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.
An Interview with Michael Martone
Depending on whom you ask, Michael Martone is either contemporary literature’s most notorious prankster, innovator, or mutineer. In 1988 his AAP membership was briefly revoked after Martone published his first two books—a “prose” collection titled Alive and Dead in Indiana and a “poetry” collection titled The Flatness and Other Landscapes—which, aside from The Flatness and Other Landscapes’ line breaks, were word-for-word identical. His membership to the Alliance of Icelandic Writers was revoked in 1991 after AIW discovered that, while Martone’s registered nom de plume had been “born” in Reykjavík, Martone himself had never even been to Iceland. His AWP membership was revoked in 2007, reinstated in 2008, and revoked again in 2010.
After his first two collections, Martone went on to write Michael Martone, a collection of fictional contributor’s notes originally published among nonfictional contributor’s notes in cooperative journals, The Blue Guide to Indiana, a collection of travel articles reviewing fictional attractions such as the Musée de Tito Jackson (most of which were, again, originally published as nonfiction), a collection of fictional interviews with his mentor Kurt Vonnegut, fictional advertisements in the margins of magazines such as Tin House and Redivider, poems under the names of nonfictional colleagues, and blurbs for nonexistent books.
But his latest book is perhaps the most revealing—Racing in Place is a collection of essays on Martone’s obsession with blimps, basketball, and the Indianapolis 500, symbols for him of “this kind of frenetic motion and also this kind of staticness in the Midwest.” Born in Northport, Michigan, Martone has often been described as a regionalist, and his relationship with the Midwest mirrors his relationship with literature: Martone thinks of the Midwest as a “strange, imaginary place, with no distinct borders or boundaries.”
Martone now lives in Tuscaloosa, where he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama. In spring 2011 Martone was arrested outside of Golyadkin’s Pub in Tuscaloosa for assaulting, allegedly, the writer Thomas Pynchon, allegedly. During Martone’s six-week sentence at Tuscaloosa County Jail, I was approved for a “non-contact visit” for our interview: meaning that Martone and I could meet face-to-face, but separated by a panel of bulletproof glass, talking to each other over yellow telephones. (It’s unclear why Martone wasn’t allowed a “contact visit”—typically an inmate serving time for a misdemeanor, especially one with a sentence as brief as Martone’s, is granted contact visits as a matter of routine, SOP—when I asked Martone about it, he refused to answer my question.) Martone wore an orange jumpsuit, did not wear but instead held a pair of tortoiseshell eyeglasses, and had not shaved since his incarceration. I was allowed one pen and one pad of paper—nothing more.
Upon his release, Martone and his wife left for Frankfurt, Germany, where they will spend what remains of his sabbatical year.
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July 14th, 2011 / 1:32 pm
July 14th, 2011 / 1:32 pm
The GZA on Writing
“One time a producer asked me, ‘what kinda beats do you like?”‘ That’s like asking me how does energy look? I can’t tell you that.”
“It should be clever. It should be fly. It should be hard. I think it should be gangsta. I can do songs that have only one profane word and it will sound just as hard as having a bunch of very profane words, because I can deliver it like that. And a lot of artists don’t realize this because they don’t control it—the environment controls them.”
“She asked me, ‘what’s your song about?’ I said, ‘it’s hip hop’ – I’m not being funny, I’m being blunt. She was like, ‘I know it’s hip hop, but what are you talkin’ about?” I’m speakin’ about so many different things… The majority of my shit is just a whole bunch of shit, but still a clear picture. You can come off deep without trying to be deep.”
“Y’know, it’s like imagine scratchin’ a lottery ticket, y’know? Sometimes you really got to go beneath to see what’s under there, if you won, y’know? It’s like listening to the album over and over. Go beneath it, listen. Listen.”
“You might not catch it for like two years or three years. You might not catch it. I’m not sayin’ that it’s deep, that what I write is so, so deep where it requires research. It doesn’t. It requires thinking.”
“It doesn’t make a difference whether you live it or you don’t. I can write about stuff I don’t live, the person who wrote Harry Potter you think they lived all that shit?! I don’t have to physically own a Rolls Royce to talk about being in one. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with talking about cars or clothes, but shit, make it interesting.”
“With the clock you can be winning on the board, but losin’ in time. It can really throw your game off. It’s like the best thing to do is not to even pay attention to the clock, like it’s not even there. If your time runs out, it runs out.”
“The majority of people are not gonna catch the lyrics at all. But I do it for myself.. Whether you catch it or you don’t, I don’t wanna make it simple. It may sound simple but…It’s like I say ‘On a man made lake there’s a sheet of ice/unskilled skaters couldn’t figure eight twice.’ I’m talkin’ about ice you can skate on. I could be talkin’ about jewelry, y’know? Then I say ‘they couldn’t figure eight twice.’ That’s sixteen, ‘cuz 8 and 8 is 16. Then I say ‘Uncut direct from the Colt.’ Now I’m talkin’ about a gun, but I don’t have to say gun. ‘Head on assault/the result was death by the bulk.’ It’s like you can see it so many different ways. That’s how it is.”
