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.
Long Ass Interview with Tao Lin part 2 of 2
[Hi, this is Stephen Tully Dierks. I interviewed Tao Lin re his second novel, Richard Yates. This is part two of the interview. You can read the first part here.]
Are there any other artists with whom you’d like to collaborate, either directly or indirectly?
I would like to draw the album art for any band that I like. I would like to be the cover artist for an issue of McSweeney’s or Best American Non-Required Reading.
I think I feel like not collaborating on writing things at this point, unless it is a letters-type thing, like hikikomori with Ellen Kennedy.
Haley Joel Osment states in the book that Nobel Prize winners used to be depressed existentialists and now they are sociologists. Could you expound on this idea?
I think he was being sarcastic to a large degree. He maybe had some vague idea that people like Camus, Hermann Hesse, Sartre used to win the Nobel Prize and that there has been some kind of change, and that different kinds of writers now win the Nobel Prize, ones focused more on how people are like within a culture or a society, rather than within the universe, maybe, in that the “write-ups” about them seem, to Haley Joel Osment, to always mostly focus on their political or gender-issue or cultural themes (Haley Joel Osment assumes, though, that that’s just the journalists “doing their thing” and not an accurate portrayal of the writers; for example many articles connect Kafka to Prague rather than to “existential issues” or something).
Who do you think Haley Joel Osment would say is his favorite Nobel Prize winner for literature?
Maybe Knut Hamsun.
By what writer do you feel most interested in reading a review of Richard Yates for what venue?
Maybe a 5000-word review by Dennis Cooper that is somehow in New York Times Magazine (don’t think they publish reviews).
19 Comments
October 13th, 2010 / 10:57 am
October 13th, 2010 / 10:57 am
Archive Cursor Corp. Catalog NYU Face
1. If you missed last night’s live reading/q&a with Grace Krilanovich, it is now available for archived viewing here (in multiple parts, below the live feed screen).
2. Richard Nash announces Red Lemonade, the first imprint of his new Cursor publishing apparatus, including three compelling titles: Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman (Apr 2011), Zazen by Vanessa Veselka (May 2011), and Follow Me Down Kio Stark (June 2011).
3. Timothy Donnelly’s Cloud Corporation gets a 2 page review in the latest issue of the New Yorker (partial preview online): “…In Donnelly’s hands, we feel again that we live again in a universe with a god.”
4. Giancarlo DiTrapano writes about cluster headaches at Thought Catalog.
5. Arthur Neresian & Tony O’Neill will be reading together at the NYU Bookstore on Wednesday, Oct. 20th at 7pm.
4. We now have an HTMLGIANT group on Facebook you can ‘like,’ if you feel like that.
Live Giants #9: Grace Krilanovich
You missed Grace’s live broadcast but you can still check out and buy her novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, at Two Dollar Radio, and you should do that cuz it’s ooooo.
Banksy Directs Simpsons Opening
[Video removed by Fox.]
From the streets to Fox, with meta commentary yeah? Seems less subversive than just mostly, mmkay dude. It’s definitely blowing up twitter, though, which is kind of like the graffiti shithole of the internet, if easily addictive. How many more sites like this can we have that become a new daily tab in the refresh bin. My Firefox at all times does Gmail, iGoogle, Facebook, Twitter, and at least 1-2 other tabs of whatever I am trying to remember to look at again or buy something from, or just something I’m reading. Does it end? What else are you going to do? I like to sometimes login to Myspace and walk around like I’m in a bombzone. Deleted profiles, weird spam thugs talking to no one, desperate new features by the machine trying to catch up & keep alive. I like the people who are still there spinning out things as if to no one and the people who used to be there. The smartest thing Banksy ever did aesthetically I guess is keep his head out of the light.
A to Z of Stupid Feelings About Anybody
Are you hungry. Did you come because you are hungry. When you eat do you eat more than you had planned to eat and then feel so full you cannot as well move or do you limit yourself to the eating of the thing that might best keep your body toward a vision of something people look toward and do not not see in jest.
Books come in the mail. I stack them up, some on the sofa arms, some on the floor around my bed. At night in the dark trying to walk or piss I slip on them sometimes and often have to move books to make room on my desk to sit my laptop down. I’ve been thinking about reordering my books in the order that I read them. I have been keeping a list for ten years. I’ve yet to make the switch because I am afraid of disrupting the order of the stacks I’ve already put together, which is based on associations such as press, idea, time, generation, like-mindedness, or something else. I mostly know where everything is.
Can you please talk to yourself more. A public forum doesn’t demand the idea of losing steam. It doesn’t mean you are doing a service to people who are mostly wholly worthy of doing service to, but it means there is somewhere doing something and sometimes trying to eat. A girl just sat down next to me in the coffee shop and pulled her shirt down over her pants in such a way. Her pants are too long at her feet. She doesn’t seem to be trying.
