Anatomy Courses

by Blake Butler, Sean Kilpatrick

PRAISE FOR BLAKE BUTLER "An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer." - Publishers Weekly "If the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring." - Globe and Mail (Toronto) "Try Blake on. Lace him up. Wear him around your neck in wreaths." - Vice "If there's a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn't." - Dennis Cooper PRAISE FOR SEAN KILPATRICK "This is a book you need. Language reset. Guidebook." - HTML GIANT on Sean Kilpatrick's fuckscapes "The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a 'fuckscape': where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on their victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick's brilliant first book." - Johannes Goransson on fuckscapes "Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx's blood." - CA Conrad

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

132 pages, Paperback

First published February 14, 2012

About the author

Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.

Reviews

[Greg]

There are some similarities between this book (novel? short stories? poem?) and some of my favorite songs off of my favorite album of all time. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea" mixes the grotesqueness of the body and inner organs with sex and possibly some incest to create the circus side show feeling that runs the counter-narrative of the album to the Anne Frank narrative. One day I will finish my book review about the Neutral Milk Hotel 33 1/3 book and talk more about this, but I'm just mentioning this here. This book is sort of like taking the weirder lyrics from this album and constructing a book made up only of them and leaving the narrative elements aside.

The body is a gross thing and the lines in this book revel in the grossness that makes up the body and it's workings.

A good portion of the book has some very evocative and interesting language going on but I never got a sense of what was going on. I would have liked some kind of pointer or some little crevice in the text that would let me in to what was going on, but I never found it. Maybe like a great album that takes awhile to grow on you, this book needs to be read and re-read and personal meaning constructed slowly with layers from each repeated exposure. But a great album will usually pull you in with some kind of hook, maybe a catchy melody, or one song that makes you want to go back to it again and again with the more difficult or not-so immediately accessible bits growing on you with repeated listens, unfortunately books generally don't (for me) have this kind of hook that makes me want to go back to them over and over and over again and let them grow on me. I'm a greedy consumer who always moves on to something new.

According to one of the blurbs on Blake Butler's There is No Year, if I don't get him then I'm just too old. But, I've given his two other books a chance, and I've ended up putting them down about half way through and then forgetting to pick them up, this one I finished, maybe because it was so short I didn't have the time to put it down and forget about it. I want to like him, his books look so nice and they seem like they should be great, but I can't get into them. I can appreciate how good a line here and a paragraph there is, but there never feels like there is anything brining all the good parts, all the nice (I mean this in a non-condescending way) parts of the language he uses together. I might be an old-bourgoise reactionary but I like to have some kind of coherent narrative to help me through books, or to have the books excite me on some intellectual level, but pretty grotesqueness about familial sexual dramas just don't excite my mind, and I can appreciate that some of the writing is great, but it's nothing that gets me wanting to really work with a text or spend too much time once I'm done with a book thinking about it.

I haven't given this book a rating. I don't know what to rate it. I liked some parts. But mostly I was very indifferent. I imagine people liking this, but I think part of what goes into enjoying this is being titillated by the shockingness of the imagery, but for me it was sort of like another of my top twenty all-time albums, "Nothing Shocking".

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beneath an epidermis of clever 70s-text-book-design camouflage, the specimen is endowed with unfamiliar organ systems. While sub-components are largely familiar, the manner in which they are organized and utilized within the organism are not. Morphological similarity to certain known biological systems exists, however, particularly those of David Cronenberg's pulsing bodies and William Burroughs' textual vivisection, perhaps specifically even to their meeting-point in Naked Lunch. Also, some homologous structures to those seen in Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String and perhaps traces of enzymes originally evolved in dadaist automatism. It is difficult, upon initial confrontation with this cryptic viscera, to discern whether or not it actually serves any true function, besides the obvious aesthetic appeal and disorientation of seeing such bizarre anatomical structures at all. All that we can decisively report is this: no word is out-of-bounds and each can mean anything we want. At each breath, 17,000 pustules sing: Full Moan for throblight. I milk myself alive. Pap smears anoint me. My area code is SIKE.

[Dustin Reade · Rating 4 out of 5]

I...don't think I get it.
Let me explain: I knew two things about this book going in.

1. It was released by Lazy fascist Press, which is awesome and has so far put out some of the best books I have read in years.

and

2. Blake Butler co-wrote it, and he is amazing.

That said, I just don't get it. What the hell is this book? What is it about? It seems to utilize every experimental technique in the outre-writer's toolbox to create some bizarre tale of incest, rape, torture, bodily fluids, molestation, and other atrocities, but it does so in such a way it is hard to tell if any of it really happened or if I was just imagining it was happening.

