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.
Klaus Kinski on Writing
“Fun? There is no fun.”
“Put a bird cage near the window so that the bird can see the sky? It’s much better to look than not to, even if it hurts.”
“You don’t need a framework. You need a painting, not a frame.”
“I could be with a woman in a bed, for weeks even, and it would seem to me like three seconds. Or 300 years.”
“Through the years it became clearer and clearer, this thing. When I had to concentrate on a person I had to become, this thing became stronger and took more of me.”
“It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away.”
“It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows.”
“People who do not see the terrible things therefore do not see the beautiful things, either.”
“I was walking through the streets of Paris. I started crying, because I could look at a man, a woman, a dog, anything, and receive it-there was no difference between physical and psychological.”
“In a way, everything concerning a movie leaves me cold.”
“They think you can dump all this and be an actor. Then they say, Good job. Do you say, Good job to an earthquake?”
“Those assholes! Do you ask a car crash for another take? Do you ask a volcano for another take? Do you ask the storm for another take?”
“I didn’t think anything. I just was Aguirre. You remember yourself in the 16th Century.”
“Why do I continue making movies? Making movies is better than cleaning toilets.”
“The ultimate acting is to destroy yourself.”
“There can be no word to express this secret. Because this secret is very simple, but it includes almost everything.”
“Don’t be sorry, OK?”
“You can call it my consciousness of using my talent like a whore uses her body: to pay the price.”
“Being conscious of all this means changing everything, like in nature; never-ending movement.”
“This is a consolation for cripples.”
Win Evan Lavender-Smith’s From Old Notebooks
As Chris Higgs discussed a while back, ELS’s recent hybrid memoir-philosophic mania-idea machine-joke book-power assemblage From Old Notebooks is simply out of control. In the vein of Markson or D’Agata, but with a manic, hilarious, intense vision that makes it so singular it’s almost its own genre, this is the kind of machine you could keep returning to at any point inside it, any line as much its own as it is a contribution to same insane whole.
Here’s a line at random: “What if God had said to Phil Mickelson, Would you rather shit your pants or shoot a double bogey on the 18th hole in the U.S. Open?”
I have an extra copy of FON to giveaway to the commenter who tells the most compelling something he or she should probably keep hidden. Winner will be selected Saturday morning.
Excerpt reading and purchase here.
Blake Butler—
1. At The Rumpus, Stephen Elliott questions the authtor copy policies of publishers, rightly insisting that the author is his own best promotion machine and should therefore have books to back it up.
2. At Abe Books, 25 iconic book covers. Any they missed? [via Moby Lives]
3. At DC’s, 80 chandeliers.
4. At n+1, Paul Maliszewski remembers David Markson.
David Markson reads at the 92nd St. Y, 2007
[Thanks to Stephen for the heads up.]
Blake Butler—
1. Apple’s dabbling in the censorship business, specifically Ulysses.
2. Kimberly King Parsons gives Eugene Marten’s Firework five stars at Time Out New York.
3. Simmons interviews Tom Bissell at Fanzine
4. I rewatched Dead Ringers for the first time in about 10 years last night. Man, that movie is fucked up.
Blake Butler—
Deborah Treisman responds to Qs about the New Yorker 20 Under 40 list via live chat. Heheh: “DEBORAH TREISMAN: I have a degree in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. I don’t think there’s only one kind of university at which aspiring writers can get an education. There’s an enormous range of educational opportunity out there.”