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.
Breaking News on Paris Review Scandal
Sheep in Wolf's Clothing
Latest in the controversy regarding manuscripts recently turned down post-acceptance at the Paris Review, apparently we may get to see the maligned documents see daylight after all. According to insiders at the Peemsmen Monthly, a second-shift janitor at the P.R. headquarters, upon realizing what literary-scandal-wrongdoing-travesty he’d been made to take part in, ran back out into the trashyard where the massive P.R. dumpster is and fished out said to-be-and-no-longer-ParisReviewianed language.
The janitor, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, is currently looking to publish the lot as a “found manuscript.” He is available for contact via representation by Marble-Withersby Agency in New York.
Currently tallied among the rubble:
– A haiku by Jonathan Franzen on the brevity of life and the deliciousness of fat free yogurt
– An erasure by Nam Le of his mother’s travel diaries as a child, concerning her impregnation with him, which Nam Le erased himself from entirely, a retroactive comment on the Gulf War
– Two halfcompleted crossword puzzles teamwritten by Alice Mattison & Barbie Smeemersund
– A photograph by Charlize Theron taken from the midgrade-price seating of a recent Chicago Bulls practice (kinda blurry)
– Another haiku by Jonathan Franzen about the writing process of the first haiku, which originally appeared on a popular upcoming literary journal’s twitter feed at the tune of $400 a syllable
– A concrete poem self portrait by Rick Bass repeating the word fishinglure in various crazy anagrams
– A transcript of every adjective Richard Ford spoke while restringing his son’s guitar twice in the same afternoon
– A third haiku by Jonathan Franzen regarding the phone call he received from his mother while writing the poem about the writing of the poem, and her subsequent medical condition
– A tear-out unfoldable paper shirt designed by Martin Amis’s agent’s neighbor, a previously unpublished author
– Letters written to Al Gore by Denis Johnson in the voice of Al Gore’s dog, with audio samples contracted to have been available online for $.99 a download on a portion of the website that also will no longer grace the web
I don’t know about you, but I’m positively peeping in anticipation and great terror. Robin Hood or hoodrat? Sylvia Beach or motherfucker? We’re living in a no-holds-barred world here, people, where wicker elephants walk among the real ones. First Tin House is trying to force people to actually buy books, and now these guys want to change their minds on history. Hold me!
Gordon Lish Interview @ BOMB + Harry Crews
1. Fantastic new interview with Gordon Lish at BOMBBLOG, on the occasion of his revision of his work for the Collected publication.
GL: The less I have in mind, the more my mind can be counted upon. Unhappily, for me, mind is scarcely the whole of what applies. Call it the art of the bricoleur—making do with less. Making much out of little, a mountain out of a molehill.
2. Edited manuscript, plus photo and brief audio excerpt of Harry Crews teaching in Florida in 1980, at This Long Century.
The Coming Envelope
Compelling format from BookThug’s new literary journal, The Coming Envelope:
The Coming Envelope is BookThug’s new publication of experimental prose fiction edited and designed by Malcolm Sutton. Every issue features work from five writers. It accommodates hard-to-classify work by those already treading various precipices: uncomfortable here, courting the perverse, typographically observant, exposed to the elements, politically not unaware, falling alongside language.
Issue 1 features work by: Jacob Wren, Sheila Heti, Lily Hoang & Debra Di Blasi, John Goldbach, and Lee Henderson.
$10, on sale now.
McCarthy Lives
In a year of many masters dead, today is Cormac McCarthy’s 78th birthday. Tyler Flynn Dorholt started a thread on FB for sharing some favorite lines in celebration. Really it could be most any of his lines in most any of his books. Add your favorites here?
“Friends row by row watched his passing and waved at him with their fingers and whispered among themselves. Who’d spoke of disorders of the soul and news of the night. When you asked for the shop of the heart’s apothecary we thought you mad. We saw you took down to the brainsurgeon’s keep, deep in the cellar, under the street. Where saws sang in stoven skulls and wet bonemeal blew from an airshaft in the alleyway. Out there in the blue moonlight a gray shecorpse being loaded into a truck. It pulled away into the night. Horned minstrels, small dancing dogs in harlequin garb followed after.” – Suttree
Happy bday, big dog.
THE SICK CITY “CHANGING SEATS ON THE TITANIC” TOUR 2010
Tony O’Neill’s new novel Sick City drops today, and in the wake of it he’s hitting the road. If you are in the trajectory, have a mark! Annotated dates after the break, including NYC, TX & CA…
Blake Butler—
I am currently finishing up what will be the final issue of Lamination Colony, at least in its current incarnation. Big machine, this last piece. In the spirit, I am opening submissions to anyone for the rest of today, until midnight east coast time. I will probably only take a couple pieces, as it’s already large and scary, but send me something totally ridiculous and terrifying, please. Responses will be sent if I have room, otherwise likely just thank you in advance. Send to: laminationcolony [at] gmail [dot] com.
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On Vandalism, Ownership, Masturbation, and I/O
In April I visited the Cy Twombly museum in Houston. The door was open and there was no one at the desk. I walked around the series of rooms that form a rough circle by myself for twenty minutes before I saw or heard anybody else. I felt like at many points I could have done anything I wanted in those rooms to myself or to the paintings. I didn’t do anything but look.
In 2007, at another exhibition of work by Cy Twombly, a woman named Rindy Sam kissed 1 panel of the triptych titled Phaedrus, a set of all white canvas, getting red lipstick all over it, altering the white. She was arrested and tried in court.
The prosecution, calling it “A sort of cannibalism, or parasitism”, while admitting that Sam is “visibly not conscious of what she has done”, asked that she be fined 4500€, compelled to an assorted penalty, and to attend citizenship classes. The art work, which is worth an estimated $2 million, was on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Avignon. In November 2007 Sam was convicted and ordered to pay 1,000€ to the painting’s owner, 500€ to the Avignon gallery that showed it, and 1€ to the painter.
John Holmes on Writing
“A happy gardener is one with dirty fingernails, and a happy cook is a fat cook. I never get tired of what I do because I’m a sex fiend. I’m very lusty.”
“Sometimes you get a girl to work with who is gorgeous and with a fantastic body. That makes it all much easier. But I can concentrate on just one aspect of a girl if she doesn’t sexually appeal to me. I can concentrate on the color of her nipple or something like that and it gives me the necessary mental focus.”
“Friends will get you killed.”
‘I’ve never found a girl who could not take it. It’s really in the way you do it, though. I’ve had some women say they’ve had guys half my size who couldn’t get it in. The problem is that most guys don’t know how to read a lady and what she really wants. With some, you have to be gentle and romantic and with others you just have to get down and dirty. The secret is you have to get in touch with what they want.”
“I don`t always hide in the bathroom, sometimes I hide other places. It`s just that the bathroom is usually the only room with a lock on the door.”
“I don’t take drugs. Drugs take me.”
Ellis on Wallace
Everybody’s innovator-buddy Bret Easton Ellis, during a q/a in Hackney:
Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?Answer: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well i don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…
[via The Howling Fantods]