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.
Stranger Than Fiction?
Sorry, this is funny. Good spirit. But funny.
Song of the day? Converge? Trying to figure out the perspective here. On a Wallace review video for the recent Pale King excerpt he talks about how you can mention “DFW” at a hipster party when people are talking about “hipster lit” like Bolano and Lispector. F’real?
Blake Butler—
At Vice, a text/image collaboration between Brian Evenson and John Sellekaers, excerpted from a book length work.
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Blake Butler—
1. Incredible post by Derek White on “travel writing,” specifically Crawford, Zornoza, and Lopez.
2. If it’s not already, Kate Zambreno’s blog Frances Farmer Is My Sister should be in your feed. A feast.
3. This $10k for disappearing challenge sounds like the one to sign up for.
Michael Kimball Guest Lecture #2: Keeping Going
So let’s say we have a great opening and maybe even a good idea or an interesting voice to go with it. Now what? How does the writer keep going? One of the things that has helped me keep going while I’m working on a novel is not thinking about it. That is, I try to not think about what I’m writing when I’m getting it down (the thinking, so to speak, comes later). For me, it’s just a voice speaking, a way of talking, and I’m trying to be receptive to it, open. I’m just trying to get from one sentence to the next sentence. Often, I do this by looking at the previous sentence—its syntax, the words in play, the acoustics of it—I’m thinking in these small ways, but not so much in bigger ways (say, story or plot or idea). I’m just trying to get material down, which is the hardest part for me. After that, after I have something to work with, then I feel like I can do something with whatever I have on the page. It’s the blankness that is difficult for me, filling in the blankness.
Here are some quotes from Sam Lipsyte, Gary Lutz, Joseph Young, and Blake Butler that discuss a similar process in somewhat different ways.
Artifice Magazine #1
New magazine Artifice, out of Chicago, has just published their first issue, with new work by many radicals, including myself and our own Roxane Gay:
Carol Berg – Jessica Bozek – Blake Butler – Neil de la Flor – Andrew Farkas – Ori Fienberg – Elisa Gabbert – Kelly Haramis – Roxane Gay – Kyle Hemmings – Tim Jones-Yelvington – Gregory Lawless – Jefferson Navicky – Lance Olsen – Joel Patton – Christopher Phelps – Derek Philips – Cynthia Reeser – Kathleen Rooney – Davis Schneiderman – Maureen Seaton – David Silverstein – Susan Slaverio – Kristine Snodgrass – William Walsh
Featuring:
Koalas, terror, that one time you watched your father boil lobsters, infidelity, faithful robots, faithless robot dogs, compromising situations, and at least one missing body.
In the spirit, they have offered to give away three free issues to HTMLGiant readers.
All you have to do is looking at their submission wishlist, which lists the kind of stuff they are looking to publish, and make a suggestion of something to add to that list. Examples are: # 1 piece you’d tell a child not to put in their mouth, # 3 halves of a story, # 1 game code that unlocks a secret level. Comment with your suggestion and 3 winners will be picked tomorrow afternoon.
In the meantime, consider picking up an issue, and/or sending your work!
[P.S. This is the 3000th post at HTMLGiant. Weird.]
R. Kelly on Writing
“It’s almost like mama jokes to me. You got some good mama jokes and I got some, you hit me up then I got some. You go first show me what you got and if they good we gonna trade off and use em. We just change up and trade up.”
“You’re trying to throw a rock at the top of the Sears tower.”
“When I’m up twenty I always play like I’m down forty.”
“I usually don’t hear my influences til the song is over with. When I’m writing I’m so into what I’m hearing on the radio in my head that I’m just like, ‘Wow, I can’t wait to finish this so everybody else can hear what I’ve just heard.’ It’s like there’s a monster in the backyard, and you’re just like, ‘Look out the window, y’all!’ I just want people to hear what’s in my head and I just be anxious to get into the studio and get it done. Once it’s done it’s like, ‘Oh man, that riff right there is like some Sam Cooke shit.’”
“My greatest competition is, well, me…”
“I’m pregnant by music.”
“It’s a silent competition. But it’s all good if you know how to keep it in perspective and have fun with it. A lot of kats don’t understand that the point of a remix is to make it better than the record, not just change it. They think that if they just change it that should do it, but what they’re really doing is just killing the original song.”
“Not only did I get an A in music but I got an A in ladies.”
“Sometimes the doctor has to inject his own self.”
Two New Covers
Two excellent new covers for two books I am really looking forward to this year:
Patrick Somerville’s The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, from Featherproof Books Fall 2010, design by Zach Dodson
(which was just announced as a Featherproof title I think yesterday, on the heels of his smash The Cradle, and while you’re at it, take a look at the covers for Christian Tebordo’s The Awful Possibilities and Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy’s, (Daddy’s? wow), which are both also damn beautiful and exiting)
Tao Lin’s Richard Yates, from Melville House 9/7/10, photography by Michael Northrup
Blake Butler—
Andrew Ervin is offering a copy of John Banville’s Kepler, signed by Banville, to the person who can correctly identify the most books in his milk crate bookshelf posted here. Send your list to our email and Andrew will find the winner tomorrow night.
benmarcus.com
Ben Marcus has updated his personal website with new content, with excerpts of some recent work (specifically, a section of “The Moors” from the latest Tin House, and a piece on Thomas Bernhard from Harper’s in 2006). Hopefully this is a precursor to his hopefully soon forthcoming next novel, The Flame Alphabet.
He’s also put up some pieces by other authors, including a ridiculously sublimed piece, “The Copper Beeches” by the excellent Mark Doten. Check this man out:
Mother, father, me, here in the mansion, she and her father over the garage, the Mechanic’s House, we called it, her father a mechanic, then a suicide, still after his death we called it the Mechanic’s House, not the Suicide’s House. Spied through bedroom window, tits in profile, bigger by the year, opera glasses, the two of us children, just think, two children, running among the sycamores, then our crawl space where the Second Nocturne hissed. Our hand-crank record player, she wouldn’t have abandoned all that. And the stench in the foyer, lounge and conservatory, rotting meat. Perhaps a human stench, a human rot
I want Doten’s book Green Zone Kidz now.
Word Spaces (18): Andrew Ervin
[Andrew Ervin is the author of Extraordinary Renditions, coming this fall from Coffee House Press. He took some time to show us around his home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits the Southern Review.]
As usual, I have a number of different projects going on and for each I write using different tools.
For short stories, book reviews, and whatever this thing for HTML Giant turns out to be, I use the program OmmWriter, which my friend Nikki recommended. I like it a great deal & encourage everyone with a Mac to download it. For the edits to Extraordinary Renditions, which will be published on Sept. 1, I’m using Word for Mac, which I detest.