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.
In giddy pleasure for our sisters, we are pleased to announce and celebrate the one year anniversary of The Rumpus, who for that whole full year has been feeding the nonstop glow of daily good. Now it’s time to enjoy that in the flesh (if you’re a NYer anyway). Those of us elsewhere can hang out in the spirit. But for those around, the digs are juicy. Looksee:
The evening will feature readings by a line-up of literary stars:
RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances
TAO LIN, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel
DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Vacation
JUSTIN TAYLOR, author of Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever
STEPHEN ELLIOTT, The Rumpus’s own editor and author of The Adderall Diaries.
With music by ALINA SIMONE and DIANE LOUVEL
WHERE: Broadway East, where Chinatown meets the Lower East Side. 171 East Broadway (nr. Rutgers). View Map. Kitchen will be open with a light menu of snacks.
WHEN: January 21, 2010
7:00pm – 10:00pm
$5
Hope to see you all there! Big love.
Why shouldn’t a book repress with its pages?
Every body is very old.
What is literal about the word ‘penis’? What do you think of when you read the word ‘penis’? If you are man? If you are a woman? Every body. For years I found it hard to imagine that my male friends also had dicks. Masturbation isn’t simulation.
“Ejaculaton is a waste of valuable resources.” Does this statement attack the female? Does this statement attack the male? Does this statement attack? Does this statement?
Some people find it hard to believe when people aren’t willing to concede that sex is sex. That in not thinking this, it is by some avoidance, some superiority, some hiding. The necessity of defecating is much more quietly acquiesced. No one questions the morality of the operation of negotiating the shitter’s ass with the shitting hole, though sometimes just as much skin is placed. And a longer lingering of air. Some of my friends find it surprising I can’t smell come. My urine the last few weeks has smelled like food. Ratios of water. Cookbooks.
Male and female rats have been shown to find it more difficult to sleep when the smell of a previously housed male rat lingers in the cage.
Sad. Dead guys and alive guys on a brightly colored graph.
Suppose an object is not required to reckon sociologically with every object it contains. Suppose it contains. Suppose even the objects that are the most accessible to placing in dotted-line-connected camps.
Fucking camps! [“See how he meant that two ways at once?”]
“Did your urethra write that?” [I wish it had.] “Which kind?”
Certain books are culled, not called.
Reading is a self-indulgent act. Blinking is a self-indulgent act, too. When books aren’t self-indulgent they aren’t there.
The politics of sitting.
Today I learned that the phrase “telefono” means Repeated blows to the ears rupturing the tympanic membranes.
When the first consideration is of a switch outside the object, the considerer has not listened. “How do I fit into this?” “All of this is…”
“These are my concerns.” “This is how I can make a [ ] via consideration.” “This is this.”
“Same/same.”
A Dissection of ‘the High Five’ in the Works of These Works Written By Those Body Formats under Pressure
What Meats Are or Are Not Avoided In the Production of My Favorite Tacos
“My Art of Your Art” “Art is”
“My Vote for the next new president”
The plane of organization is constantly working away at the plane of consistency, always trying to plug the lines of flight, stop or interrupt the movements of deterritorialization, weigh them down, restratify them, reconstitute forms and subjects in a dimension of depth.
Googling ‘penis book’ results mostly in porn. ‘Vagina book’ is much more widely varied, but contains instructions, jokes, costumes, less porn.
Trees get grown. Water in the food. Why shouldn’t a
Why shouldn’t a shouldn’t a shushushuhhhhiuushhhshhshhh h hh shhij kkkk kk kk jiui ui uiuuui uiudiu iu aisdhhakljshdf kjhasljkdflkajsd;l kfa;osdhf;jha s;jbdvk absdknvb kans dnvba;kjshdfjhasldjhfajkshdlfjhdjhfdjhfjdhfjdhfjdhjfhdjhf a jahdjfhaj;sjhf; a;sjh ;asdl.
For years I didn’t get the music. I’d slam my fists in anger over those who’d say how Beefheart knew. Funny how often those things you come to like among the most are ones that make you angry to begin with. Accumulation of a grime.
“There is only the slightest movement of the fingers that makes the v-sign different from the Nazi salute. Always watch that.”
“They’re about to poke their genitals into our cream cheese moon right now. That’s my eye; the moon is part of me. Why don’t they poke it in the sun? They’re not very daring.”
“I don’t think there’s any way you can *know* music. The minute you *know* it, you stop playing, and the minute a person stops playing, the music isn’t playing anymore.”
