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My review of Jesse Ball's THE WAY THROUGH DOORS is in the new issue of The Believer, you can read the first few sentences on their site. I gave it the highest praise I could muster.





Also, an interview I did with Norman Lock back when I was writing my Believer review of his Grim Tales is up in this month's web edition of Hobart, along with fine fiction by Scott Garson, some dude named Sean Lovelace, and many others. Nice'ns.





If you have been kind enough to link me, and have a second, any updates of my link from the old url (blakebutler.blogspot.com) to the new one (http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com) would be helpful, as it will facilitate the switch in search engines and shit. The old links will still work but, internet or something. RSS feed should continue to work as before also. Sorry.





I drank so much coffee that I feel like shit, and like excited, like 'excited shit,' which is causing me to have churning feelings of extreme hopelessness and boredom mixed with extreme possibility and ideas.





What am I talking about

RR R R RRRRRRRRRRRRRRR R R RRRRRRRR R RRRRRRR RRRR RRRRR RR RRRRRRRR RRRR R RRRRRR R RRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRRRRRR

I interviewed Jesse Ball for Bookslut. I love what Jesse says. If I haven't mentioned it enough, everyone with an interest in interesting new fiction should read The Way Through Doors. It is magic. More on that in my Believer review which will be out in May.



Sean Lovelace wrote a long and very kind review of EVER on his blog, including photo representations of selected sentences. This is the kind of review you write for.



If I don't stop bumping my arms and legs and other errant appendages on shit accidentally several times a day I am going to (a) be a very sore and bruised old man and/or (b) slit my face.



Finished reading Zizek's 'Violence' last night: it feels really good to be reading philosophical documents again after so long. This one in particular is fun and constantly packed with ruminations that continue to build. The last chapter on 'divine violence' is something I would hand out to a writing class: it discusses the manners by which applying meaning or intending meaning in a text or other artwork becomes both ridiculous and obscene. He quotes a passage from G.K. Chesterton which comes down to the idea that people want to applying meaning to ideas because what they are truly afraid of is a four word phrase: "He was made Man."





Last night I began reading 'Finnegans Wake' via a page or two before bed. I have had this book for so long and never more than flipped to random sections, but my amazement last night at staring at the pure iconography and gibberish invention and the sheer blocks of new inch by inch throughout made me decide I will require this injection. If anyone wants to join me in the reading you can do 3 pages tonight and then we will go forth on the 1 by 1s.




Secret Chiefs 3 playing a John Zorn Masada songbook = the way Zorn is meant to be played. Forgot about this one for a while but am in the enjoyment hemisphere again.



I hope this person who has mistaken my email for 'Troy's' email, and who keeps text messaging me from her cell phone, keeps it up. It is becoming a motivator of light. The last msg, from yesterday evening:

Subject: Hoe I tried to call

Hoe I tried to call u back and it went to voicemal.
-i.love.troy.*




No Colony is sharing table 673 with Publishing Genius and NOO Journal at AWP next week (next week?). Dang. Come do a look.

Issue 002 has just arrived and will be going to out to purchasers on the jump tip.

what kind of good is the best good if you are going to open the spaghetti do it now i have to be at the sand farm in 15 min & my hair is leaking light

** (people can win a copy of EVER by talking shit here)



Sean Kilpatrick pushes another piece into my top 5 favorites of the year Progress: A Play in _ Acts. I mean, I want to stop talking about the dude, but he won't let me. Such as here is a part from the play that makes me squish ink:

An arm sticks out, aiming a pistol straight up.

CHARACTER A: I'm pregnant.

CHARACTER B: Congratulations. Who's the father?

CHARACTER A: I'll never tell.

CHARACTER B: When you straddle a cannon the whole ghetto perks up.

The gun recedes. Several shots sound.

That's a man, read the rest.





Another recent hero is Brandi Wells. Read her new blog post about a poem she published in her school journal causing a call for censorship. It's a great poem. The poem was also published here at decomP, you have to scroll down: We have been dating so long I feel like I can tell you anything.

Brandi is doing really strong work esp. lately, it makes me happy when I see her new words. The letter from her school reminds me of what school feels like. I thought I missed it. Maybe I do.





