@Diagram, Kim Parko contributes a review of Ever b/w Shane Jones's Light Boxes, including mini-interviews with both of us, and lots of wild thought: These books are creation stories, funeral dirges, and the mystifying yawn between. Thanks Kim!
I am reading Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero right now on a whim, and man so far it is gorgeous. Huge. Hope it continues in such way. Seems like it will.
Halloween. Everybody getting boners or throwing up some. I wish I was 12 again. I wonder how my life would be different if that year I was 12 I hadn't stopped my friend and I from walking down the hill in the neighborhood down from my house, where in the light off of the tall lamp a van had parked and as we crossed some grass these two men came walking as if to cut us off, no one else anywhere around. I stopped and said we'd missed a house behind us and my friend said no we hadn't and I said yes we did I'm going back and the men were getting closer and my friend didn't get it and I grabbed his arm and we started up the hill again and the men walked faster and we ran. That night a few other kids were abducted in our area by men inside a van.
That is better than being around more dumps getting drunk.
Longest thread ever at HTML Giant is weird.
I am doing a photo shoot tomorrow for a profile in a big UK based magazine, I think I'm supposed to destroy something in the process, if I want to. I think we're going to a ghetto strip mall and an abandoned bunch of tiny buildings.
New proof of Kristina's book looks amazing and beautiful, should have them hopefully by end of next week, which is later than I'd hoped but they will be just right and magic. If you'd like to review the book or interview Kristina please drop me a line. She's funny.
Showing posts with label ever. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ever. Show all posts
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Eating Scorch Atlas, page 2
Blake Butler eats Page 2 of Scorch Atlas from blake butler on Vimeo.
Mike Meginnis dissects EVER, including two video posts of the reading I did for the NYC launch with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez. Feels weird to watch one's self read.
An excerpt: "There is nothing floating about these sentences. Again: They are fundamental. Your fundament is your asshole, where shit comes from. There is shit in this book, and come, and blood, and mold, menstruation, mucus, fat curtains. I resist intimations of transcendence. Some might call these sentences musical. But not everything pleasure is music (though most of it is) and we should demand recognition of this. There is pleasure in the sentence, in these sentences."
Just got my order from the ridiculously awesome Dalkey Archive sale, 10 of any of their titles for $65 shipping included, going to go stare at some now.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Dollar Store Tour + Ever 2.0
I am leaving town on Friday for the Featherproof Dollar Store Show, so probably won't be blogging much.
I will likely be drunkenly tweeting here slightly more often to keep the bug in my eyes, unless I decide to bring my laptop, which I am kind of scared to. Is bringing yr laptop on the road to bars a good idea? I can't decide.
Either way, we will have Scorch Atlases, which the best way to get one before Sept, if you'd like.
Here are dates I will be where, would be really great to meet see talk confabulate with some heads.
Friday JULY 3 : Nashville
Sunday JULY 5 : Austin
Monday JULY 6 : Houston
Tuesday JULY 7 : New Orleans
Thursday JULY 9 : Atlanta
Saturday JULY 11 : Baltimore
Sunday JULY 12 : NYC
Monday JULY 13 : Philadelphia
Tuesday JULY 14 : Boston
If you are those spots, please come out! For full info on where/when/with who, check the Dollar Store Show site.
The first printing of EVER is now sold out, except for I think some copies at Powells and SPD.
The second printing is already underway, so don't go paying $60.49 for it used on Amazon just yet.
Thanks again to everyone who has bought / talked about / supported the book, it is beyond appreciated, as always.
Ok, hope to see you.
I will likely be drunkenly tweeting here slightly more often to keep the bug in my eyes, unless I decide to bring my laptop, which I am kind of scared to. Is bringing yr laptop on the road to bars a good idea? I can't decide.
Either way, we will have Scorch Atlases, which the best way to get one before Sept, if you'd like.
Here are dates I will be where, would be really great to meet see talk confabulate with some heads.
Friday JULY 3 : Nashville
Sunday JULY 5 : Austin
Monday JULY 6 : Houston
Tuesday JULY 7 : New Orleans
Thursday JULY 9 : Atlanta
Saturday JULY 11 : Baltimore
Sunday JULY 12 : NYC
Monday JULY 13 : Philadelphia
Tuesday JULY 14 : Boston
If you are those spots, please come out! For full info on where/when/with who, check the Dollar Store Show site.
The first printing of EVER is now sold out, except for I think some copies at Powells and SPD.
The second printing is already underway, so don't go paying $60.49 for it used on Amazon just yet.
Thanks again to everyone who has bought / talked about / supported the book, it is beyond appreciated, as always.
Ok, hope to see you.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Head full of black teeth for an hour
I finished reading Robert Lopez's Kamby Bolongo Mean River last night. It was, oddly, or not oddly, one of the most emotional reading experiences I've had in a while. It honestly at one point got to me so much I had to stop and look at the wall and talk to myself. Actually, I stopped a lot during the reading of the book, every few paragraphs or so, and either reread a graph (the book is written in mostly very short graphs like a David Markson novel) to hear it again, or just stopped reading so I could continue to hear the first reading in my head.
It is quite a book (one about, on its face, simply a man locked in a room with a bed, chalk, and a phone) and it excites me in the best way a book can: both making me want to write, fueled by the sentences and ideas, and making me not want to write, in awe of those sentences and ideas, and their masterful assembly as text object.
You will hear me talking about this book a lot from here on, and a formal review is forthcoming, but in short: Rob, he did it.
Put this one high up on your list.
Still reeling gleefully this morning in finding this:
the incredible Dennis Cooper says, "'Ever' is easily one of the best novels I've read this year."
Man.
Oh you can now 'Search Inside' Ever at Amazon, if you would ever want to do that.
Now it's time to have a good weekend.
It is quite a book (one about, on its face, simply a man locked in a room with a bed, chalk, and a phone) and it excites me in the best way a book can: both making me want to write, fueled by the sentences and ideas, and making me not want to write, in awe of those sentences and ideas, and their masterful assembly as text object.
You will hear me talking about this book a lot from here on, and a formal review is forthcoming, but in short: Rob, he did it.
Put this one high up on your list.
Still reeling gleefully this morning in finding this:
the incredible Dennis Cooper says, "'Ever' is easily one of the best novels I've read this year."
Man.
Oh you can now 'Search Inside' Ever at Amazon, if you would ever want to do that.
Now it's time to have a good weekend.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
13 Jun 02:15:50 PM www.google.co.in why there is a shape of hill on vegiana
The man who lives alone next to my parents has been putting up this sign on the front of his house for a week or so at a time every other month, when he feels it:
Some days before they stopped letting him have his kids but while he was under review this guy would have pool parties at his house and would rent a PA and play music and then talk on the microphone between songs to the kids, saying very constrained polite and fun things. He organized them to eat popsicles together and had contests in the water. The PA was very clearly meant so the neighborhood would know what a good dad he is, which made the hearing of the children sounds and music with his talking to them very uncomfortable even if on its face it sounded OK.
As for whatever else happened I don't know.
The always wonderful Amelia Gray reviewed EVER on her blog. An excerpt: "The deal with this book is that it offers a puzzle like The Exquisite but instead of dissecting reality, it dissects surreality as it wobbles in a frame of reality, which essentially turns you on your ass and shoves a prism up there. Needless to say, I recommend reading EVER in the bathtub."
Thanks Amelia!
The also always wonderful Pratha Lor also wrote up EVER on his blog, concentrating mostly on the musical aspects of the work, really nice: "Butler' work is episodic, presenting a paradoxical landscape to explore that is both physically constricted, yet mentally elusive--requiring much more unravelling and sensing on the part of the reader."
Thanks Prathna!
My 6th post on Brian Evenson's Fugue State is on the illustrated 'Dread,' and has been guest posted at Ghost Island.
Thanks Ben!
Sorry I got out of order on those. The 7th story in Fugue State is still here.
Belong is an excellent band.
The Tyrant just took a story that I think is the best thing I've ever written, 5000 words about a mother destroying her child. It had been rejected quite a bit, I
I
I
I want to think out loud about ideas dictating sentences in fiction vs. sentences dictating ideas but I'm a little hungover. Some other time then.
