Blake Butler On Reading

“Reading is eating. There are corndogs and there is cereal and there is lettuce. It's fun to get a lot of weird shit up in your waddle. You get really hungry sometimes, and other times you want to go for a good big walk. I like exercising on a stationary bike or running on a treadmill while I read because it's like becoming and unbecoming the fat boy at once, which pushes out inside doubly. Sometimes I drive my car and read. I drive better because of it. I want everything inside me. I want to see a dog squatting over America. Books have butts. They have legs and arms and money. Some will help you to the bed. Guns are in books sometimes and sometimes, less often, Hostess products appear. My mom taught me to want to read by showing me a big bag I was not allowed to look in. I took one book out at a time. I am a pig child and so I ate it and I ate the words and I got XL. I had to wear the shirts that looked like teepees. Thanks, books.”

Blake Butler's Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

This story is old; I’ve told it before but I’ll pinch it to this: In the spring of ’08, I read his story “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach” in Ninth Letter and felt a hard hurt in my throat. I flipped to his bio, discovered his blog, and for the next days I systematically clicked and read my way down the entire list of his online publications. I discovered journals and writers I never knew existed. And fell in love — deeply, head over heels — with this world that he had led me into. It dawned on me that maybe it didn’t take a story in The New Yorker to become a real writer. I even wrote him fan mail and he wrote back! Encouraged, I submitted to Lamination Colony. He responded, Yes. And there it is, my not-so-well-kept secret: Blake Butler was my gateway drug to the Internet — into the online scene of writers and readers and editors and publishers for which I am and will never stop being grateful. Every day I wake and check it still exists when I open my laptop to make my rounds: email, Facebook, Twitter, Reader, etc. This is, I realize, what I am doing every day when I go online — I am making sure the Internet didn’t go away in the night.

Or, in my case, in the morning hours. Like Blake, but not at all like Blake, I have trouble falling asleep. These days, because my job and schedule allow it, I usually work until 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning (it’s 4:28 right now, hello) until my eyes close, until suddenly I’m asleep after hours of agitation and thoughts that will not stop unless distracted by “work,” by which I mean staring or reading or Interneting or Netflixing or whatever else I do in the company of dark rooms lit by lone lamps and probably mostly I just waste time thinking nothing then sleep the sleep of the dead as if drugged until 10 on work days or noon on non-work days and two on days it doesn’t matter. Whenever it is though, I always wake and reach for the laptop. Something that now, after reading Nothing, seems maybe like a problem. Or addiction. Something not quite right yet comforting all the same. And the only reason why, for me, is because it’s there.

Those who follow, or have ever followed, Blake’s blog will know that he is an insomniac. I knew this about him early on, probably from the first blog posts of his I read. Perhaps this is one reason beyond his fiction that I gravitated toward him. It was his blog that kept me coming back, that drew me in. I’m not sure if he’s doing much with it these days, but there are many who will remember how his blog could become, in minutes, a hot-spot, a place where it seemed like everyone who was anyone and everybody else who was interested could pop up in the comments and party, a place where, suddenly, five comments could explode into a hundred or more. I came late to this, as I only ever got to witness it once or twice, and of course it had been going on for who knows how many years before I found it. But even so, it was exciting to be around Blake. To be in the presence of him, online, immersed in the buzz and hum surrounding him. And then, on slower days, if you were paying attention to his posts, he would write something true and heartbreaking, or something you felt or wanted to believe was true and heartbreaking — you never could be sure — and if you were me you would leave a comment that usually had the words “big” and “hug” in it.