Do you think it’s wrong to try. Do you think it’s wrong to say too many good things. Is there so little out here that it’s surprising that the things that get lit to are the things someone would want to talk about. I’m sure there are articles where someone is telling everybody how there are so many books coming out each year. People are worried about machines. Machines are getting older too.
Hank by Abraham Smith
Most everyone I’ve talked to about this book or about Abraham Smith in general, his reading performances or his writing, his ideas, his sense of verbal compulsion and montage of syllable, his voice, has pretty much come to agree on one point: “I have no goddamn idea where this guy came from.” His first book Whim Man Mammon, also from Action, was one I read I think in a small room and somewhat in my backyard, thinking somehow someone had learned to talk to a machine, but like a machine that used to sit in the back room of a shaving place where men came to bark secrets at other men while getting the hair done off their face. An image from one of the poems in that first of a man throwing a chair at a sweet gum tree remains one of those tranplanted sights that is just now a full part of my own head.
Earlier this year then I saw Abe read from the same poems in a larger room, channeling some kind of cross between his own admitted sound of hearing preachers through transistors growing up in Kentucky, and some kind of tangled man caught in a draft vent. Everyone I went to that reading with still talks about jesus christ that guy is something. I had to reread that first book again after that and understood it not as a machine but as someone maybe talking to the ground that used to be underneath our feet and the sky that used to have a different kind of color too, and with a shitton maybe of whiskey and old music that sits in the soles of people’s feet. [Here’s a downloadable video of Abe reading from both books.] Here’s another:
This new second book, Hank, after Hank Williams, goes even further than that first one in just inventing and channeling this who the what where how did you say mode. These poems are longer and all titled not in english but in expletive deletion symbols, probably like the weird kind of coils that seem to come up when you hear someone talk like this. I can’t even pick excerpts from these ongoings because it feels like taking the finger off a hand.
15 Comments
October 10th, 2010 / 12:29 pm
October 10th, 2010 / 12:29 pm
Ted Bundy on Writing
“The fantasy that accompanies and generates the anticipation that precedes the crime is always more stimulating than the immediate aftermath of the crime itself.”
“I don’t want to beat around the bush with you anymore. I’m just tired.”
“I’m no social scientist, and I don’t pretend to believe what John Q. Citizen thinks.”
“It was like coming out of some horrible trance or dream. I can only liken it to (and I don’t want to overdramatize it) being possessed by something so awful and alien, and the next morning waking up and remembering what happened and realizing that in the eyes of the law, and certainly in the eyes of God, you’re responsible.”
“I went down the road, throwing everything I had, the briefcase, out the window. Throwing the briefcase, the crutches, the rope, the clothes.”
“You take the individual we are talking about and then you subject him to stress. Stress happens to come randomly, but its effect on the personality is not random; it’s specific. That results in a certain amount of chaos, confusion, and frustration. That person begins to seek out a target for his frustrations. The continued nature of this stress this person was under — the nature of the flaw or weakness in his personality, together with other elements in the environment that offer him a logical target for his frustrations or escapes from reality — yields the situation we’re discussing. There is no trigger, it is truly more sophisticated than that.”
“Possessing them physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting, or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual.”
“I’m talking about going beyond retribution, which is what people want with me.”
“Countless millions who have walked this earth before us have gone through this, so this is just an experience we all share.”
“I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.”
“It’s a moment-by-moment thing. Sometimes I feel very tranquil and other times I don’t feel tranquil at all. What’s going through my mind right now is to use the minutes and hours I have left as fruitfully as possible. It helps to live in the moment, in the essence that we use it productively. Right now I’m feeling calm, in large part because I’m here with you.”
Grace Half-Off Intimacy Entertainment
1. Monday of next week (Oct 11) we’ll be hosting a live web interview / reading with Grace Krilanovich, author of the truly fantastic The Orange Eats Creeps, here on the site at 9 PM Eastern (that’s 6PM on the West Coast). Mark it! The novel was just selected for the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award.
2. Dzanc is running a 50% sale on many of their titles, too good a deal to pass up on if you’ve got some gaps in that collection you’ve been looking to fill.
3. This week The Faster Times is running a multipart epanel on intimacy and social networking involving myself, Stephen Elliott, & Christina Kingston, hosted by Jesus Angel Garcia. Part one is here, with part 2 following today, etc.
4. Those who were interested in the Wallace-inspired A Failed Entertainment exhibit I posted about at the beginning of this year should check out a new development in the series, with an open call for new exhibits for forthcoming exhibitions of the event.
Tao Lin @ Booksmith in SF 10/5/10
[Takes a second to start. Short reading, medium length q/a. I laughed a lot. Fuck you for whining, if you’re whining.]
Blake Butler—
Can we drop the “Talent borrows, genius steals” line yet? It was never really true, and sounds even more lame every time it gets “borrowed” in repetition.
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