I have a big post about the apparent wish for democracy in literature in me coming soon, thinking about it last night kept me up until 630, I thought I would remember what I wanted to say but now I can't remember, I hold my hands in fists when I am sleeping.

Everything is not good. It's ok to be critical.

And it's funny, Ryan and I are just talking about this right now: for all the good you talk about in public, it is the things that are shit talk or are negative that garner the attention. If people didn't like negativity, they would make 100+ comments on the presence of a Kitchen Reading Series. But they don't. What people like is to see other people cut the skin off each other's faces. Me too. Fine.

I am going to figure out what I mean and talk better later.

Why can't the air be made of Mexican food.







Last night finished reading Jesse Ball's forthcoming THE WAY THROUGH DOORS, it is magical and filled with doors and tunnels and stories within stories and is exactly what I needed to read. My review will be coming out in Spring but for now let me say that this book is important and new and old and beautiful and many things, and if you have liked anything of Jesse's before, or like Calvino or Marquez, you are going to be in for it.

There is a definitive thread in the book that says something on par with the idea that: 'Nothing is incidental.' There is a lot of wild energy and new unraveling and dream terror and old wit and maps and drawings and enchantment and etc. in this book. I can't stop thinking about it.






I heard something today about an unreleased chunk of a large unfinished novel that he had given to a very small lit mag to be published right before his death will be coming out early next year. Knowing that is out there and coming makes me feel like I can sit up in this room and listen to the humidifier and put my socks on when my feet are cold.







Let's always be talking about something else.








Like my 3 favorite google searches ending here today:

1. keeping people from touching your infant
2. pink ball in dog's vulva
3. poems about who gives a shit about a little girl

'Yo mammy and yo pops, man, they bout to find yo body'

Rauan Klassnik, author of the really brutal and beautiful HOLY LAND, just posted a long process-oriented interview with me about EVER, including 'Physics, The Universe, Charles Simic, Cormac McCarthy, Tea or Coffee' and shit. Ron also interspersed some critical thinking on the book's text as well as some quoted sections and etc. His questions were really on point.

I think Ron is the first person besides Derek and those who blurbed who has read the book, excluding Peter and 2 or 3 who saw a really early draft. Thanks to Ron for the really nice words, and for the interview. Please have a peek.

And then (inhale), you can still buy EVER for $12 plus a buck and a half for shipping, which will come with free new life and maybe a cheat code for Arkanoid and some other things.




If anyone else is interested in doing an early review or other, I can probably get you a pdf version to checkout. Other press people please drop me a line for paper version when it arrives.

Thanks again to everyone who has checked it out so far, the response has been really nice for just a few days on the block.









If you feel like getting one of the best deals I've ever seen on amazing books Dalkey is doing a huge amazing sale. I already spent $60. If I didn't already own a huge portion of their catalog I would probably have done the 20 books for $110 twice. Amazing.

For $60 including shipping I got:

Geometric Regional Novel by Gert Jonke
Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique by Gert Jonke
Pigeon Post by Dumitru Tsepeneag
The Bathroom by Toussaint
The Complete Butcher’s Tales by Rikki Ducornet
Temple of Texts by Gass
The Conversions by Harry Mathews
Romancer Erector by Diane Williams
The Obstacles by Eloy Urroz
The Mirror in the Well by Marcom

They have also released some of my favorite books ever, including The Tunnel, Magnetic Field(s), several of Markson's, Ben Marcus, the new Stanley Crawford rereleases, Nightwork, Coover, Barthelme, Elkin (oh god I should fill in my Elkin gap: THE MAGIC KINGDOM is one of the all time greats). Just too much.








I read the first half of Jesse Ball's THE WAY THROUGH DOORS last night. It is utterly insane. Sort of like IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER if it had been written on even less sleep. Be excited for it.







twitter is actually kind of calming

'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.

Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR + boinking in a baby year

Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing.

The first section uses these calm and almost Lutz-like renditions of the two divorcees, Fog and Car, trying to smooth their lives out into something, Eugene Lim writes about the cleaning of houses, the method of a swimming routine, and all in this meditative, language-conscious but not overtly languaged and extremely absorbing way, the book also continues to evolve by stretching the forms of the way the words are delivered, but again, in calm and nuanced methods.