I have been waiting for this book, for Nothing, since “The Gown from Mother’s Stomach.” I’ve known it was coming, without question, since the blog days. I hoped it would be readable, or comprehensible, or that it would show an extreme amount of care and love or trust — in you, in me, in us. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes, I doubt. Scorch Atlas is one of those books that will stay on my favorites shelf forever. I’ve taught it, I’ve bought it in bunches, and I still seem to keep running out of copies because I loan it out and never get it back. But I have one copy, sent to me by Blake himself, that I will never give away. It is signed, of course, and tucked inside is a strip of denim fabric. It is the book’s bookmark. I don’t know exactly where the fabric came from but I think I have a guess. If that guess is correct, then I feel special. If not, it doesn’t matter; I’ll still treat the fabric as if it’s special, because it is anyway, because I make it so. Ever, I struggled with. There Is No Year I couldn’t read, but not because I didn’t want to or didn’t like it; no, but because that book begins with such heavy iambics I couldn’t make sense of the words making sentences — I could only hear their sounds, their syllables. It was distracting. It also felt too big, too wide and heavy to hold or read comfortably. I put the book on the shelf and told myself I’d come back to it. I never did. But I will. It waits.

Nothing is different. Nothing is Blake, is like Blake’s blog back in the day and like Blake’s Scorch Atlas stories about mothers and fathers and children — like the free-throw father and the gown mother. There is love and pain and sadness and love and suffering and confusion and love and words toward sense-making all throughout these pages, on every page. There are also brackets and all caps and footnotes, but none are used to distraction.

There is this:

“ ] SAY MY MOTHER’S NAME, MY FATHER’S”

And there is this:

“I go to get a glass of water. I’m watching my dad again today so Mom can go to quilt guild and get out of the house. Dad in time has gotten stranger, more far gone from knowing who or when or where he is or was. Around the house he walks and knocks on glass and punches his own hand, in endless iteration. He seems continually waiting for something to happen, though when things do happen, it’s not the thing. In the late years of his life, he seems newborn in certain ways, definitionless, no longer knowing where to aim, though in his eyes and in the knocking and the skin around him, you can see that he has lived. None of this is his fault, or anyone’s. It is days.”

And this:

“Here I am not asking, not saying, moving past, for how these hours, new to him, for me repeat. That how, in my father’s blanking and often disoriented, disturbed flesh, in his forgetting, confusing ways he’d walked inside of so long now every day — how underneath that, in the moment, in the sheer bulk of his frustration, the bulge of his tongue pressed in the fury behind his bottom lip, same as mine in the same spot — how in the deliberate way he chews, in all his pacing, staring, seeing, I see him still right there — caught or clogged inside a self of other self, a fully breathing body mask — how underneath that, at its center, beyond the fluttered veils, and no matter how gone — he is there.”

I worked my way backwards with these quotes. This section of the book, which comes at the end, this section or chapter from which I have quoted all these moments, actually begins like this:

“Somewhere in this sprawl of hours is my father, and the destruction of his aging brain.”

Other, previous sections of the book seem to offer separate things, and function in different ways. An early section builds and builds to its conclusion with constant footnotes. A middle section reads vast and encyclopedic, researched, and structured upon a timeline of facts of sleep-related history. And other sections, too, provide brief glimpses of a mother — Blake’s mother, yes, but here, as ever, he paints her not as his own but as anyone’s. Always distinctly his mother. Yet somehow, also, everyone’s:

“To keep me calm or to recalm my internalizing terror in the fake light the house held to keep the night out, my mother read to me aloud. She read me books beside my bed about boys or men who, waking, moved — through forests to find fathers or ride on rivers, men who walked because they could. Her voice gave a calm and even glove of warming, one like an endlessly played album I can in my head alone invoke: a soft pocket right there all through the veils of junk recorded on my brain’s ends. With her there nearby, projecting softly aloud, the larger world felt far away — the crushing veils of silence in which the evil things could hide and approach suddenly filled with protection, an eye. She would stay there, predicting end points for our evening when she would need to leave me and always staying when I asked for further, more.”

