I went up north uh and got some holy

Derek White wrote one of the sentences in EVER.

If someone guesses correctly in one guess which sentence it is, I will send that person a custom made mix cd of musics for you to enjoy and a book that you will probably like or something.




The 4th post in my series of posts about every story in Brian Evenson's Fugue State is now up at Corduroy Books, a look at 'Mudder Tongue' which originally appeared in McSweeney's.




Filthy Gorgeous Things is a sexy website about being sexy, it has naked pictures on it, it published my brief essay in their new issue: The Female Body as Conduit: Fleshy Corridors in the World(s) of David Lynch.




'This is not not a Contest' received more than 100 entries, I have yet to count the final count. I have read about 15% of them so far. I have marked two of those for consideration as finalists. I will try to complete this and have results by the end of next week, hopefully.





I just ate refried beans off of a large, white, plastic mixing bowl spoon.




I am very tired I still haven't slept right in about 2 weeks now.




I only want to type short declarative sentences starting with the word I from now on.




Look, me reviewed Andrew Zornoza's 'Where I Stay' from Tarpaulin Sky Press.




Me think you should watch this cool documentary on the making of U.S. Maple's amazing ACRE THRILLS album (might wanna skip to 4:30, as the beginning is just jacking around). Al Johnson's vocal recording techniques make me want to rent a hotel room and sit on the nightstand. Go read dude's lyrics n whatnot. Google U.S. Maple lyrics. It's fun.



Musics.scs.

33333333333 3333333 333 3 3 3 3333333333 333 3 3 33333333333

Just finished reading an absolutely amazing book, EUROPEANA by Patrik Ourednik. At AWP at the Dalkey table I asked Jeremy Davies to recommend me a couple of titles that I should read that I had not yet. He pointed at EUROPEANA and asked if I'd read it, I said no, he said, "Pick it up and read any page." I read half of one page and bought the book.

That kind of confidence: that literally any page in a book could make someone want to buy it: is perhaps all too rare thing in books, and yet with EUROPEANA, it could not be more true. Labeled as 'A Brief History of the 20th Century,' this book is essentially a tour of the grotesque and absurd elements of that period in the world, focusing on concentration camps, consumerism, fucked art movements, psychologies, inventions, and other compilings of the stranger auras of human life. Though the book is still rendered in fiction: if anything, it is Ourednik's even manner of reportage and interjection in the outlaying of such horrors that make it literally almost impossible to want them to stop. Ripley's Believe it or Not could only beg to have half of the resonances here.

Here, I am going to turn to a page and type a couple lines at random:

Engineers called radio wireless telephony, and some elderly people thought that radio was like the telephone and they had paid in advance for someone to telephone them and let them know where a war had broken out. And when they first watched television, they thought it was like the kinetoscope that they had seen at the world fair, and that someone in the building, such as a daughter-in-law or grandchild, was turning a handle and making fun of them. Some elderly people were also in the habit of replying to the questions asked by television or radio presenters, such as when someone on the television or radio said AND WHAT DO YOU THINK HAPPENED NEXT? they would say WELL, I REALLY DON'T KNOW, or when someone on the television or the radio said AND WHAT DO YOU THINK THE WEATHER WILL BE LIKE TOMORROW? they would say IT'S ABOUT TIME WE HAD A DROP OF RAIN, OR IT'LL PUT AN END TO THE HARVEST. Great achievements were also scored in the field of hygiene, because before the First World War people bathed infrequently and when they did, the whole family bathed in the same tub, or the whole family and the neighbors, etc.

The book goes on like this, in short bursts of knowing, often much more brutal and concerned with ideas like phone sex and genocide and communism and bastard children and etc. It is the best 122 page book I have ever read, and does more in those 122 pages than most books of any length, and is a surprisingly smooth and fun and funny read despite its heavy subject matters.







Derek White wrote a long and really excellent post about reading Wittgenstein's Mistress on the beach.






Rereading Johannes Goransson's Swedish issue of Typo makes me want to write more, in power. What an amazing collection of work. I really love the first poem by Gunnar Harding here.







