Blurbs & Blabs + Day 8 sidenote

BLAKE BUTLER ON MIKE YOUNG: "Mike Young's poetic teetaw caused a cosmic enjambment in my scrote, which once infected, defined a nation, and that nation was neon purple & made of email, and I left that nation with Mike Young's mother's mother, and Mike Young's mother's mother was the dude who scripted most of Legend of Zelda II."

MIKE YOUNG ON BLAKE BUTLER: "Blake Butler's synthesis of Lynchian hyperbole and didactic Wu-Tang skank tropes (in the Lacanian mode) causes readers to question anew our semiotic Dairy Queen panopticon. What Roland Barthes called "the grain of the voice" and Jeff Gordon called "I could've won if the other cars had just gotten out of my way" is embodied in Butler's spry, wedgie-tight narratives of American betrayal and disillusioned shopping cart races. Coming strong as dinosaur's breath from the Fugitive poet tradition, think of Butler as a modern day John Crowe Ransom with buck teeth, a penchant for "iced coffee" (in the Derridian sense of the phrase, more than a surface-level thirstiness and rather a concertedly diachronic poop-under-the-bridge aporia), and a finger up yo dirty brain nigguh."

FENCE nominated me for Best New Poets. They are allowed 2 nominations. That made me glow. Beyond an honor coming from such folks. TY, editors. Hot fuck action maximum. Titty licker.

Crunchy sumppump dicktease googoo.

Today is very good if filled with humming if a little rough around the edges if making me shake.

Still working on NOVEL for today. Results to post. (Late night update: There are now 33113 words. Figuring I will be done now around 40k.)

Did you know these things about LOST HIGHWAY:

- The Mystery Man never blinks during the entire film.
- In a recent interview, director Lynch confessed that Lost Highway and Twin Peaks take place in the same world.
- According to Lynch, the first scene in the film is based upon an incident which occurred in his own life. He says that early one morning, his intercom buzzed, and when he answered it a voice he didn't recognize said, "Dick Laurant is dead." However, by the time he got to the front of the house to look out the window, there was no-one outside.



Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon! Pretty soon!

Reading

Today I read Matthew Rohrer's A GREEN LIGHT while running on a treadmill. I read the whole book on the treadmill. It is a good book to read. I want to read more while I am doing other things. Running while reading made me feel twice as productive and pushed me through a window at certain points so that I could feel things triplicated.

After that, while waiting for the gas people to come turn my gas on, I read Daniel Brenner's THE STUPEFYING FLASHBULBS twice back to back.

According to the FENCE BOOKS website this book has sold only 150 copies so far, though it won the 2006 Fence Modern Poets prize. It deserves to sell a lot more. It reminds me of the Rohrer but also is more surreal and battered. It kind of invents things without sounding over-languaged. I liked it a lot and read it twice.

Here's a poem from it that I liked. I hope it is okay to put it online.

HERE IS A JUMP ROPE AND SOME ICE CREAM
by Daniel Brenner

The interviewer asked my mentor
If he had made anything up
This was before the engine burned up
With the patterns in it
But anyway during that moment
He was a role model and he
Told the interviewer no I didn't
Make anything up while throwing
A paper airplane




Most of the other poems in the book are much more chopped and strange but that one made me laugh. You can read another one of the more definitive poems and more about the book at the FENCE BOOKS BACKLIST PAGE.

Okay. Buy books.

Fence v10 n1

The new issue of FENCE is out now (not sure where, but their website features the issue and you can order it there under the subscribe tab).

The issue, like all of Fence's issues, looks smashing:



and is full of a ridiculous amount of incredible writers, including: NICK FLYNN, JOE WENDEROTH, J'LYNN CHAPMAN, ROB COOK, JOYELLE MCSWEENEY, PAUL MALISZEWSKI, RIKKI DUCORNET, ALISSA NUTTING, and PRAGEETA SHARMA (whose new book is also just released from Fence Books).

I don't know how I ended up among such people.

My contribution is another list, this time published as a poem. I have now published lists as fiction, nonfiction, poetry and other.

This one is #26 and titled: RAIN.

I have a poem called RAIN.

Next I am going to write a poem called: PAIN.

And then one called: DADDY.

I hate that Plath poem DADDY. I don't know why it is so revered.

Anyway, here are the first few lines of RAIN.

1. Today I wanted to feel evil.
2. To put my lips to the breach and breathe.
3. Corral the remnants of my spirit as in the way a horse is trained to jump for show.
4. In the high-jump event, the puissance wall may get taller than seven feet.
5. Last week while running I saw a muscular Italian with a little fluffy dog. He was jogging very slowly: slow enough that the dog tried to stop and take a shit.
6. The man didn’t notice. He kept on running, and the dog felt itself getting pulled, causing it to run to keep from getting choked while the shit still fell out of its ass.
7. Soon I will be finished moving in to my new home.
8. My loft apartment where the trains pass and my next-door neighbor has Tourette’s.
9. In the evenings his whoop and whistle, his grunt, his bark, his woo-hoo! ha!
10. Laughing in some forced way as if having an orgasm he doesn't want.
11. To most religious believers evil consists of more than a series of individually destructive acts, constituting a powerful and mysterious supernatural or metaphysical force that lies behind individual instances of hurt and suffering.
12. At my parents' house, a photo on the fridge of me at 15, weighing 80 pounds more than I do now, in a turquoise shirt with sweaty pits and a bowl cut.
13. Beneath, the caption: You can do it!
14. Most nights I lay awake until 4 AM.

To read the rest, buy the issue. I haven't gotten my copy yet, but Fence is always worth the money.

One time they had tits on their cover, if you didn't see:



Supposedly I was yelling about tits the other night drunk in Fellini's Pizza at 1:30 am.

Another day a man was trying to sell me a lizard in the street.

To receive this publication, I tailored the inseam of a young man's pantshorts so that it would more befit his crotch region, thus increasing his attractability and increasing his odds of finding a wife, so that he will not grow old alone and masturbating and at the gym staring at women in their spandex pants and buying coffee at the Starbucks and talking too long to the barista, who wishes she could drink Frappuchino for breakfast, lunch and dinner without the anguish of gaining weight, and therefore growing old alone and masturbating.








My girlfriend is very beautiful.