In grad school Amy Hempel had us read a Mark Richard story, I can't remember the name of it, I think it is the first one in THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Amy, in perhaps her only 'lecture-like moment' of the workshops talked some about how Richard was able to show the passage of time by using fields and dogs rather than talking about time, and how it opened the language and the feel of the words in this surprising way, I think Eugene Lim's descriptions here worked on me in that way, though rather than over the function of time it was over the function of distancing and grief, so much so that I couldn't stop wanting to propel through it, and I was so pleased to find myself reading a book supposedly about relationships about still feeling completely engrossed, as I hate relationships in books usually, for their wheel-spinning, I think people who get excited about Richard Yates would really enjoy the meditative stancing of the early sections especially.

Then there are two more sections in which Lim continues to open the way the story is built into an almost Paul Auster kind of maze, path-inducing manner, there is following and weird rooms and strange phenomenon that continue to be braided together but left open in other strands.

Here is a sentence from the book that maybe exhibits the balance of strange and familiar sense of both situation and language in FOG & CAR: "He forgot his name and became her bellybutton."

Then, in the last third of the book, which begins to develop into a really strange configuration of earlier elements and a linking of space, I hit a page, a strange development involving a man in an empty room and an elevator, and a little later, further linking, which made me stop and touch the book against my chest. I remember not knowing what to do having read it, it was very late by then and I'd stayed up longer than I meant to, and yet I wanted to keep reading, and yet couldn't the page had stopped me in a way that I felt I needed to think about rather than go on with the rest of the book right there, I went to bed. I could not stop thinking about the book in such a way that I stayed awake for several further hours, and when I finally did sleep I had a dream about writing about the book as I am now, and other dreams branching off from the book. When I woke I walked around for a while and then finished reading.

FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.

Along with WASTE, if you haven't gotten on board already, both are available from Ellipsis as a package deal. I can't imagine an innovative fiction press with a better introductory one-two punch.










Right before I woke up for the last time this morning, I had a dream where Marilyn Manson was talking to me, he was speaking a quote, the quote, I knew somehow, was from someone named 'Vivino', talking about chess strategy, which Manson was applying to something about writing he and I had been talking about, I have no idea why I was talking to Marilyn Manson about writing, the quote was, "Begin with a false position & allow the position to become." This may become the epigram for RICKY'S ANUS, which I am deep in. Deep in Ricky's Anus.











I got a galley of Jesse Ball's new forthcoming novel THE WAY THROUGH DOORS in the mail today. Fuck yeah.











There is a new issue of BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS, I have a story in it, as does Sam Pink, Ofelia Hunt, Mike Young, Matthew Simmons, D. Harlan Wilson, Darby Larson and several others, I can't wait to read it, the cover is amazing. Thanks to Bradley Sands for his hard work and wild mind.

The issue is only $5 plus a little shipping, 'the squarest price in town.'

I fell asleep inside BACK TO THE FUTURE am I okay

1. If someone is smart they will publish SAM PINK's fragmentary prose amalgam: I AM GOING TO CLONE MYSELF AND THEN KILL THE CLONE AND EAT IT. If I had a press, which I might soon, I would give Sam Pink an eight figure advance so he could stroke his shaft with 20000 dollar bills.

Sam Pink is like Russell Edson with much bigger balls and a tendency to aim at the throat rather than the spleen.

Seriously, shit is real. This should be made flesh. Talk to him.

2. THE CUPBOARD is a revitalization of a pamphlet series releasing incisive work, the first released is by Jesse Ball, I am subscribed, it is cheap to subscribe or to at least buy the first issue by Jesse Ball, $5, go support this excellence.

3. Ross Simonini's musical project THE FAMILY DANCES made me feel glad about listening to music again, he is doing something here with this, it makes Animal Collective sound like Staind.

4. Paul Siegel has released POEMERGENCY ROOM through Otoliths books, it seems nice, I am going to touch it.

5. Jeremy James Thompson posted more about the Charles Bernstein broadside I helped annotate.

6. Saw GONZO, the Hunter Thompson documentary last night. Hunter Thompson was a real piece of shit. He didn't even write that much, he just kind of babbled, I like babble, I like FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS, he could have done more with himself, he could have done more, I find it amusing that one of America's most 'famous' authors was more famous for his being a dick and doing a lot of coke etc. than he was actually saying things, he 'gave up' I think, maybe I will give up but instead of coke I will slide into throwing babies in the air and catching them and sticking my tongue far up their nostrils.