Can I say I love Rauan Klassnik? He has a new ebook out, RINGING, from Kitchen Press, that does new things for ebooks, both in form and content. (a) the book has its own url rauanklassnikringing.com, which I love, and the book is offered as html text only, a printable version, and in flash with illustrations by Ron. Two innovations for ebooks there that make this project exciting before you even begin to read.

The content as well is classic Klassnik, with brash sex and convulsive imagery. I am going to walk around for the next few weeks repeating the line: "Birds like planets——all ripped up." like Rain Man.

He seems to make these little aggressive forts inside of words, half throw-uppy and often childish, half ornate and/or sublime. The closest artist I can think of to compare to Klassnik is Pasolini, for their carcrash sex powerlight and their clear care among the 'profane'.

Here is a page from the book that exhibits this to me:

Curled up against each other we licked and sucked till we came splashing in each other’s faces. A chimp’s running down through the streets in the rain. Suddenly he pulls into a doorway where a woman’s undressing. We must have looked so cool——arched back, waving. Columned. Spired. Domed.

I like how this works in shifting between high and low, gross and high, etc.

Another wonderful read from someone doing something new.






I think I have more things to say about things in a thing way but I am going to save it, it is raining here and the rain makes me want to turn off and go roll under something, I am going to try to focus on reading soon, I have been reading several things at once and though I rarely do that, I am enjoying it.



Coming next week, Thursday March 5 I am reading with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez for EVER release at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, if you live in town and have interest please mark the day, I will say more about this later.





There are several big-medium to large sized things in occurrence proceedings, which will be elucidated soon, I hope.




Going now to edit this very long novel I am halfway finished with editing a second draft of.

'Ejaculation is a waste of valuable resources.'

Thanks to everyone who has preordered EVER so far. I've been really happy about the first two days. The more that get preordered I think the more I will make to include in the free shit, which I will be telling more of soon. Very awesome, anyway, that folks have bothered.

Please check out & order EVER. I am going to keep saying that for a while, bear with me.

God help me I just joined twitter


What text by Zizek should I read? What is his 'most important' work, or at least the one I might like the best? I have always meant to read a full book but in looking at them I find it hard to know which I would most respond to. Comments?


This morning I woke up with 'I saw myself / What were you doing' written on my hand, though it wasn't there when I went to sleep and I don't remember writing it during the night.


My sleeplessness is ramping up again, I sleep two hours and want to get up. I don't. I don't know why.


Here is Derek's book trailer, for those who haven't seen it:



If anyone has readings in the southeast or northeast and would have me for a reading, please email me also. I have some dates set up in NYC, Baltimore, pending Michigan, pending Northampton, Chicago for AWP, and some others pending. I would love to do a bunch.



Awesome website for Shane Jones's LIGHT BOXES



I think I am beginning to give up. No negatives today, despite Rod Stewart coming through the damn wall.











God I can't stand brass instruments.


I think I have said 'fuck america' out loud at least 20 times today, I'm not sure why.



I am going to read Jesse Ball's new book tonight maybe. I have been waiting for the right time.



We saw LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, a new Swedish vampire movie: it does a really good job of not overburdening the idea of vampires, and making it something that could fit into the world, which makes it that much more palpable and invoking than the typical retardation of normal vampire films. The shots are really good, there is a bed explosion, there is child violence and blood and Morse code, this is a horror movie I can get behind.


Ryan Call just saved my mind.

EVER: cover, Doors video, images, etc.

Thanksgiving: EVER is nearly here. Here is the cover. Derek White blogged about it, including excerpts of images from the book that appear inside the book and now are for sale in their original gorgeous forms. In the blog Derek says: If Peter [Markus] is all about mud, then Blake is all about crud. Them's the words.

More info on ordering and blurbisms and other potential things should be forthcoming soon. If you are with a nice place that might run a review please drop me a line. If you would be so kind as to be interested in doing interviews to promote the book when it comes out, please drop me a line. It might be nice to arrange some things in advance for when it comes out. It would mean a lot to me.



Here is one of 3 blurbs that will appear on the back of the book:

Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality. - Gary Lutz



Anyhow, one of the things that is missing from Derek's post is an incredible video trailer he made to go with the book, which is hiding in the crud storm of African internets. Because his will blow mine out of the teeth, here is a promo video I made in response to his response to me, severely crippled as duh by YouTube, but still. It looks better if you look at it larger via the direct link but here it is as well:



Thanks for watching. Watch the Calamari Press site or here for ordering info, some more specs, info and etc.