Some days before they stopped letting him have his kids but while he was under review this guy would have pool parties at his house and would rent a PA and play music and then talk on the microphone between songs to the kids, saying very constrained polite and fun things. He organized them to eat popsicles together and had contests in the water. The PA was very clearly meant so the neighborhood would know what a good dad he is, which made the hearing of the children sounds and music with his talking to them very uncomfortable even if on its face it sounded OK.
As for whatever else happened I don't know.
The always wonderful Amelia Gray reviewed EVER on her blog. An excerpt: "The deal with this book is that it offers a puzzle like The Exquisite but instead of dissecting reality, it dissects surreality as it wobbles in a frame of reality, which essentially turns you on your ass and shoves a prism up there. Needless to say, I recommend reading EVER in the bathtub."
Thanks Amelia!
The also always wonderful Pratha Lor also wrote up EVER on his blog, concentrating mostly on the musical aspects of the work, really nice: "Butler' work is episodic, presenting a paradoxical landscape to explore that is both physically constricted, yet mentally elusive--requiring much more unravelling and sensing on the part of the reader."
Thanks Prathna!
My 6th post on Brian Evenson's Fugue State is on the illustrated 'Dread,' and has been guest posted at Ghost Island.
Thanks Ben!
Sorry I got out of order on those. The 7th story in Fugue State is still here.
Belong is an excellent band.
The Tyrant just took a story that I think is the best thing I've ever written, 5000 words about a mother destroying her child. It had been rejected quite a bit, I
I
I
I want to think out loud about ideas dictating sentences in fiction vs. sentences dictating ideas but I'm a little hungover. Some other time then.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
"What I am fine means is please stop talking."
From the very kind John Domini, a Goodreads review of EVER that I couldn't help but repost:
"Blake Butler brings off sentences that at once estrange & seduce, their phrasing & pacing like some 21st-Century resurrection of the Middle English, constructed w/ an ear to assonance & buried rhymes. From the second page of EVER: "In the light my skin was see-through -- my veins an atlas spanned in tissue." Not much later, more pugnaciously: "Streams of night might gleam like glass. The dirt would swim with foam." Appreciation of this small, scary miracle depends on appreciation of such beveled gems, the bits & pieces of which it's composed. Myself, I might as well've been knocked from my horse on the road to Damascus, & what floored me is also a miracle of compression. EVER contains only occasional full pages of prose, indeed it features a central sequence on which there are no more than a few lines per page, & it has interstititial designs to boot, faint gray hints of Gorey, breaking up the novella still further. Yet I find gleanings of story enough to sustain me. EVER tracks a soiled Alice (unnamed, actually) through the looking-glass & way beyond, drawn on by a force she can't understand, & that may eventually destroy her. But first she travels through room after room of a phantasmagoric home. Sample: "The next room was made of wobble. Magnetic tape streaming from the rafters, bifurcating blonde split-ends. Cashed." (& the rest of the page runs blank... inviting meditation, perhaps?) Strange as EVER's house-tour is, though, it nonetheless recalls a classic turn of the mind, the psychological phenomenon sometimes called "the dream of rooms." Such dreams can occur at any age, but they're most common near the end of life, as a person revisits all the arenas of experience. Garcia Marquez makes brilliant use of this phenomenon, for instance, when he anticipates the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia in 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE. A more compatible figure for Butler's well-paced nightmare, however, would be Beckett's Malone, since if this girl too is dying, it's of some illness or wound she can never understand, in a place she can't say how she reached, & yet it's these very same gaps of self or soul that help her achieve a perverse assumption to heaven -- & the reader's along with her."
Couldn't ask for much more out of a review that that. Much appreciation to John.
Still waiting for his 'A Tomb on the Periphery,' which is currently on hold with Amazon due to ordering a quilting book for my mother that is still estimated 2-3 weeks. Grwouchadl.
Fair enough, though, as Evenson still has me by the throat (next few story reviews coming soon in a variety of places)
and just today in the mail got an ARC for Robert Lopez's 'Kamby Bolongo Mean River,' which I have been anticipating ever since Rob told me about the book in early 2008.
Already in the first few pages, too (which I could not abscond from peeking at immediately), Lopez has me cracking up and lit in the head. Can not wait.
More on all of these soon.
In the meantime, my review of Jeremy M. Davies's fantastic 'Rose Alley,' out right now from Counterpath Press, is in the new update of Bookslut.
Soon I am to explode.
The bags under my eyes from not having slept more than a couple hours a night in the past 2 weeks are now large enough that you could live inside them. Rent starts at $8.99 for three days. Holla.
"Blake Butler brings off sentences that at once estrange & seduce, their phrasing & pacing like some 21st-Century resurrection of the Middle English, constructed w/ an ear to assonance & buried rhymes. From the second page of EVER: "In the light my skin was see-through -- my veins an atlas spanned in tissue." Not much later, more pugnaciously: "Streams of night might gleam like glass. The dirt would swim with foam." Appreciation of this small, scary miracle depends on appreciation of such beveled gems, the bits & pieces of which it's composed. Myself, I might as well've been knocked from my horse on the road to Damascus, & what floored me is also a miracle of compression. EVER contains only occasional full pages of prose, indeed it features a central sequence on which there are no more than a few lines per page, & it has interstititial designs to boot, faint gray hints of Gorey, breaking up the novella still further. Yet I find gleanings of story enough to sustain me. EVER tracks a soiled Alice (unnamed, actually) through the looking-glass & way beyond, drawn on by a force she can't understand, & that may eventually destroy her. But first she travels through room after room of a phantasmagoric home. Sample: "The next room was made of wobble. Magnetic tape streaming from the rafters, bifurcating blonde split-ends. Cashed." (& the rest of the page runs blank... inviting meditation, perhaps?) Strange as EVER's house-tour is, though, it nonetheless recalls a classic turn of the mind, the psychological phenomenon sometimes called "the dream of rooms." Such dreams can occur at any age, but they're most common near the end of life, as a person revisits all the arenas of experience. Garcia Marquez makes brilliant use of this phenomenon, for instance, when he anticipates the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia in 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE. A more compatible figure for Butler's well-paced nightmare, however, would be Beckett's Malone, since if this girl too is dying, it's of some illness or wound she can never understand, in a place she can't say how she reached, & yet it's these very same gaps of self or soul that help her achieve a perverse assumption to heaven -- & the reader's along with her."
Couldn't ask for much more out of a review that that. Much appreciation to John.
Still waiting for his 'A Tomb on the Periphery,' which is currently on hold with Amazon due to ordering a quilting book for my mother that is still estimated 2-3 weeks. Grwouchadl.
Fair enough, though, as Evenson still has me by the throat (next few story reviews coming soon in a variety of places)
and just today in the mail got an ARC for Robert Lopez's 'Kamby Bolongo Mean River,' which I have been anticipating ever since Rob told me about the book in early 2008.
Already in the first few pages, too (which I could not abscond from peeking at immediately), Lopez has me cracking up and lit in the head. Can not wait.
More on all of these soon.
In the meantime, my review of Jeremy M. Davies's fantastic 'Rose Alley,' out right now from Counterpath Press, is in the new update of Bookslut.
Soon I am to explode.
The bags under my eyes from not having slept more than a couple hours a night in the past 2 weeks are now large enough that you could live inside them. Rent starts at $8.99 for three days. Holla.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Contest winners, etc.
So many good entries for the EVER etc. contest, I don't even know how to judge.
Hence, thus, and etc., I have selected a few and then threw the rest in a hat and pulled.
Here, then, are the winners:
the overall mad winner is Sabra Embury, she actually made me feel ill some, in power, a full yes: tho she's already read EVER and so has agreed to donate her winning copy for a stack of some other books will shall be shipped to her in bloodwrappers
So then the winners of EVER:
1. Crispin Best (mmm)
2. Mark Leidner (it was the 'tomato sauce' that got me)
3. Mathias Svalina (tricky tricky)
& of Chris Higgs's 'COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS...': Ani
& of Jamie Iredell's 'BEFORE I MOVED TO NEVADA': Tim
& of Jimmy Chen's 'TYPEWRITER': BusterFrank
If you are one of these, please email me your shipping info, and you will receive your prize.
