Sleepingfish 0.9375

i have a short piece of something quasi-fiction quasi-handbook in the latest issue of sleepingfish magazine #0.9375, the line up of which is absolutely sick, including some of my favorite working writers and others i greatly admire: gary lutz, terese svoboda, peter markus, deb olin unferth, laird hunt and tons more. to see my name among such a group is inspiring, really. it is the first piece in the issue, which seems nice.

here's an excerpt:

THRUST MANUAL: Young Recruit Edition
By Blake Butler

I. GENERAL PROCEDURE

Be washed. From a distance resemble a thing someone might desire. Say hello, yes sir, or good evening but not more. Do not look them in the face.

The Client will have been informed enough to possess an idea of you. He'll want to learn your smell. Allow his fingers where they will. Do not cringe. Do not smile unless requested. Sit up straight. Allow enough detachment in the preliminary minutes to allow a rejection without shame. If one does walk out, don’t worry! The queue is never-ending.

Sweat only in the moment. Make hot sound if prodded, enough to acknowledge but not disgrace. Lubricate if dry to ripping.

In event of pleasure, time will be deducted from your payclock.

- - - -

to read the rest you can buy a copy of the magazine here and it is worth every cent, as is everything i've read that calamari press releases.

the cover alone makes it worth buying, in my opinion:

new reading

two excellent new stories by Ron Burch and Michael Jauchen are now live at the web journal i do,
Lamination Colony.

read and enjoy.

interview & stuff

last week i was the featured writer at a nice blog called
What To Wear During an Orange Alert?
here is a link to the interview


this week i received acceptances from several print publications, i think 4 in 4 days, which was nice and unusual.

i am addicted to ebay (selling for once, instead of buying) and online poker.

it distracts me from writing.

one good thing to do is eat ice cream until you feel ill and then sit down and start babbling.

i have nothing of interest to say because my brain is fried from sitting at the computer typing for 8 hours a day minimum.

goodnight.

Paula

i have a new short piece called 'Paula' up at Thieves Jargon.

it is a short vignette from a novel called 'YES I AM AWARE THAT I'M IN HELL' that i abandoned because it was fucked and bizarre.

the majority of what i've written to date i don't to intend to ever show anyone.

Kelly Link and simul-publishing

I just finished, perhaps way behind everyone else, Kelly Link's latest collection 'Magic for Beginners.' I think I started reading this book several times and each times didn't make it very for reasons I didn't realize until after I'd read them all. Some of the stories, and I think the first one in the book, just didn't hit me and I kind of started thinking of the book in the wrong light. The stories that did work here for me completely shredded my head. I think one called 'Stone Animals' I think is a perfect story and is a story I've tried to write many times. I think it's one of my favorite stories. I like the way she can throw things in and go way out with bizarre details but still end up feeling like she's not just jazzing around to be weird or funny, but she also doesn't try to tie everything up, either. She leaves a lot to rumble around and a lot is playful and smart and sloppy in a smart way and still manages to cause an effect, however indefinable. I like things that meld fantasy with reality, in a Barthelme way, or Marquez. I like to laugh or say 'fuck that's good'. I also know I liked the last story 'Lull' a lot, though I can't remember what it was about or why I liked it because I don't have the book in front of me. I could go get it because it's just in the other room but I don't think I'm going to because I'm lazy. I didn't much care for the title story, though I didn't not like it. I think I really liked this book a lot and I'd recommend it to people, though I think a lot of people already read it.



Miranda July's promo site for her forthcoming book is really good. Tao linked it and I went through it twice. It's smart. Click on Tao's link here and there's a post there with a link to her site. I've never read any of her stories. I want to read her stories now. I liked certain things about her movie 'Me and You and Everyone We Know' but I didn't like it completely. I liked it more several days after I watched it than I did immediately after watching it. The little black boys typing on IM is very good. I imagine her story collection will be very good and I plan to read it.

I have a bunch of other little things here and there I think are coming out soon. A lot of short pieces pending that I feel good about. S0me print and some online. Outside fiction and poetry, I have an interview with Dennis Loy Johnson, in which he talks about the threat looming over small presses right now and it kind of socked my gut, some of his answers. It's going to be a good interview. I never heard back from Sonora Review when I told them the story that they wanted to run had been online, which makes me think I made them mad for not telling them already, which I feel bad about. I feel conflicted about the whole thing. If anyone else reads this, what do you think about simultaneous submissions and maybe allowing things to get published in more than one place? I can't figure out how I feel about it. I do a small online lit journal sporadically Lamination Colony and I wouldn't care if someone sent me something that'd been published before. If it was good, I'd want to publish it. But that's just a tiny web-based site, so it's probably different. I understand somewhat and I don't. If it's been in the New Yorker or VQR or something huge that a ton of people read, then I'd understand why they wouldn't want to republish. There's so much out there and people want new things in their magazines. I get that. If it's new to them though, it must be new to most people. I don't know. Tao talked about first serial rights a lot on his blog for a while when he had some rigamarole over a previously published piece at Pindeldyboz. That was a good post. I need to read that again.

