00kk

@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.

BEEOUU

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

TIXE

@Keyhole, a long interview w/ Molly Gaudry re: Harper Perennial deal, Year of the Liquidator, Scorch Atlas, etc. Thanks Molly!




The new Flaming Lips sounds like Oneida. I'm not sure yet if this is a good thing, but it seems better for them somehow.

The new Themselves has me excited, downloading now. I think I am irretrievably stuck listening to rap for the rest of my life, except in small spurts of other, as it is the only music that still innovates, while still repeating itself. In this way it is like Gordon Lish.

I am going to be lecturing on Three 6 Mafia and Gordon Lish and why Chekhov is bad advice at the New College of Florida next month.




Reread the proof of Kristina's book last night: it is fucking amazing. There is no other book that reads like this book. I can't wait to get it into people's hands. We're aiming at Halloween, but may be a couple days late due to fucking with the printers. The cover is bright red and came in burgundy. Proofs are smart.



If you are in Atlanta, Heather Christle and Chris Deweese are reading at Beep Beep on Thursday at 700. You should come. They are both hilarious and amazing. Heather's book just came out from Octopus. I am going to buy it from her there.



After &now I have decided to spend all of October and November focusing only on perfecting the novel, which is due in December or something. Editing is kind of fun and kind of gritty. Feels like the book is coming even more alive. Feels like there are still mirrors hidden in it that I have to turn around and face the other way in the paper.

Book inside a book.

I kind of want to call the novel Ever also. Can I do that? Can I just keep writing Ever for the rest of my life, over and over again?

This download needs to hurry up.



I tricked Apple into replacing the battery on my laptop after 380 cycles, 15 months later. I didn't know their coverage of the battery supposedly stops after 300 cycles. If your battery has changed at all in quality and you have Apple Care and you are nearing 300 cycles you should call and make them replace it.




There is a big difference between nice and kind. I like to think I'm kind.

Beehiveded

Jereme Dean again benevolently bought a bunch more copies of Scorch Atlas to give away. For one, just comment on this thread with anything and I will put you into a drawing for it, done on Tuesday.

I killed all of my links mostly, cuz linking 50 people seems insane, and not linking 200 other people seems insane. I've had complex linking guilt for a long while now and so just decided to erase it. I will link things now from the postbody, as they are better there. What is linking.





@Deckfight, a list of the 5 best things I've read lately

@Holy Land, Rauan Klassnik talks about his experience so far 45 pages into Scorch Atlas: "like biting into a burning apple. A sizzling cherry. Each taste's a piece of fire that whirrs on the tongue and surrounds the brain in a live-dead sack of cold-burning aura. This book's going on my night stand next to Finnegan's Wake..."

@htmlgiant, I wrote about my experience of the &now conference





Should I call my novel Beehiveded. No. I want to just call it Exit. I like the long title but maybe should just make it brutally short. Should it be called O0o0oo000oo, or another unspeakable chain. I don't know. No. I'm way behind on everything.





The rest of this year will be spent focusing.

Adifjdofi

The benevolent J.A. Tyler reviewed Scorch Atlas for Tarpaulin Sky: Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways. Blake Butler has made something enormous here, in the reams of his Scorch Atlas, and if nothing else, we are simply destroyed by it, mistaking our skin for its cover, our blood for its damage, our eyes for its violent and broken images.

Kind thanks to JA.




K. Born's book is on it's way to the printers, expect preorders to ship by Halloween. Boom!




Leaving tomorrow for Chicago book release party at No Coast at 7 PM, then Quickies on Tuesday night, 730 @ Innertown Pub. Then Wednesday through Saturday evening in Buffalo at &Now, including a panel for the 30 Under 30 Anthology on Thursday at 1130.

Let's get it.

Ook

Unsaid has a new website, with a lot of issue 4 all available online. People aren't full of shit when they say this might be the greatest issue of literary magazine of all time. I still haven't stopped reading its 500 pages, a bit every other day or so.

I have 3 pieces in the issue, one of which was part of EVER. This piece is a section from something much larger. The emdashes are fucked up online, but yeah.




A rather long and in-person interview I did with the rad Ben Spivey is up at Writers Bloc.

Dennis Cooper mentioned Scorch Atlas as a book he's recently read and loved.




The new issue of Make is out and I have a list in it, along with work by Dorothea Lasky, Stephen Elliott, Claudia Smith, Tomaž Šalamun, a lot of other good, it is beautifully designed.






Researching roleplaying games and BBSs and bikini briefs and sleep disorders and plastic money is giving me sleep problems again.

And I am actually listening to the new Pearl Jam, it's like an ass tattoo.

See you at &Now?

Kristina Born's One Hour of Television

Year of the Liquidator, the press Shane Jones and I started earlier this year, will release its first title, Kristina Born's One Hour of Television, on Halloween.