Thank you to the many entries, quite a few of them made me pleasure and squiggles.
& thanks again to Jereme for the magic yard to play in, and the contest idea itself.
** Less than two weeks left to enter the SCORCH ATLAS remix competition **
I think I have spent 8+ hours so far this year watching videos of juggalos on youtube:
This whole nearly 2 hour 'shockumentary' about ICP gave me a green bee haircut:
Dang. Neat.
Hence, thus, and etc., I have selected a few and then threw the rest in a hat and pulled.
Here, then, are the winners:
the overall mad winner is Sabra Embury, she actually made me feel ill some, in power, a full yes: tho she's already read EVER and so has agreed to donate her winning copy for a stack of some other books will shall be shipped to her in bloodwrappers
So then the winners of EVER:
1. Crispin Best (mmm)
2. Mark Leidner (it was the 'tomato sauce' that got me)
3. Mathias Svalina (tricky tricky)
& of Chris Higgs's 'COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS...': Ani
& of Jamie Iredell's 'BEFORE I MOVED TO NEVADA': Tim
& of Jimmy Chen's 'TYPEWRITER': BusterFrank
If you are one of these, please email me your shipping info, and you will receive your prize.
Thank you to the many entries, quite a few of them made me pleasure and squiggles.
& thanks again to Jereme for the magic yard to play in, and the contest idea itself.
** Less than two weeks left to enter the SCORCH ATLAS remix competition **
I think I have spent 8+ hours so far this year watching videos of juggalos on youtube:
This whole nearly 2 hour 'shockumentary' about ICP gave me a green bee haircut:
Dang. Neat.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
What happened to that kid Nick H. who in 5th grade I watched rip open the flesh of his hand with a pen expressionlessly in the back of math class
Weston Cutter profiled EVER on Corduroy Books, with some very kind words, including: "...Blake Butler’s one of maybe ten writers currently writing whose sentences are miracles." Dang, thanks Weston.
Also awesome write up in the same post, of J. Robert Lennon's two new ones, one of which I read when it came out in the UK, 'Pieces for the Left Hand,' which is incredible. Really excited for 'Castle'.
I think my goal for this year is going to be to read 30 or more books released by Dalkey Archive, not counting, obviously, the many I've already read other years. So far for '09 I think I've read 6 of their titles, so I have some work to do, but I have a big stack on hand.
Entries to the nasty contest (see post below this one) are open through the evening. Get it juicy, kids. Not that you haven't already. I actually got a little green during some of the posts, either from nast or envy. Prolly both. Do a join in.
Have almost finished a first draft of the EVER-related novel, which takes place in the same house as EVER, I think. Don't know how I got so into it, but I think it is almost twice as long as EVER. Or something. What. What else.
Also awesome write up in the same post, of J. Robert Lennon's two new ones, one of which I read when it came out in the UK, 'Pieces for the Left Hand,' which is incredible. Really excited for 'Castle'.
I think my goal for this year is going to be to read 30 or more books released by Dalkey Archive, not counting, obviously, the many I've already read other years. So far for '09 I think I've read 6 of their titles, so I have some work to do, but I have a big stack on hand.
Entries to the nasty contest (see post below this one) are open through the evening. Get it juicy, kids. Not that you haven't already. I actually got a little green during some of the posts, either from nast or envy. Prolly both. Do a join in.
Have almost finished a first draft of the EVER-related novel, which takes place in the same house as EVER, I think. Don't know how I got so into it, but I think it is almost twice as long as EVER. Or something. What. What else.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Win a free copy of EVER with your nasty mind
False start on the contest below, but here is a better one.
A very simple chance to win a copy of my book EVER, from the graceful and bounteous hands of Mr. Jereme Dean:
First, add EVER on Goodreads
if you aren't on Goodreads you can instead post a link to the book on your blog, in the comments of another blog, or twitter the shit
then come back here, and leave one literarily-related vile phrase in the comments section (ie: make it germane to books somehow)
such as
mary gaitskill's bleeding anal capacity for filling milk in veterinary life
or
jose saramago scraped the vulva urine from his extra dildo and tossed it to America's forbidden dad
or
octopus magazine's ramrod shunt got caught perpetually in the butt year of blackened mayonnaise
or
i fork-dicked the comte de lautreamont with a salad shooter penile sneak and then we cried lanyards of white need
or
roald dahl's creamy gaping V
whatever you got, be real and nasty
top 3 goodreads or other adders plus dirty mind lit children get the EVER books
*** after this, three more winners will be divvied up copies of
jimmy chen's TYPEWRITER from Magic Helicopter Press
Chris Higgs's COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY
and
Jamie Iredell's BEFORE I LEFT NEVADA from Publishing Genius.
six chances to win now, and 4 different books. let's get even dirtier. multiple entries welcome.
best comments win on friday morning
thanks again to jereme for the very generous offer
let's get nasty
A very simple chance to win a copy of my book EVER, from the graceful and bounteous hands of Mr. Jereme Dean:
First, add EVER on Goodreads
if you aren't on Goodreads you can instead post a link to the book on your blog, in the comments of another blog, or twitter the shit
then come back here, and leave one literarily-related vile phrase in the comments section (ie: make it germane to books somehow)
such as
mary gaitskill's bleeding anal capacity for filling milk in veterinary life
or
jose saramago scraped the vulva urine from his extra dildo and tossed it to America's forbidden dad
or
octopus magazine's ramrod shunt got caught perpetually in the butt year of blackened mayonnaise
or
i fork-dicked the comte de lautreamont with a salad shooter penile sneak and then we cried lanyards of white need
or
roald dahl's creamy gaping V
whatever you got, be real and nasty
top 3 goodreads or other adders plus dirty mind lit children get the EVER books
*** after this, three more winners will be divvied up copies of
jimmy chen's TYPEWRITER from Magic Helicopter Press
Chris Higgs's COLORLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY
and
Jamie Iredell's BEFORE I LEFT NEVADA from Publishing Genius.
six chances to win now, and 4 different books. let's get even dirtier. multiple entries welcome.
best comments win on friday morning
thanks again to jereme for the very generous offer
let's get nasty
Monday, April 6, 2009
Blue Nap
Usually I double-brew coffee. I think today I've triple-brewed it. It tastes like a tire. With wheels. I will eat it with my lungs.
Reading Genet and Hannah at the same time is like eating that protein shit that muscle dudes eat. I feel raucous and randy.
I have been slowly upping my run distance over the past week or two, from a 2.4 mile cap to now last night I ran 3.56, all at steady pace. With the state of the real estate, you have to go on a long Spinal Tap-esque trek through corridor after corridor because the fucks who are working on the place and have been for a year now decided to put up a fence around the normal to the walkway to the gym. So they can work on it? No. It just sits there. Though last week they restricted our parking so they could have room to park their BBQ truck and have a 'we've been working on this bitch for a year and still aren't done, hurrah for us' party. Eating BBQ in front of the residents whose homes you've been dicking around on for forever, listening to music and bullshitting rather than working = wish I owned a BB gun.
Elizabeth Glixman did a long interview with me about EVER for Eclectica Magazine. This one was interesting because Elizabeth had a lot of questions about what the book means, which tends to be a common question among my local friends and etc.
The look on my friend Anna's face last night as she told me she'd read the book on a plane was a prize winner, and worth the time it took the write the book.
So this discussion I hope is helpful for those who may have read and didn't understand, and for those who did. The questions are fun, and resulted in an answer I can print up and give to people when they ask me about what the book is about next time:
I am happy with the categorization in your mind in relation to light, houses, structures, blood, and mud. I feel strongly for all of those things and will probably continue writing about them for the rest of my life. I also like shit, babies, mold, layers, rash, titties, hair, teeth, junk, and crud.
We also talk about Beckett, Bobby Beausoleil, blood, the literal, genre, and others. The read is here. Thanks Elizabeth!
Um, MF Doom is good and stuff.
Many many stylez.
I can't listen to 'rock music' anymore, I think. I always get bored in 10-18 minutes and have to go back to rap or noise mess or nothin. When will the $$$ die?
Final month for entering the Scorch Atlas remix contest, let's see them DJ skillz!
