Archive for the 'Blake Butler' Category

NEW YORK (!)

Published on March 3, 2011 in Blake Butler, Grace Krilanovich and NEW YORK CITY get a rope. 3 Comments

Sean Lovelace breaks CUBE down at HTMLGIANT.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about New York, it’s that New York will always find a reason to bring you to her. I’ll be there March 29-April 1 to crash some magazine party, and then May 17-19 to read at the FSG series with Chris Adrian.

I really wanted to come out around March 20-25, but the SXSW music festival shuts shit down around here and plane tickets are suddenly a thousand bucks and it’s like we’re Paris in Texas (or maybe the opposite of Paris in Texas). Here’s the stuff I feel tragicated to miss:

  • Vol.1 is putting together a reading at the Brooklyn Winery on March 23rd, in conjunction with Big Other. Norman Lock and Marcy Dermansky are on the menu.
  • Sunday March 20th at 7pm, the Soda Series goes up with Michael Leong, Janice Shapiro and Mike Young.
  • All next week is an epic read-through of Blake Butler’s There Is No Year at different venues. Bring your Magic cards.
  • Joni Wallace is reading in a Four Way Books benefit reading way out around May 5, location unknown, let me know if you want me to find more info for you and I shall.

If you live in New York you should make it a point to go to those things and then post on my blog making gentle fun of me for living in America’s most Texas-shaped state.

Also, big congrats to Grace Krilanovich for making The Believer finalist list.

Pear Noir at the end of the world

Published on August 14, 2010 in Blake Butler, CL Bledsoe, Ethel Rohan, Gregory Sherl, Rebecca Sherm and Shane Jones. Closed

Pretty sure Austin is ending in fire today. It is seriously the final thermodynamic state of the universe out there. I made dinner plans but I don’t think any of us will be alive in four hours. It was nice last week, when I was going out to sunbathe at Barton Springs, bringing along the latest copy of Pear Noir! to read and bend the cover and slop with sunscreen. I love abusing journals, I want to gobble them up in my chops. Some juicy parts:

  • C.L. Bledsoe’s title “If You Meet a Man in the Street Who Claims to Be Rupert Murdoch, Kill Him; the True Rupert Murdoch Is Within” I read the title to my girl Amy, who was beside me on a towel at the springs. She said “That’s crazy.” I almost read her the piece, which is also good, but then I realized she was flirting with this bartender guy she knows, so I didn’t
  • Gregory Sherl, all of it man all of it “Here, a Place I Have Never Touched” is rad. “Sometimes we’re so far from each other it’s like we’re not even connected by stars. The stars said fuck it and gave up.” Real happy to see sincerity in blend with this levity. His might be my favorite pieces in this. I spilled coffee on them
  • Blake Butler’s “Camera Eye” After I read this outside it felt like I was being recorded or that the sun/sky was itself a recording. Good one: ”cut up, runny, on the roof” phew
  • Rebecca Sherm’s “Cherry Pie” Super sexy. This marks the second time this summer I’ve read butter as sexy. Brings me one step closer to mayo erotica. I pulled this story out to mail my girl Sarah
  • Shane Jones’s “Lumberjack and Bear” Strange and sweet. I wondered why it was in numbered grafs, though it did make me think of an advent calendar, and then think about how cool it would be to do a linked flash chapbook in the form of an advent calendar, and each day you pulled out a new piece of the story that also worked independently
  • Ethel Rohan’s disease stories Spending a lot of time thinking about an infant covered in seeping brown crust

catching some rays

Check out a nice article in the Chronicle all about reading shows in Austin, new and old. Check out the weather in Austin and pity me because it’s 101°F but feels like the inside of a 109°F sponge. I’m gonna go delicately faint on a chaise.

AWPed

Published on April 12, 2010 in Adam Robinson, Blake Butler, Dan Wickett, Featherproof Books, geeking out, Justin Sirois, Matthew Simmons and Readings. 4 Comments

Denver happened. I yelled about driving an Iroc-Z in New Mexico for a restaurant reading with Matt Bell, Elena Passarello, Kevin Sampsell, Matthew Simmons, and Rachel Yoder. I marveled at Molly Gaudry‘s perfect twin braids and she said it was the work of her training as an only child. Mary and I bought the biggest dreamcatcher we could find and I read with it in an elevator. Lindsay and I drank milk out of jugs while Patrick played the banjo and Zach slapped his thighs and sang along.

