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.
Evidence of why there hasn’t been a good American film in 20 years
This is a half-scale, all CG simulation of the ‘elevator of blood’ from The Shining that I did just for amusement in spare hours. I never expected it to look exactly like the real thing. The RealFlow fluid sim uses only about 1.6 million particles and therefore appears thicker and ‘blobbyer’ than an actual water-like liquid at this scale. I think at least ten million particles would begin to look convincing, but since this took about a month to calculate and render on on I-7, 3.2gh quad core, it isnt practical to attempt more particles without a far more powerful and prohibitively expensive computer.
Next Thursday, May 27, Live Giants 5 w/ Sam Lipsyte
Mark your thing or whatever, as we’re superstoked to be hosting Live Giants 5 with the magnificent Sam Lipsyte, who will read from his home (or perhaps some surprise location) on May 27 at 9 PM Eastern, for his latest novel, The Ask. As usual, the live stream will be right here and free for all, with chatroom and q/a opened up to those who hang. See you there!
Author Spotlight / Comments Off on Next Thursday, May 27, Live Giants 5 w/ Sam Lipsyte
May 17th, 2010 / 12:35 pm
May 17th, 2010 / 12:35 pm
Blake Butler—
“The entire system of the novel in the last century, with its cumbersome machinery of continuity, linear chronology, causality, noncontradiction, was actually a last-ditch attempt to forget the disintegrated state we were left in when God withdrew from our souls, an attempt at least to keep up appearances by replacing the incomprehensible explosion of atoms, of black holes and impasses, with a reassuring, clear, unequivocal constellation woven so closely that we’d no longer hear death howling between the stitches, amidst broken threads hastily reknotted. No objection to this grandiose, unnatural project? . . . No objection, really?”
Alain Robbe-Grillet, from Ghosts in the Mirror
10
Where the Words Come From: A Gmail Fuckoff about Getting Work Done
Ryan: wat else you doing rightnow?
like this instant what ar eyou doing!
i am always curious what you doSent at 1:45 PM on Thursdayme: hahai was laying on the bedthen i got back up and saw your msgi got up cuz i thought of a sentence for this collab thing i am trying to finish a draft ofRyan: hahai seeyou just think sentences?i dont think sentencesi dunnoi cantmy braini dunnome: well i have a set of images the thing is ending withand i had a sentence that resolves one of them occuryeah i think entirely in sentences mostlybut often based out of an initial image or situation of imagesso the sentence kind of falls out of the image in specific wordsbut i dont really think about the wordsor the image
Curse Speech
From Esquire, July 2008 via Clusterflock
Blake Butler—
While I was just now reading a random small section of Cronopios and Famas from a copy I found left sitting in a small stack in a small room, a tiny hundred-leg bug suddenly scurried out from between two earlier pages and onto the white around the sentence I was reading. Close up, in my face, a little word. I screamed, threw the book down, killed the bug, looked at its smashed parts. Pretty shortly I came back to reading, suddenly creeped by the pages and nervous to go further on each word. Now suddenly it seems pointless to be writing anymore until I can figure out how to make that happen again, from the other end.
Win Robert Lopez’s Part of the World
In one of my favorite books last year, Robert Lopez’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River, a man is locked in a room with a telephone and a bed. He spends a lot of time answering phone calls from strangers, and a lot of time drawing stick men and masturbating, and rummaging through his brain contents of growing up in a place called Injury, Alaska.
The book’s title comes out of the narrator’s remembrance of his brother repeating the phrase from the TV miniseries Roots. The phrase, along with other odd small ideas, indented moments, phrases looped, present themselves so seared on the narrator’s head it is as if he’s not in this single tiny room at all. If you’ve ever wanted a perfect book to teach or observe voice as character, setting, etc., Rob is the one, both here in Kamby, and in his first book Part of the World. Few maintain such control line by line of what, where, and when while managing to keep you hypnotized in tone.
Rob has offered to give away a few copies of a rare purple-covered edition of Part of the World, never before available. To enter, just comment here with a memory of your own childhood related to some looming repetition of phrase or sound or image from TV or film.
Three winners will be selected late Thursday night.