Today I am not going to let anyone have any inch of my time but me and this electronic paper, starting now...
Reading Genet and Hannah at the same time is like eating that protein shit that muscle dudes eat. I feel raucous and randy.
I have been slowly upping my run distance over the past week or two, from a 2.4 mile cap to now last night I ran 3.56, all at steady pace. With the state of the real estate, you have to go on a long Spinal Tap-esque trek through corridor after corridor because the fucks who are working on the place and have been for a year now decided to put up a fence around the normal to the walkway to the gym. So they can work on it? No. It just sits there. Though last week they restricted our parking so they could have room to park their BBQ truck and have a 'we've been working on this bitch for a year and still aren't done, hurrah for us' party. Eating BBQ in front of the residents whose homes you've been dicking around on for forever, listening to music and bullshitting rather than working = wish I owned a BB gun.
Elizabeth Glixman did a long interview with me about EVER for Eclectica Magazine. This one was interesting because Elizabeth had a lot of questions about what the book means, which tends to be a common question among my local friends and etc.
The look on my friend Anna's face last night as she told me she'd read the book on a plane was a prize winner, and worth the time it took the write the book.
So this discussion I hope is helpful for those who may have read and didn't understand, and for those who did. The questions are fun, and resulted in an answer I can print up and give to people when they ask me about what the book is about next time:
I am happy with the categorization in your mind in relation to light, houses, structures, blood, and mud. I feel strongly for all of those things and will probably continue writing about them for the rest of my life. I also like shit, babies, mold, layers, rash, titties, hair, teeth, junk, and crud.
We also talk about Beckett, Bobby Beausoleil, blood, the literal, genre, and others. The read is here. Thanks Elizabeth!
Um, MF Doom is good and stuff.
Many many stylez.
I can't listen to 'rock music' anymore, I think. I always get bored in 10-18 minutes and have to go back to rap or noise mess or nothin. When will the $$$ die?
Final month for entering the Scorch Atlas remix contest, let's see them DJ skillz!
Today I am not going to let anyone have any inch of my time but me and this electronic paper, starting now...
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Mega Dick Preloader plus Scam Curfew and 'Codebook of Come Pressure'
Mad back on track n shit n whatnot, maybe, haha, though every day in this Georgia shit is rain. There isn't even mud. Just water. Someone digging in the concrete around the house at night.
EVER-related new novella/novel/something is blowing up around me, in the good way. Finding new doors in the house I had left closed, and more of them, and new. Feeling strongly. This one may be longer. This one may be.
The title 'White of White' jumped out of my tits yesterday, while driving past a middle school near my house that I did not go to and that often seems in its color and condition filled with a creme I can not smell.
Really tired of people 'asking probing questions on their blogs' about certain 'specifics of the act of writing and genre, to stir a 'debate' that will maybe define these terms in some useful way' and 'further the community while opening up topics of discussion of form'.
Something to be said about democracy and linearity and 'playing the game' here but fuck words that aren't words.
In 'Violence' Zizek had a whole great set of ideas about how talking about a thing, such as world peace or racism, in a way that sets up a commodity of 'community discussion' and 'awareness' about that idea but as an act really 'does nothing' is actually more damaging than those generally conceived as counterproductive or limited and void of void, which I won't try to reiterate or expound upon.
There's something to be said here about NaNoPoWriMo (NaPoWriMo)? or whatever that dumb shit is called, but fuck words.
That's all about that.
I just ordered Harmony Korine's Collected Fanzines. Mad excited. I think I read 'Crackup at the Race Riots' ten or twelve times over the years. Though not as much a fan of Mister Lonely, I think Korine is as important a voice as Lynch: no one else saying things in his way.
Wondering now about his 'Fight Harm' series, where he would go talk shit to people in the street with hidden cameras and provoke them verbally until they beat the shit out of him, which he had to abandon after 23 minutes of footage because he had been taken to the hospital several times and badly damaged. Was supposed to come out on a dvd of rare stuff of his, such as 'The Diary of Anne Frank Part II,' where where where where where.
I heard a story about the scene of the two brothers in the bathtub washing each other in Gummo (very brief shot) that made me like the inclusion even more.
There is something to be said about idea meeting image here, but fuck words.
Watched all of the Vice Guide to North Korea last night: highly recommend: they sneak their way into the ridiculous regime and capture some really bizarre shit there. Part one of 14:
Also creeped by the documentary on the drug 'scopolamine' or 'the devil's breath,' which was kind of fascinating. here.
VBS tv has so much great watching, if you have not explored, give yourself a few hours at least, all of it online, free, fun.
Have been reading and enjoying the shit out of a series of numbered shorts on Laura Carter's blog for a good while now, she posts several a week, short clips of text about rooms and spaces and aura, oddly, I wonder if this is a book she is making, I think someone should publish it as a whole thing when it is finished. Laura is interesting, she does not believe in revision, but saying it right the first time.
It is raining today, there is a lot of thunder, there is money coming out of a tree I can see through the window, where someone has been burning something every day for the past few days.
I like writing on a desktop computer when it is storming badly, as there is the fear that the power might go out at any minute and destroy what has been written and not saved, which imbues the moment of typing with this weird energy sometimes, if I am the pea carrot eater of that minute.
I am going to go now.
EVER-related new novella/novel/something is blowing up around me, in the good way. Finding new doors in the house I had left closed, and more of them, and new. Feeling strongly. This one may be longer. This one may be.
The title 'White of White' jumped out of my tits yesterday, while driving past a middle school near my house that I did not go to and that often seems in its color and condition filled with a creme I can not smell.
Really tired of people 'asking probing questions on their blogs' about certain 'specifics of the act of writing and genre, to stir a 'debate' that will maybe define these terms in some useful way' and 'further the community while opening up topics of discussion of form'.
Something to be said about democracy and linearity and 'playing the game' here but fuck words that aren't words.
In 'Violence' Zizek had a whole great set of ideas about how talking about a thing, such as world peace or racism, in a way that sets up a commodity of 'community discussion' and 'awareness' about that idea but as an act really 'does nothing' is actually more damaging than those generally conceived as counterproductive or limited and void of void, which I won't try to reiterate or expound upon.
There's something to be said here about NaNoPoWriMo (NaPoWriMo)? or whatever that dumb shit is called, but fuck words.
That's all about that.
I just ordered Harmony Korine's Collected Fanzines. Mad excited. I think I read 'Crackup at the Race Riots' ten or twelve times over the years. Though not as much a fan of Mister Lonely, I think Korine is as important a voice as Lynch: no one else saying things in his way.
Wondering now about his 'Fight Harm' series, where he would go talk shit to people in the street with hidden cameras and provoke them verbally until they beat the shit out of him, which he had to abandon after 23 minutes of footage because he had been taken to the hospital several times and badly damaged. Was supposed to come out on a dvd of rare stuff of his, such as 'The Diary of Anne Frank Part II,' where where where where where.
I heard a story about the scene of the two brothers in the bathtub washing each other in Gummo (very brief shot) that made me like the inclusion even more.
There is something to be said about idea meeting image here, but fuck words.
Watched all of the Vice Guide to North Korea last night: highly recommend: they sneak their way into the ridiculous regime and capture some really bizarre shit there. Part one of 14:
Also creeped by the documentary on the drug 'scopolamine' or 'the devil's breath,' which was kind of fascinating. here.
VBS tv has so much great watching, if you have not explored, give yourself a few hours at least, all of it online, free, fun.
Have been reading and enjoying the shit out of a series of numbered shorts on Laura Carter's blog for a good while now, she posts several a week, short clips of text about rooms and spaces and aura, oddly, I wonder if this is a book she is making, I think someone should publish it as a whole thing when it is finished. Laura is interesting, she does not believe in revision, but saying it right the first time.
It is raining today, there is a lot of thunder, there is money coming out of a tree I can see through the window, where someone has been burning something every day for the past few days.
I like writing on a desktop computer when it is storming badly, as there is the fear that the power might go out at any minute and destroy what has been written and not saved, which imbues the moment of typing with this weird energy sometimes, if I am the pea carrot eater of that minute.
