walk to my house

i am not inside my house, walk to it anyway, open the purple curtain

behind the purple curtain someone is making pie

it will be a delicious pie when it is sursurrated hard and long against the open sweetness of your bald throat, sure

so have some of the pie

come back when i am tired and i might be actually inside the house, i will be warm

i will negate you for your asking for the warmth of me also but i will give it, it is not a warm warm, it is a sash

it is the longest sash anyone inside this country with a shirt has ever put across his left breast laughing in this year, this is a thing you can believe

there are many things you might believe about the color of the circuit system above your heart's mash, but this is a mistake, it is not a mistake i'd prefer to correct in you most likely as when it becomes correct you might have something sharp to say

i don't need the sharpness, or the knocking, or your food or any shirts

there will be a great circus that comes to town soon, surely, and when that comes you will be an ash inside the the ash, blur thrown by the circus friendlies for a great gnashing when their teeth respond in tandem to the color of your maximizing flesh exposed to rain

all this rain i ate might make me heavy someday but i am done with that

i have the surface area divider on lend from koresh and judson

i have the box

come back here to the house and look again

come back and ask a question for god if you have the fuckmaster cojones, which you don't

"no god"

"no god"

blah blah blah beckett blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah beckett blah blah blah blah blah blah

the remainder of this year in my life belongs to joey f. snordsen, and he alone.

5 Selected Goodreads Reviews of Scorch Atlas

"This was maybe the worst book I've read in five years. The author is trying too hard to be unique, but doesn't have the talent to pull it off. Instead the book ends up feeling adolescent, indulgent and clumsily written." - "Kristen" 1 of 5 stars

"A novel featuring all-new scenes, Scorch Atlas is literature." - "Mickey" 5 of 5 stars

"The prose is quite good, and the premise is interesting, but wow is it ever disgusting. Some of the descriptions were so vile that I could barely make it through the book--and it gets more repulsive as the book goes along. I think the author is talented, but I wouldn't recommend this to anyone." - "Sarah" 1 of 5 stars

"It's amazing that a book this poorly written could actually get published . . . These stories read like a bad imitation of Samuel Becket. Artsy, self-indulgent, pretentious, and just really, really bad. The kind of stuff I used to read and make fun of in my undergraduate writing workshops. Wish I could give this one less than one star." - "Lee" 1 of 5 stars

"Makes the characters from The Road look like a bunch of pussweeds." - "Andrew" 5 of 5 stars

"In polite stories the world had been made acquainted with the picturesque lives of these commonplace but worthy people. In detail their story had been told. Over the precipice in Yosemite the Bridal Veil Falls had been launching its water for a thousand years and ignorance was fattening his belly apace."

William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel, 1923

SCORCH ATLAS BIRTHDAY DESTROY CONTEST

via Featherproof, on the forthcoming 1 year anniversary of the book:

Once upon 2009 we decided, since Scorch Atlas was a destructive force, to offer destroyed copies on pre-sale, to the brave few who would let us mangle their copy. That looked like this:

Scorch Atlas (destroyed) by Blake Butler from featherproof books on Vimeo.

We got a surprising amount of requests for mutilated books, and happily complied. Blake was so happy he got hungry and started to eat the book. That looked like this:

Blake Butler eats Page 1 of Scorch Atlas from blake butler on Vimeo.

Despite a few protests from the People for the Ethical Treatment of Everything, the idea spread. Mike Kitchell exploded one:



Sean Lovelace shot some arrows at one:



And it became clear. The only way to truly finish Scorch Atlas was by destroying your copy. Thus: we propose a new contest. Destroy your copy. Better than any has destroyed before you. Smash it smear it, pepper it with flak, and digest it thoroughly. We want you to do your worst. Also acceptable: creative methods of destruction that don't necessarily destroy the book physically but endanger it, terrify it, or brutalize it. Like humiliating the book in public, or changing the text, or reading it aloud to your grandmother wearing a gas mask.

Post your video to YouTube or Vimeo. Let us know you did so at contest@featherproof.com by September 9th, 2010 (Scorch Atlas's birthday.) Then we'll pick a winner based on criteria of Risk, Bloodlust, Derring-do, Internet research, Smarts, and Pheromones Released.