I just woke up from a dream I had about the breakfast place where I went with Sarah, Nick and Michael. There was a sizable Austin crowd and I felt at home in scenes fancy and non-fancy alike. I hugged Dollar Store tour friends and read with them, put faces to names/said hello again to Kyle Minor, Justin Taylor, Brian Evenson, Jim Ruland, Justin Sirois, Roxane Gay, J.A. Tyler, Dan Wickett, and Elisa Gabbert. I walked the bookfair floor with Adam Robinson and spent a chunk of cash.

excitement

I caught the shuttle and avoided making eye contact with a trio of lovely poet ladies from California who spent the trip to the airport talking about a panel they saw on poetry saving the world. The ladies were wrapped in golden shawls. I considered writing a story about chapped lips. I graded on the flight all the way home and navigated the damp community college campus to teach for three hours about the departmental exam. At the grocery store I bought turkey sausage, turkey breast, lean meatballs, and egg whites. I went home and made a glass of chocolate milk with extra egg whites. I unpacked my books and photographed them.

home.

Addendum: News of the weird

Published on September 24, 2009 in Blake Butler and Matthew Simmons. Closed

A free Austin tribute to David Foster Wallace rides this Saturday.

Annalemma‘s Issue 5 comes with a limited-edition letterpress piece and stories from me, Laura Owen, William Walsh, Anne Elizabeth Moore, Danny Jones, Angi Becker Stevens, BJ Hollars, Jaime Martinez, and Erika Somogyi.

Blake Butler got a deal with Harper Perennial.

Matthew Simmons’ A Jello Horse is in its second printing.

Poe Mania in Austin gives local graphic designers the excuse to use gothic fonts.

EVER by Blake Butler.

Published on June 12, 2009 in Blake Butler. Closed

EVERThough it doesn’t exactly suit the book, I have to think about EVER in terms of plot, character, and (I know, I know) author biography. Talking about it any other way would require the use of color fields and degenerating tones, though, and that shit does not translate to the blogosphere.

Blake’s booknotes offer hints to EVER, which otherwise stands un-annotated as a series of rooms folding in on itself, a girl folding into rooms and finding rooms. Apparently he wrote it after the Atlanta tornado destroyed his house and he went to live at his parents’ house. He talks about the tornado here and it’s very clear the state he’s in that would give rise to a book like EVER. (I’m done talking about Blake like I am his biographer because he is my friend. The fucked claustrophobic nature [to borrow a phrase] of this book would make me curious about the author’s state regardless.)house1

EVER is all full of brackets, which suggests the open/closed roomlike/womblike construction of the thing. I thought of it in terms of HTML but a normal parenthetical kind of thing would work I think. Here’s a little bit:

[I could see the door still a little.

  [I could -- still could -- see the door.

    [Door(s)(s).

      [Def.: door (n): 1. a thing I'd noticed.

        [2. A thing through once I'd --

          [once I'd -- been. ]]]]]]]

The brackets are important to the book, which is all about open and closed spaces and yawning chasms and riddles. I’m picky about layout and typographic tricks in fiction; if you’re not writing what you’d call a hybrid, anything beyond the traditional or slightly modified words and punctuation of your language are all you get, unless you have a very good reason, such as expressing the idea that a girl thinks in terms of small spaces.

There’s one part where the narrator is licking the bathtub and she tastes a layer of herself and a layer of Comet and a layer of her mother. That pretty passage is the book distilled; layer upon unsettling layer, intriguing even as it attempts at times to repulse.

Incidentally, when I was showing the book to a friend of mine, he flipped it over and read the Gary Lutz blurb:

[B.B.] is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality.

Semiotician friend noted, “ridden has two definitions, Lutz” and then I looked it up and realized that Gary Lutz Was Right—a phrase I would wear on a t-shirt if the opportunity was presented.

house2The deal with this book is that it offers a puzzle like The Exquisite but instead of dissecting reality, it dissects surreality as it wobbles in a frame of reality, which essentially turns you on your ass and shoves a prism up there. Needless to say, I recommend reading EVER in the bathtub.