I am going to go now.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Dog Camp + Buttresses
I can not get this sick out of my body, but at least today I am drinking coffee. A friend suggested I try putting cinnamon into the grounds for brewing, to mask the mold taste. He does this frequently regardless. It is a fine thing to do. Today I am drinking coffee for the first time in a month or so.
I have slept more in the past week than I did for probably certain trios of weeks last year.
I found a file with like 3500 words in a similar voice to EVER and have been playing with it some today. I don't know how exactly it relates to the original: not a sequel or prequel or like that, but something. Maybe another person who lived in the same house before or after. Don't know if I'll keep working on it, but the playing is more interesting than anything I've tried to write in the last month. Lots of stops and starts, this voice feels better again, I don't know.
Still behind on a lot of things, trying to catch up.
Particularly behind on readings and reviews of a few things I've been dibbling in over the past few weeks, though planning to get to that this week and next.
Really excited, too, to receive Jeremy M. Davies's debut novel ROSE ALLEY from Counterpath Press today in the mail, Jeremy is too awesome and this book is gorgeous, and from the description + Harry Mathews blurb, this book has me mega excited. More on this soon.
Random excerpt from DECADE novel (the novel I pretty much wrote all in one long diatribe after reading Gert Jonke's GEOMETRIC REGIONAL NOVEL) is here @ Abjective: it is a text box from one page, kind of cribbed out of the middle of several other voices on the same page variously referring to one another, so I believe comes off rather cryptically here as an excerpt, though I enjoy it in that way. Haven't really done anything at all with that novel beyond revising it wholly twice through, and felt strong about it. Don't know where to send a hugely weird typographically fucked novel at this point, whichever.
Feeling slightly more positive today than last week, though still caught under yucktown, missed my Boston readings because of it, which made me sad. I hope a good time was had, and my apologies again to Adam and Jen from Quick Fiction for the missing out. Yarf.
Not having coffee for a month and now full bore again is coming on strong through my veins, maybe the lack of coffee is all that attributed to my rut, plus the sick. I am too quick to let myself join in in a fuckdown of self.
"This is a Formica table."
I have slept more in the past week than I did for probably certain trios of weeks last year.
I found a file with like 3500 words in a similar voice to EVER and have been playing with it some today. I don't know how exactly it relates to the original: not a sequel or prequel or like that, but something. Maybe another person who lived in the same house before or after. Don't know if I'll keep working on it, but the playing is more interesting than anything I've tried to write in the last month. Lots of stops and starts, this voice feels better again, I don't know.
Still behind on a lot of things, trying to catch up.
Particularly behind on readings and reviews of a few things I've been dibbling in over the past few weeks, though planning to get to that this week and next.
Really excited, too, to receive Jeremy M. Davies's debut novel ROSE ALLEY from Counterpath Press today in the mail, Jeremy is too awesome and this book is gorgeous, and from the description + Harry Mathews blurb, this book has me mega excited. More on this soon.
Random excerpt from DECADE novel (the novel I pretty much wrote all in one long diatribe after reading Gert Jonke's GEOMETRIC REGIONAL NOVEL) is here @ Abjective: it is a text box from one page, kind of cribbed out of the middle of several other voices on the same page variously referring to one another, so I believe comes off rather cryptically here as an excerpt, though I enjoy it in that way. Haven't really done anything at all with that novel beyond revising it wholly twice through, and felt strong about it. Don't know where to send a hugely weird typographically fucked novel at this point, whichever.
Feeling slightly more positive today than last week, though still caught under yucktown, missed my Boston readings because of it, which made me sad. I hope a good time was had, and my apologies again to Adam and Jen from Quick Fiction for the missing out. Yarf.
Not having coffee for a month and now full bore again is coming on strong through my veins, maybe the lack of coffee is all that attributed to my rut, plus the sick. I am too quick to let myself join in in a fuckdown of self.
"This is a Formica table."
Monday, February 9, 2009
^^ ^ ^ ^^ ^ ^ ^^ ^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
i am still too tired as fuck to think about thinking about writing about the world of please & thank you that occurred at the chicago: though notes of some sort will be forthcoming. met and resaw and hung with way too many amazing people, each of whom it seemed like i only got to see for seconds, but the best seconds. brain is hiding now, let's talk later
in the meantime, there's been a lot of internet occurrence, here is some:
1. Michael Kimball interviewed me about EVER for elimae
2. I did the Book Notes feature for Largehearted Boy, which is a slightly different version of the soundtrack that came on the CD i sent with EVER (which I may post soon as a download link or something): EVER book notes
3. Didi Menendez interviewed me for Best American Poetry blog
Also, more reviews surfacing of EVER (which I sold out of at AWP on like the 2nd day, fucking awesome, thank you to all who did the touch):
pr's husband @ HTMLGiant: 'In a hole, filling a hole with holes. Sylvia Plath starving in a crawlspace, stoned on anti-psychotics.'
Adam Coates @ Internettle: 'ever is atmospheric'
Evelyn Hampton @ Lisp Service: 'What really comes out are sentences, perfectly formed and capable of nesting in your syntax for however long.'
The new issue of Action Yes is fucking transcendent.
Too much more to say right now, I'm going to have to come back later, I can still feel the liquor in my teethhhhhh.
I have heard there are lots of pictures floating around, including some from the absolutely transcendent el train reading which my throat is still sore from, but for now here is me looking hungover on my way to redrunk with two of the realest wonders you could ever meet:
as well, here quizzical with Christy Call (most smiles ever, and also a wonder) and Gene Morgan (AKA the 1 man funparty and megabrother for life):
in the meantime, there's been a lot of internet occurrence, here is some:
1. Michael Kimball interviewed me about EVER for elimae
2. I did the Book Notes feature for Largehearted Boy, which is a slightly different version of the soundtrack that came on the CD i sent with EVER (which I may post soon as a download link or something): EVER book notes
3. Didi Menendez interviewed me for Best American Poetry blog
Also, more reviews surfacing of EVER (which I sold out of at AWP on like the 2nd day, fucking awesome, thank you to all who did the touch):
pr's husband @ HTMLGiant: 'In a hole, filling a hole with holes. Sylvia Plath starving in a crawlspace, stoned on anti-psychotics.'
Adam Coates @ Internettle: 'ever is atmospheric'
Evelyn Hampton @ Lisp Service: 'What really comes out are sentences, perfectly formed and capable of nesting in your syntax for however long.'
The new issue of Action Yes is fucking transcendent.
Too much more to say right now, I'm going to have to come back later, I can still feel the liquor in my teethhhhhh.
I have heard there are lots of pictures floating around, including some from the absolutely transcendent el train reading which my throat is still sore from, but for now here is me looking hungover on my way to redrunk with two of the realest wonders you could ever meet:
as well, here quizzical with Christy Call (most smiles ever, and also a wonder) and Gene Morgan (AKA the 1 man funparty and megabrother for life):
Sunday, February 8, 2009
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
More Ever reviewings(s):
John Dermot Woods: 'Ever asks you to vacate your seat - your room - your house - your place, and then it takes that place and wraps it around you really tight and makes you breathe in the darkest, mustiest parts of it that you usually avoid when your room is your room and then it yanks it away from you so fast that you’re bare in the cold and want to be covered again by anything, even if it stinks.' (full review includes an awesome drawing John did in response to one of the text sections)
Jimmy Chen @ HTMLGiant: 'a kind of timeless consciousness that is, remarkably and/or ironically, very relevant to a particular time: now' plus comparisons to Beuys & Beckett & a note on Ever as hermaphrodite. MMMM.
Valerie O'Riordan: 'heart-wrenching and difficult and dense and brilliant'
In one negative review I've gotten, the old man with the British accent at my work looked at the book for a while then put it back on the desk and said he'd give anyone who could get through the book a dollar.
The Atlanta leg of EVER release party went down on Friday really wonderfully, it was packed out and full of so many friends. A surprise and wonderful to have everyone come out in hometown on a Friday night. Jamie Iredell's reading from his 'Atlanta' chapbook was awesome as always, as was the music and drankin. Rad.
Quite excited too still for the March 5th release at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez. Derek White is flying in from Nairobi, no shitt. Make a plan!
Bunch more readings in Boston, Providence (2x), Northampton and etc are forthcoming.
