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 is psychotic literature – not the literature of (or by?) the psychotic. Curious minds we have – unbraced even for simple reality. Should reality change – minds flail to adjust.

What life would be like in a world where quantum effects regularly erupt into the macro world? Where the ban on macro quantum strangeness is repealed? The quotidian, daily life, boredom, depression, the functions of the body, lovingly rendered, meaning, boiled, in fourteen dimensional space. Time corruption, contraction, decoupling, as in an acid trip. Voices garbling, as when the didactic robots contract schizophrenia and babble in Martian Time Slip. Buzzing, howling, under the influence of heat.

A palace of swords reversed – symmetry reversed – not apparent, neither the symmetry nor the reversal, but mathematically modeled and demonstrable. Certain, uncertain – does the equation balance? Do the braces tie? I think that with the right definitions and declarations, the right includes, Ever would compile.

The bubble – laughing stock of the natural world. The comic relief amongst physical configurations. The membrane expanding until pressure is balanced, or rupture occurs. A bubble sufficiently compressed, imploding rather than exploding, is the only known method of producing nuclear fusion at sub-plasmic temperature.

Bled a thread, above would crud, striations of smaller spores – rhyme, alliteration, sound substitution – a muon becomes a gluon, a word becomes another, congruent, lexical devils dashing semantic symmetry.

In a hole, filling a hole with holes. Sylvia Plath starving in a crawlspace, stoned on anti-psychotics. Sound is vibration after all – if not a thing, a property of a thing. Inappropriate properties – strangeness, spin – doors, houses, rooms, dirt.

I was told that a book about nothing is about writing. Language, light, let loose, loudly. Look out.

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.

Light (even the shifty bracketed-text seems to flicker on the page) is used, I think, as a metaphor for consciousness. Early on, Butler establishes light’s residence in place of the brain with the brilliant line, “Behind my eyes the light went on.” (I got light-headed when I read that.) This has some objective significance, being that our visual world is this exact refraction of light. Butler’s use of it is not merely a romantic trope, but a way to juxtapose the ‘natural’ world (“Let there be light” Genesis-y stuff) and the unnatural ‘corrupted’ world (post-human), a world colonized by human endeavor and its architecture – which brings me his concept of ‘the house,’ Butler’s Barthian a la Lost in the Funhouse play-thing. Put simply, the ‘house’ is used to create a dichotomy with ‘light,’ representing the unnatural and natural world, respectively. The house – that which physically confines the narrator is the very same thing that launches and enables [her] hyper-solipsist narration. Ceilings, windows, and doors are mentioned in a frenetic way, unable to establish space or location. We get the sense of entropy happening, we just don’t know where: outside the house, inside the room, or — terrifyingly – inside the body.

Butler‘s version of the body, relieved from any sentimental humanist tendencies, is both a parasite and subject to parasites; a mere host (some dot on a food-chain) for fungi, mold, and bacteria. Butler‘s use of skin as some permeable sack makes it difficult to distinguish its edges. His fixation on body fat/lard reminds me of Joseph Beuys and his homeostasis concerns. For Butler, the body is not an entity, but an event.

I find the writing very ‘male,’ and the choice of a female narrator is peculiar. Perhaps Butler, given his penchant for boundary blurring, is supplying us some hermaphrodite text. Not trying to make a joke here, but while reading I kept on reminding myself “this person has a vagina.”

Light, house, body – a lovely triad by the way – functions (or dysfunctions) in the same manner. The vague motifs themselves collapse. Ever is an experiment in narrative entropy. (Not to be too gushing, but I find it more resonant than Beckett’s work of similar concern.) The result is something aesthetically brilliant and mentally nauseating. Ever is an important, enthralling read.

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.

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.