Western schools

12/17/09 Mike Kitchell typed: "i’ll make a video of myself setting a copy of scorch atlas on fire amid the snowy landscape of northern illinois after i finish reading it if you send me a copy to read"

12/18/09 I put book in mail

3/28/10



3/28/10 Anyone else interested in reading/burning/filming please inquire

Jobs by Steve Jobs

900% of persons appearing are to be appeareing ierjeirj aij jijijijijijijijiijijij

800% of persons sodijoidjroaijsdkfjaskdjfakjsdfkjal sjdkfjalskdjlf ajslkdjfa

700% of any persons who have done the talk

600% fhisdfioasjdofijaosidjflakjsdlfkjasldkjf;askjdf;lkjas;ldkjf;alksjd;fkja;lskjdf;lkjas;kd f;ajsdl;kf jal;skjdfl;akjs ;dlkfj;alk sjl;kfja;dskjf;l kajsdlkfja;lksjdf;ljasd

500% give back any inch you had planned to give back to give back to

90ei990ir9iapoipofkpajsdfkijasjdfl;ajsl;krjl;kj% is peraaeirjlkajsdlfk alksjdfl kajsldkfjlaksjdf;lkjal; skjdlfk ;laksjdkfl jal;ksjdflkj

Let's have a walk to the Tunica

2222222 ni ininnni ninnninn ninin KA ka ca cacacacacacacaca


Barrettes in the bareijarlkjs lkdjf a;lkjds; kjas;lkdjf;lkajsdlk
Batons in jiafjd oiajfo;ijsa odj;fojah;sldjf;lajsl;kjd lkjasldkjflkajsdlkfj kj
Badges for aoils aj oil will have dinner if
Beebees for BB
Baabaablacksheep if you alihjsdl fjao shofhaojdhf;oahjsd;ljf;lajsld;kjf
Hornbucket
Past person

#11 diuretic stimulus pancreatic dementia sundowner tablet box

Today I watched my dad pour OJ on cereal, he said it was good
The cereal went in the fridge
Still haven't found the OJ


Easy click kat no hello no buybybybye
Instant message

Instance messagedgdafsdf aspoidu foaisd;oifjaso djfha;s hdf;ljha s;ljdhf; lajs;ldfj ;lajshd ;jfha; sdjhfkajs
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port authority panbeep

box o babs

boods if u r r r rrrrrr rice



the letter e


the letter e



ajdfiua osiduhf oahjsdo;fha;osdhf;oah;osidhf ;aoihsjd;oifj
osdi
foais
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-----*&&*

being home is good. feel kind of like a moron a lot. had a good time out west though. saw some people i'd known a long time and never met, relaxed, ate food, ate mexican food every day but one, played live cards for the first time in more than a year and won $, spent $ at powell's which was a very nice store, spent 4 hours at city lights and bought nothing on purpose, had a car campout, petted simmons's cat who i liked even though i couldn't breathe him, talked some, slept some, didn't drink that much, liked the west coast feel.

jamie blogged about an odd thing that happened on our flight to san francisco.

i probably won't be going anywhere for a while.



while i was out Molly Templeton wrote a review of Scorch Atlas for the Eugene Weekly that is very excellent and kind indeed: "I think I fear it — its relentless and overwhelming vision, and the power Butler has to drill a hole in my chest with language. But Butler’s strange masterpiece doesn’t ask for your love. It demands your attention."

Nicolle Elizabeth wrote a review for The Brooklyn Rail that is also very kind: "Performing as an ashen, crumbling work in our hands, the work urges us to push forward before it—and we—turn to dust."





having returned home i am on a new regimen. no drinking, except special occasions, which was pretty much true anyway. running 7 miles at least 4 days a week and 3.5 miles the other three days. reading a lot. putting final edits on this novel, very close i think. more sleep book work and beginning a collaborative project that is very exciting and that will stay quiet for now, except to say it is with two people i admire massively.










something something fuck it

pear-0ae9ra04

A chapter from my completed-last-year novel-in-waiting, Decade, appears in the new issue of Redivider. It's the first long section of the book to be published, maybe the only. There's some weird typographic layout shit going on in it, which looks nice in the Redivider style. There are at least 5 voices going on at various times. It is called, "Our Anniversary, Repeated." Thanks to Brooks Sterritt and Matt Salesses for the time.

Michael Kimball, Dan Chaon, and many other excellents also appear.




A week from today Jamie Iredell and I are going to the west coast for a brief-ish trip, doing some readings.

