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.
Wesley Willis’s Joy Rides
A retrospective documentary on one of my heroes. Showing just for this week at Pitchfork (follow that link for the full film, the embedded video has been removed). [via Caketrain’s twitter feed]
[I got to bump heads with Wesley once before he died. I bought a piece of his art at a show and he had me bump heads and growl with him. I miss Wesley.]
Blake Butler—
The New Yorker has an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, ‘All That’. Feel kind of immensely scared to read.
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Ricky Gervais interviews Larry David
A rare behind-the-scenes conversation with Larry David about his creative becoming and processes, in 6 parts (takes a minute to get going, you can skip to around 5:00 in part 1 to get to the meat of it, and then parts 2-5 follow in links from there…
Great Translations of 2009
NPR posts their 5 picks for best foreign fiction this year. A nice idea, but would have liked to see more.
Here are a few other 2009 releases I read in translation this year and would highly recommend:
Homage to Czerny by Gert Jonke [Dalkey Archive]
The Other City by Michal Ajvaz [Dalkey Archive]
With Deer by Aase Berg (trans. Johannes Göransson) [Black Ocean]
Tranquility by Attila Bartis [Archipelago]
Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Ito [Action Books]
Jerusalem by Goncalo M. Tavares [Dalkey Archive]
Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog [HarperCollins]
Babyfucker by Urs Allemann [Les Figues]
Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard [Vintage]
What are some of your favorite translations or works from nonamerican authors from this year?
Blake Butler—
Reup on two Diane Williams interviews, old and new, (1) by John O’Brien at Dalkey Archive, and (2) by Kevin Sampsell at New York Tyrant: “My motive is to break up and reorganize. My prayer is that a new object may be revealed. An object can be seen with clarity and still be mysterious. I love Magritte’s observation that the mind loves mystery because the mind knows that it is mysterious.”
Dock Ellis’s No Hitter on LSD
via Ken’s Twitter feed
Holiday Lists
Do people still make Christmas lists? Or Hanukkah lists or something other? Most years I am asked by family to procure one so they have some idea beyond candy or whatever. Usually the lists are mostly books and clothes. This year I asked for
The Lost Origins of the Essay edited by John D’Agata
The Drug of Art by Ivan Blatny
Three Novellas by Thomas Bernhard
a by Andy Warhol
The Mandarin by Aaron Kunin
Cinema 1 by Gilles Deleuze
The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis by Mark Gluth
and I think a pair of shoes.
What books are on your freakin’ Xmas list, or your whatever-holiday-you-like list, or if you don’t mess with that mess, what would be if you did?