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.
Blake Butler—
An interesting ‘Top 25 Films of the Decade’ list at Hammer To Nail, with a lot of surprising or limited release picks. Netflix.
Blake Butler—
“Do you think a work that is faulty but which has fine and powerful things in it can be considered to have less authenticity than a work that is perfect but without inner resonance?” – Artaud, who will kill himself less than one year after asking (via this gorgeous object)
Blake Butler—
Anybody get some new cool junk to read? Or eat? Or touch? I have two 700 pp. nonfiction books on my lap, like someone’s sitting on me.
Blake Butler—
Kind of crushing article at Wired about the recently disbanded, 12 year process of creation, repetition, competition, innovation involved on creating the failed video game sequel Duke Nukem Forever: “George Broussard, co-owner of 3D Realms and the man who headed the Duke Nukem Forever project for its entire 12-year run. Now 46 years old, he’d spent much of his adult life trying to make a single game, and failed over and over again.”
Blake Butler—
If one were going to have a ‘John Ashbery 101’ course, what would be the syllabus? I want to dig, and am not sure where to start, and don’t really just want to pick up the Selected. Flow Chart I recall being compelled by, as well as Three Poems (I believe it was in the McSweeney’s issue that Justin edited that someone talked about a writing assignment from Donald Barthelme being “get a bottle of wine, a copy of Three Poems, and write four pages in an evening.”). Anyway, help?
Blake Butler—
Robert Swartwood nicely calls out Narrative Magazine on twitter about their $20 submission fees and their $10K NEA grant FOR A WEBSITE [“helps (a little)”] and they, as usual, avoid giving a straight answer. Bring em coal, Santa!
106.2 Books in 2009
I read 106 books this year. Actually, I read more because even in going through the list I am seeing things I remember reading, like John Dermot Woods’s collection, and Amina Cain’s, and Tim Horvath’s novella, and Justin Sirois’s and at least a handful of others, not to mention the various books I read in manuscript form for blurbing or review or feedback or whatever, and all the other writing in magazines and where else. Nor does it include chapbooks, which skips a lot, because there were a lot of good chapbooks this year. In the formal count pulled off the list of books I hold on my hard drive I read 106 books, and probably will 2 or 3 more between now and the year’s out. That doesn’t count, either, the books I started and gave up on: as such, the majority of the books on this list I enjoyed.
Anyway, this is what I wrote down that I read. Writing it down as you go, which I’ve been doing since 2001 now, helps me a lot to remember what and where and when about it. It also seems to help me move along. I limited myself to saying a single sentence about each, which was hard to keep to, and then hard to finish, because that’s a lot. Not as much, probably, as the number of books I bought this year or in years before still waiting for me on the piles around my loft, which together will one day become the bricks of my future home. So anyway, for the hell of it…
Blake Butler—
The Tyrant has posted an uncollected Gary Lutz story ‘In Kind’ from their NYT issue 3 today at Vice. “I had no friends, just timid emergency contacts. I married the second woman to come along.” Also worth checking out, an excellent interview with the stoner-Manson-looking Alan Moore.