Harper Perennial and Congrats to DearLeader
Fifty-Two Stories with Cal Morgan is a ‘New Delivery Service’ from Harper Perennial intent on publishing a short story a week for an entire year. Of the site, Cal Morgan writes:
This year we’re celebrating the thriving art of the story by sharing a new one every week: most of them new, a few of them classics, from authors you know and some you don’t, each of them treasurable in its language or wit or human insight.
This week, Morgan has posted ‘The Copy Family’ by our own Blake Butler.
About the story, Morgan writes:
Here’s the first story we’ve selected from the wide array of submissions from our readers. Blake Butler writes to say that “The Copy Family” is from a book he’s just completed, not yet published. It reminded me of some of Poe’s comic stories, or of Tom Neely’s graphic novel “The Blot.” Could I describe exactly what it’s about? I’m not sure I could do this odd family story justice. But it will stay with me for a long time.
Click on over to have a read, everyone, and good work, Blake Butler.
Poe sorry for his drinking. Butler, not.
Here:
“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. “You must have conceived a queer idea of me — but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”
Compare, contrast to this in the comments.
Best compare/contrast wins a prize. Or two. I have lots of galleys and am cleaning house. Prize packages tailored to the tastes of the winner.
UPDATE:
Apologies for vagueness. In the comments, write a short essay (Oh, even just a paragraph long) comparing and contrasting Poe’s apology for his drunken behavior in New York to the video of our fearless leader screeching drunkenly about smoothies when he visited New York a couple of years ago. The video is linked to the word “this” because I was unable to embed it.
Butler takes Greenpoint: a photo diary
WHAT: Blake Butler, Gary Lutz & Robert Lopez read at WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on Thursday, 3/5/09.
Sorry, I didn’t get pictures of the other two. I don’t think Gary likes to have his picture taken, actually, and I didn’t want to spook Robert by shooting with a flash without warning first. As you can see, I didn’t give a damn about spooking Blake. He’s staying on my couch while he’s in town. Camera with flash is the least of his worries.
AFTER THE READING WE WENT TO THE PENCIL FACTORY
Ever Contemplated by PR’s husband
UPDATE! CONTEST! Find the three 80s indie/punk band album titles in his piece (one title contains the adjective rather than the noun in the two word title) and I will send you a bunch of books. I will be seriously impressed, too.
We all have a better half. My better half is actually a human being. He wrote his thoughts about Ever by Blake Butler. Here they are:
EVER: A Review
The narrative constraints of Ever – presumably a woman inside a room; that’s it – is a precarious way to write a novella. Without characters, plot arcs, locations, etc., language itself is summoned as a surrogate protagonist. The writer – thus reader – are both stripped of the typical arsenal of fiction; what is left is simply language’s ability to summon or evoke the most intrinsic visceral ‘truths’ of being alive, a collection of nerves funneled into a consciousness.
And that is, at heart, what Blake Butler’s Ever is about, a kind of timeless consciousness that is, remarkably and/or ironically, very relevant to a particular time: now – dispersed with cryptic evocations of some post-apocalyptic world, as in “[…] not that we knew the moon here anymore […]” Notice that Butler chooses the word ‘knew’ instead of the more likely ‘saw’ or ‘had.’ This suggests either a cognizant or intuitive decision to focus more on perception than facts.
new Lamination Colony
frontman Blake Butler might be too modest and decent to say something, but luckily for all of you I’m not obliged to follow suit. The new issue of Blake Butler’s exciting, excited, and excitable internet magazine LAMINATION COLONY is now up, and it’s loaded with dreams of a brighter never. It also features several HTMLGiant contributors, friends, frenemies, and people whose very existence is as of this writing still a mystery to me. See if you can guess which are which!
Mathias Svalina
Carol Novack
Ryan Manning
Didi Menendez
A SPECIAL BONUS SECTION: The Colonist Reading List, which features recommended reading lists from the likes of Robert Lopez, Peter Markus, Matt Kirkpatrick, uh me, Tao Lin, Lee Klein, etc etc etc
Elizabeth Ellen
Rauan Klassnik
David Peak
Gena Mohwish
and a whole lot more besides. So go check it out.
let the good times...
...roll!!!
Uncategorized / 39 Comments
December 15th, 2008 / 9:06 pm
December 15th, 2008 / 9:06 pm
We are all winners
Results of the Blake Butler “Ever” mean giveaway are in. (Actually they have been in since Friday. Apathy is a motherfucker.)
Blake picked Ryan Bradley. It was a toss up between Barry and Darby for me. Barry was slightly meaner.
Barry and Ryan email me your addresses. I need to put the order in before I forget.
*No retards have been depicted in this post.
Mean Mondays: Blake Butler hates your medulla oblongata
Blake Butler is the single most selfish individual on the face of this earth. Blake Butler often smells of fatty oils and spits when he talks. I don’t understand how any one finds value in his writing.
Babies eating each other is not good literature. Is it even literature?
He’s constantly writing nonsensical fluff like:
d;lk**346;d44OIIIOOOPP3ffd)
What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? It has no meaning.
Or he’ll misuse body parts in ridiculous sentence structures. “Sniff urethra farm sailing pie”
huh?
Let’s analyze why Blake is a douche.
