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.
Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body
From its first page, Donora Hillard’s Theology of the Body presents itself a mesmerizing object of equal command and restraint. It defines, in the remove-voice of not a narrator, not a guide, but some black sound, the birthplace of the title, via 3 thin lines which crown a long white blank: “Theology of the Body is defined as the study of how God is revealed through the human body; this is also part of Pope John Paul II’s title for his collected lectures on the subject. It is being promoted throughout Catholic institutions as a sexual counter-revolution.” The remaining white that fills the page floods on, as does, often, the battered brain of the encroached.
Most of the body of the book itself continues on in this thick statement/relief shriek arrangement: as if someone has eaten through the mantle of the paper, leaving selected words and languages as would the aggressor leave the remains. Hillard does not require a lot of language to implant the tone of stroke. Many poems are a few calmly stated lines.
Winter, Michigan
you pinned me up against an oak in a park near where you were young and your hand
sang inside and you were the resurrection you were violent light behind the mountain
HTMLGIANT’s 400 Under 1
What follows is a list of what we at HTMLGIANT consider the top 400 writers worth watching under the age of 1. We all know it’s kind of hard to make predictions of the young artist, but that’s why we picked 400. These up-and-coming writers are from a lot of different countries and are of at least two different sexes. Some of them are probably even poets! We feel pretty good about it.
I keep saying we, but really I don’t want to trick you. I just compiled this all by myself. There have been many lists and lots of pining. But I, too, was scientific. Look:
During my extensive research process of compiling the 400, I talked to more than a couple dozen parents, nannies, day care owners, playground lingerers, pediatricians, obstetricians, and jr. agents. The infants range anywhere from second trimester (if its got a heart (for narrative), it’s legal) to the cut off period of exactly one year. Unfortunately there were some fantastic young pen holders who’d just had their first birthday party who we had to cross off the list. I also crossed off those babies who didn’t quite have that look in their eye. You know what I mean.
Other than their age, the work of these young authors have absolutely nothing in common that I can see. It’s a group of enormous, enormous promise. It is the future of all language. I hope you will join us as we watch these young Hemingwhos and Faulkwhatzits rise into the storyteller’s light.
Blake Butler—
Kendra Grant Malone’s Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful at Bear Creek Feed. Also, her vagina turned into a book.
16
Ken Sparling’s Book
In Book, Ken Sparkling’s newest book, which I believe partway through now not only to be his best, but many’s best, on page 21, the would-be becoming age, the page begins like this:
“A space opens among words. Move the words apart. Wire the sentences to the page. Lean over the spaces you’ve made. Do you think they will all be the same? It must be part of the problem that they won’t go away. Make the sentences cold and unknowable. Every single sentence you’ve written, let this happen. They won’t fight back. Sentences don’t fight back. They get empty. Fake. They get hard. At some point the words will change. Twist. The words seem to open very wide. When the sentences seem to point and grin at you, indifferent, grab the paper. Watch the words appear beneath your hands. Run your hands over the paper.”
I am now age 31. Page 31 of Book ends:
“He thought if he waited long enough, the little campers would calm down and stop talking amongst themselves. He thought he could just keep waiting and that eventually one of them would tell him what this was all about. The ogre had an eye where his belly button should have been. Even more disgusting, he had two belly buttons where his eyes should have been.”
I hope to live to the age of 226, the last page of this book. It’s the only way to take it all in, no matter how magical, how funny, how every graph maxed. $$$. I’m reading.
Blake Butler—
1. Gigantic is new for June and on the search for submissions!
2. Les Figues announces Not Content!
3. I just ate too much chocolate cake and it hurts!
4. So much Artaud!
Two Books I Loved Lately: Janice Lee & Alix Roubaud
KEROTAKIS by Janice Lee [Dog Horn Publishing]
Since my father’s dementia got worse, reading has been whitish. The words come in and hobble around and yet I’m often not wholly up in brain: what sticks is as if in cycle of him, little licks and bumps of old; and yet more often, where the image hits hardest like an erasing brain would, I get more. KEROTAKIS probably came into me as sheer and cleanly as I could have asked. Like Anne Carson pushed into a machine’s dreamgame, fudging the weird heart of science against the mush of time, this book goes beyond the sprawl of wanting less what and more how from a text object. What comes of color and of cramming or uncramming nameless matter among space. Via this object, while following 4 characters (a cyborg, a past scientist, the traveling brain of the scientist, and the Mother of time) through a series of beautifully spare, Beckettian-on-Burroughs narrations, Lee uploads us with aphorism, monologue, black space, image, footnote, fact (?), dialogue and arsenals of memory-smear that in their beautifully sequenced order open up some new section of the head between the head(s). “It is as impossible to produce a metal out of a plant as to make a tree out of a dog or a baby,” the book says, but what the book has made out of sentences is not not not not wholly freaking and alive.
Alix’s Journal by Alix Cleo Roubaud [Dalkey Archive]
These are the journals of the photographer, philosopher and young wife of Oulipian Jacques Roubaud, Alix, who died at 31 of a pulmonary embolism. Made up of fragments and ruminations and photographs chronicling the last 4 years of her life, these texts and images are simultaneously mindaching and sublime. In constant stress over her mind, her struggle with aesthetics, her relationships, her body, her sense of impending death, these languages seem to recognize the black oncoming, and the blank spaces in the light there before. “Fear for nothing,but after all so many things are for nothing and so it is. this evening I am not/anything at all but I write to you as I can,before myself to bed,despite the feverish frenzies of the past two nights I like this bed until very soon,until very soon (not sent).” Between the texts the images, often of the home, her gorgeous body, in bed with Jacques, forms, light, fill the space and in the white space of the language with even more air. This is a flesh machine; an apparatus in praise of Wittgenstein and in self hell, curling to make something. I don’t believe I’ll be able to put this on my shelf; it needs to stay loose, around: too passionate an object, a guidebook to some hole.
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June 15th, 2010 / 11:40 am
June 15th, 2010 / 11:40 am
YouTubers for Clean Waters: There Will Be Bell
[via Ryan MacDonald]
Blake Butler—
1. On Kickstarter, Astrophil Press is raising money to rerelase Brian Evenson’s Contagion. The video contains an interview he did on TV in France. I like how she says ‘pee-doh-file’.
2. At Transductions, David Rylance considers David Lipsky’s David Foster Wallace book. Triple D.