And then, even earlier, near the beginning of Nothing:

“ . . . my mother goes to look more for the baby books in which throughout those years she wrote us down — sentences rendered in her looped handwriting, making claim of what she’d feed me, how I’d laugh. It’s a practice she still has not given up — each evening before bed now ends with her writing out the full day of her life, word by word. She is often up late into what is called the witching hour, sewing, singing, awake alone in the house, as my father has always been prone to nodding out early. My sleep complications, as is so much of me, are likely sewn from her: aura transferred into flesh in bridging time — a pattern printed on the lengths of lymph that make my brain and lung meat, which, if I decide to mate, I may too funnel into another body, here, a child. My mother’s journals — there must be a dozen of them now, each fat with ink and clippings from her hands — I already feel my skin tightening against me at their presence, as my incessant selves insist on realizing how one day, under the event of a thing I will not name here, those pages will become a tunnel back through and into her, her own sleeplessness, her longing, her days in step and click — the words the image of her thoughts and ways and ideas given from her as each day passes, written into text instead of me — as for every instant I am not there, her child, or anything I was not there for her to say, will be another wall that breaks my body in a maze that will not end.”

My final quotation, which I debated including, seems especially impossible not to include, though I worry I’m quoting too much, or that if allowed I’d keep on quoting, but, OK, here is the one I’ll end with:

“That I am writing these sentences in the same bedroom where this dream came for me seems only fitting — that old bedroom now converted in my parents’ house to a makeshift office where I come most days to be around to help my mother care for my father in his dementia — a constantly degrading state in which he less and less can recognize his surroundings or himself and how to move within it as he had — though no matter how hard I try, the ceiling of the room here now is just short and flat and white. There is nothing visibly disrupted in it. The nightglow stars have been removed. The walls, having been painted over purple and populated with my mother’s things, are different enough that the room itself seems not that room from back then here at all — though in the air, the presence, I can feel it, I’d rather not let it know I do.”

There is more. There is so much more I want to say. About this book and about my own parents — my mother, my father — but I won’t. Can’t. But I will say this. For the past four or five minutes I’ve been scrolling through old emails I sent to Blake. They reveal back to me a very young, often gushy, mostly exuberant me that is recognizable but not. I’ve grown up maybe a little since those early emails. It seems I used to share all kinds of news; it seems I maybe used to direct a lot of excitement his way. It’s been a while since I’ve done this. Since before December 2010, which Gmail indicates was our last correspondence — a PayPal exchange for books, the one that got me that mysterious denim bookmark. So much has happened since December 2010, since that spring of 2008 when I first discovered him in print, and online, and followed as best I could his lead, inspired and optimistic. In some way, this post feels very much again like one of those old emails, transmitted across space and time unseen, but meant, very much, to be read and hopefully heard and understood.

It is 5:00 now. It is Monday morning. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I’ll post this to the site. It will be a very happy day, a cause for celebration and excitement about this book, about Nothing, about what seems though, really, to be about everything and everyone that matters. Congratulations Blake, and big hug.

An Interview with Blake Butler

Blake Butler needs no introduction, which means all I need to say here is that the following interview was conducted using Google Docs between August 10, 2009 and October 18, 2009, and it originally appeared in Keyhole Magazine in October 2009.

1. Scorch Atlas

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi Blake. Thanks for doing this. What would you like to say, right off the bat, about Scorch Atlas?

BLAKE BUTLER: I would like to say that the first thing I wanted to do when I had the book in my hands is eat it. So I am going to. My plan is to eat one page of the book every day or thereabouts until it is all gone. Page by page, with sauces, maybe some candles. A bubble bath. When I am done maybe I will start with a second copy, if I'm still hungry. I am always very hungry. This book had been a long time coming in a way, and so now that it is here I just want it back inside me. I mean that in the best way.

MG: What would it mean to be "back inside" you, not literally?

BB: It would mean that now that it is an object and having removed itself from me it is a picture of my brain and shit and mindstate of that period, if not fully even back then controlled by me. It would mean that having seen the thing come out of me I would have as just as much relationship with it existing if I were (and am) to eat it and have it come through in my flesh, but even then it would shit right back out of me again if not quite resembling what it did the first time. At least then it would be a thing I could fully wipe away. All of this said I am very happy with the object as an object and my relationship with it is the same as it would be with my bed, which is equally to me known and unknown, ruined and not ruined, soft and full of bugs.

