Saturday, December 1, 2007

Bear Parade & Pushcart 3 & Dream

The new Bear Parade book small pale humans by daniel spinks is now released and it is excellent. You should go read it right now. It will take about 15-20 minutes and is very worth it.

Here are some of the lines I liked best:

'"You kept saying masturbate a kitten. Did you go on the internet again."'

'But I thought of my poor sperm just lying there on the Berber carpet. I couldn't abandon them. I took them and put them in an empty pickle jar, which I hid on my side of the closet next to all the Christmas gifts I still had to wrap.'

'She cut off a part of her pancake that had not been touched by syrup and wrapped it in a napkin. She held it with two fingers and made a face like she wanted to punch something in the throat.'

Those were actually chosen pretty arbitrarily. Most every line is excellent.

Go fucking read it, damn you.

While you're at it, if you haven't yet, read Tao Lin's essay on modern fiction, which is one of the best things I've read in a while.

3 AM nominated me for the Pushcart also this year, for my poem 'eventually i will be mostly lipid.' Thanks to Tao and the someone that helped him.

I have had extremely violent dreams the past two nights. They have been very long and realistic seeming while in the dream and emotionally assaulting. The last thing I remember before I woke up today was my father, who looked like Hulk Hogan, was in a dimly lit room where he'd been assaulting some woman who was supposed to be my mother but looked nothing like her. I'd been hiding in the other room watching him attack people and show his teeth for several real time hours in the dream. At the very end he saw me watching them and had an apple he was holding and was being very casual about how he had my mother straddled on the ground and was beating her and making her scream. He was trying to force the apple in her mouth but being all teasing about it and he let her take it away from him. She thought she'd gotten the upper hand. She was beating with him with the apple while I laid on the carpet near them watching and the light was still very low. My father looked up at me smiling while my mother beat his head with the fruit. Then he took out some matches and lit the stem of the apple and grinned even bigger and the stem of the apple started to burn like a fuse and my mother who did not look anything like my mother could not get the apple out of her hand.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

yes yesyes

Josh Maday said...

congrats on the third pushcart nomination. amazing year, butler.

Anonymous said...

when will we see you on oprah?

BLAKE BUTLER said...

i appear on oprah every weekday. i am her unseen colostomy. i like to tingle.

jereme said...

I wonder if she has a designer colostomy bag, like from Dolce and Gabanna or Louis Baton.

It probably is diamond and emerald encrusted and has an electronic device that sings the dukes of hazard horn sound every time it is full.

sam pink said...

jereme, you have described my dream colostomy bag.

jereme said...

it does sound pretty fucking awesome now that I reread that.

I almost which I had a colostomy to possess such a sweet bag of shit holding.

only in dreams