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.
Win Heather Christle’s ‘The Difficult Farm’
The amazing and on-point-to-the-point-of-wow Heather Christle is giving away copies of her very soon to be released debut book of poems, The Difficult Farm, which is coming this month from Octopus Books. Winners will be random, all you have to do is comment on her blog, and for the winners’ books Heather “will draw your home state on the title page from memory.” Well, shit, you better get on that.
You can also preorder the book now.
Blake Butler—
Madras Press is a new small publisher of novellas and short stories that donates its profits to charities of their authors’ choosing. The first series of 4 titles has just gone on sale at very affordable prices, including titles by Trinie Dalton (!), Aimee Bender, Rebecca Lee, and Sumanth Prabhaker. Couldn’t ask for much more.
4
from Tripticks
Not to be outdone I suggested we all strip and rub one anothers’ bodies with some very special oil I happened to have. My wife immediately muttered ‘sacrilege’, and abruptly turned away from me for the rest of the evening. Partly because of her attitude and my own position in all this I started looking around at the other women. There wasn’t really much choice. I chose about the youngest, a girl who still had the air of highschool around her. I really wasn’t turned on by her, however, she seemed to respond amazingly quickly in the candlelit room to my hands which at first I only dared put through her long dark hair. I whispered that we should go into another room. But as we were sidling out of the door, my wife, who lay naked on the altar, incense it seemed wafting from her body, called out ‘if you want to do anything do it here only don’t bug my trip.’ I had the feeling that other than the potions Nightripper had handed out he had also passed around something else. The scene resembled a Bosch vision of hell. Some women were staring, some were unusually happy, some were sick, others were screaming, and some said the walls were moving. These days if one escapes being hijacked in an airplane, mugged in the street, or sniped at by a man gone berserk, one apparently still runs the risk of getting accidentally zonked by the hors d’oeuvres at a friendly neighbourhood cocktail party. As soon as I thought this I began hallucinating, and ultimately freaked out, overturning the altar, calling Nightripper my motherfucking father. Apparently everyone soon left, except the girl, who my wife asked to stay, hoping between them they could bring me through. I remember there was a point when I didn’t want to come down, but remain on an edge that appeared to touch upon a very thin line between life and death, and such power! I felt I was capable of anything, by merely putting my hand out things would fall or rise. I was Satan with God as my servant.
– Ann Quin, Tripticks, pg. 61-62
Blake Butler—
Interesting article by John Berry in the Baltimore City Paper questioning the merits of teaching Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, leading into a larger discussion of what the fuck short stories are supposed to be for anyway.
Blake Butler—
Interesting back and forth between Darby Larson of Abjective and a submitter submitting work already published at the site by another author, check it: Especially when it comes to the deep unconscious nature of such work, would you not agree that language can have the tendency to oddly criss-cross between unknown individuals? Editors: got a good weirdo story? Send it our way…
Blake Butler—
Some of you recent commenters, I have no doubt, if handed a cheese sandwich your mother made you for your lunch, would take the sandwich and look at a second, and hand it back for where the bread had a bubble hole baked in the edge.
Blake Butler—
“A dream question (Hebrew: ‘She’elat Halom’) is a practice of divination whereby a person attains a prophetic state while dreaming, receiving a divine answer to a question meditated on before sleep. The early medieval master Hai Gaon notes a method for attaining a dream question involving fasting, purification, and meditation on a text. Based on comments by Abraham ibn Ezra and others, scholar Moshe Idel has identified this text with Exodus 14:19-21, each verse of which contains 72 consonants alluding to a mystical series of Hebrew letters said to represent the true name of God. In their autobiographical writings from the early 17th century, both mystic Hayyim Vital and rabbi Leon of Modena claim matter-of-factly to have asked a dream question.”
Blake Butler—
Guernica is in the process of serializing a novella by Jesse Ball titled Pieter Emily, part 1 is live now. A sentence: “If I were to go first into a house of stone, and then into a house of wood, and then into a house of straw, and then into a bare roof set upon poles, and then to lie upon the empty ground beneath the sky with a blanket, and then even to cast the blanket aside and lie in the cold on the open ground, would you not think that I was making a grave for myself?”
Tao Lin Reading + Q&A + Minireview
Tao Lin reads from the first section of Shoplifting from American Apparel, then answers questions about writing process, influence, shoplifting, etc.
I read and greatly enjoyed this novella a couple weeks ago. It makes some interesting use of what people who want to put tags on things could call verbal minimalism inherting cinéma vérité, as well as a mash of Andys (Warhol and Kaufman), new uses of internet language in print, and a linear-alinear timeline modeling that more correctly models everyday life than most textual attempts at representing everyday life. That’s if you want to put tags on things.
I’d prefer to just say that I laughed more at parts of this book than I’ve laughed in a long time, and I think those who see this book as ‘incomplete’ might be missing part of the point here, which is not to exploit the expectations of Tao Lin’s previous work while also not exploit some kind of forced shifting of an artist’s tone. Like many artists who are ahead of the curve, this book is ahead of a curve that you might not yet see curving, particularly because it most succeeds on the level of entertaining the reader while being ahead of the curve, which then most easily becomes mistaken as unfocused, when in fact it is the extreme opposite: focused beyond focus.
I really enjoyed this book.
You can buy it here.