“Wu is the sound when a sword swings. Tang is what you hear when it hits an object or another sword. The tongue is a sword, when in motion it produces wind, just like when I speak. Everything is connected.”
“I don’t really know too much about astrology, but I can relate to the universe and the stars, because that’s me, that’s us, y’know.”
So Bad It’s Good: An Interview with Wolf Larsen
My wife says that I “just have a bizarre fascination with him.”
“Him” being “Wolf Larsen,” and she’s right. Like my wife, my literary-minded colleagues—and, I’m guessing, most people—have been content to indulge my fascination for a moment then brush it off, saying, “That’s great, Jamie. Yes, it’s hilarious. The guy’s crazy.”
That’s what happened when I became aware of his existence through a submission to a literary magazine (we were all together for a meeting, sitting around a large table). I kept going back to that submission, laughing intermittently for over an hour as I marveled at this literary accident. How can you not find hilarity in books with titles like Pricks, Cunts, and Motherfuckers, or Ten Thousand Penises in Your Ear? Then there’s God and the Devil Dancing through World War III Together, with my favorite cover copy for a book ever: “The characters in this book include Caligula, Marie Antoinette, Wolf Larsen, yuppie cannibals, crack whores, Adolf Hitler, the Virgin Mary, the entire human race, etc.”
What I can’t figure out is if Wolf Larsen (obviously a pseudonym, taken from the Jack London character) just totally sucks, and that’s why I sometimes find myself going back to his homepage (like rubbernecking), because he knows it and he owns it, or if he’s oblivious, or if he doesn’t care and it doesn’t matter. I’m leaning toward a combination of all these, and tossing in a little plain old crazy to top it off. Still, there’s a paradoxical value to Wolf Larsen’s existence; or maybe that’s just my obsession.
Before this interview I tried contacting Wolf Larsen for over a year. I had forgotten about him till one night with a friend I remembered him and his website and said, “You’ve got to check this fucker out; it’s hilarious.” That friend suggested this interview, so I sent emails that garnered no response. I found some online venues and poetry forums where he’d published or posted and tried getting in contact through those editors’ and other’s emails or avatars: nothing. Then the other day I googled “Wolf Larsen,” and came across a blog (mentioned below). Wolf Larsen had surfaced. A blog comment later, we started up this dialogue.
Call Heather Christle at (413) 570-3077
On the occasion of the release of her second book of poems, The Trees The Trees, which just came out from Octopus, and is indeed mazelike, Heather Christle has secured a phone number that you can call her at, through which she will read to you a poem. This begins today and will continue through July 14th.
The number is (413) 570-3077
Calls answered during Eastern Standard Times:
M: 10am-6pm
T: 10am-1pm
W: 10am-6pm
Th: 10am-1pm
F: 10am-6pm
S: 12pm-6pm
Su: 12pm-6pm
Get the book while you’re at it; it’s unprecedented, and gorgeous.
Where can we go now, motherfucker?: An Interview with A. Minetta Gould
A. Minetta Gould was raised in the mittens by a beautician. She’s since transplanted herself to the West where she worries herself with rust, the epic, and pagination. She’s the managing editor for Black Ocean and edits the journal Lonesome Fowl. She is the author of two recent chapbooks: Arousing Notoriety (Publishing Genius, 2011) and Dutch Baby Combo / The Boys are Talking about Restlessness at Five-Points (Spooky Girlfriend Press, 2011).
Nathan Logan: I first remember encountering your work in elimae, and then in the fifth issue of Caketrain. Your poems seemed strange in the best kind of way—in both issues, no other poets seemed to be up to what you were doing. It is a hard feeling/observation to quantify. Do you see yourself as writing in/out of some tradition—do you get your cues from any specific poets or schools of thought?
A Minetta Gould: I think the poems you saw in elimae and Caketrain work outside any poetic tradition for a very simple reason: I didn’t know anything about poetry, really. I started writing poems when I was 20 or 21, and I started publishing when I was 21 or 22, and I hadn’t yet realized how to examine the tradition. I was influenced by play, by being anything but the tradition, and had no desire inside myself to learn about it. The first books of poems I read were by kids—people who were maybe 25-30—from small presses. The first books I can remember buying are Jason Bredle’s A 12 Step Guide (whoever has that please give it back) and Laura Glenum’s Hounds of No (which also is no longer in my possession). I had no clue what was going on in those books, but I knew I liked it, and knew I wanted to be weird. I didn’t have time for dead white guys, the 1970s, or, heaven forbid, craft studies.
Then I turned 25 in my first year of grad school and realized it’d be super dumb of me to keep fooling myself into thinking weirdness came from ignorance. I started with the big buzz dude’s, the Surrealists, and have worked my way around the scope of what it is I think I may do. At this point in my career (I think I’m referring to an academic career here, not some sort of poetic one) there are several names/traditions that obviously have an influence on my writing: Lyn Hejinian, Mina Loy, Russell Edson, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Celan, etc. I’m intensely interested in the Lyric due to my intense studies with Martin Corless-Smith, and will probably never let those dirty little tricksters of the Surrealist Movement go.
Borders is drunk
Just looking at this spam email Borders sent out in the night, trying to sell, wine. Just looking at it.
