For the past year or so, I seem to read a book and then read one by Thomas Bernhard, then another, and then one more by Bernhard.  His stories in The Voice Imitator are messing with my mental grammar and syntax these days.  He can take you through days of cognitive motion in a single sentence.  And it’s really amazing to see his language distilled in these one-page stories.  It’s usually his dense pages-long considerations of minutiae that drive and comfort me.  I think of Bernhard as exhaustive, but these stories rely on a much finer balance of language.

I first came to Bernhard when I learned that Stephen Dixon has only written one critical work in his life, and it is about Bernhard. That was enough to make me realize that I needed to read him immediately.  The essay was in Rain Taxi about 10 years ago; you can read it here (it’s got a classic Dixon first line that begins, “I did a coupla readings for my last novel…”).  Now, having read Bernhard, it seems that his work is the closest I’ve found to acting as a precursor for Dixon’s own beautiful exhaustion.

click to read five selected stories

I finally read Ever today (I say ‘finally’ about a book that’s only two weeks old, because I feel like the last person to have read this devastating little book).  It’s by Blake Butler. I can confidently say that it was one of the most compellingly suffocating literary experiences I’ve had in quite some time.

My plan was to read it in one sitting – it seemed right from what I know of Blake’s writing (read these stories we published in Action,Yes).  So I read it on the train this morning (the 2 train to Atlantic Ave., the Long Island Railroad to Westbury, changing over at Jamaica, and then Long Island bus to campus).  And I read it during extend train and bus stop waits in 10 degree weather, alternating hands between book-holding and pocket-warming.  I didn’t put my gloves on because that would stop me from turning the pages.  It hurt, but I was too worked up.  That painful excitement also seemed right for this book.  I got to campus before it was done.  I used a ticket stub as a bookmark, pulled from my pile of bookmarks.  It was from a Mets-Braves game late last August when the Mets were still cruising into the playoffs.  (Blake lives in Atlanta – don’t know if he does the tomahawk chop – but I figured I grabbed the right bookmark.)

When I checked my email this afternoon – in my office in the 10 minutes before my faculty meeting in which we were reminded that we still don’t have a contract and shouldn’t plan on one anytime soon – I realized that Ben and Amanda had posted Blake’s reading on Apostrophe Cast last night.  It’s great.  But I already knew that; I heard it weeks ago.  If you’re reading this, stop and go listen now.  His voice is strained through a grinder.  It’s a selection from Ever.  If you’ve read Ever, then you understand how much sense this makes. (I hope Ben interviews Blake for the Apostrophecast blog – I think that’d make for a good battery.)

Ever asks you to vacate your seat – your room – your house – your place, and then it takes that place and wraps it around you really tight and makes you breath in the darkest, mustiest parts of it that you usually avoid when your room is your room and then it yanks it away from you so fast that you’re bare in the cold and want to be covered again by anything, even if it stinks.  If makes you reconsider whatever it is you inhabit (it necessarily causes you find a new way of sitting in the very room that you’re sitting in now and always sit in when you Google things and read blogs).

Thanks for writing this, Blake.

This image from Ever stuck me all day: “The hall’s walls were also seamless and hung with photos of faceless men. By faceless I mean their fronts were facing backwards, away from the camera, from me. It was not certain what they’d been made to look at, what they wanted, who they’d need.”

So I’m finishing my day by drawing this picture:

The Beeswax folks from Oakland just put out their new issue and it’s beautiful.  Go and get it here.  These things are hand-bound with letterpress covers. The covers feature this amazing drawing by my friend Lydia Conklin, and more of her comics are inside.  It also features three more stories from my cycle The Complete Collection of people, places & things. There is a host of other great fiction, poetry and meta-literature from this lot:

Kelly Davio • Elizabeth Eslami • Crag Hill • Jason Jordan • Shane Michalik • Edward Mullany • Kristine Ong Muslim • Ray Skjelbred • Michael Spring • Jim Steel • Kat Steiger • Brendan Todt • Jess Wigent

Excerpt from "Just One Second" by Lydia Conklin

When I hold a thing like Beeswax, it makes me want to create something small and limited and tactile and right.  I get really excited by limitlessness of what we can do with Action,Yes and the web, our ability to leave ideas of form and hierarchy behind us. But sometimes I want rules and containment.  This recent boom of literature-art presses is very exciting to me, similar to the explosion of online journals a few years back.  All these things seem to be indicative of the dying off of sales rankings, big publishing, print runs and other literary indicators that are so antithetical to artistic creation.  Large industries are dying off, but these creations that depend on little capital are thriving; people continue to create just to create.

Here’s a couple of panels from a story that I’m just about finishing up.  It’s called “The Remains.”  I’ve been having a tough time with the resolution but I think I’ve finally cracked it.  My idea is that this story will be in the first in a series of “episodes” on which I’m collaborating with Johannes. I’ve begun thumbnailing the next few stories, which will make up a section I see as “The Awakening of the Genius Child Orchestra.”