Including... Wednesday at AWP for Orange Alert:
Thursday at AWP for Quickies:
and Friday at AWP with these insane freaks:
which includes a live reading and short play on the train on the way to the reading.
Come out to 1 or more if you can!
I am going to buy a snakeskin jumpsuit for myself for this week to keep the blood sopped up inside me.
One of my favorite online journals has a new edition: Apocryphal Text
My long review of Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS
Didi Menendez is blogging this week at Best American Poetry blog &, being the saint she is, she interviewed me for a post that will be up in the next few days. Being 1 of 3 she interviewed (next to Ron Silliman and Bob Hicok) is pretty funny and awesome. Didi rules.
Be sure to check out the new issue of OCHO guest edited by Miguel Murphy.
NO COLONY 002 is in hands and I am beginning to pack orders and contrib copies today. For those I already know will be at AWP I will likely hold onto your copies and lick your chest when I see you and stick the book to it there, if is okay. Otherwise hopefully I can get them all out before flying out on Wednesday.
This week is going to be a dog in a blender in the best of all ways.
John Dermot Woods: 'Ever asks you to vacate your seat - your room - your house - your place, and then it takes that place and wraps it around you really tight and makes you breathe in the darkest, mustiest parts of it that you usually avoid when your room is your room and then it yanks it away from you so fast that you’re bare in the cold and want to be covered again by anything, even if it stinks.' (full review includes an awesome drawing John did in response to one of the text sections)
Jimmy Chen @ HTMLGiant: 'a kind of timeless consciousness that is, remarkably and/or ironically, very relevant to a particular time: now' plus comparisons to Beuys & Beckett & a note on Ever as hermaphrodite. MMMM.
Valerie O'Riordan: 'heart-wrenching and difficult and dense and brilliant'
In one negative review I've gotten, the old man with the British accent at my work looked at the book for a while then put it back on the desk and said he'd give anyone who could get through the book a dollar.
The Atlanta leg of EVER release party went down on Friday really wonderfully, it was packed out and full of so many friends. A surprise and wonderful to have everyone come out in hometown on a Friday night. Jamie Iredell's reading from his 'Atlanta' chapbook was awesome as always, as was the music and drankin. Rad.
Quite excited too still for the March 5th release at Word Bookstore in Brooklyn with Gary Lutz and Robert Lopez. Derek White is flying in from Nairobi, no shitt. Make a plan!
Bunch more readings in Boston, Providence (2x), Northampton and etc are forthcoming.
Including... Wednesday at AWP for Orange Alert:
Thursday at AWP for Quickies:
and Friday at AWP with these insane freaks:
which includes a live reading and short play on the train on the way to the reading.
Come out to 1 or more if you can!
I am going to buy a snakeskin jumpsuit for myself for this week to keep the blood sopped up inside me.
One of my favorite online journals has a new edition: Apocryphal Text
My long review of Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS
Didi Menendez is blogging this week at Best American Poetry blog &, being the saint she is, she interviewed me for a post that will be up in the next few days. Being 1 of 3 she interviewed (next to Ron Silliman and Bob Hicok) is pretty funny and awesome. Didi rules.
Be sure to check out the new issue of OCHO guest edited by Miguel Murphy.
NO COLONY 002 is in hands and I am beginning to pack orders and contrib copies today. For those I already know will be at AWP I will likely hold onto your copies and lick your chest when I see you and stick the book to it there, if is okay. Otherwise hopefully I can get them all out before flying out on Wednesday.
This week is going to be a dog in a blender in the best of all ways.
Monday, February 2, 2009
OOOO O OO OOOO O OO O OOOOOOOOO O OOO O O O OOOOOOOOOO O O OOOOOO OOOOOOOO OOOOOOO
Two more responses to EVER:
Johannes Goransson @ Exoskeleton: 'What makes this novel very interesting in this context is that it seems to be written from the other direction - not a murder mystery that loses its narrative, but a narrative-less cinematic body-fantasia in search of a narrative.'
Brandon Hobson @ Clusterflock: 'The music somehow made me want to lie down on the floor and sliver. I’m not sure why. When I told my wife this she asked if I’d taken my medication (which I had).'
Two Lynch references in two reviews = I am happy child.
Dang, Adam Robinson kills it here. I am really excited about his forthcoming book, brilliantly titled ADAM ROBISON.
Kind of flabbergastingly awesome post by Dennis Cooper on board games and writing
I also really like this recipe on Elimae by Nathan Neely
I just got Shane Jones's LIGHT BOXES in the mail. It is beautiful. You should order it. I am really excited to read it again in its final form. Since I preordered, mine came with a copy of Shane's MLP chapbook 'Black Kids in Lemon Trees,' which I already have as an MLP subscriber. Forward me a receipt for ordering the book from today or later and I will give you my second copy of it.
Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS is out now from Underland Press. I will be posting a full review of this probably later this week, but as anyone who has touched Evenson's ink likely already knows: this is a book for owning, reading, rereading, eating, touching. I can't think of an author who has influenced me more, honestly. I recommend this book as highly as any other book he has written: they are all vital.
Last night I read his story 'The Adjudicator' in the new issue of Conjunctions about a hairless man living in a house after a great conflagration, who is then asked to 'adjudicate' a man who looks, he believes, exactly like him. Evenson's corridors of narrative, always as if chiseled out of something that has existed forever, somehow seem both speaking to you and speaking secondly inside you at the same time, each saying slightly different things that then interweave in your brain meat and then, in the collision, form the narrative. How Evenson is able to portray such complex moods in lines that seem so simple, and yet so timelessly phrased, in their pronunciation, is one of the great many magicks he possesses.
This Friday, doing a small pre-NYC-book-release-party book release party in Atlanta. Friday 8:30 @ Kavarna in Decatur. My boy Jamie Iredell is on the mic, as are a couple bands. I don't think more than a couple Atlantans read this blog, but oh well, it's a mention.
I watched Roy Andersson's YOU THE LIVING the other night. I didn't love it as much as SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR, which is one of my all time favorites, though it was not too far behind, and almost like a sequel.
I love the use of the swastikas on the table after the cloth is removed in this scene, a perfect encryption that somehow gave me goosebumps when I noticed, even despite the laughter:
I kind of am enjoying this year thoroughly thus far.
"19: OS OS OS IS SI, Day of Speak Only in Hymn, for yes, the song is joyous, and in our zoning we yes do indeed enjoy the song."
Johannes Goransson @ Exoskeleton: 'What makes this novel very interesting in this context is that it seems to be written from the other direction - not a murder mystery that loses its narrative, but a narrative-less cinematic body-fantasia in search of a narrative.'
Brandon Hobson @ Clusterflock: 'The music somehow made me want to lie down on the floor and sliver. I’m not sure why. When I told my wife this she asked if I’d taken my medication (which I had).'
Two Lynch references in two reviews = I am happy child.
Dang, Adam Robinson kills it here. I am really excited about his forthcoming book, brilliantly titled ADAM ROBISON.
Kind of flabbergastingly awesome post by Dennis Cooper on board games and writing
I also really like this recipe on Elimae by Nathan Neely
I just got Shane Jones's LIGHT BOXES in the mail. It is beautiful. You should order it. I am really excited to read it again in its final form. Since I preordered, mine came with a copy of Shane's MLP chapbook 'Black Kids in Lemon Trees,' which I already have as an MLP subscriber. Forward me a receipt for ordering the book from today or later and I will give you my second copy of it.
Brian Evenson's LAST DAYS is out now from Underland Press. I will be posting a full review of this probably later this week, but as anyone who has touched Evenson's ink likely already knows: this is a book for owning, reading, rereading, eating, touching. I can't think of an author who has influenced me more, honestly. I recommend this book as highly as any other book he has written: they are all vital.
Last night I read his story 'The Adjudicator' in the new issue of Conjunctions about a hairless man living in a house after a great conflagration, who is then asked to 'adjudicate' a man who looks, he believes, exactly like him. Evenson's corridors of narrative, always as if chiseled out of something that has existed forever, somehow seem both speaking to you and speaking secondly inside you at the same time, each saying slightly different things that then interweave in your brain meat and then, in the collision, form the narrative. How Evenson is able to portray such complex moods in lines that seem so simple, and yet so timelessly phrased, in their pronunciation, is one of the great many magicks he possesses.