I need to go to bed.

I need to get my wisdom teeth pulled.

I need to not be dumb more often.

efficient shit

this is i think my 4th blog. i had a blog that i made with txt files a long time ago before blogspot places existed
i have two other blogs i deleted
i have a blog i write in a lot more on my myspace page but mostly there i just talk shit in an indirect manner about people in atlanta

i just found out i was a finalist in the sonora review short-short fiction contest, and though i didnt win they want to print my story but i had to tell them it was already online somewhere so i'm thinking they may not want it anymore. should i not have told them that? i think more people read things on the internet anyway. if people were honest they'd mostly only publish online because way more people read that than issue #3 or even April 2006 of small magazines, though i do like small magazines. i guess what i'm saying is more people should do online writing more often and not think that its cheaper or easier or something. i read way more online magazines than print ones and i read more print ones than your average person. let's be honest more often.

but maybe they'll still want to print it because different people read different places. i never understood the reprints policies most places have. if its good, it should be printed so the most people can see it, at least to some extent.

i am trying really hard to waste time today so that i dont actually get work done before i go on a trip starting tomorrow.

here's what i wrote in the other blog today.

this summer i wanna wear goggles a lot
not swim goggles but the kind motorbikers wear
i do not want a motorbike because those are dumb
i want to wear the goggles in the intense sun so that my face burns around the goggles so that even when i'm not wearing the goggles it looks like i am, though of two different colors
i want to wear the same shirt everyday and sweat in it a lot
i do not want to get a tattoo
i want to eat a lot of food one time every day and not eat at all the rest of the day because i feel efficient when i do it like that
right now i am not very hungry
swimming is going to be fun
people like to mess with money
i like when people spell people as 'peopel'
i didnt decide i liked that because i misspelled it when i wrote it but because i genuinely thought about how i like it
i wish more people would have tried to buy my cds so i can get rid of them i am going to put up more cds on ebay even ones i think i still like because i really dont still like them they just symbolize a thing that used to be cool to me and a thing i thought was giving me something but alls it was really giving me was a hard time
i like phrases like 'a hard time'
i found a joke i wrote on my hard drive
not on the hard drive itself but on a file on the hard drive though if it were a really good joke i would have written it in sharpie right there on the spinny drive part
here's the joke i wrote:

A: For Pete's sake.

B: For Pete's sake? What about Jalliope?

i dont remember writing that joke its still a joke right
i think the j in jalliope should be pronounced as an h because thats what mexican people do
i think everyone should write a poem today
i think it'd be neat if more people wrote poems
i wonder what certain people i know would write if they tried to write a poem and were honest about it rather than doing what a lot of people try to do when they dont really write poems and they like have to for a class or something--usually they get all lyrical and retarded and say things the way they think it should sound to be a poem
the best poems are ones that dont do that i think
the best poems are ones that just say things
like this me writing right now is a better poem than a lot of poems
maybe i should submit this to a literary journal and see if they take the average number of days duotrope.com says it takes them to reject the poem
or maybe they'd take it
i'm still typing
did you like my joke?
i think maybe i didnt write it
i think maybe someone else came and wrote that joke on my computer and saved it with all the other files of writing i have so i'd look at it and wonder why i wrote that joke
i dont like standup comedians because they work too hard at talking
i'd like to see that one guy dane cook get thrown in front of a big truck driven by someone without a conscience
not really because i dont want to see anyone die right now but he at least needs to be quiet a little more often
most of the things he says arent funny and people only laugh because he makes a big deal out of it
they included tim allen on the list of stand up comedians on wikipedia when i looked it up because i couldnt think of dane cook's name
i am very bad at names
i am very bad at talking though sometimes i can act like a dumber version of myself and be all nice and easygoing but really i'm not like that
i really just like to sit at my computer and get new email and type dumb things and keep going back to the refrigerator to see if there's anything new to eat there
which there isnt

reviews and dumb

I have a review of Myfanwy Collins's flash fiction piece 'Quarter' now up at Smokelong Quarterly. The review is longer than the story.

I also have a review of Tao Lin's upcoming novel EEEEE EEE EEEE coming in the next Bookslut. Both that novel and his story collection BED can be ordered at his website by clicking on that link. And they are well worth it, as I'll talk about in the review.

I'm trying hard to blog more but I lose track of these things so quickly.

I have been writing about 40 hours a week on a new novel, almost immediately after finishing a previous one. After finishing it I wasn't satisfied with the ending and I felt too tired to rework it. I'd been in that same mode for so long and the work felt too difficult. My characters in the novel were all unsympathetic. I like unsympathetic characters. I like to imagine the thoughts of people I wouldn't mind seeing get hit by a car. The mainstream reading public, and probably the majority of even the literary public, does not like unsympathetic characters. And so this book will exist on my hard drive for a while, until I get the nuts to go back and fix it, but for now I kind of like it there.

