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.
Random Live Broadcast of Recent Books I Like
The random ass live reading is over. I will probably do it again, maybe once or twice a month when there are new books to talk about.
Here are the books I randomly read pages from this evening on uStream:
Collobert Orbital by Johan Jonson, translated by Johannes Goransson
How They Were Found by Matt Bell
The Black Eye by Brian Foley
Richard Yates by Tao Lin
Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
The Cow by Ariana Reines
Pilot by Johannes Goransson
1987 David Foster Wallace student evaluation
[Used with permission of Jessamyn West. Thank you to her.]
Blake Butler—
Books from David Markson’s personal library have been showing up in bulk at The Strand. Sad. If anybody gets some, would love to hear more about his notes. I knew living in New York was good for something.
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Postscript to Word Space (18): Andrew Ervin
[Andrew Ervin is still the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press and which Publisher’s Weekly recently named their “Pick of the Week.”]
Since February, when this original Word Spaces feature ran, I have decided to move back to Philadelphia. I thought it might be interesting to look at what happens when one’s writing area is dismantled, when it stops being what it is. It’s kind of cool and kind of terrifying at the same time.
Here are the crop circles that the buckling stacks of milk-crate bookshelves left in the rug.
Whitelaw’s Beckett’s Not I
[For the full performance, plus an intro by Whitelaw, as well as the text transcribed, see Ubu]
Blake Butler—
Ships that pass is “A collection of fake, imagined, and literary missed connections posted to Craigslist and then re-posted here with real and actual responses to fake, imagined, and literary missed connections.” And it’s good, recently featuring Sommer Browning, Fiona Maazel, ++.
Jeez, Jackal, You Sure are a Jackal!
I feel loathe to spread attention about a dude who goes by the goober moniker “The Jackal,” but the story is moderately interesting enough to bring up: supposedly notorious literary agent Andrew Wylie makes a supposed splash by selling e-book rights for books that had not supposedly had previous e-rights contracted, including Updike, Nabokov, and etc., in an exclusive contract to Amazon via his newly established Odyssey Editions, formed entirely for ebook handling. Now there’s a big legal kerfuffle over who gets to do what with what and why to who and for how much and why not me and what are you doing motherfucker that’s my vacation house #2 fund we’re talkin’ bout. Moby Lives has the full scoop.
Agents. I mean look at this guy!
Props to MHP for the 'shitforbrains' image filename
Now look at him again, in 1972!
All the LeatherJacketed Young-Once Not-Really-Literary Men
If you’d like to buy a copy of that picture to hang over your bed, the pricing & information has been included in the image like a good salesboy.
I wish George Bush era brains had popularized Styrofoam-books instead. That seems more fun.
Richard Yates | Story Prize | Fence
1. Tao Lin is hosting a huge Richard Yates contest at his blog, with cash and books and other things to win. I am reading Richard Yates right now. It’s kind of crushing and insane. Emotional-minimalist brutalism? It’s good.
2. The Story Prize has a blog, where they are hosting authors talking about their nominated books. Our man J.T. is all up in it, as are several others. Do a look!
3. New issue of Fence is out, and as always looks amazing. Checking my mailbox daily as I do during this time. My local homeboy Chris DeWeese has some poems in it from his Alternative Music series, wherein he tries to remember the lyrics to rad songs from the 90s without really relistening to the songs. I am ready to see that project become a book that I can hold.
Touch Me How I Want to Be Touched
@grahamfoust responds like a human being to the Paris Review retroactive rejection on twitter: “I’m actually not that upset–they’re giving me fries with my kill fee, and the poems were all just shit I took from Google anyway.”
@ the Observer, Christian Lorentzen gives the most evenhanded coverage of the thing in full: Dead Poem Society.
But really, if we’re going to talk about this, which I guess people insist upon, here’s a question: as a writer do you feel entitled to careful handling?
Is this handling different, say, than the care you’d receive at McDonald’s? If it is different, how is it different? Because McDonald’s is a service you are buying, and selling writing is a service you are offering, shouldn’t the quality control be more on the McDonald’s end than the other?
If kill fees are common in all other art, including journalism, why should poems carry different weight? Even outside of art, why more than any other object? If I buy a table from Crate & Barrel, then decide I can’t use the table, for whatever reason, I take the table back no questions asked.
Why should art be given special treatment? Should it?
Am I wrong to return a book I don’t like to Borders after reading part of it? What if I read the whole thing? Have I consumed?
Furthermore, why are the most popular blog posts online always about topics such as rejection, submission, balance, all things that pertain wholly to the self? Are we a consolidation of 8 year olds, looking for fingerpainting time? Where is fanfare needed more?
Aquarius Rising by Ben Fama
Now available from Ugly Duckling Presse comes Ben Fama’s Aquarius Rising…
“how much do you rely on planets? Ben Fama poses this question in his astounding astrological sequence of poems, Aquarius Rising. He doesn’t depend on planets: he sees signs in all that’s around him — sky, sea, sequins. A poetic horoscopist, he knows that there is nothing more difficult or fun than attempting to make sense of the present. For Fama, the present presages another present, and then another; and he reads it with wit and wonderment and wily smarts. I take his words to heart. Fama is the future.”
-DEREK MCCORMACK, author of The Haunted Hillbilly and The Show That Smells.
“If you love someone you might want to call her and leave Ben Fama’s poems as messages on her voicemail. The messages would be informative and casual and glowing. They would be a big deal—a glamorous shrug from the heart!”
-HEATHER CHRISTLE, author of A Difficult Farm