Here are dates:

February 8 - SAN FRANCISCO - Dogeared Books 630PM w/ Meg Pokrass
February 9 - SAN FRANCISCO - tba
February 10 - RENO - some college I forgot to ask Jamie
February 11 - RENO - something else I forgot to ask Jamie
February 12 - EUGENE - Live Lit West 4. 6:00-6:45 at Tsunami Books on Willamette St.
February 13 - SEATTLE - Neptune Coffee 7PM


Hey, shitty job putting dates up Blake. I know.

Hey, shitty we aren't going to L.A. or Spokane or Portland, dude. I know.

We will stop in Portland for a lil though for sure, and hang out.

If you are around these places come out, or email me or something?

We are probably going to be thrown into a squat of pioaer.















um, editing editing editing
hide hide hide
life

&&@@@(((@@@(((((((((((

crod in the box
box dad
dad was a weeblo before me in the same cult
cutting little ones for strip bars
eating dice
i am hungrier when u r
when u u would have
hey
hey i am seven dollars short of a biggurl pony to take away
america is the best
of the best of the weeblos when we eat those cakes shaped like trees
that aren't trees but have lights on them also
shit
you shouldn't say crod in the box when you are a box dad
and will never have a son
except to go to clubs with
throwing animals out of the way to get to the big door
the bigger door than that

OO#r9u89

fine tuning this novel is making me dizzy. near the end of turning in a draft. i think it is called The Black Gazebo.

in the editing and fine tuning it is gathering some kind of exponential gathering i had only guessed in knowing as make, it is funny to stare and sudden click after many peerings




read this past weekend in Ann Arbor for the kickoff of Great Lakes Great Times reading series with Brian Evenson and Joanna Howard. was very calm and nice and good, good crowd, felt exciting

the first night i had nachos. the second night Brian ordered nachos and i felt glad




i am reading Wayne Koestenbaum's biography of Andy Warhol, called Andy Warhol, which is really interesting. i didn't know Warhol had made an early adaptation of A Clockwork Orange where his worker Gerard plays Alex and is subjected to drugs, actual drugs, during the treatment, a torture scene of sorts. i don't know where if anywhere you can find this

oh, it's called Vinyl. it's on youtube. there. not that cool. don't watch it. just think of what you think it could have been.


last night I watched the movie Sugar, it's probably the closest thing I've seen to a film version of Ever, at least in parts, though there is murder in it. it's a woman locked in her apartment. it's worth seeing, some amazing tactile scenes



very nice review of Ever by Angela Stubbs at The Collagist, thank you Angela and Matt







listening to Acid in the Style of David Tudor a lot, especially while editing, it makes me feel itccccccccccccc

c



ccc
c
c
c
c
c
c
c
c
c
c
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc


# version too many times to give a dingdong





days measured in days

Ujdjjjjdjj

Dash Snow freaks me






Crackshit on Vice with Gian and Ken




At 31 today, still feels nice to hear my mother say she doesn't know what she'd do without me

At 31 I feel ahead of where I'd planned to be and that is nice

I am thankful, could always be more thankful




My father said something else today to me that I know I won't forget, pointing at himself, the room, the backyard




Ever bestselling fiction of 2009 top 25




Sitting in this particular chair makes my head spin






New Sleepingfish has massive amounts of great, a piece of what is i think a companion to Ever, a draft here somewhere

thankful for Derek and people like him who continually give and make




the new John D'Agata book is beautiful and new





Creative Loafing listed my HP novel as among most anticipated of 2010, the working title they have there is not the final title










Depeche Mode






margaritas






sorry

MURRRRMLANNAMURRRRRRRRRRMAMAAAA

"Sourcebook" (from Tyrant 7) is published now at Vice

it is long, but maybe the story length thing i am most happy with of mine

it has an illustration by Atticus Lish, thanks to the Tyrant

it has more eating in it also

eating



i don't know what else

" "

TABLE 1
Most Commonly Used Torture Methods Applied to Victims
Seen at the Danish Centre for Rehabilitation of Torture Victims

Physical Torture

Beating, kicking, punching (with fists, rifle butts or truncheons)
Electricity (via cattle prods, pointed electrodes or metal bed frame to
which victim is strapped).
Burning with cigarettes, hot oil or acid
Submersion of the head in water until partial asphyxiation occurs (also called "submarino" or banera".)
Forced positions
Prolonged standing
Rape and other sexual assaults with foreign objects
Cold exposure
Dental torture
Repeated blows to the ears rupturing the tympanic membranes (also called "telefono").


Psychological Torture

Witnessing torture of others
Sham executions
Sleep deprivation
Continuous exposure to bright light or noise
Solitary confinement
Total sensory deprivation
Threats





------







Kevin Sampsell incluced EVER on his 9 Best from Small Publishers of 2009. Thanks Kevin.

