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—
Nice thread on the Dalkey Archive Facebook, featuring interviews with authors from their Best European Fiction 2010: Julian Gough, “Any decent writer is playing with nuances, rhythms, echoes, soundstuff that will evaporate in any literal translation. I like a lot of layers. Puns, resonances, double-meanings, Tipperaryisms, things my mum says at Christmas. Often the point of the sentence hasn’t anything to do with its literal meaning at all.”
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Alec Niedenthal interviews Rudy Wilson
[Please welcome once again the incredible Alec Niedenthal, our to-be next Giant, herein talking language in a quite incredible Facebook-based interview with Rudy Wilson. Enjoy. – BB]
I have Blake’s original post on the book, and Peter Markus’s write-up on the same, to thank for running me into Rudy Wilson’s masterful and wildly original The Red Truck. Or, I guess, for running The Red Truck into me. If I’m remembering right, after one or two editions on Knopf, The Red Truck stayed out of print until Ravenna Press reprinted it earlier this year alongside Wilson’s new collection, Sonja’s Blue. The Red Truck is Lish-edited. Lish cut about two-hundred pages out of the book and carve(re)d the sentences to his liking. Blah blah blah. The result–though I’m quite confident that the original manuscript has the same beating heart–is haunting, colorful, relentlessly strange; The Red Truck has a light and sinister southern music very much its own. This kind of writing, to me, counteracts the sordid history of the South; it is evil confronted by the sleeping noise of a brain-fucked boy (though a girl does eventually narrate, there is really no differentiation between voices), by the rhythm of his throat. Not dissimilar to Peter Markus’s boy-based songs, The Red Truck is the record of a boy shrouding violence in his sound.
Blake Butler—
Johannes Goransson has posted Joyelle McSweeney’s The “Future” of “Poetry”, involving Hiromi Ito, Kenneth Anger, Artaud, and a general consideration of the state of the state: “Poetry’s present tense rejects the future in favour of an inflorating and decaying omnipresence, festive and overblown as a funeral garland, flimsy and odiforous, generating excess without the orderliness of generations. It rejects genre. It rejects “a” language. Rejects form for formlessness. It doesn’t exist in one state, but is always making corrupt copies of itself.”
Ten Albums that Didn’t Shit Me in 00s
I kind of gave up on music during this decade. I got tired of the repeat. Or tired of things that could not be repeated, as most albums I got a hold of got thrown out of the window after a week. There were some things worth hearing a few times, as wallpaper, and then no need to hear them again. In me, music seemed to have become mostly tired of itself. On that note, here are ten albums from the last ten years that to me felt both new and worth repeating, or at least ones I spent some time with, or had their own business about them, whatever that means. Yeah, another list, feel free…
1. Liars, Drum’s Not Dead [2006]
2. Madvillain, Madvillainy [2004]
3. Storm & Stress, Under Thunder and Fluorescent Light [2000]
4. Tom Waits, Alice [2002]
5. The Angels of Light, Sing ‘Other People’ [2005]
6. Fantômas, Delìrium Còrdia [2004]
7. U.S. Maple, Acre Thrills [2001]
8. Subtle, For Hero: For Fool [2006]
9. Of Montreal, The Sunlandic Twins [2005]
10. Boredoms, Vision Creation Newsun [2000]
As much as I like these albums, along with perhaps a few others, I’m still going to maintain that this past decade has been by far the worst decade of music thus completed. 99% blank, in a bad way, and getting blanker. Somehow electronics and onlines and send this and that here and there has come to mean ‘less work, less presence’ in the sound. Here comes the 10s.
Blake Butler—
A bunch of year’s end reading reflections by people like Phillip Lopate, Rick Moody, Stephen Elliott, William Gass, Nick Flynn, Jesse Ball, etc., at The Millions.
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Kool Keith on Writing
I read an interview with Kool Keith once where somebody asked him about his vocabulary, and he gave a list of 60 words that rhyme with orange. Every time writers want to sound like they’re saying something, they say why some rule someone else said is wrong. It’s all wrong, even the wronging of the wrong, even this paragraph.
Here’s some advice from Keith on how to do a making:
“When I say ‘I get all up in your ass,’ I mean that my rap is like combat, like anal combat.”
“Leave the 70s and the 80s alone. And the 90s.”
“I’mma stay right here with the roaches and the gorillas, I don’t want to move anywhere, I’m just gonna stay right here.”
“You been rappin for 20,000 years / And you ain’t got your fuckin deal yet? / What the fuck / Don’t take your problems out on me / And the rest of you muthafuckas / Walkin around lookin like/ some old alien niggas / Muthafucka, I pull your face off / ’bout to show you what the fuck you look like / Cause you keep it real / Too real muthafuckin broke / 2001 / Nobody was sayin that shit / when I was payin for them / fuckin hot wings / Hope you burn your fuckin lips”
“Like I’ll get open on somebody’s project like they will start their album off with 4 good beats, but they’ll make a mistake. They ll put a remake here in the middle of the album, two remakes and that turns me off right there.”
“I didn’t buy my computer yet. I heard the Internet is very powerful.”
“I seen rap come from a street pole and lamps in the street.”
“I’m not against women. I’m not against men. I just write about me telling my side of how I would say something.”
and all of the lyrics to “I Don’t Believe You”
Blake Butler—
Dennis Cooper posted today about his current theater project, which sounds and looks just too ridiculously cool for words: [Basics: ‘This Is How You Will Disappear’ (2010). Director: Gisele Vienne. Texts & Dramaturgy: Dennis Cooper. Score: Stephen O’Malley (w/ Jim O’Rourke, Merzbow, Boris, Peter Rehberg). Lighting Design: Patrick Riou. Fog Effects: Fujiko Nakaya. Holographic Effects: Shiro Takatani. Performers: Jonathan Capdevielle, Jonathan Schatz, Margrét Sara Gudjónsdóttir.] Also, if you are in NYC, his ‘Jerk’ will be at the Under the Radar festival from January 7-17, tix available here. I’m aiming to make a special trip.
Box Hype Contest
See that little advertising box up in the right hand corner? Right now it’s scrolling through 3 different pictures, which in weeks and months to come will be populated with new ads, images, etc. We thought it would be cool inside the stream if we opened that space up to our users, as a chance to promote their books, chapbooks, magazines, pics of self, or anything else. So we’re opening the gates…
Through the end of next week we’ll be accepting entries for the first of a monthly series of contest prompts where one person will get a free slot of any picture they’d like to see rotating in that box (linked out to wherever, waking hype, traffic, etc.). 1 in 3 viewers of the site will see it each time it reloads. No, it can’t be porn, or really disgusting. We reserve the right to streamline too much baddy.
To win this spot, for month 1, we’re asking that you submit a response to any piece of creative work published online. A mini review of a story you liked in Diagram, or a poem you liked in Typo, or a review of a chapbook, book, anything. Critical response, creative response, whichever way, but please make it clear what you are responding to (and include a link!). One winner, out of however many entries, will be selected by a HTML Giant contributor to be named later, and that winner will select an image/link to put in the box for the next month. Simple, fun, pimping.
Posts should be 300 words or more. We’ll reserve the right to use any entry, including the winning one, as a post on the site (with you credited, of course). Send your entires through next Sunday the 27th to contest@htmlgiant.com. We’ll pick the winner and host them through January of the new year. And then February, a new contest. Etc. Go!