some words I saw while walking.
Have the years you’ve spent working on writing affected in any way your belief or lack of belief in god?
You missed the live reading but you can watch it archived.
Featuring excerpts read from:
Museum of the Weird by Amelia Gray
Flowing in the Gossamer Fold by Ben Spivey
The Book of Frank by CAConrad
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle
Event Factory by Renee Gladman
Sean Kilpatrick’s “The All Encompassed Drowned” in New York Tyrant Issue 8
This Fall saw the release of the debut collection from one Lindsay Hunter, aptly and majestically titled Daddy’s. If you’ve ever seen Lindsay read in person you probably were hiding in your closet with your head between your legs covering your junk quivering about this monster, a collection of short texts trapped inside a tackle box. Lindsay’s language is somehow both frightening, gut-bunching, weirdo, home, cover your face, open your mouth, transcendent, and of heaving sound. At times like if Gummo turned into words and date-raped Mary Gaitskill’s language then went to the gas station to buy tissues to clean up the messies and bought you a snack of discount heat lamp chicken. Underneath it all, this weird American convulsive heart that sounds like someone if we haven’t been, at least we remember getting beaten up in middle school.
Over email, so as to not get bit, I traded q’s with Ms. Hunter re: the book, humor, music, inspiration, fear, performance, and all the rest.
BB: I love how Daddy’s operates in reading almost as a series of rotations in a brain of what some would call trash life: each of the stories in the collection often concerns sex, food, and body fluids. The sky is referred to in turns from piece to piece as if it is shifting through a section of a place that does not change: and yet each story feels so singular. Was this variation something you were super aware of while you were writing the stories, or did the voices just keep coming out? By what means was this book written?
LH: I don’t know that I was aware of this as I was writing each story, but looking at the book as a whole, it definitely feels like there is a town in which these people live and it is the same town. I generally start with the first line of something and then see where that leads me. I’ll have first lines in my head for days, or sometimes I’ll get one and I’ll need to sit down and just fucking follow it. Every now and again I’ll have an idea for a story, like some kind of situation or glimpse–like in “That Baby” I wanted to write about the jealousy of babies–and I’ll wedge my way in and try to write what I see.
I think these stories are what they are because I tend to go sentence by sentence and edit as I’m writing–I can’t move on until each sentence is just right, and if I’m bored by a line it feels wonderful just to delete it and start over. That’s my main thing–I hate boredom and being bored and boring writing and cliches and puns and double entendres and cleverness. So I try to eviscerate all of that. But watch, I’ll open up my book and see the phrase “and that was the end of that” or “new lease on life” or “make love” and I’ll have to face some pretty ugly truths about my inner life.
Issue 8. 276 pp. $8, postpaid.
Contributors
Joseph Aguilar, Nubia Bint Aqeel, E.C. Belli, Carrie Bennett, Amaranth Borsuk, Paul Braffort, Blake Butler, Jak Cardini, William Cardini, Jon Cone, Juliet Cook, Olivia Cronk, Kelly Dulaney, Laura Eve Engel, Géraldine Georges, Kristen Gleason, Sarah Goldstein, Adriana Grant, Hillery Hugg, Gabriela Jauregui, Sean Kilpatrick, Robert Kloss, Darby Larson, Tan Lin, Matthew Mahaney, Megan Martin, Gordon Massman, David Ohle, Brian Oliu, Kim Parko, Nick Ripatrazone, Kim Roberts, M Sarki, Kathryn Scanlan, Farren Stanley, Heidi Lynn Staples, Louisa Storer, Emily Toder, Ashley Toliver, J.A. Tyler, Maren Vespia, Danielle Vogel, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Rosmarie Waldrop, Joel Weinbrot, Jess Wigent, Corey Zeller.
1. Fantastic new story by Lonely Christopher at Fanzine, “That Which,” from his forthcoming book The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, out next year on Little House on the Bowery.
2. The 14th issue of Octopus is out, and brimming. Also congrats to the three selected works for publication from their recent open submissions: The Black Forest by Christopher DeWeese, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find by Jenny Zhang, and Conception by Rebecca Farivar.
3. At Montevidayo, Johannes Göransson wrote an interesting response to Daniel Nester’s ‘On Bullshitting,’ which apparently really pissed DN off. Why are people so touchy about online interaction? It seems like eating pizza without the calories. There are lots of other rooms.
Wes Anderson’s undergraduate fiction surfaces at Analecta. Afraid to read, as the cuteness might burn my eyes.
The 7th issue of the Wag’s Revue is now online, & includes a new interview with Gary Lutz by Dylan Nice: “I have too a hard time picturing anyone ever turning the pages of one of my books to worry about what that person might make of having ended up in the privacy of my paragraphs, though my heart no doubt goes out all the same.” It also contains new work by Jen Percy and an interview with Paul Harding, as well as a compelling “frenetic examination of self-loathing in the online era” by Mitch Salm.
What do you think are the 5 top online magazines, based on content, prestige, and design?