Flavorwire goed that i'm a hipster

i have a profile in the new issue of Dazed and Confused, courtney loves shows her tits in it too or whatnot



i hate ringing phones
i see email and see it




trying

"It's inadvertent. It triggers something."

I just read The Late Work of Margaret Kroftis by Mark Gluth, a novella, it felt aurally pleasant in a way of great refreshment, with mirror time worming and layers of photography and weaving of levels of consciousness and continuity, all in very brief, clean sentences; a beautiful package with one of the most memorable endings I've read in a while. Feels of classical short French writing but in modern American scenery, which I can't remember having happened in other books. A lot of people I will know will really like this.





I'm selling myself into reading from here on out, reading like happens in a bath, except I won't always be in the bath. I've read quite a lot in the days since Xmas. The sleep book is eating much of my air.

My dad's brain is going quickly.




I published an ebook on Lamination Colony: Georgic, With Eclogues for Interrogators by Mark Cunningham. It is different than most things that have been on the site. I have a huge triple-sized issue that is going up hopefully soon and then another ebook. Then I am not sure what I will do with the site.





I just remember this bit I published last year or something on Wigleaf is one of the only published parts of the novel that will come out from HP next year.




.





For the new year we are going to the mountains to hide and eat food.

Year

3:AM Magazine named Scorch Atlas their 2009 Novel of the Year, very thankful and honored.

Dennis Cooper included on his list of Favorites of 2009, as well as Kristina Born's and several other friends, beyond kind as always.

Robert Lopez shouted at it on The Millions, thankful to Rob.

Thankful as well to all those who've listed it and Ever on their year end lists, very kind and thankful all around.





I read 106.2 books this year, here is what they were.





Life is kind of crunchy mix of weird and nice right now, my time has been mostly spent in mind throughout this season, and the season before. It was a nice year. It went fast and mostly in rooms. Next year is the same day.



Seeing an end at least now to insomnia book, MS word stops showing the word count at 100,000, which is good, because words









oinkfudglet

parrotcud

s

Story by Story: Brian Evenson's 'Fugue State' (18) 'Traub in the City'

It's been several months since my last speech re: Fugue State. I've been in a blank mode of my own, circling, recircling, in small rooms, reading texts within texts, thinking about sleep. In this time I've read this next text in the order, next to last, also the shortest, 'Traub in the City,' at least a dozen times. This weekend, I reread The Open Curtain, followed by The Wavering Knife, and then returned again to pick up at the second to last and smallest text inside this book, and found there in the shortest scrim the longest shouting. The book enveloping itself. This is not surprising in Evenson at all, considering his propensity for disclosing volumes within volumes (today 'Moran's Mexico' from The Wavering Knife about made me dizzy, with its room of teeth and tunnels in), and that even in seeing the small spacing of the two pages I knew something laid there ready to eat again in its eating, having learned what I've learned since last touching its face. These ideas could be called hyperbole in their intent, but this year for certain I've begun to feel that the certain thing I've tended toward in these last years can be felt only in such terms, or in the description around the center of the center, as I've gone on about here: that certain things have hyperbolic faces because the body on which they sit is made of something else. I won't continue in the circling of the circling of that meat body, but to say that herein, in the several months since returning to this two page spread, having read Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, and his Cinema 1, and with them begun searching for doors beside my doors, literally, this text, in two pages, owns a context for perhaps a whole body of work, an understanding, the groundwork on which Evenson's fictions sit gathering their power not even out of simple sound, as I've rattled on about in past months, but also in the borrowing of an other dark, of "several faces, coming one after another, quicker and quicker," all while underneath a very fine and sublime curtain, such as the curtains described in 'House Rules' from The Wavering Knife that, when lifted, show that the windows outside the house have been boarded down, allowing in only little stream of light where cracks make the space between the boards, hardly enough to illuminate any part of the whole house. As Traub here sees the bodies of a public metro all part of one vast and unnameable body, continually shifting and amorphous, he continues to try to draw the spaces, knowing he can not, knowing even in that vast amorphous massively spread face the air that makes the room around him does not touch any other object there inside it, does not touch him correctly, like all these texts in their becoming in this book here, in all the books, only a slightly further stretch to define that nowhere space, himself an oddly renamed image of a body already depicted in this very book, the mirror elongation of the slightly earlier 'Bauer in the Tyrol,' and yet he can not disturb that will to draw that space, confining and confined, elongated over several books within books, each ejecting and drawing into their black centers some massive fabric that will not be delineated or erased, will not lose its way in magic among these sentences and the rendition in their flood of something that is just above us and something in the stomach of this stomach in and of this house, a skin.

if anyone has had experience with the out of body or lucid dreaming as related to maps or homes or tunnels or film please email me




















mmusic