ONE GRAND PRIZE WINNER will receive: the complete featherproof fiction catalog of books, including a signed, first edition (blackened edges) Scorch Atlas, in clean/perfect/mint condition, Ever by Blake Butler, both issues of No Colony, a t-shirt that says 'Knife That', mini-books, Kristina Born's One Hour of Television, stickers, a packet of Blake's hair, a book that Blake loves destroyed just for you, and a drawing he made in his sleep. It sounds like a joke, I know. But this grand prize package is SO NOT A JOKE. It's for real.

FIVE FIRST PRIZE WINNERS will receive a signed, first edition (blackened edges) Scorch Atlas, in clean/perfect/mint condition. To replace the one you mangled.

THE REST OF THE LOSERS just fucked themselves.

Have at it.

issue 7 of The Lifted Brow is out, it has some freakshit, cover my Matthew Furie, words by Diane Williams, Matt Bell, Ryan Call, Jimmy Chen, Brian Evenson, Kim Chinquee, Mike Meginnis, Zachary German, Gabe Durham, Sam Pink, and a shitload of lot other. A section from Ricky's Anus serves as an introduction to the issue.

I don't have anything else to say about fucking life

small year in Disgaza w/ my seizure
glowdoze slicing the house into what i can fit & can not fit
smaller than a life coach with white hamstrings
the zap will kill one of 11 mimes in me

my inner black child is exploding

today at the home when we came in there were four women singing together in a room full of older people sleeping. they were singing words without music, "oh i want to go home now, but the water is too high, oh i want to go home now." their voices were old and out of tune and strange in the room following my mother to wake my dad who almost never looks up these days from the ground.

later my mom told me that the song was a song one of the women had written and begun singing to herself around the home for weeks. at church sermons in the home on sunday she would sing it instead of hymnals, though on the days outside of church she would steal the tune. in this way others began to pick the song up. now they sing it often in long loops.

later in his own room my father recognized the first thing i've seen him recognize without prodding in the last few times i've seen him, the brief prechorus of an old 60s soul song that goes "oh oh oh." he sang it as if he had been cued to join in, then went back to trying to put the cookie on the floor.

there must be 8 more replicants of 7 to complete the 7 sets of 7 sets of 7 comprising the fourth section of the text which has no beginning and no end

nobody really actually believes anybody else or often listens
many of the things i have loved best i have never even seen
tonight the light coming through the red curtains has it apple-shaded enough to want to bite through, i think of someone's skin, i think of my skin
any hour i don't talk to my mother i am growing very old
though often when i am actually around my mother my skin makes such loud noise i can hardly think
another house
i should probably bite the skin and eat it and digest it, it would birth a set of clothes
i would wear the clothes and go near people, it would stink loud
today at the glass door to the backyard the blue bird from yesterday appeared again he seemed to knock twice i was looking for food
two bananas and various forms of pretzel dipped into wettish substance i read your instructions for how to not want to eat, the worm of slight repetitions under long mind, something stretched in big sound of fire at an asp
in the bathroom i read john cage saying in so many words because there is no message there need not ever be response
the buttons on this machine could find a way to type a message to someone larger than this home i'm sure but i don't have the sight inside me any more this year or i am too smushed or stupid or there is the color of my bones
i don't think i need to be any body ever over numbers, there could exist a perfect mall, another one and i could buy a machine that stitched itself against this one here and sent itself into the center of the lock
the rhyming machine the color machine the ten boxes of brownie mix
my father's ring somewhere hidden in the house unless mom found it, i can't not remember which, i can't not remember if i actually can not remember or if i am willfully allowing disambiguation in the name of saying something more indirectly in the hope that something like a hole or god could find its way into the stupid typing these days do not even demand but more likely give me something i can bend, something worth laughing at in public and ignoring every night now that i have been remaindered now that everyone is grease
can't even remember the last time i saw an insect other than the one i crushed the other night under a soft book
i had not read the book and likely never will

the machine in my house won't stop beeping, someone is there
around 4 am i climbed onto the bathroom again and tried to hoist
black shit on my arms, found pieces of the swiffer under my pillow
sometimes there is this weird dark dust on the seat of the toilet
i think i talked to the two men in the guardroom for 15 minutes about god
but they were talking about ladders and i kept trying to close the door
"Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window
to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window;
from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire,
from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door..."
i need to begin again at something, no food, no light, no speech, no persons outside
get a little longer in your mind's bitch before i come back and there's a darker knob
make a sandwich have a baby bring me the plastic doll i asked for age three to have something to beat the shit from and did not get until it was too late

"what we were then each for himself and for the other

glued together like a single body in the dark the mud

how at each instant each ceased and was there no more either for himself or for the other vast tracts of time"