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.
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
Inestimable are those writers who we look forward to like children in want of being told, the arrival of whose books come in great anxiousness and sublime waiting, in the way one might for a magical movie or arrival of a friend. I can remember obsessively visiting Barnes and Noble in the weeks and months before Wallace’s Everything and More came out, how I must have been back there a couple dozen times, in each checking the Wa- partitions of the fiction, science, and philosophy sections to see if it’d been stocked (I for some reason didn’t want to buy it online, I wanted it the very day it was in stores). All of this over a book of theoretical science! Math! Who else could render such desire in my mind? In his future absence, the dome of delightful patience in expectation over future books seemed greatly dimmed.
And yet, when I heard of the upcoming release of John D’Agata’s About a Mountain from W.W. Norton, I found myself again beginning to obsess over its event. Reading his Halls of Fame several years ago I become absorbed by it, some certain modes and designs therein feeling in my fingers a certain way, a manner of speaking that combines fact and vision, architecture and heart, packed in a style that looms and moves from page to page. As well, the two anthologies of innovative essays, The Next American Essay and the brand new The Lost Origins of the Essay (which I’ve also already torn through, all 700 pages, which is a whole other sets of posts herein forthcoming), each from Graywolf, have acted as buoys or maze-mirrors in the way of thinking about interpreting and approaching language as objects and objects as language in the world, tomes that anytime I’ve felt blank or stifled for new ways of writing I’ve opened them again and felt lit up.
Even in his anthologizing and therein collaging of others’ texts, D’Agata’s poise and manner has proved for me something magical to look after, and all of this at age 36: a blink of future by present day. Say what you want about the pursuit of ‘creative nonfiction’ (for which D’Agata, by hook or crook, is in some ways a young figurehead, with degrees in both nonfiction and poetry, his style a magic wedding of the two, and more), but in what can often be an over-stylized or navel-gazing (in a bad way) or simply a very difficult thing to make seem new, D’Agata not only wields that poetic essayist branch in a way that transcends any decoration, any term, but makes it something worthy of compulsion. Where for me great writing is great writing, some great writing is a true event, on par with any sort of aesthetic experience, and that is the most needed thing, what keeps the art of it in the body, and alive. It is what we need.
In Georgia today Gov. Sonny Perdue is arguing for a new bill that will make teachers’ pay pend on how their students’ testing scores come out. Somehow the program will also cost taxpayers. Curriculum remains unexamined. In other news, though I still don’t like Kid A, I listened to “Everything in its Right Place” 57 times in repetition at JFK airport and on the plane returning home.
The Tyrant Giancarlo Ditrapano sends a word:
Hullo. The New York Tyrant has opened submissions again. I know, I know. It’s been awhile, but hold off on giving me shit before I have a chance to explain. See, I have this huge fear of submissions readers. Besides pieces suggested from friends, I am the only reader I have. That’s a bad idea, I know. The reason why I won’t take on any readers is due to the fear that they might pass over something good. I mean, I know I don’t have magic eyes or anything but what if something really great got passed up? To avoid this I’ve always had a small submissions window in order to not get too bogged down and forced to make hasty decisions. I mean, staring down a pile of slush and saying, “I’m fixing to end you, you mother,” and then going at it and throwing them so fast into the rejection pile that you never really have a chance to read their name, well, it ain’t so fair. You’d be lucky if I even got past your title. Sometimes even the first name is as far as I’d get (“There is no way I am publishing another fucking Thomas this year, sorry!”). That would be terrible. Then I would be at the bar later on, drunk, doing drugs in the bathroom with someone I don’t even like and I’d be telling them, “Yeah, I went through like 200 submissions today.” And he’d be, “That’s impossible.” And I’d be, “No, it isn’t, I’ll show you. How much of that is left? Let’s go back to mine and I’ll show you.” And we’d go back to mine and I’d say, “See!” and he’d say the slush pile looks like I didn’t really go through it but just kind of moved it to the side a bit. And he’d be right. And I’d be sad. And you’d be cheated.
But I met someone though. I took a class on plumbing this summer and met someone I think I can trust. Luke Goebel. He’ll be handling the direct submissions for now. Great guy. Plus, he lives a magical kind of life. The other day he was swimming with dolphins in fucking Hawaii (sounds cheesy but you just know it isn’t cheesy at all once you’re doing it) and an hour later was rejecting submissions for me. I need that kind of sunny extension of myself because I’m a fucking mess. It’s freezing cold in New York, my apartment is getting smaller (it really is!), and I am almost done smoking all of the non-menthol cigarettes in Hell’s Kitchen. I can no longer read the labels on my prescriptions (“Wait, is that even my name?”) and I’m thinking about shaving my head. I need a man in Havana (nonsense). I need a Marlow (not nonsense).