Designed to run as a series, the books, as we hopefully put out more, will form a continuum of design and style, like a little freakhouse on your nightstand.



People have already said nice things:

To read One Hour of Television is to flip channels between a 50’s science film on the joys of nuclear prowess and a heist-driven road movie set in a late-imperialist apocalypse. In Born’s hands, all social code is a recipe for deadpan horror. Strained domestic tableaus are intimately wedded to carpet bombings and crowd control, and our best chances at intimacy arrive via gruesome medical emergencies. This book is in revolt against language as an anesthesia machine. It's in revolt against an empire in which any vote you cast necessarily ends up as a vote for genocide.
- Lara Glenum, author of Maximum Gaga

One Hour of Television's recurring headwounds make an apt symbol for the work as a whole; urgent and insistent, the oozing gauze on an otherwise lovely skull. Would that all flash fiction be this deadly.
- Amelia Gray, author of AM/PM

You can read an excerpt and preorder One Hour of Television now for $10.

Thanks!

Lamination Colony contest issue

New contest special issue of Lamination Colony is now live, with the contest winner Bobby Alter, as well as 9 finalists: Mark Doten, James Chapman, Mel Bosworth, Christian Tebordo, Darby Larson, Sasha Fletcher, Drew Kalbach, Andrew Borgstrom, Ben Segal. Feel really excited by all of the work in this issue, like it demonstrates a coming explosion. I like to stare.




Chicago folks, there will be a release party for Scorch Atlas on Monday October 12 @ 7 PM at No Coast, readings, bands, stuff. Trying to rummage up a baby to take a bite of.



Also going to the &Now Conference from Wednesday to Saturday, a panel on Thursday at noon for the 30 Under 30 Anthology, with tons of good readers. Come hang out. Free with attendance is a copy of the &Now Anthology of Innovative Writing, what they are calling the anti-Pushcart, which I have a piece in, and Giancarlo Ditrapano's piece from the first No Colony also is in.

Speaking of No Colony, we have just reopened for submissions, looking only for long works, from at least 8000 words up to whatever. The issue will probably 3 or 4 very long pieces only. Don't send short, we'll have to delete it. We don't wanna do that.

Sleepfuck + Scrotal Cash hard

Have you ever written or invoked a language in your sleep?




We are thinking about printing up a limited run of hard copies of the Scrotal Cash remix of Scorch Atlas. They would be rather expensive since they'd be in very short run, probably like $20-$22 apiece, at like 180 pages, but would look really nice and I think the work is powerful enough that it warrants book object? If you would be willing to buy a copy at this price, please comment? I will throw in some extra junk like a soundtrack and some other goodies to help increase value. I would really like as many people as possible to read the incredible work of remixed here (still available for free.

Contributors would obviously need to give their seal of approval on this, which is pending, and we couldn't afford to buy everyone one out of pocket, but if there is sufficient interest and everyone is cool with it, it will go down, and be a cool limited edition object of sorts. Holla?

claim matter-of-factly to have asked a dream question.

Over the weekend I saw Sunn o))) at a refurbished church basement in the ghetto, I have never been a super huge fan of Sunn on record (though their latest album is kind of amazing), as it seems for noise music there is something lost in the recording, thus going to see them live was the perfect way to absorb.

They played for 2 hours straight at the loudest volume I have ever experienced in a smallish room, it was so loud that my whole body was shaking and in the way the chords would vibrate as they rang out it would flutter my shirt and pants, if I put a hand against my chest I could really feel my sternum shaking. I went unearplugged though they were selling them at the door.

Over two hours the sound was drummed and shrieked so hard into me that when they would pause and at the end the whole body still went on gumming, it was as if I had been put through some kind of masher or a tunnel. An amazing sensation that I have never felt elsewhere. Their robes and lifting arms up to the ceiling with the chords vibrating at first seemed silly but by the end I was knowing exactly.

Also during this Attila from Mayhem came out and did vocals over most of the set, he held the microphone out before him like in worship, and played with it in such ways for about 5 minutes before he even spoke, his voice would shift from deep and large to the most pressure-cooked vocal garble I have ever heard, to strange backward speaking and prophecy. At some point he went backstage and came back out wearing a cloak of mirrors, he took his knees and donned a crown of mirrors, then lasers literally shot out of his hands and he would hold them tightly in his face and then spray them into the mirrors and refract, or hold the beams to shoot across the room.

All in all, amazing as performance, and if you have a chance to see them, do it.

Obviously you can't capture sonics like this on tape, much less video, but the sound here is actually OK (unfortunately it does not feature Attila).








Matt Bell kindly wrote about his experience during the remix project, which is still available free for download from featherproof.