7. Daniel Bailey started a video blog where writers can do videos of themselves reading, it is here: HERE EXPLODES MY GIANT FACE.

7.5. I want to record an audio book of Roald Dahl's THE TWITS, that is going on my to-do list goddamn it.

8. RYAN CALL posted an excerpt from a conversation we had yesterday. I think Ryan Call was nicely drunk when we spoke again later in the evening, he said things more directly that he usually does, I liked it, he helped me figure out to keep the title I have for the new novella I am finishing.

The novella may be almost long enough to be a novel, it is spaced out with a lot of white space and works in graphs and lines mostly, I think I like it a lot, it is going to remain with the title HOW MANY FLOORS DOES THE NIGHTMARE HAVE? until I have that title beaten from my hand by someone.

I think I am just going to send the novella around all over the place like those Chinese restaurants that stick ads on my doorknob, that must work somehow, they probably at least get a few customers like that, I feel like I can be reckless with this thing. Right.

Interview with J'Lyn Chapman

My interview with J'Lyn Chapman, author of BEAR STORIES, is up at Bookslut.

Check it out and then buy her book. It is only $5 from Calamari.

Also, Jesse Ball's story from the last Paris Review is up on their website so you can read for free. THE EARLY DEATHS OF LUBECK, BRENNAN, HARP, AND CARR. I enjoyed the story quite a bit. It melds some kind of antiquated storyteller speak with Kafkaisms and weird injected musings such as this one:

They say that in a heavy storm one shouldn’t be beneath trees for fear of lightning. Also they say don’t go into an open field. This is very confusing, as, when I have on occasion been in a place of fields and trees during heavy rain and lightning, I have become completely confused. At what point do I stay away from the trees? At what point from the fields? Do I dig a hole in the ground? Do I need to keep a little shovel with me for rainstorms? In such a hole wouldn’t the rain collect and drown me? That’s not so much better, and in fact would be much the same because I have heard that the bodies of people killed by lightning are bloated in a similar way to those found after a drowning.

WHERE AM I WHERE HAVE I BEEN WHERE ARE YOU now contains 47393 words. I have added 8000 words in revision, including a short appendix. More is slipping in through the cracks. I don't want to stop but I am going to try to keep as much of the original draft intact as possible. I am going to limit myself to finish by end of week, I think, though last night after reading a chapter of Joy Williams's THE CHANGELING (which is getting really fucking good), I blurted a 900 word chapter that seems essential to the book as a whole about an egg that gives the mother orgasms.

SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS & David Lynch

I read straight through SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS by Jesse Ball yesterday. I went to look at it at Borders after Shane Jones mentioned he'd read and liked it. The writing is cut into short lines that break every page or every few pages and the top blurb on the back of the book said it was like David Lynch so I bought it without further question.



Jesse Ball is a poet. I like prose written by poets. You can usually tell the difference because they often use less words and more clear words. The story is filled with a lot of surrealist imagery and bits of unusual quasi-science like what I enjoy in Ben Marcus's NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN. The back of the book also referred to Kafka, and this book seemed more like Kafka than a lot of other books that are referred to as seeming like Kafka.

There are a lot of little bits in the book that don't go anywhere. I like those bits the best. I liked less when things were made to come together.

I am still looking for a book that appropriates the experience that David Lynch creates in his films. This book had certain elements but did not fully capture what I like about Lynch. I don't think the author intended that anyway, but I'd like to read more noir-ish, creepy unresolved suspenseful absurdist writing. I can't think of any book that is very close to David Lynch in style.

I have never read a book that made me feel like I do looking at this:



or this



or this



or like the first 40 minutes of LOST HIGHWAY which makes me feel more fucked than anything else ever.

I wrote a novel last year called MORE LIGHT trying to write a David Lynch style novel and was told the characters were unsympathetic and that you could not feel for the characters. I did not want anyone to feel for the characters. I will probably never try to do anything with that novel. That is 58,000 words that I worked for 5 months on that will never see another's eyes, likely. I am fine with that.

I liked SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS. I would recommend it to others. I wish more books were like it in that it made me want to read to the point that I had no choice but to keep reading until I was done. Those are the kind of books you live for.