Maybe that wasn't what the book was about at all? Maybe I am just sick in the head and have no understanding of literature or experimental writing. But I don't think that is the case.
I mean, I have read some pretty out there stuff (Naked Lunch, Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, Nohow On, Finnegan's Wake, and so on) but I am at a loss when it comes to this book.

I really liked it.
I really didn't like it.
I loved it.
It made me feel stupid.
At other times it made me feel like maybe the writer's were just messing with me, and they had simply thrown random words together to see if they could get somebody to read it.
I hated it.
I adored it.
It was great.
It was terrible.
It was strange.
It kicked ass.


Never has a book left me so perplexed.
Did I really read it? Or do I just think I did?

I don't know. And you probably think I am crazy based on this review. Well, if you met me in person you wouldn't think that. We could have coffee and I would impress you with how mind-numbingly ordinary I am. You would think that because I would behave in such a way that you would never guess I read and enjoyed books this strange.

Whatever.
I really think people should read this. The language is confusing and beautiful.

It felt like getting stabbed in the eye.

I recommend it.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was swimming in the dark like everybody else until I've read a review that compared that book to a grindcore album and it got my gears turning. So what is that slim, inscrutable beast really about then? If God was a malevolent, mischievous presence and most important, a sadistic home invader, the world would be like ANATOMY COURSES depicts it.

It's an act of complete rebellion and a declaration of freedom through language. The two writers here pry open the most normal setting they could find (family, neighborhood, quiet streets, backyards, swingsets) and unleash unholy hell upon it. I've seen ANATOMY COURSES as a four giant middle fingers raised at the way we tell stories right now. I don't think there is any causality between the "chapters" or "classes" and I do think it's by design. I liked to think of the construction as the same day happening over and over again.

Anyway, your guess is as good as mine because I don't think any of that was pre-planned before the book was written. It's just something that emerged and I really LOVED the intensity and the intellectual integrity of it. Does it make sense?

[Rebecca Gransden · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You're a sight you look like / Someone dressed as you"

A Grand Tour through the rot of negative space.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early William Burroughs meets Ben Marcus. There is no plot, no beginning, middle, end, just a cataract of word poetry with stunning detonations that make you stop up and think. It's a remarkable achievement to wield language in such a different way, not of sentences where subject noun does something to object noun in an adjectival way, but this forces you to let the words paint images for you. "This, my bedroom, with the stirrups, and the paneled bleachers stuffed overboard with chunky puppets. The men left encamped inside the father where he burst through all his horse suits like a dickface overall." The key word here, the perhaps lone orienting milepost, is 'stirrups', not in its equine sense, but in a gynecological one. For while I would never proffer the following as the definitive answer to what is the book about, I think this is a book from the fish-eye view of a foetus in the womb, peering out at the carnage and power relationships each time her parents have sex. The book is filled with slits and slots and stoma and a whole myriad of openings for gases, liquids and of course vision to squeeze through. And yes there is the implication of pedophilia too. The whole book reads like an assault, on the senses and the sensibilities, which is why one can never really recommend it, since not every reader is going to be comfortable with it.

[Jay Slayton-Joslin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I mean, I couldn't get through this at all. I struggle with this kind of cut-up style, not really knowing what they were trying to achieve. Part of me thinks maybe that's the point, that as I put it down and write this review the joke is on me.

That being said, some people have responded to this well. Look at the other reviews etc. Maybe this isn't a bad book by any means but just a book that I failed to connect with.

[Tristan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two houses, both alike in indignity: Butler & Kilpatrick expose the body in text-ured, Dadaist proesy—molestation as linguistic floristry.

[Jamie Grefe · Rating 5 out of 5]

As published here: The Eyeslit-Crypt on Anatomy

Anatomy Courses Vocabulary List (unit seven): , wallpaper, New Hypermind Deformity Cauldron, cookies, Gilles De Rais, Aztec, newborn, mole, leach, um-um, everready, magicked, life-sac, crunch-rain, Sinatra, lymph, scissors, rap, pajamas, backfire, tinfoil, egg, milk, robe, tea, pork, Xerox, zillion, gravity, barf, beer, tee-tee, axe, Pasolini, exfoliate, languid, Vietnam, swaddle, OK, 33, 3

*
I study ANATOMY COURSES the way one might boil the slime smear of bird skin scattered and scorched on the lawn into etchings yellowed on the teeth of dead rattlesnakes.

*

[I may still be somewhere wandering on that lawn, groping for the window] One should suspend the injection of oneself and let the anatomy courses first settle in the mouth. They will dissolve on the tongue. Chew. Swallow. Exhale. Don’t forget her ipecac-laced scalpels for the scrub-down. You may pick those up in the lobby called “Father.”