In other great news, the 30 Under 30 anthology that I coedited with Lily Hoang has been accepted for publication by Starcherone Books in Spring 2011. Really excited about that, it is packed with some really incredible new work. More on that soon.

Equally excited about ML Press rereleasing their first year of chapbooks all together as a single volume, including my 'In the Rape Year of the Ghetto Toddler the Houses Will Awaken' and a ridiculous count of others.





Heavy at work on my insomnia book. It is coming out like like.

Things good.

Scrotal Cash: the Scorch Atlas remix ebook

The results of the Scorch Atlas Remix Contest is now live and arrived, had a ton of crazy awesome shit come through, and here are the fruits of that freak labor:

a 150 pp ebook full of Scorch Atlas remixes by a crazy slew of folks, including: Brian Evenson, Matt Bell, Elizabeth Ellen, Chris Higgs (who remixed the whole book by erasure), Matthew Simmons, Marcus Whale, J.A. Tyler, Catherine Lacey, Andrew Borgstrom, John Madera, and Jon Cone.

Thanks to all of those others who entered, it was seriously hard to judge, and amazing to see the string of insane results that came through. Watching people take words and remake them and chew them up and spit up new spit up is exciting. Bird peoples. Let's make more.

Out of the all the contest entry submissions, I chose Krammer Abrahams's 'Remix' as the winner of them all: dude took the 1200ish word story and made new sentences for each sentence, then wrote paragraphs appending, a total of 10,000 words in total, each line cut from some fucked language limestone I have yet to see most anywhere at all. I seriously could not believe what I was reading, and how hard I laughed. It is better than the original, that's a promise. Take the time to lick and imbibe, free (or for a small donation to F-proof, if you dig)!

Download Scrotal Cash here.



Also please note that you can enter two win one of two free copies of Scorch Atlas in the post below this one,

and you can buy the book here.

Scorch Atlas Contest

The always very kind Jereme Dean has purchased a few copies of Scorch Atlas for me to give away. These, if you wish, will come as damaged copies like from the preorder period, bloody or waterlogged or otherwise chunked to bits (but readable), which are now no longer available anywhere but here.

So, two copies to give away (a third copy will be given away later this or next week on my blog), and entry is simple:

Name the book you would most like to see beaten into shit and destroyed for all of time, and briefly why.

If you don't ever wish a book would be destroyed because you are not that kind of person, tell me why you are not that kind of person.

Contest will run until Thursday morning when a winner will be picked (based on which answers I like the most), copies will be trashed, and mailed.

Thanks again to Jereme for the support and the fun.



** PS: In the latest edition of the Ninth Letter podcast, a reading of 'The Gown from Mother's Stomach' spoken by Jennifer Bradford.

*** PPS: The SA remix ebook is very very nearly done and should go live any day now.

Gorgonz

Thanks to everyone again for the kind words about things. Feels nice. Humbling, and I am grateful.

For those that have asked, the nonfiction book is not my book of lists, but a new manuscript that is currently in progress, which will be about insomnia and obsession. Getting along, underway.

Feels like there's more I could/should say about all that but maybe I'll just hush for now. Maybe I should lay out how the whole thing went down, which seems a very unconventional method of a book deal happening. I don't know. Maybe later.




The Faster Times reprinted a conversation between me and Michael Kimball about acoustics and language. It's probably my favorite craft talking I've gotten into. It originally appeared in Unsaid 4.



Tobias Carroll followed up on his profile of Scorch Atlas by posting the full text of his interview with me at the Scowl.



Barrelhouse asked me and a bunch of other people about favorite Patrick Swayze movies.




I ate some more pages of Scorch Atlas but the video came out really dark, I wish I had Final Cut still so I could put a bunch of them together in hyperspeed, iMovie really sucks.




You can review or say small things or post segments from already existing words you've blogged etc. about Scorch Atlas on Amazon, I'd really love you if you did, things like that seem to help.



You might also review Young Jeezy's 102.

Harper Perennial

It's been in the making for a while and is official as of today: I've signed a two book deal with Harper Perennial, for a novel and a book of nonfiction. Crazy and exciting for me in many ways, most of all in having a book as crazy as the novel that has been bought is to be considered in the big houses. It seems a sign of good times, I think.

Massive thanks to Cal Morgan, my editor at HP, and to Carrie Kania, the boss, for not only stepping up to a wild book, but for really working to make HP something else. I could not be more excited to work with such minds.

As well thanks to Bill Clegg, who has recently signed on as my agent, for negotiating the deal, and being amazing.

Also thanks to Dennis Cooper, Tony O'Neill, Justin Taylor, Shane Jones, and Ken Baumann for keeping me clued in and glued up and halfway sane in the proceeding. Seriously. Feels insane.

More on this perhaps later, but right now I'm going to go walk around the block.