MG: There are some videos of you actually eating your book; the first page you ate raw, and the second you drowned in ketchup. I believe you've eaten a few more, though the videos aren't up yet. So far, which pages have been the tastiest? Do you have ideas for future recipes?

BB: The tastiest was the most difficult one, which was the first. The very first page in the book is pure black on both sides, all ink. I didn't think about it when I started with that one. I didn't think about water making it easier either, so choking was involved. It was pretty good to taste that way. Since then I've gotten lazy. I've done some more but yeah, none have made it matching with that first black mass. I'd like to make one with a fruit cocktail and a tube of icing. I'd like to wrap some inside veal saltimboca and maybe one with human flesh fritters (I really do want to try human). When I get serious I'll just take a straight up bite out of the book and break my teeth.

MG: Tell us about the design. It is a beautiful book -- perhaps what I consider the most beautiful book on my shelf. Usually, one wouldn't think that things of beauty should be destroyed, but in this case it makes perfect sense. Why?

BB: That's all Zach Dodson. I'm still amazed by what he did. I had high hopes for the way this object would appear when it was finished, and he far exceeded those hopes. I've really never seen another book that looks like this one, and that is a blessing I can only continue to be thankful for. Each page in the book has a unique texture to it, handmade and scanned in. I feel grateful that even if the words in the book were shit, one could still sit and stare at this book and see something in it. It's like batting with a quadrupled sized bat.

We wanted to destroy these books because they were designed to look as if they'd suffered through their contents, the rains and bugs and bloated babies and weird fire. It seems interesting that the books themselves appear destroyed in their freshly-printed state, and in going on and destroying them physically, they really take on that aura in full. If bookstores would stock books that were bloated triple sized with slick water and covered in dust and burned some and smelling of rot, they would all be like that, I imagine. I like the feeling of something that's been beat. Some of the books I most remember in my life are ones I snuck wet out of ruined houses. One year when my friend's neighbor's house burned down, there was a bag of books out on the lawn. I fished a picture book out of the pile that had a shot of a nude woman on it. I had never owned a picture of a naked body. The book was covered in bugs and mottled and made mushy. I took it home. I think I hid it underneath some junk deep in my closet, and I would take it out and look at the woman's hair and I would sweat.

MG: Without giving too much away, I love how your DIAGRAM piece functions, spatially, in this collection. This is an odd comparison, but I was reminded of the intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure I've encountered the structuring device in many other books. What led to that decision? Or, which came first: the DIAGRAM piece or the idea for Scorch Atlas?

BB: The layering of the storms from the DIAGRAM piece actually came about as a design element, thought up by Zach. His idea was to put one of the storms before each story so that the story itself could then be designed to look as if it had suffered through that storm. Though we ended up keeping that idea contained to the paper that the storms appear on, rather than throughout the book, but the effect I think was even more provocative in how it played out as an intermediary for the mood of the whole book. Because of the nature of that piece, as a series of storms that continually worsen in breadth and horror, it really for me added a sense of continuity and gradation that brought the book together that much more as an object than if the storms had appeared as the singular story, as it was in my original manuscript. I am really lucky that I had Zach and Jonathan on this project, as it was ideas like that that really took the book as a whole to a whole new level, beyond what I'd even imagined for it during its becoming.

As for which came first, I didn't really intended to write Scorch Atlas as a book as it was going on. I simply was pounding out these stories, one after another, and only after I'd finished them all, the DIAGRAM one included, did I realize I had a full on manuscript. I think the only story written after I had assembled the book is 'Want for Wish for Nowhere,' which oddly might be my favorite in the book.

