Blake Butler's Blog, page 3

4 Recent Internet Shits of Me Running My Mouth Etc

Profile of myself & HTMLGiant & There is No Year at the NY Observer: concerning David Lynch, internet machines, ego blur, and getting shit done

Excerpt from There is No Year at the Collagist: three consecutive scenes from Part 2 of 4, re: the mother's relationship with a polymer egg and a lawnmower

Interview at Bomb re: 4-night marathon reading of There is No Year in NYC, the internet as place, metaphor as fartcity, etc.

q/a & new short text "Hexagon" @ The Center for Fiction's The Literarian: a recursive piece concerning fornication, hibernation, wanting, pig babies, ass ends of the universe(s), etc. (connected in some way to this other short piece published earlier this year at Guernica, "I do love god"

+ + +

Also to announce, my 4th book, a nonfiction work about sleep and insomnia, titled Nothing, is slated for release this November.

No Year Prelease NYC marathon events

"Are you in there?" "In where." "In you." [shakes head no...

"Are you in there?" "In where." "In you." [shakes head no] "Where are you then?" "I don't know." "Where would you like to be?" "I don't give a shit." "What would make you happy?" "I don't know." [drinks V8]

There is No Year reviewed by PW, Kirkus, Library Journal

3 nice reviews from nice places seems nice




from Publishers Weekly:

Butler's inventive third book is dedicated "For no one" and begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. Suitably forewarned, the reader is introduced to an unexceptional no-name family. All should be idyllic in their newly purchased home, but they are shadowed by an unwelcome "copy family." In the face of the copy mother, the mother sees her heretofore unrealized deterioration. Things only get worse as the father forgets how to get home from work; the mother starts hiding in the closet, plagued by an omnipresent egg; while the son gets a female "special friend" and receives a mysterious package containing photos of dead celebrities. The territory of domestic disillusion and postmodern dystopia is familiar from other tales, but Butler's an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer. This subversion extends to the book's design: very short titled chapters with an abundance of white space. Not so much a novel as a literary tapestry, the book's eight parts are separated by blank gray pages. To Butler (Scorch Atlas), everything in the world, even the physical world, is gray and ever-changing, and potentially menacing. (Apr.)


from Kirkus:

A family lives in a house in which strange things start to happen (or—it's a new novel by Blake Butler).

Love him, hate him or feign indifference: There's really no other way to react to the work of writer/postmodernist/multi-hyphenate Butler (Ever, 2009, etc). For those who like their prose fresh out of a cleaner and more traditional wellspring, Blake's writing can prove tedious at best and arduous at worst. But for those who lean toward writing that is more visceral, taxing or outright demanding of the reader, this might be the right cup of tea—see Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), to which this novel owes some debt. The book concerns a family of doppelgängers so featureless that Butler doesn't bother to give them names (or more accurately, likely purposefully washes them out to their elementary characteristics). So, the father, the mother and the son live in a house, just like the carbon copy father, mother and son had done before them. The father stares at a computer screen. The mother stares at her lined face in mirrors and thinks protective thoughts about her son, who suffers from a disease that nearly ended his life. The son goes to school, makes a friend and watches television with his family. It's all presented in hushed, monochrome language that gives the whole enterprise a sense of menace from the beginning, even before Butler introduces the father's paranoia that things in the house are changing without his knowledge. And then things do start changing.

A gruesome slice of familial oddity that demonstrates its author's versatility.


from Library Journal:

Butler keeps the reader guessing in his latest novel. A family moves into a house where another family lives—a lifeless, unseeing copy of the family. The family goes through individual psychological and paranormal experiences that make one wonder about the origins of the family's demise—Is it the son's carefully mentioned past disease? Some metaphysical demon in the son's subconscious? Or does the newly purchased house cloak discontented poltergeists? Whatever the cause, each family member endures a private psychological hell that is disturbing in its authenticity. ­VERDICT This artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature is recommended for contemporary literature fans looking for something out of the ordinary. Butler integrates unusual elements into his novel, such as interview-style monologs and in later chapters poetry-like stanzas. Also recommended for students of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as the distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis. [Eight-city tour.]—Jennifer Funk, Southwestern Illinois Coll. Lib., Belleville

"When the notes were all burned, all that writing, as Fra...

"When the notes were all burned, all that writing, as Franz expressed himself, he, Wertheimer, called up Salzburg and ordered the piano and Franz distinctly recalled that during this telephone call his master kept insisting that they send a completely worthless, a horribly untuned grand piano to Traich. A completely worthless instrument, a horribly untuned instrument, Wertheimer is supposed to have repeated over and over on the phone, said Franz."

yearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyearyeary...

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you don't have to beg a dog to shit in the house they jus...

you don't have to beg a dog to shit in the house they just do it

Luger

"The Make-A-Wish Foundation ceased granting hunting trips in 1999, amid criticisms from animal rights groups. The Foundation explained that the decision was based on the danger of having a child in a weakened state handling firearms."

i finished reading foucault's history of madness today, i...

i finished reading foucault's history of madness today, it was spectacular beginning to end













00

glueyes

plan is to fuck the remainder of this year in the dick "how many dicks do you need to get fucked by to get fucked real, year" i already asked it i've been asking it all year and it finally told me, the year is fucked, hey sugar, bye year

family xmas sheeit + making makes of making = year getting fucked in the dick the hardest

i'm thirsy

& also thristy

& also, fuck, THIRSTY

mmk

i will be a polite boy with a friendly demeanor thank you, for this year is going to be super as a remainder and then it'll be all gonesz

this diet ginger ale tastes like champagne

i am almost 2/5th finished getting up the guts of 2666 and eating its unit off by rewriting it completely

i read 2666 earlier this year and really actually enjoyed it, it was different than i would have guessed, and i am ready now to write it as i would have liked to imagine it if i'd had positive expectations instead of negative ones that resulted in me being surprised, i would have liked to see 2666 eat the dick off of this year but instead it was quite a creation

tho as i said, my plan is to fucking chew the gnarly ass dick off of this shityear with a hammer

so i am rewriting 2666

this book will be about the murder of everyone in america by everyone else in america plus a guy named darrel

i think i used to think that name would be pronounced "dare-ul"
though after looking at it here it will be pronounced "dah-rel"