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.
Random Ass Live Reading Of Some Recent Books I Like #6
The reading is over.
I read from:
Fog Gorgeous Stag by Sean Lovelace
Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City by Michael Bible
The Village on Horseback by Jesse Ball
The Iguana Complex by Darby Larson
Sparrow and Other Eulogies by Megan Martin
The Book of Interfering Bodies by Daniel Borzutzky
Tongue Party by Sarah Rose Etter
Helsinki by Peter Richards
&
The Cow by Ariana Reines
By the time you get to the murder it’s going to seem like a cough: An Interview with Andrea Seigel
I met Andrea Seigel ~5 years ago while we were both at Bennington. Unlike most writers, she was more down to talk about soap operas and strange medical conditions and wicked dance moves than book junk, which those familiar with her work probably won’t find at all surprising. So far she’s published three books of young adult fiction, of a voice surprising I think to even that genre: often wry and dark and funny, though also carrying heavy material in a rather elegantly surreptitious way. Over the past several weeks we traded emails about her latest book, The Kid Table, as well as the influence of TV and screenwriting, narrative function, daily process, the influence of the internet, particularly twitter (of which, her feed is one of my constant favorites), and more.
BB: I remember when we were in school you said you would often write in front of the TV or with the TV on, and maybe that you couldn’t write without it that way? Is that right, and do you do that still? How does that work, or what does it allow you?
AS: i used to be like that and then i don’t know why, but i didn’t want to do it anymore. maybe it was getting high-speed internet– i didn’t used to have that, and now the combination activity is that i watch tv and fuck around on the internet. around 2008 i was still writing everything but novels with the tv on, like i wrote a screenplay and an sat audiobook that year. but i started writing my young adult book to complete quiet. you know, that could also have something to do with the fact that my boyfriend was basically living with me during that period, and then he was actually living with me, and we were in one room.
the reason i used to write with the tv on was because one, there weren’t enough hours of the day to get everything in that i wanted to get in, so i had to double up. and two, i used to feel that watching tv while i was writing helped me be less neurotic about writing because i’d be half thinking about a performance on “american idol” and half thinking about my book, and maybe this is a false memory, but i remember my first book getting written so easily and so fast that way, like i don’t remember ever being stuck.
2 New From Fence: Brenner, Holiday
Super excited about new Daniel Brenner book June available now from Fence. I’ve read his first one, The Stupefying Flashbulbs, at least a dozen times. His images are jellyfukked. Also new from Fence is Harmony Holiday’s Negro League Baseball, which comes with music. You can get them both together for 30% off.
Blake Butler—
Have you ever read something and thought, “This is not writing.”? I’d like to hear about it if you have.
119
Kenneth Anger on Writing
“Nobody in America, in the modern generation, has read their mythology or legends.”
“In fireworks are released all the explosive pyrotechnics of a dream. The inflammable desires, dampened by day under the cold water of consciousness, are ignited at night by the libertarian matches of sleep, and burst forth in showers of shimmering incandescence. These imaginary displays provide a temporary relief.”
“But films are very constructed—they’re like architecture. They’re pieced together, glued together. To me, it’s a craft. It’s like making a tapestry. And I prefer to think of it—you know, um, the sweat is supposed to be invisible.”
“I’ve made several films that haven’t been shown.”
Blake Butler—
Ruth Fowler shits on Tea Obreht winning the Orange Prize: “Oh how I long for the days of writers like Nabokov: those who hadn’t spent five years learning how to put a fucking sentence together, but instead wrote with their guts.”
I am drinking gin & wrote about 7 songs as they came up on random in my itunes while they played until they ended part 2
“Dust Switch,” Squarepusher, Music is Rotted One Note
I always wished there was a stairwell in my bedroom and I never had one, you see those movies with the rooms that have the stairwells that spiral up into somewhere else, like that room in the second half of Geronimo Rex that ends the book and the weird passage of bodies through it. I spread out on the grass beside Barry Hannah’s grave last week, I rolled my back against the ground until I could see the sky behind me and the buildings there upside down, there was this yellow-lighted building where there was a party that was hanging out of the earth toward that and it was like being pressed against something in reverse gravity and I wanted to stick there but people were talking and it scrambled something like the bass in here. I always wished I could play drums but I am not a drummer-person, drummers are made out of different kind of human scrap, all drummers seem to me like they aren’t going to age at all and one day they’ll just die. This song’s ok but it really just makes me want to listen to Bitches Brew. The key tone in here is pretty nice, reminds me of crystals
“W,” Codeine, Barely Real
More keys in here, it’s like the keys in the other shut the fuck up and became the keys in this song. I wonder if you had all the songs ever written you could put them in a logical order that would just be another thing, I wonder if the length of all the songs ever written is longer than the amount of time people have been playing music, seems like yes but maybe not, when do people go to sleep, how many songs are being written right now. I don’t like this song at all really, well I guess sort of but it doesn’t song like what I remember Codeine sounding like though it’s been a long time since I pulled them up, I like those songs on albums that you skip when you are originally listening to the album a lot because you like that one song less and then later that song suddenly reappears and seems so new in the context of the others, and you can listen to it in a different way than the whole album, I’m thinking mainly of the “The Good Thing” by Talking Heads because I always hated that song until one day I didn’t. This piano part now is really getting irritating. I’ll take a sip of this drink. There’s some limeade in it which I discovered this week having in my fridge improves my life by a good 8-11%. I wish I could look up right now and see someone I didn’t expect to be here sitting in my house, it could be anybody, as long as they were supposed to be elsewhere. Will the internet let you do that one day, I hope not. Fuck a stairwell I want rope.
Blake Butler—
What’s the last book you reread that you had loved before? Did it hold up, get better, feel worse/different?
Then Disappear & Then Rise Again: An Interview with Ben Loory
Ben Loory’s first book, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day, will be published next month.
Shane Jones works in an office building 40 to 50 hours a week in Albany New York.
* * *
Shane: After reading your book I got really excited because it’s very fairy-tale land, weird, new, and a major press is publishing it. How did it come about that Penguin accepted it? Were you surprised?
Ben: Well, maybe it’s strange, but I don’t think of my stories as weird. I mean, they’re classically structured and very straightforward. In my mind, they’re a mix between Aesop’s fables and The Twilight Zone; I’ve always seen them as a very mainstream thing. The new stories I’ve been writing, the first-person ones, I think are much, much weirder. But for some reason they seem to be read as more “normal.” I haven’t yet been able to make sense of the whole thing.