MG: I often ask writers to name their own favorite pieces, and many kindly refuse. Why is "Want for Wish for Nowhere" your favorite? And why did you write "oddly"?

BB: Yeah, having a favorite seems hard, and kind of stodgy. I probably change my opinions on how I feel about certain bits regularly, based on the way the mind changes and like if I happen to open the book and be in a bad mood and see it shitty, or find some error in how I'd phrased it, how I'd do it differently now. I kind of don't like reading things in print I've made as I always want to edit them some more, which is less a result of not having edited it fully in the first place, and more of how flesh morphs the more you eat and listen. Then there's the problem of going back and editing something you made a while back and then coming back even later and finding the edits you made ruined the original voice. I like concentrated phases of writing, concise eras: it's got more value to me than the constantly affirmed 'love labor' of writing something over years and years. Why not get a picture of yourself in a moment? You have a lot more time to get old.

I realize none of that answered your question, which points to that favorites are fucked.

MG: Do you have a least favorite from the collection? Why or why not?

BB: Everything I write is my favorite and least favorite. I don't think about it past that. Thinking too hard about one's own writing as a mantle is asking to be shit on in the hair.

MG: I think Matt Bell and I are agreed that "The Gown from Mother's Stomach" is our favorite. Have you received much feedback on this story? I'd be interested to hear some of it, if you'll share.

BB: That tends to be the one I hear the most about, which kind of confuses me, honestly. I shat that story out in a few hours. Actually, I wrote the first sentence down on a scrap while I was asleep once, and found it, and sat down and wrote the first half of the story from it in about 45 minutes. Then that sat on my hard drive for about 4 months, and I came back and added the bit about the bear, then added the second half, about another 45 minutes. Then I edited it a few times. I think people like it because it seems to me the most contained. I'm not sure what else it is about the story that people respond to any more than the others, but I am glad people like it. Maybe it also kind of comments on how sometimes the least amount of work you put into something, the quicker it comes out as it is supposed to be, the more aura it has about it, and the more immediate light, maybe. I don't hate the story, but if I had to go back to the above question, it might be my least favorite now simply because I am a contrarian.

MG: I feel compelled to share with you that I'm teaching Scorch Atlas in a sophomore-level Introduction to Literature course. I've learned that in this setting, as opposed to a creative writing workshop, it is absolutely necessary to facilitate the students' discussion. To this end, I've given them handouts on plot, character, setting, tone, style, etc., and I was really pleased to discover that your book really works alongside these sort of generic questions (e.g. Who is the protagonist? What does s/he want? How does this complicate the plot?). How do you respond to this--the idea that your writing, which I think is so stylistically brilliant, also satisfies, or fits into, these rather traditional constraints? (If the stories didn't do so, I think my students would be absolutely lost. I, and they, are grateful!)

BB: That is nice, that they respond well. I think everything has these elements. Even the most obscurist, language-oriented, symbol-laden text you could conjure would have these things in them, particularly if you are scrounging for them. Story architects itself. This is why I find it amusing when people, as authors, are so concerned about roadmapping these kinds of elements during the creation period, as if it has to be something they set up and intone, like some kind of wizard, instead of just letting it generate itself naturally, out of ideas, the way most days do, in life. I don't understand, or rather, don't buy, the notion that any one person can be so in tune and ahead of every reader that he or she must design and present these elements, however covertly, to their audience. It cheapens the fun, and you can smell it usually a hundred pages away, this kind of furtive bending, implanting. "This story has fake tits!" There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, I'm sure, but I'd rather not know about them. Let the magic be the magic.

MG: One of my academic interests is ecocriticism: the study of literature and the environment. Do you consider Scorch Atlas to have an investment in fate of the natural world? To what extent are the characters responsible for the downfall of their habitat?

BB: Honestly I've never been much of a nature person. I hide inside a lot. The dirt and air confuse me. Maybe I'm a bitch. I like clean pants. More than that, I think I am afraid of water and of mud. I am afraid of being ripped up into something. At the same time, I am fascinated by it. A lot of my natural interaction comes from dreaming: the way that water and mud is embedded in my blood.

