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.
NYers: this Thursday, 7 PM at Littlefield NYC, the Post Apocalypse Survival Party feat Survival Panelists: Andrew W.K., Tony O’Neill, Matt McCarthy, and a bunch of other craze. The panel is free with electronic RVSP (see website), and afterwards is a party open to the public. Makes me wish I had the NY blood.
This month’s issue of Poetry features a buncha dudes/dudettes who won the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, which if you are like me and had no fuckclue what that means it means they got paid $15 grand for being writers. Awesome, right? People should get money for making words (truly). Let’s look at some of these fifteen-thousand dollar words, no?
Sifting in the Afternoon
by Malachi BlackSome people might describe this room as spare:
a bedside table and an ashtray and an antiquechair; a mattress and a coffee mug;
an unwashed cotton blanket and a rugmy mother used to own. I used to have
a phone. I used to have anotherroom, a bigger broom, a wetter sponge.
I used to water my bouquetof paper clips and empty pens, of things
I thought I’d want to say if given chance;but now, to live, to sit somehow, to watch
a particle of thought dote on the dustand dwindle in a little grid of shadow
on the sunset’s patchy rust seems like enough.
Oh, whoops. Seriously?
How did that blank piece of regurgitated dog anal win the moneys? Surely there are kids in 8th grade writing more interesting pap than that, yeah?
Hold on, let’s take a little look at old Malachi (pen name?)’s bio:
Malachi Black is literary editor of the New York Quarterly and a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. His work appears widely.
Oh, gotcha.
Excuse me, I was going to write a bunch more about these people, but now I have to take a blood dump, and there are plenty of sitcoms already on TV.
Thanks for killing America a little bit harder, Poetry Magazine.
Sometimes I kinda miss Foetry.
(P.S. If anybody wants to write up a close reading of this poem, or any of the other Ruth Lilly pieces in Poetry, please send it over and we’ll probably run it.)
Nice interviews with Laura van den Berg on the event of her debut What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us live now @lunapark and @thefastertimes.
Antichrist is by far the best and most well made film I’ve seen in at least a couple years.
If you’ve got the balls to be shitting on everything, you should likely have the balls to be doing something magical.
[Ariana begins around minute 16, if you want to skip the intro.]
I almost bought China Miéville’s The City in the City last night, but then I put it back and bought Foucault’s History of Madness (5x the book for the same price). It seems hard to know what sci-fi books are actually heavyhitters, and not just things to maybe replace a movie. The Miéville seems a good fit (I’ll wait for the paperback), but I’m wondering what sci-fi labeled books transcend the trappings and are just great books, in both language and idea? I’ve dabbled a good bit but never really found that much and know I’m missing a lot. I tried Dhalgren years ago and wasn’t that killed. Steve Erickson seems to be a transcender, if so much that he’s hardly even in the genre anymore. What you got? Don’t say Dick.
Ian Svenonius is a bonkersbaby. So is Mr. Prince. Here they go. (Full archives of Soft Focus here.)