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.
Blake Butler—
Video of Peter Sotos presenting “Mine, Kept” at Le Nouveau Festival at Centre Pompidou.
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Blake Butler—
Mark Baumer tried to get funds on Kickstarter to write 50 books in one year. It didn’t get funded. He’s writing them anyway and releasing them one at a time. You can read them online and you can buy them. I love Mark Baumer.
Freedom [2010]
Online performance in a war videogame in which Eva Mattes tries to make an artwork and pleads not to be shot, only to always meet a violent death.
Fear, Loathing, and Comics
Comic book artist, Ed Piskor
If you’re walking the streets of Pittsburgh at night, be prepared to encounter an intimidating gang of comic book artists. There’s Ed Piskor, who wears sunglasses indoors, has a different Public Enemy t-shirt for every day of the week, and who Rolling Stone calls “the next big thing in books”. There’s Tom Scioli, who stutters a tad with delight when retrieving a comics-related file from his encyclopedic mind, and whose work on Godland and American Barbarian is compared to that of the eminent, Jack Kirby. Then there’s indie artist, Jim Rugg, whose books Street Angel and the Eisner-nominated Afrodisiac have made big waves in the small press scene. He also co-hosts a podcast called Tell Me Something I Don’t Know with artist, Jasen Lex. BFFs since college, they grill folks, such as Hellboy’s Mike Mignola, on what it means to live and work as an artist.
If these guys are excited about something, so am I. So when they invited me to film them at a “special event”, I jumped at the opportunity. Then they told me the shoot would take place in a subterranean warehouse in the middle of nowhere.
Jack Kirby’s 2001 series, in the basement
“No, you see, this basement is legendary,” they said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Ellwood City, Pennsylvania is a small town 45 minutes outside of Pittsburgh. In 1895, it became the first place in America where seamless steel tubes were pierced. Nowadays, Ellwood City is most synonymous with the New Dimensions Basement Sale – a bi-annual event during which a pop culture treasure trove of over half a million comics and magazines is opened for public perusal and consumption. Comic lovers from Toronto to Alabama drive tractor-trailers over the Pennsylvanian landscape to buy and sell a store’s worth of illustrated matter. Each book is priced at one dollar, whether it’s a Jack Kirby back issue that will never again be reprinted or Prophet #4, one of the most sought-after books from the 90’s comic boom.
Win Lonely Christopher’s CRUSH DREAM
Hot new shit all over the place coming from Radioactive Moat : Most recently Lonely Christopher’s CRUSH DREAM : Of which CAConrad said “DON’T BE STUPID you know as well as I do these poems boil to the top of the gravy!!” : And of which RM has kindly offered to giveaway a copy along with copies of Ji Yoon Lee’s IMMA and Lucas de Lima’s GHOSTLINES , both also from RM.
All one has to do is : “Write Three Sentences About Your Worst Crush.” : Leave your sentences as a comment and a winner will be selected by Lonely Christopher : in ~48 hrs
Blake Butler—
HTMLGIANT is now open to queries for regular or irregular columns / articles / contributions of questionable sort. Please write to blake [at] htmlgiant dot com with ideas of potential interest / content. Bizarre perspectives encouraged, as are calm or serious 1s. Will respond as best at ++++.
New York Tyrant Vol. IV Num. I
Better get this now; they always sell out fast and this will be no exception. One of the few magazines I still read cover to cover, maybe the only one. This issue is special-edited by Luke Goebel.
PAULA BOMER, HOB BROUN, CARRIE COOPERIDER, PUEHLE DIEBSONOVICH, CATHERINE FOULKROD, SUSAN FRODERBERG, RACHEL B. GLASER, BRANDON HOBSON, NOY HOLLAND, MARK LEIDNER, TAO LIN, GORDON LISH, ROBERT LOPEZ, GARY LUTZ, DAVID McLENDON, PADGETT POWELL, COOPER RENNER, PAMELA RYDER, AMBER SPARKS, JOSIAH SUMMERVILLE, J.A. TYLER, SAM VIRZI, ZACK WENTZ, COREY ZELLER.
Blake Butler—
At the Quarterly Conversation, “Ed Park, Laird Hunt, Dan Visel, Jeremy Davies, A D Jameson, John Beer, and Daniel Levin Becker each discuss one of [Harry] Mathews’s books… from The Conversions (a novel worthy of William Gaddis, as Dan Visel puts it) to Cigarettes (Mathews’ most conventional, and only truly Oulipian, novel, says Jeremy Davies) to Mathews’ poetry (discussed by award-winning poet John Beer) and his unclassifiable Selected Declarations of Dependence (discussed by his fellow Oulipian Daniel Levin Becker).”