** UPDATE ** A second video trailer for EVER is now live at Derek's blog.

She stroked the stroke lymph MMMMMM

I hate Christmas time until the day of Christmas. Cars. I wish gas still cost $4. I do. The luxury of 50% less traffic in the fuckville of Atlanta was so worth the doubledime. I am going to set an oilfield on fire. People here think they can go straight through you when they switch lanes. No collision if you are moving horizontal. Faux urban redneck dynasty. Dick eaters.

OK

Regardless, HTML Giant is doing a Indie Press Secret Santa, check it out, sign up.








The final components of EVER are now in place. The cover is mostly finalized and is totally righteous and tech-headed and made of colored light. Derek's inspiration for the cover art was in part: BUSH OF GHOSTS (I just realized how rad the new remaster of this album is: turned from 80's mud style mix to really defined, hearing all this shit you never knew was in there, amazing). Shouldn't be long before the shit goes down. Derek's art for on and in the book makes me go rubbery. No one else could have made this book.

The EVER site is different now, and primed to have various apparati that are coming together to be installed on it, I will update this as it happens, a lot of cool shit I think.








'GREAT,' which I mentioned last time is now for sale, here's how to get it, $4.








I had a sentence occur to me a couple days ago, I came to sit down and write it down as a place to start for later, instead ended up continuing to write it right then until it was 5000 words. After another 10 hours revising, etc., I think it is the best thing I've written, I had forgotten what writing a longish story feels like. It felt good. I don't know who will publish a very long story about a mother destroying her child.

I think I have about 7 stories so far for what is another set of interlinked stories set in a nether-period occurring after the period of SCORCH ATLAS, I think I am going to call it GLYPH ATLAS, I like the idea of having two paired books like that one that erupts from the other, the idea makes me feel like lifting weights made out of shaving cream, this is a note to self.









Lastly and greatly, the new print issue of Tarpaulin Sky is out, it is $12 including shipping and includes a bunch o bunches:

Cover Art by Brandon Downing. Nw work by 35 contributors: Aidan Thompson, Amber Nelson, Andrew Michael Roberts, Bernard Noël, Blake Butler, Brian Henry, Brigitte Byrd, Cal Freeman, Corey Mesler, Dan Thomas-Glass, Erin Lyndal Martin, George Kalamaras , Gregory Howard, Heather Green, Jamey Dunham, Jess Neiweem, Jill Magi, Joanna Ruocco, Jonah Winter, Kim Gek Lin Short, Kristen E. Nelson, Kristi Maxwell, Laynie Browne, Mark Cunningham, Megan Martin, Michael Clearwater, Michael Rerick, Patrick Morrissey, Peter Davis, Rae Gouirand , Rauan Klassnik , Richard Froude, Rob Cook, Sara Veglahn, and Tim Roberts.

Mine is a section of EVER, though in a pretty radically different shape than it will appear in the actual book, and with lots of different lines etc. I think of it as a wholly different thing I think. I am excited to be in TSky with great people I know like Joanna and Peter D. and Rauan and Mark Cunningham, etc., as well as what is sure to be a boatload of the new and sexy. Check her out.





4 recent Google searches that got people here:

1. a real guy give birth in his dick with no towel
2. nice tits can i try one baby bib
3. frogg in vegina
4. i want to see a man penis in a bitch or goats vegina want to see how can a man fuck them

What the hell is in the water in India?

Editing 'Ever' & Punk

I am working with Derek now from Nairobi making edits on my 'Ever' manuscript.

It is funny, making final words. With proofs from magazines I mostly always feel some kind of thing running in nodules on my back. Something final with them, but final only for a second. These edits here are 'final' final.

In the early stages now I feel very good, though, about the way things are going. Derek is making images and developing page layouts for the text that make me feel excited and ready to nail this thing into what it exactly wants to be.

The structure of the text is strange, slightly less usual than most other books. I'd used a numbering system on the lines while I was making them so I could keep the thoughts in strands, kind of layered, but as it is being put to the page the numbers are less vital, and there are other ways to guide the text. Reading the book I think in the end will be more an experience than a read, at least that is what I am hoping, and from what Derek has done so far, it feels true to think that.

People are funny about letting others edit their work. I think I like it, the interchange at least, especially when the editor is someone I trust a lot. It is like switching another tint in pane of glass at a window to see what the yard looks like that way. Something.

There are lots of little things wedged hidden in the lines that I am remembering only as I read them, I don't really remember writing most of this thing I'm finding, it's almost like editing someone else's work, which is nice.

In my room at night now there is no way to get out all the light.

Someone has been letting themselves into our apartment supposedly for upkeep reasons such as changing the blinds. When we got home from NYC there were mud prints all over the floor. They had not removed the trash outside and the trash bag was covered in huge maggots looking for a way in.

Yesterday I spent many hours line editing and moving through Derek's notes then came home and we cleaned up the house trying to make it ours again.

I tried to find a youtube clip of my favorite scene in Lost Highway, it's not even a scene really, just the parts where Bill Pullman's character is walking through the house in the dark, looking for his wife, and there are parts of the house that seem to stretch forever into darkness and he just walks into them and is gone, then reappears somewhere else.

I just now remembered that I'd said before how I felt like the 10 day novel I wrote was set in that house in Lost Highway, which is actually David Lynch's house, and I also feel this novella is set in that house, if another part of it entirely.

My friend just called to let me know he got in trouble for having printed out a mail in his Gmail browser to hand in to a professor at his school, which happened to have his Gmail chat buddy list on the page with it, including my current away message 'MY PUSSY IS COLLAPSING.' The teacher was not amused.

If someone gave me $10,000 I feel like I could change my life and possibly several other people's lives, $10,000 is not a lot of money to a lot of people, it could probably even be a lot less than that, maybe just like $6 or $7 thousand, I would not use it on my self but on making things, I read somewhere today that the average CEO makes in 3 hours what an average blue collar low pay worker makes in a year. Those people should be required to give one half-hour of their pay each month to an artist to make art. Or probably to hungry people first, but I think more importantly to make art. Is that more important than eating? Let's not have anyone complain about me saying that, or how it would be bullshit if those rich people were required to give $$ away and no one else was, who gives a fuck.

I am tired of hearing about the election. The same thing is going to happen no matter what. Nothing is going to change except for what would change by the year anyway, I think, it's like flushing the toilet. The 2nd time I saw Don Caballero right before they broke up and Damon Che was pissed about the drum sound, about the way the drums had been mic'd, he got on a mic and asked if anyone in the audience had a paper chef's hat, he said 'We desperately need a paper chef's hat to come up and mic the drums.' It was funny. It's sort of like that.

Poets and Writers talked about Calamari Press kindly, I agree with the word 'punk' Peter Markus used in relation to their ethic, 'punk' has become a misplaced word, maligned, when people say 'punk' now they are often referring to shit like NOFX or Warped Tour or some other bullshit that is basically a commodification of indie beer sold to you by men whose Vans are suits, I think Calamari is more indicative of the real meaning of the word 'punk,' the meaning exhibited in the creation of work like The Clash's SANDINISTA! or the Eno records by Talking Heads, and less in the beat-yourself-in-the-head-while-puking-PBR idea that it's been torn into.

Noy Holland is punk.

New York Tyrant is punk.

Ellipsis Press is punk.

Gaspar Noe is punk.

Chris Higgs is punk.

Tao Lin is punk.

Sam Pink is punk.

Brian Evenson is punk.

Gordon Lish is punk.

DIAGRAM is punk.

Gene Morgan is very punk.

I would try to name a recent band now that's punk, real punk, but that's not really possible anymore, try to argue with me.

My friend said he'd buy my book if it has the word 'titties' in it, I am going to go find a way to get 'titties' in it, if it's not there already, it might be.

Titties are punk, sometimes, though if often not at all.

EVER

I've been waiting a long time to write this post and now I don't know really what to say.

Short word: looks like Calamari Press will be releasing my novella, EVER, sometime in the foreseeable future.

Those who happened to be among the gajillion commenters/perusers in the last few days re: my last post might have seen this buried in the comments, as EVER, I think most likely, became the first manuscript ever officially accepted via blog comment.

No clear plans as of yet as to when, etc., as Calamari father Derek White is as we speak perhaps still in the air in midst of his departure from America to live in the fairer climes of Kenya, of which I can only wish to one day follow. (I hope Derek doesn't get eaten by a wild goat: I will find the goat and eat it and vomit Derek back up and paste him back together.)

Save it to say I am beyond excited and honored to have my first full-on book with a press I could not admire more.

Thanks to Derek for this moment even in the midst of his own moment of such huge transition. And thanks to Peter Markus, the other new Calamari captain, for reading and believing in the book, and to Robert Lopez for just being a Calamari brother. It's no stretch to call these guys inspirations to me.

I'm blabbering a little, sorry.

EVER was written over several months during the period between the last story in Scorch Atlas and when I began the 10 day novel. I spent a lot of time staring at nothing between each sentence.

If you are interested in peeking at what EVER is like (I like to think of it as somewhat of a reversioning of Markson's WITTGENSTEIN'S MISTRESS fed through a Ben Marcus shredder and doused with maybe melted WHY DID I EVER and the spit of who I become only during sleeping), the only part of it that has been published to date is on the Unsaid website: 13 Plastic Doors.

Funny, also, and yet not cosmically surprising, that other brother Sam Pink almost simultaneously placed his mindfuck of a collection I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT with the brand new Paper Hero Press. Fuckmaster bananafuck. I am going to mail myself to Sam tomorrow so we can walk into the street and take turns taking wide bites out of small cars while our ears spurt black blood.

I guess I have to get a tattoo, now: I always said I would.

Derek White's MARSUPIAL

Calamari Press has now released Derek White's new novel MARSUPIAL, wherein the term 'new' is both germane and not germane in several ways, as foretold by the note in copyright page at the beginning, stating it was written from 1997-2008. From what I understand of the story and in following Derek's blog, it is based at least in part on a remasked novel, the first version of which he wrote those almost 10 years ago and toyed with after, a novel began during which he was employed as an extra or body double during the filming of a film by bizarre Quentin Tarantino once-collaborator, Roger Avery (for more on that backstory, read Derek's post re: the novel germination here).

This book excited me from the get-go not only because I love Derek's collection POSTE RESTANTE, but also because you can't help not getting excited about a book with as beautiful and provocative a cover as MARSUPIAL's:



In this case, the cover does speak to the book as a whole itself: in that, it is stark, cryptic, and gritty, and yet in all the same ways it is pristine. MARSUPIAL for the most part is a wide collage of disparate but all related elements. There are prose vignettes, there are bits from film scripts, there are the strange collagist images Derek has impressed into most of the Calamari releases, there are news clippings and other official documents, dream sequences, definitions, and on and on, and tying all of these together, there is the first person narration of Stu, a character who over the course of the novel continues to shift identities and meld with other characters to the point of a kind of laden, historical blur.

With all of these elements embedded, it would be easy for a text like this to get derailed to go so off course. In fact, the story itself, even in its most linear sequences has a tendency to skew everything to bits. In the mind of INLAND EMPIRE it follows the production of a film subject to all kinds of strange interruption. The narrator often finds himself out of body, referring to himself in quotes. As early as page 9, his head comes off his shoulders as he holds in a sneeze. As things continue, the narrator, worried he is being surveilled, obsessed with his brother's broken-english speaking girlfriend, acting as his brother's stunt double in a film that continues to become more and more flush and fractalled with the reality in which it is being filmed: all of this could make for easy, lazy 'surrealism' (in fact there is a quote somewhere embedded regarding this effect, the way laziness in art can often be passed off as intentional in the name of the surreal).

I for one have never been at peace with the 'surrealist school.' I've always tended toward bizarre images, and juxtapositions of weird dream logics, etc., but I've often felt coming up dry in the ways of the actual produce of these effects. Breton's NADJA, for instance, bored the shit out of me, and seemed passed off, sold as an idea, in the way that Bolano's THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES seemed to be trying to sell me a new leg of poetics. Surrealism, to me, should not be political, and this is where so much of the genre has gone wrong. Politics? In art? Aren't their politics enough all everywhere else? Can't we have one fucking awake state that feels as good as sleeping? Isn't that the point?

