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 Live Reading of Recent Books I Like #5
Shit be over but I read from a bunch of books:
Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead by Neil Strauss [It Books]
Cop Kisser by Steven Zultanski [Bookthug]
Entrance to a colonial pageant… by Johannes Göransson [Tarpaulin Sky]
“CEOs” from No Colony 003 by Krammer Abrahams
Today and Tomorrow by Ofelia Hunt [Magic Helicopter]
The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover by Mark Leidner [Sator Press]
Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman [Cursor]
The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy [Publication Studio]
The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper [Harper Perennial]
Girl Without Arms by Brandon Shimoda [Black Ocean]
Then Reynard challenged me to read all of Vanessa Place’s Dies: A Sentence, so I did. It took five hours. Reynard left in the middle.
It’s Weird That People Think That That’s Weird: An Interview with Jamie Iredell
Earlier this year saw the release of Jamie Iredell’s second book, The Book of Freaks, from Future Tense Press, on the heels of his much beloved Prose: Poetry, A Novel. Essentially an encyclopedia-style catalog of human oddities and the author’s wild ruminations on everything from Russians to People Named Spencer and Their Wives, the whole assemblage works as a collage you can dip in and out of with immediate pleasure, but also manages to construct among its pieces a hybrid narrative that is truly singularly Iredellian. Over the past several weeks, Jamie was kind enough to take some time to talk about some of the manners of the book with me via email.
– – –
BB: Having published your first book that was largely autobiographical, but in some ways also a book full of freaks, how did you end beginning work on an actual, encyclopedia-styled Book of Freaks?
JI: I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it at all, in that I wasn’t thinking “I’m writing a book.” I was just writing shit mostly in the Notes App on my iPhone. Basically talking shit. When I thought something was funny or fucked or whatever, I’d write about it, and then in rewriting I’d make it better. Eventually I saw themes developing. I caught a bunch of these A&E shows about obese people, or folks with other debilitating conditions, like this woman with one part of her body (legs) growing out of control her entire life, so her legs were all fucked up huge while the rest of her was normal. Then I figured, if there’s something interesting about those people then there’s something equally interesting about Mexicans, or people who purposely style their hair into fauxhawks.
Forthcoming from Featherproof: Tim Kinsella
If you were in your teens or twenties in the 00s and like weirdy pop music, you probably will at least be like, whoa, what? to the announcement of Featherproof’s next forthcoming title: Tim Kinsella’s The Karaoke Singer’s Guide to Self-Defense
From what I’ve heard, this thing is as nuts as you’d expect.
Dennis Cooper says, “For all this novel’s depth of story, and that story’s grip and wealthy undercurrents, Tim Kinsella’s rushing, trippily meticulous prose is so exciting to follow that the story seems as much the novel’s soundtrack and topography as it is the point. A thorough and wildly distinctive read.”
I’m ready.
Available for preorder now.
Blake Butler—
At the A.N.D Project, a compelling collagelike interview with philosopher Richard Kearney & academic economist David Galenson about the nature of imagination and dual-creativity: “Imagination needs to be nourished by contact with what is other than itself and then, when it assimilates and digests and incorporates and incarnates with something other than itself, there’s always something other.”
An Evening of Poetry at the White House
If you’re wondering what Kenneth Goldsmith ended up doing when he read at the White House, here’s the video (he’s at 8:55).
Michael Kimball’s US [Tyrant Books, 2011]
At last in its U.S. edition, Tyrant Books makes their third release in the form of Michael Kimball’s gorgeous US (formerly released in a different version overseas as How Much of Us There Was).
This is one of like three books ever that made me cry. I read it in a bathtub, all in one go. It is essentially the story of a old man losing his wife to sickness, but rendered in a way that only Michael Kimball knows. You should find out.
Shipping now from Tyrant Books.
James Joyce likes anal
Check out James Joyce’s raunchy love letters [thanks to LL].
e.g. “I am happy now, because my little whore tells me she wants me to roger her arseways and wants me to fuck her mouth and wants to unbutton me and pull out my mickey and suck it off like a teat. More and dirtier than this she wants to do, my little naked fucker, my naughty wriggling little frigger, my sweet dirty little farter.”