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.
Writers like shitty music (a sampling)
1. The Beatles
If these guys
suddenly stopped playing songs written for girls to get wet over and instead started writing ‘serious’ music, I wonder if generations years later would go around quoting and praising these fine young men as the greatest band of all time…
Naw. Ruiners of everything good.
Blake Butler—
Things to not say in blurbs or reviews so as to not sound like a tool: tour de force, startling, bad adverb + adjectives like furiously alive or wildly inventive or utterly involving, triumphant, [last name] swings for the fences, like [blank] on crack, like [blank] on LSD, romp, rollicking, breathless, a unique voice, poignant, sexy (horny is OK), well-wrought, death rattle, tongue fart doublespeak like dizzyingly-high-concept debut of genuine originality, any reference to Dada or surrealism, any employment of the phrase experimental, neo-anything, any vague or direct use of the phrase meditation such as resonant meditations, “[last name] really sings,” cautionary tale, anything about Kafka or Carver or Bukowski, any reconjuring of the phrase reminds us what it is to be human…
112
Blake Butler—
Things to not include in your bio so as to not look like a tool: Pushcart or other award nominations, that you were a finalist in a contest or a judge, every magazine credit you’ve ever gotten, where you went to school, where you got a grant or were handed money, what kind of book you’re currently shopping, why you write…
Rauan Klassnik fondles Seth Abramson
Before Rauan Klassnik joined the team here at HTML Giant, he did a little blogging in the realm of parody with a stream of posts that involved, in a semi-veiled way, the recently hotly discussed character of Seth Abramson.
Rauan provides the adventures of Sex Ableton.
They are pretty graphic, and obscenity laden, and freely riff of Sex’s wife and cock and etc, but also delve further, in the way much of Rauan’s work does, to larger ideas of identity, fucking, and, yes, love.
Here’s an excerpt:
She drops to her knees. Unzips him. There in the moonlight. In the corn.
And two hairless testicles pop out at her.
O, how cute, she exclaims, you wax!
But where’s the cock? she ponders.
And then it hits her: a house mouse cock!
O, My God she exclaims so loudly that the breath from the elongated twangy syllable she made of the word “God” swept over Sex’s balls and on to his tiny hidden cock. And it all tingles. Tingles like all the stars. All the stars crushed into a dot. A scorched waiting primordial dot.
It was as though the hand of God or some other great power or creature had touched them. He was petrified. Primary. Excited beyond the capacity of anything that measures. Mass or girth. Demons or Colin Firth.
Blake Butler—
Repeating the same thing over and over in social networks and blanket emailing my inbox is never going to make me want to buy a book. In fact, it might make me want to not buy a book. Try something else. Or better yet: just exist.
Against Transparency
It’s become a pretty popular complaint here and elsewhere: writers getting upset because there’s a literary magazine or journal who isn’t being up front about who they are and how they work. The primary complaint seems centered around the idea that editors should make themselves known to their potential writers and readers, so as to supposedly more clearly define the way the selection of work goes down, as well as lend some manner of culpability to the ramifications thereafter. As in, an editor can’t be a cock in a rejection letter, or have a real big backlog of responses waiting, without the attached weight that this will then affect their ‘reputation’ in the community. This is supposed to, I think people think, clean up on the editorial end any possible wrongdoing or ill treatment. When editors don’t do this, certain types like to claim they are “hiding behind” something, or otherwise somehow not operating on some kind of common ground of lit creation.
Who gives a fuck?
In which I kick off ‘Mean Week’ with a quote from Lyn Hejinian that seems to implicate us all
Whether by fate, chance, contingency, purposelessness, irrelevance, or best
of all, uncertainty, we are thrown around, sometimes
at each other, and no matter whether the narrative is plot-based
or character-based, we are thrown from each other
in the end, carrying borrowed being, turning round
and round. “I’m going to color outside
the lines of reggae,” A proclaims; scenery makes a difference
and with it a new personality, but what about the dog
gazing rapturously into A’s face? It’s clear that he or she is alert
to small phrasings as well as to the water level
in the creek. But, in the end, he or she will drown
in the type of creek it seems to be, a flow of sympathy
over rocks, silt, the bones of a mule, past
laurel trees and sunbathers, under suds
and water-skeeters, to Mexico and the Pacific
and to xerox — as if that would keep things
in print. To pull experience out from under
the floating oak leaves would be an act of ingratitude
and betrayal. But to meet K and M would be an honor
and a pleasure as long as no one expects me to speak.
– The Fatalist, pp. 71-72
Meat Out of the Eater by Josef Horáček, text by Lara Glenum
A rad video from an art installation featured at &Now and elsewhere, featuring text from Lara Glenum‘s Maximum Gaga. (When I saw this, it was attached in the belly of a wooden sculpture that looked like an enormous intestine.) Buy Maximum Gaga.
Meat Out of the Eater from Josef Horáček on Vimeo.