*

Anatomy Courses Vocabulary List (unit two): mastectomy, wart, quarantine, carnation, sheen, tutu, universe, slush, egg, box, gong, Disney, wine, gland, Ambien, mummify, bib, moustache, hysterectomy, filibuster, colostomy, stoma, hematoma, carrion, tummybulb, vortex, puppysong, narcoleptic, prism, eon, lard, keyhole, unstuck, armpit, thorax, flesh, Magic Eye, Andromeda, vanilla, servile, kerosene, temperature, slop-bits, ajar, yeast, vaseline, BBBBurn, sternum, Saturn, B-minor, P-solo, basin, methadone, neo-nursery, doppelganger, lovehandle, pay-per-view, brainstem, mammalian, mudflap, tuna, insulin, chewball, canal, cigarette, grouse, mount, hammy, broom, spit, Taco Bell

[Ross Lockhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mined from the same vein as the cut-up experiments of Acker, Burroughs, and Gysin, Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick's Anatomy Courses: A Skin Dictionary (Lazy Fascist Press, 2012) is an intoxicating word salad drenched in cloacal dressing. Under layers of scintillating glossolalia, brand-name invocations, ethnic epithets, anatomic cornerstones, and alien parental angst, the careful reader will find a poetic cycle of bawdy body horror, narrated by a young woman apparently forced into breeder-sow servitude to a tyrannical, godlike bad daddy and indifferent, perhaps even nonhuman, multi-wombed mommy-force forced to dwell in dark, occulted holes. Nightmare images abound: childlike bedrooms equipped with paneled bleachers, gynecological stirrups, and frightening puppets; bodies reworked into armchairs; specialized organs, pumping, dripping, and spewing weird fluids in cruel parodies of bodily functions; crushed skulls, knee boots, and white gloves. Not an easy or conciliatory read by any means; however, Anatomy Courses is handsomely packaged, evocative, daringly experimental prose certain to reward readers seeking a systematic derangement of the senses.

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

An abusive family dynamic depicted via absurdist hyperbole and written in a perverted gibberish. Try it if you vibe with garbage like Pink Flamingos. You'll be eating your extra eyelids and erecting a tent out of your prolapsed anus before you know it.

[J.A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interview forthcoming at Monkeybicycle, an imprint of Dzanc Books

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely brutal. A paingasm. For the brave.

[Elliott James · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have enjoyed much of Butler's canon, but this particular title I could not finish. It wasn't fun. It was boring. It made absolutely zero sense. I just couldn't do it.

[Emory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some have said that "Anatomy Courses" leans towards the incomprehensible.

I am inclined to agree.

I could not begin to describe the characters, the plot, the setting, the themes. After reading this book three times the whole thing still mystifies me.

And yet...

Those same elements I can not describe to you ARE there. They are all present and accounted for. Butler and Kilpatrick have put together a clear narrative that is obscured by the very language that constructs it. It is a thing of enigmatic beauty.

I can tell you that the vocabulary used is primarily organic, and not in some obscure metaphorical sense. The authors seem to have used words from a med student's desk reference to construct this entire work. It is really quite incredible.

The closest thing I can compare it to is Steve Aylett's "Accomplice" series of novels, but "Anatomy Courses" is far more obtuse and unwilling to part with its secrets so easily. This is experimental literature that will make you work, and work hard, for understanding.

I will be the first to admit: I don't get it. Yet I still keep coming back to it like the Cenobites' puzzle box. "Anatomy Courses" is like a religious calling. A madness, or a sickness even. So elegant in its architecture, so deceptive in its presentation. I want to understand. I want to know its secrets.

Maybe one day the mysteries will be revealed.

[Jim Ivy]

I must say that I have great respect for both of these authors. I highly recommend Scorch Atlas and fuckscapes. However, I was barely able to reach the 43rd page before tossing in the towel. I'm not sure why this book needed to be published. It seemed more like an exercise in cut-up techniques without any focus. The writing was so self-consciously "weird" or "surreal" that it bordered on silly. With a lack of any sort of clever foundation to hold onto, I had to abandon the book.

That said, there were a few very funny one liners.

[Adam Rodenberger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did not enjoy this collection of pieces nearly as much as I enjoyed "scorch atlas" or "there is no year." I didn't feel the same ravenous need to choke myself on every word because things felt too scattered. where there is some story more easily latched onto in SA and TiNY, I never felt grounded (or firmly rooted) in the world of "Anatomy Courses," which was disappointing as I really wanted to be.

[Tobias · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some thoughts on it: now at Vol.1.

http://www.vol1brooklyn.com/2012/03/2...

[Merzbau · Rating 4 out of 5]

i won't even begin to claim i know what the hell this book was about, what i can tell you is that i found it mesmerizing.

[Alexandre Alphonse · Rating 5 out of 5]

We prayed real slow for napalm. What our lungs had wasted finally became injected fuel waved through houses we couldn't bring ourselves to pet goodbye.

[TheThirdLie]

This book has a mustache!