Viewer Mail!
| from |  M. Baumer |
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| to | Justin Taylor |
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| date | Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:13 AM |
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| subject | a note from thieves jargon |
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| mailed-by | gmail.com |
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Hello Justin Taylor,
I am one of the fiction editors at Thieves Jargon. I was going to write a big thing about Thieves Jargon and Matt DiGangi after I read your HTML post today. I don’t think I’m upset. I think I most agree with Sam Pink. Similar to Zachary German I used to not care for Sam Pink until about a week ago. I was thrown off by his blog. Anyway, I wanted to get across to you that I think Matt has done some really good things with Thieves Jargon. He’s been at it for five years. He started it back when the internet was still good. I don’t know what that means. Someone once said, “The internet died two years ago.” I don’t know what they meant by this. I can only guess. They said this to me one year ago. Three years ago the internet was still alive? Maybe it’s because I don’t like to read comments. Today made me feel a little nauseous.
I believe BB is a good person. I know Matt is. The internet makes people different. I don’t think there is a right and wrong here. I am being cliche or a pussy. Someone should apologize. I will. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I think I was born out of wedlock.”
I feel like I’m doing a bad impression of Sam Pink. Fuck…Bitch…Lewd sexual movements in Langston Hughes face?
I don’t know where else to go with this. You know when you’re watching a movie and you can see the trainwreck coming and you tense up and want to kick the characters in the head because it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen next. I don’t think this is like that. I don’t think it matters that much.
Maybe I will go to your house some day in a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt or a t-shirt. That’s my threat. I hope you’re scared. You can tell all the contributors to HTML GIANT the same goes for them except for Jimmy Chen. If I was going to Jimmy Chen’s house I would make a cake. I have a very easy cake recipe. You only need soda and cake mix. Don’t tell Jimmy. I don’t want him to be disappointed in my cake.
Fuck, I feel like making Mr. DiGangi a cake. I think he deserves one. BB could probably use one. You should make him one.
Both of them wake up in the morning. DiGangi posts the daily Thieves Jargon story. BB probably looks at a Lost Highway poster or something. DiGangi gets on the subway and reads a book that probably no one else around him has heard of. The mailman probably thinks BB is a terrorist receiving airplane manuals. DiGangi works all day publishing boring textbooks, then he goes to class, comes home, does homework, and Thieves Jargon editor duties. BB probably writes a novel in that time. Etc. Etc. Etc.
I don’t know what else to say. I’ve rambled on and said nothing.
Just know I was serious about my threat. I’ve rejected people in person before. I’ve gone to people’s houses and knocked on their doors and said, “Hello, I’m from Thieves Jargon.”
I’m glad today happened.
Everyone should cheer.
Hail DiGangi.
I don’t know what else to think.
-Mark Baumer
—
www.thievesjargon.com
www.everydayyeah.com
Gee, that was random.
********BONUS********* JUSTIN TAYLOR REPLIES:
| rom | Justin Taylor |
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| to | “M. Baumer” |
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| date | Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 11:33 AM |
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| subject | Re: a note from thieves jargon |
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| mailed-by | gmail.com |
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Hi, Mark, thanks for writing. I don’t really know what to make of your letter. To be honest, it doesn’t seem like it should have been addressed to me. It’s not exactly about any of the things I wrote about in my recent blog post, which itself was rather explicit about being somewhat predicated by, but hardly “about,” Matt DiGangi and Thieves Jargon–two entities about which I know very little, and not for lack of opportunity either.
I’m sorry that Matt has to edit boring textbooks. We must, all of us, do something. For example, I have to think of lesson plans and commute to New Jersey twice a week to teach my class, and then I have to grade my students’ papers. Let me tell you, brother, it’s no walk in the park, although I do get to walk through campus, which has many park-like qualities. Also, sometimes the students write things that are very funny. Typically, they have not done so on purpose.
Speaking of which, I have no idea what “when the internet was still good” means, but then I’m not the one who said it. Since you’re the one who said it, it is discomforting to know that you don’t know what it means either. Do you often make declarations incomprehensible even to yourself and then send them off in personal letters to strangers?
Personally, I think shoelaces both got really lame in the mid-90s, but they seem to have really re-emerged during the last year or two, totally transformed and ready to assert their relevance–even necessity, perhaps–to the culture. I can’t wait to see what happens with shoelaces next.
In closing, I wish that I could promise to keep your secret about the simplicity of your cake recipe from Jimmy, but the fact of the matter is that I’m almost certainly going to post your letter and my response (that is, this letter which I’m writing right now) on HTMLGiant later this afternoon, or possibly even this morning, so I guess he’ll probably learn the truth that way.
JT
************DOUBLE YOUR BONUS*********
M. BAUMER REPLIES TO THE REPLY:
| from | M. Baumer |
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| to | Justin Taylor |
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| date | Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 12:52 PM |
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| subject | Re: a note from thieves jargon |
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| mailed-by | gmail.com |
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Hey Justin,
I give you permission to post my email without my permission.
Please include this:
I also want to say something about BB that makes fun of the way he gets off or something, but I am not very good at shit talking.
Justin, I think you want me to kill myself. ‘Shoelaces’ was my self-termination code word when I was created as a sad pot of soup on the back left burner. Then some family ate me.
I honestly think lots of people would consider being gay with BB’s blogspot account. I guess this is a compliment. Sometimes I worry about saying anything bad about BB and any other expert bloggers because in the back of my head I think, “If they kill themselves someone in the future will read this comment of me calling them a ‘shitfuck’ and then they’ll google my name and find my address and come to my house via google maps and dump un-erasable spam on my front lawn and my wife will say, ‘how could you say that?’ and then stop talking to me over gchat and i’ll marriage will be over.”
Oh well.
To Blake
“You’re a shitfuck. Don’t kill yourself.”
Are we having a feud now? About what?
Dear Leader
Blake Butler—our fearless leader here at htmlgiant—has a novella coming from the mighty Calamari Press. Go here to pre-order it.
That is all.