I wouldn't say particularly that the characters in Scorch Atlas are 'responsible' for the destruction of their surroundings any more than they are responsible for the destruction of any other element in air. Rot is natural. People are rotting. It breeds itself. It's what comes. You can be as clean and progressive and protective as you want. Still. It does.

* * *

2. The Internet and Year of the Liquidator

MG: What is your relationship to the Internet and what was your introduction to online writing?

BB: My relationship to the internet is when my house's computer started being able to talk to buildings outside of our building I began to masturbate using information that those other places would sent to our house's computer. I am from the BBS land where I would use dial up to make my mother's phoneline interact with adult servers so I could see women remove their clothes. Now the nudity on the internet is so clear you don't need to look at it anymore.

My introduction to online writing was with what I think of as the first wave of strong independent publishing personas, including Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz, Haypenny, the Glut, McSweeney's, and some other places. Part of me misses the days when that community was very small like that and yet seemed larger than it is now, as large as it is now. Without finding that, I might be still using computers to talk to other computers but they would talk about machine languages and databases. Jesus christ.

MG: Do you believe in Internet personas? Or do you think people are as they really are? Who are some of your favorite Internet presences?

BB: I do not believe in internet personas, I believe in personas. I don't think people are what they really are. I do not believe people believe in their personas. I do not believe people are personas. I believe people are a mash of things mostly shit and a little bit of tickle and some candy if they are good people and I guess a little light. My favorite internet presence is Lorf Ben Undwadsensen who lives inside a subnet of Google and delivers the mail with his teeth.

MG: From personal experience I can say that you are very generous with your time. I had stumbled upon an issue of Ninth Letter, read your story "The Gown from Mother's Stomach," loved it, pulled up your blog, sent you fan mail, and you responded! And it was your blog that introduced me to online journals. I read your stories, I stayed at those sites, I read others' stories. A world unfolded. I've always wanted to thank you for that. If not for you, there wouldn't be me. Such a strange thing to say, but I know it's true. Do you feel an obligation toward other writers? Or, why are you so nice?

BB: It's not that I am nice. I am not nice really. I just really do enjoy words, and I get such pleasure out of words that I want to see more words and I want to do what I can to extend the pleasure I receive in the form of words to other people who also have the receptors for that pleasure and who have the same want in them to make words that I do. I get a bigger kick I think out of publishing and hyping other people's work than I do spreading my own. Ultimately though it is about the reflex and the condition and I exist inside that condition more than I exist anywhere else, and so it is very natural for me to breathe and eat inside and around it, it is a thing I could not change if I wanted to. Not nice, a blood obligation. It is nice though maybe that it seems nice because that maybe means that it feels true what I am saying and I am not just a mouth.

MG: Tell us about Year of the Liquidator. I think we're all interested in the long version.

BB: I'd always wanted to start a small book press. It was a matter of inevitablility. I think I get more pleasure out of working with other people's ends than my own, outside the hemisphere of just writing. I was just waiting for the right time. When I found Kristina, I knew immediately her book had to be the beginning. Shane and I had thrown the idea of working together around for a long while, and when I sent him K's manuscript, he had the same reaction: this is the one. So we committed to it, and the commitment pressed the birth. I am really excited about the prospect, and hope that things go smoothly enough that we can do a couple of titles a year. We are approaching it very calmly, and yet with great excitement, as we want it to go exactly right, to be a small, good thing that has an aura, and in the tradition of my favorite small presses: making book objects that might not appear anywhere else.

Not sure yet what we will do after the first book is finished. We're kind of waiting to see how things go, and moving from there. Hopefully one day we can read submissions openly, but for now we're moving one nidge at a time, and there's already so much I want to do. Time is hard.