“For instance, the English language is the only language that has an *i* before *e* except after *c*. What’s before an *i*? Before my eyes is a sea. But the *c* I see is a sea. I’m not that word-oriented. I’m trying to use words like music so that they don’t take your mind anywhere that I want them to.”
“It’s hard to use the English language. I’d rather play a tune on a horn, but I’ve always felt that I didn’t want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you’ve got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it’s better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.”
“There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.”
“I was able to turn myself inside out, and that’s all I’m trying to do.”
BONUS: 2x Beefheart on Letterman (worth watching in full)
I interviewed Andrew Zornoza, author of the incredible Where I Stay from Tarpaulin Sky, about the book, influences, sentences, Chris Farley, photography, etc., for Bookslut. “I’m interested in new feelings that haven’t been mythologized yet, I’m trying to get as high and bent as possible. I can over-intellectualize after the fact, but in the moment, when I’m sitting in front of that computer, all that is far away, everything is far away…”
It fell completely silent. I felt like a diver who finds himself at the bottom of the ocean one minute and on solid ground the next, unable to hear whether the others are saying he’s dead or alive because he’s encapsulated in a silence as vast as if he’d brought the ocean up with him and it surrounded him now like a hue bell that no one could pass through without drowning. The fluttering plant curtains filtered the light that flickered over my eyelids as over a gray sandy bottom. I dozed off in this air that was dense and warm and green, and also poisonous, because she had already discovered me, and then, with the greatest silence, sprayed her poison in through the windows, a green poison that quickly stripped all the leaf-flesh off my human body, exposing my ribs, fluids, and reproductive system, causing me to cave in, collapse, crumble, almost vanish; yes, there was actually only a little dust remaining, and that could be easily brushed off the sheet before lying down, as if there were a little sand between the toes the evening before. I got up. A couple of drops fell from my crotch. They spread out and became a little gray spot on the sheet. A little head with ears.
Inger Christensen, Azorno, pp. 22-23 (translated from the Danish by Denise Newman)
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Inger Christensen died last year. She wrote very many books. There are no interviews with her online.
Sleepingfish 8 is out now, edited by Gary Lutz and Derek White, featuring literary text objects by: Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, Eugene Lim, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto, Adam Weinstein, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, Eduardo Recife, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Émilie Notéris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Cooper Renner, Christine Schutt, M. T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess & Ali Aktan Aşkın.
$12, with excerpts online, including music and textual collage.
In light of Justin’s excellent post below, I started thinking about how I used to think about things. Early on I wrote a lot, and constantly. I had a lot of things I hoped to do. I remembered at one point a friend had told me that one common element to many successful people was that they had early on written down their goals on paper. The concrete object of those goals existing in words then was supposed help them become true. I think I remember scoffing at that some, but then one day in 2003, before I’d really published anything I can remember, I followed his advice. Today while digging through my hard drive, I found the file there in an old folder. This was just after I’d finished the first novel I eventually abandoned, before the next 3 novels I abandoned, before I got to anything I would keep today: each one, as I realized I had to give it up, from which I learned something that helped me write the next one, and write it better, I believe. In the meantime, while those to-be-destroyed words were growing older on my hard drive, I continued to work more.
Which is maybe at least part of the point Justin was getting at: that, in all the makings, it should be about the making first, and that the spread thereafter is something else entirely, and by no means necessarily a goal in and of itself, but one that should be attended to with care. I don’t think I knew then it would be I think 3 years before I started to gather toward actualizing the first item on the list. Maybe if I knew that then I would have done something else. Maybe not. Still, since 2003, a lot has changed, environments, forums, access, but on the other hand, a lot has not. Whatever these mean for ‘where I am now,’ and as goofy or green as they may seem almost seven years later, you can take for what it is: a continuation of an idea, one still in the manner of its cycle, every day:
My Goals as of May 5, 2003
– Get short stories printed in small to medium sized magazines, starting probably with online ones, and then hopefully spreading out to print.
– Get either an agent or a publisher to accept my novel. In the meantime, continue editing the second one. In this case, a publisher would be better than an agent, but in the end, both are acceptable.
– Continue working on new short stories and random text ejaculations. Keep working on the next thing.
– DO NOT GIVE UP HOPE. Refuse to allow my aspirations to be subverted by narrow margins. Create.
– Continue to make small relationships with other writers, no matter how unaccomplished they might seem to be. At the same time, no unwarranted ass-kissing.
– After one of the first two novels has been finished, hopefully substantiate readers by spurring interest online. This part of the plan is still hazy, as I’m not sure how that operates yet, but it will come.
– Writing is writing.
This city has been burning for more than 40 years. 10 people still live there.
BONUS: An Interview with H.R. Giger