While we’re on the subject of me, seven musically inclined friends of mine wrote songs inspired by my new book, The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge. You can listen to them on the book’s Bandcamp page. You can pick a favorite. You can go here to my blog and vote on that favorite. The song that gets the most votes wins the musician a hardcover copy of The Moon Tonight Feels My Revenge.
If you like Wallace Stevens
Greg Gerke is curating a week-long tribute to Wallace Stevens set to include interviews with and tributes by James Longenbach, James Robison, Ken Sparling, Eleanor Cook (author of The Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens), Cooper Renner, Me, William Walsh, Jamie Iredell and others. Check it out.
The Measure of Excellence
Over at Luna Park, David Backer wrote an open letter to the the online literary community where he says:
I had an idea recently that I want to ask you about. What do you think of having a quantitative award for literature on the Internet? The award would be given to particular stories/poems/pieces that get the most page-views.
The prize could have a website too that would rank stories in real time to see what people are reading. It would be a breathing comparative analytic constantly updating publicly like the schedule board in a train station.
It’s popular to say literary awards don’t matter. It’s the writing that matters and the pleasure or satisfaction we derive from writing that matters. If we’re nominated for an award, we say it is just an honor to be nominated. When we lose, we say it was just an honor to be nominated. If we’re not nominated we say awards don’t matter, we don’t care, it’s the writing that matters, we’re happy for those writers who were nominated.
Blurb watching
An initial cover version of Freedom showed an orange sky, evocative of sunrise or sunset; the “final” version has a cooling blue swath in the sky (and its lake reflection) which broadens the time-line to a more general dusk or dawn. It’s as if the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux, whose air-conditioned offices are a balm for those successful enough to work there, weary of the humid “southern” light, wanted to Yankee it up and “cool it down.” The blue, visually, plays off the bird; and painterly, is the compliment of the orange. As a rule, I don’t like birds, nature, or rasterized font in perspective on covers, but I actually like this cover (I guess three wrongs make a right). The pictured lake is undoubtedly the Minnesotan lake at which the novel’s most manic drama occurs, and I’m transported there, the vector of my sad literary Updikian erection pointed at an awesome fuck scene, careful not to get any paper cuts.
Blake Butler—
What writers do you think have the most entertaining or thought provoking Twitter feeds?
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New Sixth Finch
Remember how a wave is a loanword from sign language? How poor is a diet of opossums? How sometimes there’s a different kind of power in the afternoon, or you are your own wife (you long to punch yourself), and you cry because you’re dating your friends’ dads and because the fire is beautiful, because you had no desire for work but work found you, such a very productive entrepreneur, all young and dressed in Technicolor, like all the secret gears and the way you have to start the fire yourself. Remember? No? That’s because you haven’t read the new issue of Sixth Finch. Poems. Art. Both. Check it out.