* * *

3. The Book Deals

MG: It's no secret by now that you've landed yourself a two-book deal with Harper Perennial. How far along are you in these two manuscripts? And do publishing companies often sign deals for unfinished books?

BB: The novel is finished, other than minor tinkering and copy edits, and has been for some time. The deal was initiated around the novel, and the addition of the second book, which came up in discussing the contracts, was sold on a proposal for the idea of the book. I think that's pretty standard, actually. I've heard of many deals where the second book was on spec. And especially for nonfiction, which is often I think sold on proposal. As for how far along the nonfiction is, I started work on it a couple of weeks ago, and it is coming very fluidly. It's a book I've had in me for a long time. I feel excited for it.

MG: You now have an agent and a major publishing company behind you, which I'm sure includes a publicity department and such -- possibly even eventual tour money. Does this relieve you of any burdens? Do you feel you have more time to write?

BB: I haven't gotten too deep into feeling how it feels to be with a major house. So far it's been as good as I could ask. My editor, Cal Morgan, is wicked smart and knows what he's doing. I've felt nothing but encouraged in my vision, as surprising as it might be for such an odd book at a big house. I think Harper Perennial is really interested in pushing boundaries and getting new, interesting books out there. I feel blessed and excited to be a part of that. Still not sure about publicity matters, or touring support, etc., but that's always been a backseat concern for me. I'm just happy to have a wonderful publisher for the books, one that will surely help me get my work to a larger audience, I believe, without compromising its essence in the slightest.

As for having more time to write, I've always had a lot of time. I make it my priority, and my freelance jobs have allowed me a great deal of fluidity. I'm lucky in that regard, that I've been able to maintain such a loose schedule for moneymaking around what I really love. Everyone should look into freelance writing online: there's just so many ways to make a moderate amount of money that clears your work week enough that you can write from home. It's much easier than it seems.

MG: What, if anything, is different?

BB: Well, for one, writing a book that has been already sold feels interesting. I've certainly never done something like that before, and while at first I was afraid it might feel weird having that looming, it's actually been very freeing. I've always worked best with deadlines and schedules, and if anything it really is motivating me even more to be focused and rigorous and push myself to make something wild and good. It's been especially nice in that up until a few months ago I felt like I'd wasted a lot of this year spinning wheels and slightly off-focused. I'm getting more done on the actual work than I have all year. Things feel strong.

MG: Your non-fiction is about insomnia. Is it about your insomnia? 

BB: It is about my insomnia, and insomnia in general, and also about obsession, and obsessing, which I believe has been the cause of a lot of my sleep trouble since I was very young. It is also about tunnels and masturbating and weird light and encryption and video games and film and fear.

MG: When did your insomnia begin? Is it constant or does it come and go? Any relationship to your creative output?

BB: It is a thing that has been inside me since before I was born and is still inside me now even though I sleep rather well most nights, this year. It had been unrelenting in the insomaniac form through various periods of my early childhood and especially in my midteens to late twenties, if studded in different places by errors in speech or moving or other brainwaves. It has an influence on creative output in that it is all through me at every moment and when I can control it best I am at my best, and when I can not control it it makes me feeble, but it is always in my flesh and I am always breathing it and without it I would not exist. In all of this I mean insomnia as an understanding more than simply the medical condition of not being able to sleep. I'm pretty deep in the midst of all this thinking right now as I am writing a full length text about the condition.

MG: What can you share about the fiction manuscript?

BB: It's a full length novel in segmented scenes about a family who comes to live inside a new house and finds copies of themselves already there. There is also a black box on their new neighbors' lawn that continues to grow in size. There are strangers who come to the house to visit wearing gloves. I think I thought of it as a novel in a David Lynch kind of mind while I was writing it, though it might feel totally different than that overall. It is also about consumption, young death, sleep action, tunnels, creation, weird light, haunting, disease, and death. It is a book I have been trying to get out of me for years and years now, and feels like the best thing I've ever written. I hope people like it.

* * *

4. Who is Blake Butler?

MG: Take a look around. Describe something about where you are, right now, that you haven't really noticed before.

BB: There are patches of weird sparse hair on the skin below the knuckle of my pointer and middle fingers of both hands, but not on the other fingers or the thumbs. As much as I see my hands, I'd never seen that until you asked. I can almost count the follicles. Is it true that each hair is held into your body by little microscopic insects? Did I make that up or is that common knowledge? Those four fingers are the fingers I type most with. Maybe those insects wrote this book. If not, they should have. I'll say they did.

MG: Tell us about Blake Butler as a kid. And as an adolescent? A high schooler? College boy? And now?

BB: I think I've always been the same person. People too highly rate the idea of mental change. I feel like the melding of an 8 year old and and an 80 year old, in a body of whatever age I am at any time. If I could have changed I probably would have done so by now. I will probably spend the rest of my life saying the same thing. I will get older. I will eat more. Hopefully I will go deaf.

MG: That seems an odd thing to say. You tend to be full of odd things to say. What are some of the oddest things you've ever said? (Maybe not odd to you, but odd to anyone listening in.)

BB: What's the oddest thing I've said. I durno, man. Send me a tape recorder, I'll give you hours of what I say inside my sleep.

MG: Where do you see yourself a year from now? Five years? Twenty-five?

BB: Hopefully I will go deaf. Other than that, I don't see myself anywhere, even tomorrow. I don't mean that morbidly, I mean that I don't know and I don't want to know. If I knew where I was going to be, even if I loved where that was, I would probably do everything I could to make that not occur. Again, I am a contrarian by nature, and yet when mostly around strangers I give in to others' wills. The more I love a person the more mean I am to them often, I fear. A lot of the time I just want every day to be even more exactly the same as every other day than it already feels they are. What am I talking about? I have no idea.

MG: What are you talking about? I have no idea.

BB: Glorbbenbit pu-sis londum difdong, queebibbit andit ressmonblerrib.

MG: Do you have any pets? If not, why not? If so, what do you call them/it? 

BB: I'm not good at pets, I get bored, impatient. The same reason I'll likely never have kids. My one true love as a pet is my Margot, a chihuahua, who now lives with my ex-girlfriend who gifted her to me. I miss my Margot.

MG: How about some more favorites? Favorite liquid?

BB: Urine while it's coming out. Coffee in my mouth.

MG: Favorite vowel?

BB: o

MG: Favorite consonant?

BB: b

MG: Favorite air?

BB: Whatever air is inside my mother at any minute.

MG: Favorite human shape?

BB: Pleased

MG: Favorite sound?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite hue?

BB: Black or fire engine red

MG: Favorite digestable?

BB: Money

MG: Favorite texture?

BB: Beckett

MG: Favorite shelter?

BB: No sound

MG: Favorite "recipe" of "ingredients" [that make up anything]?

BB: Masturbate in the shower until you are about to come then stop. Go wet into the bedroom and wrap yourself in a bedsheet, constricting just your arms and head. Lay down in the floor for 45 minutes.

MG: Is there a single book you've read more than any other? 

BB: I used to read Donald Barthelme's Snow White once a year. So like 8 times of that, but I haven't read it the past couple years. In terms of quantitative time spent with one book in hand it might be Infinite Jest, the book that made me want to work. I have read that book through fully twice and in bits and pieces many times and certain sections of it more times than I have read Snow White in full. In my mind I've been reading the same sentence in the same book for my entire life but it's been a whole life figuring out what that sentence is and I still haven't got it right.

MG: If you could have any combination of three superpowers, what would they be, and why that particular combination?

BB: I would like to cry money; I would like to be able to turn off sound and turn on sound, and make the sound into what I want the sound to be; I would like to be able to shrink people and grow people and throw people in the air largely and touch them and make them laugh. That particularly combination because it's the sounds that just came out of my hands when I did not think at all about the question, which is my greatest respect for the question.