Few

Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas is now available for preorder at Amazon. If you buy any book during the rest of the year, let it be this one. And are you kidding me with the design?

I must say too that Blake's words have heavily influenced, I think, many of the words in the current poetry manuscript I'm working on. But his words are a lot better. So read them.

Also check out his blog for contests and reading tours and all other things Lynchian. Not that contests and reading tours are Lynchian.

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The new Memorious is up. It's one of my favorite online journals. Rebecca actually accepted a poem of mine a few years ago for an issue, but it was already spoken for, and I did email her to let her know, so chalk that up to an instance of lost email or what have you. That said, I will keep submitting until she takes something again, because the quality seems to get better every issue.

In particular, Adam Day's poems blew me away. How he doesn't have a book out yet is beyond me, and I imagine we'll all be hearing the good news soon if all is right with the world.

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I had this dream last night that the world was ending, which happens too often. But it was more vivid than usual this time. First I was walking through a friend's ocean side house, when the waves kept getting bigger and smashing into houses. Then lightning and rain. Then all these people I want to high school with crying hysterically. And more rain. And then a lot of running. I don't remember who was with me. Then a helicopter pilot on a loudspeaker or something from his helicopter. Then four helicopters were flung into the ground, each one exploding, and everyone running. The pilot was trying to warn us that the cars were going to start on their own and come after us, and we didn't know that until they started on their own and came after us. I remember a jeep chasing me, and suggested that if we ran into a secure, bricked building that all they could do was crash into it, since no one was driving. We never made it to the building. I realized when I woke up that no one ever dies in these dreams. I wake up before anything like that happens. Sounds and screams and waves crashing and thunder, but no blood of any kind, and no real witnessed deaths.

The Road

I've been listening to THE ROAD now for the last few weeks, on my IPod after I put it on there, maybe a month, and I'm still not done with it. I've read it before, and you should too if you haven't.

I was hoping sometime late November I could go to a theater and watch it. But now it's been pushed back until early 2009.

People have seen the early screenings. You can read reviews. I wish I was one of them.

I'm pretty sure the movie is going to be amazing.

It was filmed mostly in western Pennsylvania. I'm from western Pennsylvania.

The landscape is beautifully chaotic and insane. When I go back to Greenville, my hometown, there are things I'm so ineffably in love with it clearly cannot be defined by words.

But there are other times the ugly and disgusting side comes out. And all I want to do is burn it to the ground.

Love does that to you.

The side where a girl commits suicide in high school and because the town is so small you know about it. Or there's a fist fight at the guard rail near the edge of the high school and there are so many punches thrown to the head and violently landed that it makes you sick, and when the guy who gets the shit kicked out of him is throwing up, you're throwing up too.

I always got sick at those fights. That's why I can't watch boxing maybe. I can't take it. And I'm always obsessed with it.

But listening to THE ROAD, I've had a chance to take so much in, beyond the novel readings.

Every single line and word. I said it in a previous post, but this is why Blake Butler's SCORCH ATLAS will be important to me (by the way, I won't stop talking about Blake's book -- and if you're reading this, you need to get it when it comes out); it refuses to give up on the words, on the situation, on the fact that in one second a bullet can slug through your cranium.

But it's odd that I know it's ending. I know how it will end. Everything with the beach.

I am looking forward to every scene and every word. I truly think this may happen to our world.

I don't know how someone can read it and not think that. I just always wonder about the father character. Everyone says, "This book is about a father and a son. And about a father who takes care of his son."

You can place your words there, however you choose.

And I understand them.

But the reality of it is there's a desolate landscape. And there's a good chance that neither one of them make it. And around them is ash and gray and trees falling and cannibals and people who will slit your throat at the drop of a hat. Whatever the hell that means.

When this movie is actually out at the theater, a theater around here, I'll be there.

And this might be a thing might be a thing might be a thing of the past.

Scorch Atlas

I'm thankful to finally be writing this post, thankful to be telling folks who may not know about Blake Butler's SCORCH ATLAS, which is finally coming to book form via Featherproof Books in fall 2009.

I'm not sure what I read of Blake's initially that made me so interested in his work, but I was. It seemed like we were interested in the same kind of things, if not obsessing about them. So earlier in the year, I decided to contact him about trading manuscripts, mine poetry, and his a novel in short stories. He agreed pretty quickly, and it was nice to get another pair of eyes on my work just as I was excited to see his.

I remember that time I had more than a few hours between my first and my second and third classes I was teaching that semester, so I decided to dive in.

I read for a few straight hours, cover to cover, the entire .doc file of SCORCH ATLAS, and was blown away.

There are folks who say, "I couldn't stop reading!" when they talk about books, and the reason I'm so skeptical of that phrase is from my experiences: Rarely does that happen for me and to me, and so when it does, it's much more of an ordeal. It's not that I'm terribly picky, as I admire many writers, many books, by old authors and by new authors, but SCORCH ATLAS literally had me trying to blink moisture into my eyes from having to keep them open from the computer screen and the horrid fluorescent lights in my office. But I couldn't stop reading it, and didn't until the end.

We traded comments and emails back and forth, and I like to think we both helped out each other a lot with our manuscripts. Mine, though still a manuscript, is better for Blake's advice and what he saw in it, and I like to think that even though I'm not even close to thinking of myself as any kind of an editor, I was able to give him some good advice.

The stories are, for the most part, voluminously and unapologetically throat-slashing, yet there's such a poetic beauty to the language that balances out such material (I liken this kind of comparison to some of the horrific violence of Suspiria centered around the candy-colored lensing, striking some oddly corporeal balance of opposite goings-on), making many of the bleak and apocalyptic landscapes seem like there's a chance that things could get turned around, something which you never actually see coming to fruition, but with the possibilities always indefatigably looming.

The characters seem destitute in the more narrative stories with initial reads, yet there's an underlying, deeply underlying, tenderness that comes through with more reads, things that seem to subconsciously fuse together as the novel takes on new meaning as a whole with the culmination of every story until the end.

And this is a book where every sentence matters.

Yet the words don't seem interminably chiseled or forced, but necessary, necessary for communication within such landscapes, within such oddly intriguing familial relationships that sometimes both eschew and embrace the idea that something may be worth saving in the end, and if all hope seems lost, the attempts at trying never cease to obtain it.

My words are not doing justice to Blake's words, the characters' words, I know this.

But this is a book I will be proud to own, proud to be reading, proud that such risks were being taken, real risks, without giving up the literary quality and merit of such work.

In another's hands, these stories could be a mess: full of bleakness, full of the forced apocalyptic and bizarre, to get a rise out of the reader, or strictly to shock. But there's so much more in these stories, more to be discovered upon subsequent readings, and more to be discovered by the many readers it will have.