So, you still mad? Cool. Submissions are open. Please put it inside me. submissions@nytyrant.com
P.S. Check our submissions page first. There are only like two rules.
P.P.S. Disregard the cash prize thing on postcard. Shit’s old.
Guess I gotta start making plans again to go back to NY:
The Gallery at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Presents:
A FAILED ENTERTAINMENT
Selections from the filmography of James O. Incandenza
Exhibition Dates: Jan 29 – Feb 19th
Opening Reception: Friday, Jan 29th, 6-8 pm
Film Screening to take place during opening reception.Included as a footnote in Wallace’s novel is the Complete filmography of James O. Incandenza, a detailed list of over 70 industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, and non-dramatic commercial works. The LeRoy Neiman Gallery has commissioned artists and filmmakers to re-create seminal works from Incandenza’s filmography.
Excited to announce today a new monthly feature we’ve been drumming around for a while now, and finally ready to kick it off for 2010, HTML Giant Live Giants, a monthly reading series hosted right here on the site.
On the last non-Friday weekday of each month we’ll have a writer we love reading from their home, or perhaps surprise locations, via live streaming, 20 minutes or so followed by a chatbox-prompted q/a. With so many excellent people all over the place, and all the invites we get to readings that we wish we had a time/space portal for, we hope this will help fill some of that gap, and without necessarily putting on any pants.
The inaugural reading will be that fabulous Heather Christle. Mark your calendar to show up around here on Thursday January 28 at 9 PM Eastern and witness her incantations and brainspeaks. BYOB. No RSVP.
New Stephen Dixon story ‘Wife In Reverse,’ written at the same time as his unpublished new novel, His Wife Leaves Him, is at Matchbook, “The story originated as a compressed, reverse version of the novel, though it didn’t turn out exactly that way.”
“If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting, it should be burned.
Said Shaw.”
— from David Markson’s The Last Novel, p. 68
A list of remembrances of writers who passed in the 00s, by other writers, including one of David Foster Wallace by George Saunders, plus JG Ballard, Susan Sontag, Grace Paley, W.G. Sebald, many others, at the Guardian.
[Mark Baumer, of the Brown MFA Blog sends word of his current project, a consummation with the Carl Jr’s of the US. He also recently wrote to Chic-fil-A and got a response. He’s a slut. — BB]
Dear Carl’s Jr.,
There are a little more than 1,000 Carl’s Jr. restaurants in the United States. I would like to visit each one this summer. Please give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. If you do I will only eat Carl’s Jr. this summer. You know how sometimes old people talk about the ‘summer of love’? Someday, when I grow old, I would like to talk about ‘summer of carl’.
I have a friend. His name is ‘Karl’. I think I will ask him to change his name to ‘Carl’ if you give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr.
If you don’t give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. I think I will kill a Chinaman. I just read this Hemingway book, To Have and Have Not, and a guy named Johnson stiffs this fisherman named Harry Morgan $800 and Harry doesn’t have any money so he kills a Chinaman. If you don’t give me one-thousand free meals to Carl’s Jr. I will be hungry and I will kill a Chinaman and eat him.
I’m looking at the Carl’s Jr. Wikipedia page. There is a picture of the Carl’s Jr. in Rancho Cordova, California. That sounds like a cool place. I’m glad you put a Carl’s Jr. in that town. I look forward to eating at Carl’s Jr. in Rancho Cordova.
The other day I was reading this book by James Baldwin about a black man who is in jail. It made me pause. I started thinking, “If Carl’s Jr. can afford to give me one-thousand free meals then they can afford to give some black man who just out of jail one-thousand free meals.” I think you should give me and a black man who just got out of jail one-thousand free meals each. The two of us will then drive around and eat at every Carl’s Jr. in the United States this summer. I will write a book about the experience. It will probably be a #1 best seller. Tyler Perry will buy the movie rights. The book will be called Summer of Carl. I think the black man will be named Carl. Tyler Perry will probably change the name of the book when he turns it into a movie. Maybe he will call it: Angry Black Woman Mouthing Carls.
Anyway, I think this is a good business proposal. I want to win a million dollars. Give it to me.
Sincerely,
Mark
Brian Foley’s Sir! 3 is alive and feeding piggies. Do a know about Sam Starkweather, Andrew Michael Roberts, Kathleen Rooney, Luke Bloomfield, Chris Deweese, Chris Salerno, Rebecca Favier, Peter Davis, Garth Graeper, Karyna McGlynn, Cattalus (trans John Cotter), Claire Donato, and Kate Doughtery.