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—
A (a dude, in midst of an actual conversation): Wait, Deb Olin Unferth isn’t famous.
C (another dude): She’s not? Of course she is. She’s famous.
A: Famous why? Because she had a book out with McSweeney’s and was in Harper’s?
C: People know who she is.
A: Writers know who she is. That’s not famous.
C: Famous, fine. She’s a buzzball. People talk about her. She’s famous enough.
B (a jew dude): Nobody is famous unless my grandmother knows who it is.
C: So are there any famous writers?
B: Philip Roth.
Lit Mags as an Empty Mob Scene & yes I know this is an oink
If there’s anything the majority of the community of literary magazines suffers from, it is a lack of imagination: a whole-on blanket of blanking in the way of actual attention demanding, which is very likely a large part of the reason why many of these magazines, and the book industry as a whole, often, doesn’t spread. Blank. Noise for noise’s sake. Tribunals and routine.
“Let’s talk about something important”
My first year at Bennington, the first thing we did at orientation in a dark room full of the whole student body and faculty was watch the Alec Baldwin monologue from Glengarry Glen Ross. We watched it with little to no introduction from the then head of the program, Liam Rector, who has since taken his own life. Liam played the clip at least every other semester for the new students, sometimes mentioning that it was the only thing they needed to get out of the program, and sometimes just sitting down and grinning wildly at the screen. A lot of people didn’t seem to understand what Liam wanted us to watch this scene for. A lot of them just shrugged it off and kept asking when the panels on publishing would be. You may or may not have seen this bit before, but thinking of it in context of the opening to an MFA program to me seems pretty right on both as in the mind of business and of art, if “mean” in a totally constructive and let’s-save-you-and-me-some-time kind of way. So, for Liam…
Rejected!
Over the past 5 years I’ve amassed quite a hunk of You Suck paper. This is not in addition to electronic You Suck paper, but just the places so far behind the times they still force you to kill trees and lick sugar paper. Here’s a rough sketch of my paper rejections spread into a half-light, see how many from Conjunctions you can find!:
So yeah. What you got? The best commented/linked/submitted photo of creatively arranged paper rejections by end of Friday wins a prize package of books and magazines, like a bunch.
Mean Week is Your Week too, I guess
Things don’t feel mean enough for Mean Week. Things feel like they should be more mean.
Please use this thread as a place to say mean things you feel no one else is saying. If the only way you feel you can say exactly what you mean is to be anonymous, go for it. I promise not to look at or share IP addresses, and no one else can see them. Total privacy. I won’t blame you for not coming out of the gate. Just want to hear some real spit and shit from anybody. About anything, myself included. Only respect can be gained.
Go?
Blake Butler—
Years ago I used to think the advice ‘tell the truth but tell it slant’ meant that you were supposed to be smarter than your reader, and that telling it slant meant weird or funny. Then I stopped thinking that, and less years ago started thinking that it means you are supposed to be smarter than yourself, and that the show is out of your control, and when you stop trying to tell the truth so hard the truth will come out of your sound. Now I don’t know what I think, and don’t want to, and that seems better than the other two entirely.
Sean Lovelace knows nothing about nachos
Anybody who happens to have bumped into the words or online speaking of Sean Lovelace (author of the recently released How Some People Like Their Eggs, which is fantastic and very smart (that will be my last positive reference to Mr. Lovelace in this post)) knows the dude really wants you to know that he loves nachos. It’s hard to get through a week of his blogging without at least some kind of reference to it, and to how much he loves them, etc., etc. He’s even published essays on the subject, including one in the David Foster Wallace memorial issue of Sonora Review.
To me, though, Lovelace’s endless tirading about the food seems overbloated, and in some ways insecure. It seems the food-language equivalent of truck nuts:
