Smarmump Eliminator

I think my loft's front door unlocks itself. Most nights I check sometime before I sit down the final time. Many mornings the door is unlocked.

Yesterday I saw a woman with a wooden eye, she winked at me, no shit.

'Blake Butler' is a pseudonym.

I don't think I should explain.

I wonder if how I feel a lot of days now is how a heroin addict feels, partially, though while on the way down.



I read WASTE by Eugene Marten (brand new from Ellipsis Press) day before yesterday, I am most impressed by Marten's ability to write about overlooked everyday people in a way that makes their lives seem layered like a secret door, like every person is a door into some small compartment where they keep things they value, where they sleep. WASTE is maybe a 2 hour read and will jar your teeth out some, no, really. It has a blurb by Gordon Lish, what do you think about that. It is about a janitor who goes around in this one buildings working with trash. I will read anything Eugene Marten's for the rest of my life, I feel like he is important. His sentences are sentences in the realest application of the word, in that each one kind of condemns itself on the paper or in you in your own mind. I would buy this book (and the also brand new FOG & CAR by Eugene Lim also from Ellipsis, which I am reading next) if I were you.

It seems like whenever I am getting close to the last 10 pages of a book or so, that's when all hell breaks loose, the phone starts ringing, people want to talk to me, there are things looming, that always happens at the end of books, even if I make a point to hide somewhere where no one can interrupt, so now when I get to the last few pages of a book I often start to feel an extreme sense of anxiety.

This same phenomenon also tends to occur when I am taking a shit.

I took two laxative pills the other night to see what would happen. You are supposed to take them when you go to bed and then you'll wake up and expunge. Instead I woke up with awful stomach pains and it constipated me, I was crying a little, I brought my computer into the bathroom so I could look at things while I 'worked,' I am sure you are very interested in hearing about this.

Little things are beginning to become the most severe points of contention in my mind.

I had to stop underlining passages I like in THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU literally because I would pretty much just be underlining the whole fucking book, no joke, every line.

'reached up under your dress and got the nation sack' 'pew of deacons' 'dripping through a wound like a virgin's piss'

NO COLONY release party next Friday at Barbes in Brooklyn is beginning to become like a mini-internet summer camp meetup, the list of attendees is growing, I am excited. If you live in NYC, please spread word by blogging, etc. Info is on No Colony website.

I think coffee is beginning to have adverse effects, I am becoming dependent, and yet I am starting to not like the feelings.

Yesterday at a coffee shop, very blitzed on caffeine and sitting next to an extremely loud black woman who was on the phone shouting at the service provider of her website, or shouting at the woman next to her about the photos they were editing of severely stylized black models, I began to find myself inside this other woman, psychically rather than in the body:

Eugene Marten's IN THE BLIND

Just finished reading Eugene Marten's novel IN THE BLIND from Turtle Point Press.



I have to say that on a sentence by sentence level this is one of my favorite books in recent memory. Marten's sentences are chiseled beyond teeth. It seems like every single line in this book was worked on for hours, and hours spent connecting them, and yet the story flows so smoothly, almost with an peculiar eloquence you can't help but swallow hard at.

IN THE BLIND follows this narrator around, a man who gets out of prison for a drunk driving accident and gets a job at a locksmith's. A lot of the book is filled with him thinking about locks, learning to break them, opening rooms for people, dealing with the strange, all of it in clipped and gorgeous language, actually similar in a way to SEAVIEW by Toby Olsen which I talked about a few months ago after it cut me.

I learned a lot from reading this book, in the way that Marten leaves things out, things most other authors leave in, allowing the reader to jump with him over the baggage and get to the meat, and in the transition leaving these weird gaps of air that make the surroundings that much more pushy and compelling. Certain sections of this book seem to travel out into a branch of nowhere, sort of like searching for a combination on a lock, if you'll allow the comparison. There's one section where the narrator moves through a dark part of a moored ship that is among my favorite scenes in any recent book I can think of.

I remember an interview with Donald Antrim where he was talking about how sometimes he gets the most glee in finding the ways he moves a character through a room. Marten has this in his teeth. Really. Fuck. Every paragraph is precision. I am going to stop gushing now.

I am going to open to a random page in the book and type the first paragraph I see.

I found a long one. I am going to type it anyway.

- - -

Lights out at ten. The switch that started the dark stopped the clock and you press your bunk, bury your head under your pillow, stuff your ears with cotton or foam rubber. You sleep two or three hours and you can hear it in your dreams, nightmare within a nightmare, the screaming, chanting, moaning, singing, rhyming, sobbing, preaching (Let me talk to you about God! What's He got I don't? Well it might be bigger and a whole lot sweeter!), howling of wolves, crowing of crows, knock knock jokes, someone jerking off at the top of his lungs, shouted conversations about sports devolving into death threats and gibberish, mothers, wives, and girlfriends cast in a contest of lurid punchlines (Nigger your mother's titties hang so low she got wheels on her bra, Nigger your family so brokeass poor they brush they teeth for breakfast, swallow they spit for supper), how someone's gonna toss someone's salad, how they're gonna and they're gonna till it's time to smooth your sheet, for forever till first light, The bitch cut me in my face, she cut me in my face, she ain't cute enough to cut me in my face.

If you wanted to sleep, the saying says, you shouldn't have come.

- - -

If that excerpt doesn't sell a book I don't know what will.

Every graph is that nice, often much less brutal, but still full of the refined power. You can feel the work here, you can smell it, and it made my blood tingle a little most every line.

I can't tell you how good this book is. I am trying.

i dont go out often

Went to the emergency room early Sunday morning. Was at a friend's party. Bought a bottle. At the package store I walked around for almost 20 minutes, couldn't think of what. Went to the counter, asked for the blue one of Smirnoff. Didn't realize blue meant triple distilled. Didn't realize triple distilled meant strong. I drank the whole thing and blacked out and I guess kept drinking.

Guess that's the 3rd time ever I've blacked out, all this year. The first time was on new year's day, woke up in a bathtub with a girl pissing in front of me.

This time woke up with my head inside a CAT scan machine wearing someone else's clothes and an IV. Okay.

Yesterday I slept.

Nice bruise on my forehead and elbow. I was carried to a car by 4 men while yelling where did Brian Jones go.

I remember eating cake. I remember saying something about how I like 'bitch' drinks, and two girls I did not looking at me like they wanted to crush my head. Had to explain men are more often bitches.

I remember kicking a wall repeatedly. I remember screaming something about Three 6 Mafia.

On the other side of the partition from where I was laying when I woke up a foreign man was answering questions about his prostate cancer. He could not piss.

Beer from here a while I think.

Was going to start reading THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY by Zachary Mason today but then got in the mail IN THE BLIND by Eugene Marten, which I ordered after reading his thing in NEW YORK TYRANT, and started reading the first page and haven't stopped except for this. IN THE BLIND has blurbs by Gordon Lish and Brian Evenson and a comparison to SUTTREE, my second favorite book of all time. So far it more than lives up.

Good things are going to happen.