Another Info/Link Dump

"Many young writers, I think, are drawn to what is unkindly called 'purple prose,' and most find themselves pilloried for their efforts. This kind of lavish, ambitious language is easy to fail at and easy to make fun of. Almost all of my own early work was met with rejections, dozens and dozens of them, that began with the chilling phrase 'The prose is beautiful, but...' The typical response to this barrage of criticism seems, sadly, not to continue trying to write better, richly metaphorical, muscular prose, but to retreat into something flatter and less adorned. For fiction writers there's no way round having to write some fairly serviceable sentences—'Nina had spent the night in the living-room' (Alice Munro), or 'The house wasn't clean' (William Trevor)—but that isn't a reason to give up on the excitement and the possibilities of language. The notion of a painter who isn't interested in paint is baffling, but many writers (I exclude poets) don't actually seem that interested in language. They are convinced that the interest of their work lies in characterization, plot, and theme." —Margot Livesey



Anonymous telling Westboro to chill out.



Laura's cool Field Guide to one of my favorite prose writers, Blake Butler. 

OMG. I missed the Word on Wayne White. But I'M HERE NOW. This dude is a stellar artist.

This is from the next book on my To-Buy List: Methland by Nick Reding. 

  On a cold winter night, Roland Jarvis looked out the window of his mother’s house and saw that the Oelwein police had hung live human heads in the trees of the yard. Jarvis knew the police did this when they meant to spy on people suspected of being meth cooks. The heads were informants, placed like demonic ornaments to look in the windows and through the walls. As Jarvis studied them, they mumbled and squinted hard to see what was inside the house. Then the heads—satisfied that Jarvis was in fact cooking meth in the basement—conveyed the message to a black helicopter hovering over the house. The whoosh of the blades was hushed and all but inaudible, so Jarvis didn’t notice the helicopter until he saw the heads tilt back on their limbs and stare at the cold night sky. By then, Jarvis knew he had to hurry: once the helicopter sent coordinates to the cop shop, it would be only moments before they raided the house.

Sam Harris with a Real Ideas piece on gun violence/laws.
  

"my thoughts grow mouths and swallow each other"

My dearest Laura Straub's Field Guide to Blake Butler, one of my favorite fiction ppl.

Why didn't anyone tell me about Jim Nutt?

Cool argument for Poetry getting more of the Painting treatment. 

But mostly what I envy painters for is art galleries. Just walking into an art gallery gives me a feeling of uplift. I love libraries too, but the feeling in a library is that you will paw around ferretting out information, whereas in a gallery the feeling is that enlightenment will come to you. You don’t have to know anything when you get there. You just check your coat, mash the clip-on tag to your collar, and trust that whatever you need to know will be explained as you go along.

This is why I propose that the best way to make contemporary poetry accessible to a wider public would be to put it in museums. To trot out an old saw: “Ut pictura poesis,” Horace wrote in the first century BC. “As is painting so is poetry.” This idea has been bandied about so much that scholars refer to it as u.p.p., and the question of whether poetry and painting do or should resemble each other has preoccupied artists from Titian to Wallace Stevens. These discussions, however, have primarily focused on artistic practice. What I mean isn’t that poetry should have more visual elements or become more abstract or more representational or otherwise do what visual art does. What I mean is that I think people would like poetry better if there were somewhere they could go to look at it that had high ceilings and good lighting and curatorial text to explain things about the poems that might not be obvious.

Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake Butler

I cant talk like I wish possible about this book because it is that swirl of goodness prose that is hard for me to talk about--so dense, so far reaching, so relatable yet POW, so unrelentingly dark. I love it but sorry sorry here is a bit of the booyeah.

from The Uncontrollable Reflection

A night ruined of its silence might begin in any way. In fighting its own exit, on the pillow, my brain at night will cling to anything it can corral--however dumb or old or overreaching. The idle thought initiates itself. The feeling of the thought sometimes seems to spin or worm inside my forehead, or I might roll mnemonically inside it, as in a terrifying drunk. Then the first thought begets the second, following its sound. Usually the thought is not of something massive--the bigger worries of the day already so embedded they are as if part of the air--but instead the mind often comes to take hold of the smallest bolt or jut of time.

MERRY VIDEOBLOG

I GOT A SWEET VIDEO CAMERA FOR CHRISTMAS = VIDEO BLOG = WATCH MY FACE DO WEIRD THINGS = HEAR MY VOICE GO WAHWAH

SCORCH ATLAS BY BLAKE BUTLER AND SYNONYMS

Scorch Atlas bakes the world in this coating of horror and filth.
Scorch Atlas blackens the corners of language, making everything crisp and bitter.
Scorch Atlas blisters page after page of tight story.
Scorch Atlas broils human flesh in a pan of THANK GOD fiction.
Scorch Atlas chars a little something in side the reader that forgot destruction is inevitable.
Scorch Atlas cooks up a tasty dose of image-based fiction.
Scorch Atlas melts my desire to write fiction. I COULD NEVER DO THAT.
Scorch Atlas parches the saliva within our mouths, us readers unable to close them, unable to take a deep breath.
Scorch Atlas roasts humanity and doesn't care.
Scorch Atlas scalds the eyes, like AM I REALLY READING THIS?
Scorch Atlas sears language tightly to the inner thigh of fiction writing.
Scorch Atlas seethes a realness that it shouldn't be able to.
Scorch Atlas shrivels the souls of its characters and simmers the souls of its readers.
Scorch Atlas singes its corners its cover, it seems, the beautiful damn artifact, one of the most attractive books I've ever held.
Scorch Atlas stews up a big batch of BOOYEAH.
Scorch Atlas swelters off the page, my hands are sweaty, thank you.