This Friday, doing a small pre-NYC-book-release-party book release party in Atlanta. Friday 8:30 @ Kavarna in Decatur. My boy Jamie Iredell is on the mic, as are a couple bands. I don't think more than a couple Atlantans read this blog, but oh well, it's a mention.
I watched Roy Andersson's YOU THE LIVING the other night. I didn't love it as much as SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR, which is one of my all time favorites, though it was not too far behind, and almost like a sequel.
I love the use of the swastikas on the table after the cloth is removed in this scene, a perfect encryption that somehow gave me goosebumps when I noticed, even despite the laughter:
I kind of am enjoying this year thoroughly thus far.
"19: OS OS OS IS SI, Day of Speak Only in Hymn, for yes, the song is joyous, and in our zoning we yes do indeed enjoy the song."
Monday, January 26, 2009
NO COLONY 002
More responses to EVER from kind readers:
Luca Dipierro ('Ever is one the few books that entered in my organism through my mouth instead of my eyes.')
Daniel Bailey ('the book reads like a massive poem to no one and nothing that has ever existed.')
Kevin Wilson ('if there ever was a book created to be read while holding a feverish baby against your chest, this is the book.')
I am a literary hottie (though I don't remember saying any of the things in these quotes as I was b-day drunk).
Better news: NO COLONY 002 is now for sale. We just got the proof back from the printer, and it is a sick, sick beast, full of an absolutely butt-grinding slew of new words. We learned a lot about book design in doing 001 and as a result this one looks even better than before, inside and out.
(that amazing cover image is by Michael Berryhill)
Among these we have 2 authors publishing their first ever works in print, a monologue titled 'In Praise of Rape,' a cryptic phone game, our longest story yet in form of literary mystery about a man addicted to porn, an excerpt from Ken Sparling's most recent and as yet unpublished novel, as well as some other crazy and new as new milk words. Here is who:
Alan Bajandas
Isadora Bey
Kristina Born
Aaron Burch
Blake Butler
Luca Dipierro
Scott Garson
Rachel B. Glaser
Chris Higgs
Brandon Hobson
Edward Kim
Matt Kirkpatrick
Rauan Klassnik
Lee Klein
Darby Larson
Evan Lavender-Smith
Patrick Leonard
Eugene Lim
Sean Lovelace
Anthony Luebbert
Conor Madigan
Gene Morgan
Bryson Newhart
Christian Peet
Jennifer Pieroni
Kathryn Regina
Joanna Ruocco
Bradley Sands
Ken Sparling
William Walsh
Corey Zeller
(Look, how clean!)
You can now order the issue (we will have them in hand by the weekend) for $10 NO COLONY, or if you don't have 001 yet you can get both for $15, and we also are now offering a subscription for issues 002-005 for $35, which is a limited time bargain price or something market-languaged like that.
For those that have submissions still outstanding, you are in the window for future issues, as we ran out of room and therefore stopped reading before we closed the issue. So it might be a min, but it's better than a blanket rejection party, no? New subs will likely reopen after AWP.
Anyway, we hope you will purchase and enjoy this fine piece of strange meat. I have to say, from cover to cover this collection of writing makes me want to write, for every inch. I am really excited about the words in here.
We appreciate your support.
Luca Dipierro ('Ever is one the few books that entered in my organism through my mouth instead of my eyes.')
Daniel Bailey ('the book reads like a massive poem to no one and nothing that has ever existed.')
Kevin Wilson ('if there ever was a book created to be read while holding a feverish baby against your chest, this is the book.')
I am a literary hottie (though I don't remember saying any of the things in these quotes as I was b-day drunk).
Better news: NO COLONY 002 is now for sale. We just got the proof back from the printer, and it is a sick, sick beast, full of an absolutely butt-grinding slew of new words. We learned a lot about book design in doing 001 and as a result this one looks even better than before, inside and out.
(that amazing cover image is by Michael Berryhill)
Among these we have 2 authors publishing their first ever works in print, a monologue titled 'In Praise of Rape,' a cryptic phone game, our longest story yet in form of literary mystery about a man addicted to porn, an excerpt from Ken Sparling's most recent and as yet unpublished novel, as well as some other crazy and new as new milk words. Here is who:
Alan Bajandas
Isadora Bey
Kristina Born
Aaron Burch
Blake Butler
Luca Dipierro
Scott Garson
Rachel B. Glaser
Chris Higgs
Brandon Hobson
Edward Kim
Matt Kirkpatrick
Rauan Klassnik
Lee Klein
Darby Larson
Evan Lavender-Smith
Patrick Leonard
Eugene Lim
Sean Lovelace
Anthony Luebbert
Conor Madigan
Gene Morgan
Bryson Newhart
Christian Peet
Jennifer Pieroni
Kathryn Regina
Joanna Ruocco
Bradley Sands
Ken Sparling
William Walsh
Corey Zeller
(Look, how clean!)
You can now order the issue (we will have them in hand by the weekend) for $10 NO COLONY, or if you don't have 001 yet you can get both for $15, and we also are now offering a subscription for issues 002-005 for $35, which is a limited time bargain price or something market-languaged like that.
For those that have submissions still outstanding, you are in the window for future issues, as we ran out of room and therefore stopped reading before we closed the issue. So it might be a min, but it's better than a blanket rejection party, no? New subs will likely reopen after AWP.
Anyway, we hope you will purchase and enjoy this fine piece of strange meat. I have to say, from cover to cover this collection of writing makes me want to write, for every inch. I am really excited about the words in here.
We appreciate your support.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Grostbodulism
Some very nice recent blog responses to EVER by Ken Baumann & J.A. Tyler.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to read, mention, and comment about the book. It's really awesome.
On other fronts, pretty much the day after EVER was finalized I turned around and worked on finalizing SCORCH ATLAS, which is now in the design phases.
Zach from Featherproof and Bleached Whale Design asked me if I had an idea of what I wanted the book to look like, and I said something like one of those philosophy or science manuals from the 70's: he took that and made it look 'destroyed,' as if it had suffered through itself:
This image is for the distro catalogs and all so may not be the final book cover, but it will be hard to beat in my mind, as being exactly exactly what I wanted. I want to kiss it on the page ends and cut my tongue good. Zach is goddamn wizard.
I am also really stoked about Featherproof's new enterprise, Paper Egg Books, which sounds blisteringly rad, not to mention Amelia Gray's also beautifully covered AM/PM, which will be out in time for AWP!
If you are in Atlanta, tomorrow night our SOLAR ANUS reading series will be featuring a rad duo in Bruce Covey and Matt DeBenedictis, 7 PM at Beep Beep Gallery at 696 Charles Allen Dr. Come do that!
Friday after tomorrow, the 30th, I will be reading at Emory University's What's New In Poetry series with Jen Tynes, 8 PM at Harris Hall Parlour, if you happen to be around. Come do that!
This has been an entirely utilitarian blog post.
I will go back to making a mess soon.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to read, mention, and comment about the book. It's really awesome.
On other fronts, pretty much the day after EVER was finalized I turned around and worked on finalizing SCORCH ATLAS, which is now in the design phases.
Zach from Featherproof and Bleached Whale Design asked me if I had an idea of what I wanted the book to look like, and I said something like one of those philosophy or science manuals from the 70's: he took that and made it look 'destroyed,' as if it had suffered through itself:
This image is for the distro catalogs and all so may not be the final book cover, but it will be hard to beat in my mind, as being exactly exactly what I wanted. I want to kiss it on the page ends and cut my tongue good. Zach is goddamn wizard.
I am also really stoked about Featherproof's new enterprise, Paper Egg Books, which sounds blisteringly rad, not to mention Amelia Gray's also beautifully covered AM/PM, which will be out in time for AWP!
If you are in Atlanta, tomorrow night our SOLAR ANUS reading series will be featuring a rad duo in Bruce Covey and Matt DeBenedictis, 7 PM at Beep Beep Gallery at 696 Charles Allen Dr. Come do that!