Tour Dates Announced.

Published on June 11, 2009 in AM/PM, Blake Butler, Featherproof Books, Interviews and Zach Dodson. Closed

dollar store logo

Featherproof Books is excited, no, totally pumped, to announce our biggest event the year: The Dollar Store Summer Mega Tour!  That’s right, we’re taking this renowned reading series on the road: packing 7+ of our beloved writers in a van, buying tons of dollar store junk, and hitting 11 cities in 14 days.

For three years, The Dollar Store has sold out its hometown venue with its blue-collar literature, absurdist humor, and a circus of junk. This summer, Zach Dodson, co-founder of featherproof books, will host a month long Dollar Store tour that kicks off June 28th, and will hit Austin, on Sunday July 5th at 8 PM , at Scoot Inn.

Austin, Sunday July 5th
8pm, $1
Scoot Inn
1308 E. 4th Street @ Navasota
Austin, TX 78702

Stealing from the improv community’s bag of tricks, The Dollar Store uses a “suggestion” for the pieces performed in the show. Each writer or comedian is given an item purchased at a local dollar store (mundane to insane) and a month to craft a story that involves the item as directly or obliquely as the performer wishes.  The show has been featured on National Public Radio and in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.

The tour will include the following authors: Amelia Gray (AM/PM, Featherproof, 5 Things Austin reading series) Aaron Burch (Hobart), Caroline Picard (Green Lantern Press, The Parlor reading series), Zach Dodson (boring, boring, boring, Featherproof, the Show ‘n Tell Series), Mary Hamilton, (Quickies! reading series) Jac Jemc ( My Only Wife, Dzanc Books), and Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas, Featherproof, Ever, Calamari, Lamination Colony). It will also feature local Austin writers Ryan Markel and Owen Egerton.

These performers can’t wait to hit Austin as they spread dollar store junk throughout the United States. Zach Dodson, as well as the other touring performers are available for interviews. More information for the Dollar Store reading series can be found at www.dollarstoreshow.com.

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Featherproof Books is excited, no, totally pumped, to announce our biggest event the year: The Dollar Store Summer Mega Tour!  That’s right, we’re taking this renowned reading series on the road: packing 7+ of our beloved writers in a van, buying tons of dollar store junk, and hitting 11 cities in 14 days.

For three years, The Dollar Store has sold out its hometown venue with its blue-collar literature, absurdist humor, and a circus of junk. This summer, Zach Dodson, co-founder of featherproof books, will host a month long Dollar Store tour that kicks off June 28th, and will hit Austin, on Sunday July 5th at 8 PM , at Scoot Inn.

Austin, Sunday July 5th

8pm, $1
Scoot Inn
1308 E. 4th Street @ Navasota
Austin, TX 78702

Stealing from the improv community’s bag of tricks, The Dollar Store uses a “suggestion” for the pieces performed in the show. Each writer or comedian is given an item purchased at a local dollar store (mundane to insane) and a month to craft a story that involves the item as directly or obliquely as the performer wishes.  The show has been featured on National Public Radio and in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.


The tour will include the following authors: Amelia Gray (AM/PM, Featherproof, 5 Things Austin reading series) Aaron Burch (Hobart), Caroline Picard (Green Lantern Press, The Parlor reading series), Zach Dodson (boring, boring, boring, Featherproof, the Show ‘n Tell Series), Mary Hamilton, (Quickies! reading series) Jac Jemc ( My Only Wife, Dzanc Books), and Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas, Featherproof, Ever, Calamari, Lamination Colony). It will also feature local Austin writers Ryan Markel and Owen Egerton.

These performers can’t wait to hit Austin as they spread dollar store junk throughout the United States. Zach Dodson, as well as the other touring performers are available for interviews. More information for the Dollar Store reading series can be found at www.dollarstoreshow.com.

Featherproof Books is excited, no, totally pumped, to announce our biggest event the year: The Dollar Store Summer Mega Tour!  That’s right, we’re taking this renowned reading series on the road: packing 7+ of our beloved writers in a van, buying tons of dollar store junk, and hitting 11 cities in 14 days.