To get away from unsympathetic characters I am now writing a novel about an accused pedophile. That's a good idea, Blake.

Blake is a smart fucker.

Blake wins by only thinking.

Hallelujah.

If god wrote the bible, why did he stop there? Is he a one-trick pony? Fearing the sophomore slump?

Shush, dick.

Monson/Tillman

Or Tillman/Monson, which is the order I read these two new books in.



Lynne Tillman's latest AMERICAN GENIUS, A COMEDY is the kind of book I might not have given the same chance I gave it if it didn't have such great blurbs. Fuckin blurbs: I can be such a sucker. Anyhow, besides a very nice rambling iteration by George Saunders, another blurb inferred that this book (just less than 300 pages, each one dense, and sparing on breaks)
had an "encyclopedic" quality. I tend to love books described as "encyclopedic,"
though most often it's after the reading is over that the true love arrives. As in, the book itself is an experience of a sort, and work, which is not to say that this particular small hunk is unenjoyable. Quite the opposite.

AMERICAN GENIUS is basically a book where nothing happens. A women, institutionalized it seems by choice, rambles on and on, mostly about the scheduling and content of the three offered meals; the other folks who lived in the home with her; a cat her mother got rid of when she was a girl; and her skin. The prose of her day-to-day rambling is supplicated with all kinds of facts and tidbits that happen to find their way into her brain (the character is an avid reader, it seems, and has quite a memory for facts). Thus, amongst the rummage, we get long, well-parsed and wholly interesting facts about phobias, the Manson family, various phases of art history, and so on. The way the text inscribes these two methods of relaying information (the fictional vs the factual) comes together in a most pleasing way, so that you do actually get so immersed in the narrator's brain, if you allow it, that you may find yourself having read for pages and pages without realizing it. It's a feel akin to what I'm getting now while reading W.G. Sebald's THE RINGS OF SATURN, which is turning out to be a high compliment indeed.



After (or during, rather, it was nice to be able to switch back a forth, a thing I don't often do) this I got into Ander Monson's new collection of essays NECK DEEP and Other Predicaments, which I'd been looking forward to ever since its upcoming publication was announced right around the time I read his fiction collection, OTHER ELECTRICITIES. I blasted through these essays pretty much in one night, reading three of the more experimental essays (one follows the form of the Harvard outline, another attempts to mimic snow on the page in an essay about snow) while riding a stationary exercise bicycle in my apartments' gym. The feeling of performing manual labor while reading such well-honed decisive prose (which is not to discredit Monson's excellent sense of playfulness, mixing his poetic tendencies along with a very easy to enjoy sense of talking to you) was nice. It made the time go by quickly and during I was so attenuated to the words that I didn't realize I was "working out."
Is that still working out then? I'm not sure.
Anyhow, I finished two other essays (one mostly about baths, and another about car washes) while in the bathtub. I got some quasi-DFW moments, particularly during an essay about riding on a boat (which seemed desperately to mimic Wallace's A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING.. at times, though not to his detriment). I connected with a lot of what he was saying, and was impressed with the way he said it, and overall I would recommend the book to anyone who enjoys creative essaying. I'm tired and I'm done talking about this right now.



I'm not sure who I'm talking to here though I'm pretty sure it's myself.

DFW and

New DFW story in the New Yorker. 'Good People.' I about shit when I saw it. I hadn't intended to buy anything at Barnes and Noble, was just following a friend, then ended up with two seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, as it was buy one get one free. Then I decided to hit the magazine stand to see what lit mags they carry at this branch, and got stopped by the New Yorker. Happened to glance to see what fiction was in it-- sometimes they surprise. They surprised. As I said, I about shit. I took it home without considering that the story was probably available for free online.

I'm not sure how I felt about the story. It was not what I was expecting after waiting so long since his last fiction (4 years?-- I'm not sure when the last piece from Oblivion was out-- that's the last I remember-- anyhow a while). His work means a lot to me. Infinite Jest was the first book that made me want to try to be a writer. This story was about 2 Christian kids contemplating abortion. It was filled with a lot of his usual in-the-mind-of-the-character thought distribution, well done to sound like a young Christian. There were a couple of other elements that hit me- the presence of a man standing near them at a lake, the purpose of whom is never really explain, though adding to the ambiance of the setting strangely. It made me feel weird to read the story. If I'd read it with another author's name I probably would have thrown it out. Something, though, about the way he processes thought, even in a voice as benign as this one's, clicks in my head. I imagine the story comes from the large chunk of a book that's been referred to in multiple interviews. I anticipate.


I'm not sure what I'm going to do writing on this thing. I may just blabber and not mention that its alive. Every fucker has a blog yes why not why not.