White's MARSUPIAL, though, if anything, bends surrealism into the kind of effects I've always wished to see rendered literarily. I've talked a lot on here about trying to write the David Lynch novel. Derek White, the motherfucker, may have beaten me to it, at least in a way. There are definitely Lynch-isms loaded here, the mother is referred to as 'Mary X. White,' a name fans of ERASERHEAD will immediately recognize. A lot of the meta-work and the way White manages to breed a certain feel of noir schlock and confusion humor (the screenwriter's drug use, the weird sex jokes, the studio's talkie-talkies, which translate the French film crew's directions into mangled English, 'pornography hero,' etc) with another kind of anytime-metamorphing energy, in which you literally could see the roof fly off a building overflowed with circus peanuts with little faces and feel completely okay about, not wonder what the fuck is wrong with the author. And so much of the narrative terrain moves in the way I love so much about the spatial orientations of INLAND EMPIRE and etc. It moves not as a logic earth, but as rooms connected associatively, by cosmic necessity, rather than some map sketched and pored over on the author's desk.

Somewhere near the beginning of the book the narrator's brother John says, "Personally, I think it's more interesting to write about what you don't know." This has always been, in my mind, one of the most important things to grasp in new writers, those getting told 'write what you know,' who will by and large go onto to say nothing that will ever stir anything that could not have been said by 1200 other MFA grads.

Literature for me has always felt crushed a little by realism, by BEST AMERICAN aspirations, with the need of setting place and time, getting cornered by what should or should not happen, how the characters 'feel' about it, how they assess/parse/deal with it, what's going on, even within a certain confine. The tendency to have resolution and the need for repeating images has always bothered me, and yet when there is just empty noodling, I get the same feel. It takes a deft hand to manage the surreal in a way that feels like it is doing what it should, that it has a reason to exist in the same way that Steve Vai sounds like a dickface for being all around and yet nowhere at once.

Which leads me to one of the most impressive things about MARSUPIAL, one of the things that I think I am most awed by in this weird, corrosive, and yet immensely refined book: the way White is able to take his imagery, take the sometimes intentionally obfuscated (but in a playful way) story of a man filming a film that melds with his life, his mind, his mother, his everything at once, and manages to stir it all together, with all of these disparate elements, into a thing that comes together not in a forced way, not in a 'here is why you're reading way,' not in a way that makes me angry for how it took the moody energy and explained it all to bits, but in a way that instead somehow marries these things into a non-resolutional ending, a way to leave the book, that both leaves most questions unanswered, and yet fills my stomach.

To be true, the last 20 pages of it, the climaxed chord of all these threads speaking together for a moment, in their clearly semi-en-route-discovered understandings, and their simultaneously clearly long-boiled (nine years!) effects, in what they leave out and leave for my brain to try to cut through, the embossed energy of association!!!!!!!, it left me reeling a little, somewhat in the same way I felt after having watched MULHOLLAND DRIVE for the first time, like I'd been led among a series of rooms by someone who'd designed them to unravel and reravel for us both at once.

If literature is not about discovery, a method often just as accidental as it is deigned for, then I can't feel like I'm inside it. And yet this pushing for discovery, so often it is what pushes me away. I want to be inside it, and I want it to be inside me, I don't want to feel it soldering me back closed before its over. I want to be ripped open a little. I want to see thing going on, and be awed at its creation. MARSUPIAL manages to do all of this, and yet it does not feel like work. In an age where the book is already so maligned, it is refreshing to see such a new and challenging narrative be delivered so pleasantly, with such focus, and yet with such utter disregard for the implications of straight storytelling.

MARSUPIAL is something new.

MARSUPIAL is a book that will continue to strum the mind long after it is silent, that has so many layers it can't help but seem to explode, that like INLAND EMPIRE and other open texts, will remain basting the brain long after with its cold juices, that even as I type this now with the book still inside my mind and around me I feel the same way I did the years when I was 12 and could not move inside my bed, stuck again in the recurring dream of a boulder rolling in slow motion down out of the ceiling each night to crush my face, and yet I couldn't wait.

You will buy this book.