For three years, The Dollar Store has sold out its hometown venue with its blue-collar literature, absurdist humor, and a circus of junk. This summer, Zach Dodson, co-founder of featherproof books, will host a month long Dollar Store tour that kicks off June 28th, and will hit Austin, on Sunday July 5th at 8 PM , at Scoot Inn.

Austin, Sunday July 5th

8pm, $1
Scoot Inn
1308 E. 4th Street @ Navasota
Austin, TX 78702

Stealing from the improv community’s bag of tricks, The Dollar Store uses a “suggestion” for the pieces performed in the show. Each writer or comedian is given an item purchased at a local dollar store (mundane to insane) and a month to craft a story that involves the item as directly or obliquely as the performer wishes.  The show has been featured on National Public Radio and in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.


The tour will include the following authors: Amelia Gray (AM/PM, Featherproof, 5 Things Austin reading series) Aaron Burch (Hobart), Caroline Picard (Green Lantern Press, The Parlor reading series), Zach Dodson (boring, boring, boring, Featherproof, the Show ‘n Tell Series), Mary Hamilton, (Quickies! reading series) Jac Jemc ( My Only Wife, Dzanc Books), and Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas, Featherproof, Ever, Calamari, Lamination Colony). It will also feature local Austin writers Ryan Markel and Owen Egerton.

These performers can’t wait to hit Austin as they spread dollar store junk throughout the United States. Zach Dodson, as well as the other touring performers are available for interviews. More information for the Dollar Store reading series can be found at www.dollarstoreshow.com.

Airplane accidents.

Published on June 2, 2009 in Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Closed

This recent sadness off the coast of Brazil has me thinking about aviation disasters. The worst accident in aviation history was in 1977, at the Tenerife airport on the Canary Islands. KLM 4805 collided with Pan Am 1736 in the fog, killing 583. A series of accidents and miscommunication. In 2007 a monument went up at Tenerife:

Quoted from the monument website:

The monument for the victims of Tenerife is a sculpture which is a spiral staircase, and a spiral staircase which is a sculpture. The spiral theme is a symbol of infinity.

The sculpture will not be immediately recognized as such, and yet neither is it in practical terms a staircase. There is no banister, and the ‘steps’ are not intended to be used. The 18-metre-high sculpture is not what it seems, which is emphasized by the 12-metre-high fence that has been placed around it. The transparent fence encloses and protects the sculpture.

Rudi van de Wint once said: people either like or dislike a monument, but a monument is about so much more. The ritual significance of the location is of prime importance. Monuments are often places of yearning; they are projections of impotence, of the brokenness of the human spirit and of the universal drama.

A monument which encapsulates a yearning for reconciliation or acceptance can never be too sober, because the real drama cannot be expressed in art. Art can only provide a subtle hint.

For a moment, the sculpture appears to move endlessly upwards, but the spiraling movement of the steps has been abruptly interrupted. It can be seen as having an open ending, but also as a never-ending motion. It appears to be an unfinished form, cut off suddenly, like the victims’ lives. But the staircase, high up on the mountain, also makes minimal contact with the sky above, with the infinite star-spangled heavens which it appears to touch ever so briefly.

I finished Blake Butler’s lovely strange EVER and I’m currently reading Shane Jones’s strange lovely Light Boxes. I will talk about them more once I get my head out of the sky.

A few of my favorite things.

Published on April 11, 2009 in Blake Butler and Michael Kimball. 1 Comment

My list of favorite novellas is up here on John Madera’s site, along with lists by Blake Butler, Matt Bell, Sean Lovelace (I considered JCO’s Zombie but decided it was too long), Bradley Sands, William Walsh, Michael Kimball, Gary Lutz, Molly Gaudry, Jac Jemc and more. John even provides a helpful list of everyone’s picks. Lots of people picked Blake’s EVER, which makes me glad it’s next on my reading list. Also on the list: In Watermelon Sugar (Kimball and Selgin and I represent Trout Fishing in America), The Age of Wire and String, which is on my bookshelf somewhere. Anyway reading these lists is a lot of fun. You go do that while I have a fitful sleep.

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