Friday after tomorrow, the 30th, I will be reading at Emory University's What's New In Poetry series with Jen Tynes, 8 PM at Harris Hall Parlour, if you happen to be around. Come do that!
This has been an entirely utilitarian blog post.
I will go back to making a mess soon.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Chris Higgs's reading of EVER
All orders for EVER are packed now, half have been mailed, the other half will be out on Tuesday. I think almost all of the preorders except the last few I packed come with a soundtrack I made to go with the book, the tracklist and brief elucidation of which will be posted sometime soon on Largehearted Boy's Book Notes feature. If you didn't get one, or didn't preorder and want one, email me and I'll send file or something.
You can review or say something about the book on Amazon now, though they haven't started selling it, and is better as always to buy from Calamari direct. Brief reviews or ratings or comments there are more than appreciated.
Speaking of such, the benevolent and magically attentive Chris Higgs sent me a letter with notes he wrote down in his reading journal while or after reading, which were so in a way of speaking about the book that I haven't found a way quite to do, that I felt it too apt not to share.
It's funny when a friend who doesn't read that much fiction asks what the book is about, because I really have no idea how to say. Mostly I say 'titties,' unless my mom asks, then I say 'I don't know, why does it have to be about anything.' From now on, though, I may just fwd them this.
Thanks be to Higgs for such a thoughtful and flattering read.
You can review or say something about the book on Amazon now, though they haven't started selling it, and is better as always to buy from Calamari direct. Brief reviews or ratings or comments there are more than appreciated.
Speaking of such, the benevolent and magically attentive Chris Higgs sent me a letter with notes he wrote down in his reading journal while or after reading, which were so in a way of speaking about the book that I haven't found a way quite to do, that I felt it too apt not to share.
It's funny when a friend who doesn't read that much fiction asks what the book is about, because I really have no idea how to say. Mostly I say 'titties,' unless my mom asks, then I say 'I don't know, why does it have to be about anything.' From now on, though, I may just fwd them this.
Friday, January 16, 2009, 6:47pm
I read Blake Butler's new novella Ever, while in the bathtub earlier today. I got it in the mail. Blake signed it, which was nice. He also included a compact disc labeled Ever that turned out to be a mixtape accompaniment to the book. I sampled the disc and found it pregnant with potential. When I go to read the book for a second time, I will do so while listening to the mix.
My overall reaction is one of pleasure. I really enjoyed reading it. Very rare is it that I read an entire anything in one sitting (point of reference: it took me one week to read Clarice Lipsector's 94 page novella The Hour of the Star).
The sentences kept pulling me. The sentences were Gordon Lish worthy sentences.
The artwork complimented the text, made it more than a story, made it an artifact.
Key elements, in no particular order: blood, skin, water, a bathtub, the sky, a house, doors, teeth, a mother, crawling, burping, mirrors, the yawning, sores, loneliness.
Brought to mind aspects of David Ohle's Motorman (in the way it evokes a strange world that is both alien and familiar), David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (Made me imagine: what if the main character in WM had a sister who, instead of wandering the streets confined herself indoors?), Ellen Burstyn's character in Requiem for a Dream combined with the woman character in Alexander Payne's segment of Paris, je t'aime, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves (made me think about teaching a course on representations of the home in late 20th/early 21st century literature – could use parts of Blanchot's The Poetics of Space, parts of Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space, could also use Kathryn Davis's Hell), certainly aspects of Ben Marcus (the linguistic oddity, the estrangement of language, the overall defamiliarization so characteristic of his work).
There is a part towards the beginning where some neighbor kids climb up on the roof of their house and touch the sky, there's another part where there's a button or a switch in the sky, then there's another part where the bathtub (or was it the fountain?) becomes the sky.
I loved what Blake was doing with the sky. This was certainly something "new" in the realm of literature – it made me scared of going outside, or at least, it made me scared of looking up at the sky. Which reminds me of the opening sentence in Gibson's Neuromancer about the sky looking like a television tuned to a dead channel.
Teeth are all over. Lots of teeth, lots of sores, too. Lots of bleeding. But the teeth thing. This contributed to the dream quality – for me at least, given that teeth often appear in my dreams, losing teeth, teeth cracking, etc.
It is mysterious. It is sad. It is very mysterious.
The brackets got me thinking. Typically, we use brackets to signify a passage of text that is being rewritten, filled in, paraphrased, or….
well, I just googled the phrase "how to use brackets" and this is what I found:
Brackets
Br: use brackets for parentheses within parentheses or to indicate an addition to a quotation.
PARENTHESIS WITHIN PARENTHESIS: The Lord Byron who visited Hawaii in 1825 was a cousin (George Anson [1789-1868]) of the famous poet.
ADDITION TO A QUOTATION: Samuel Johnson observed, "he that tries to recommend him [Shakespeare] by select quotations will succeed like the pedant [. . .] who, when he offered his house to sale, carried a brick in his pocket as a specimen" (264).
Br X: use brackets sparingly. They make a page ugly. With a little imagination, you can find a better alternative:
UGLY: Emily Dickinson paradoxically claims, "I [she] taste[s] a liquor never brewed."
BETTER: Emily Dickinson paradoxically claims to "taste a liquor never brewed."
According to The Keables Guide to Writing by Harold Keables.
I would argue that Ever proves Keables's aesthetic assumption wrong. Brackets are not ugly. Brackets are interesting. They raise questions that would not be raised if they were absent. They add on. They multiply possibilities.
Hermeneutically speaking, brackets could signify the narrator's inability to own her thoughts, her personality, her selfhood. The brackets make the speaker conditional.
Time is nonlinear in Ever - that's the obvious, easy answer. But I would claim that the way Blake uses time is actually demonstrative of quantum wave function. By this I mean, time seems to pop in and out of existence in Ever, much like the experience of popping a quiff. One moment exists because it is being observed by the narrator, and then it disappears, only to be replaced by another observation, which could be considered "random" if it were not understood in terms of quantum physics. In terms of quantum physics, the notions of order and chaos are collapsed because every possibility exists simultaneously even though we only experience one possibility at a time – this seems to be a genuinely interesting analogy for Ever – all possibilities exist, all time exists, but what we as the reader experience are only those moments established by the author, non sequentially, non logically, as she pops the quiff of her reality.
[remember to return to this notion of interpreting quantum connections]
Thanks be to Higgs for such a thoughtful and flattering read.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
30000000000000000000000000000
New words live at WIGLEAF now, which, depending on when you load the page over the next few days, will shift. Each is 'Rupture'. Go reload sometimes, if'n you want. It is a rather different thing. There is no schedule. Someone was sneezing in my back. Thanks to Scott for putting forth the idea of flipped coins opening doors into weird text rooms.
Some old guy in this coffee room just said 'sweet set of cock' in here really loud but not on purpose.
I mailed many EVER preorders today. More will tomorrow. It was a good bday present to myself to be sending books out. Thanks to all who continue to support. :) BUY EVER.
More presenting: the next 5 people who comment pledging to write a critical study or response of 500 words or more to any piece in the first issue of No Colony will receive the issue for free. The responses will be posted on HTML Giant. Please only if you are serious, and not if you will flake. More out loud thinking about things for thinking in the way of words is good.
I am going to try giving away more things.
Tonight I am going to get loud and drink some margaritas soon.
I didn't mean to write today. Today was going to be day off. I wrote anyway.
There were so many flies in this restroom. It kind of made me happy. I am inconsolably happy.
I am going to go be a person and have fun now.
Some old guy in this coffee room just said 'sweet set of cock' in here really loud but not on purpose.
I mailed many EVER preorders today. More will tomorrow. It was a good bday present to myself to be sending books out. Thanks to all who continue to support. :) BUY EVER.
More presenting: the next 5 people who comment pledging to write a critical study or response of 500 words or more to any piece in the first issue of No Colony will receive the issue for free. The responses will be posted on HTML Giant. Please only if you are serious, and not if you will flake. More out loud thinking about things for thinking in the way of words is good.
I am going to try giving away more things.
Tonight I am going to get loud and drink some margaritas soon.
I didn't mean to write today. Today was going to be day off. I wrote anyway.
There were so many flies in this restroom. It kind of made me happy. I am inconsolably happy.
I am going to go be a person and have fun now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
