A couple of weeks ago I got down to Georgia for three readings. Went even better than expected. We filled the Cine screening room in Athens for Sabrina Orah Mark’s book launch for Tsim Tsum (with Blake Butler and I opening) – I did an all comics reading, which almost didn’t happen because we rolled in late from Atlanta and I barely got my laptop hooked up in time. After the reading we introduced Blake to The Manhattan Cafe’s Maker’s and Blenheim’s – I think we have another convert. The next day Sabrina and I went back down 316 to the ATL to read at The Solar Anus with Sandra Simonds and Laura Carter. Generous and solid human beings Jamie Iredell and Blake hosted us, and we had the pleasure of meeting the third Anus host, Amy McDaniel (read her posts on HTML Giant – she’s smart). Small crowd, all good people, awesome reading. We sat in a circle around a cooler of beers. It’s kind of weird that not all readings use this format. Back to Athens – genius reading by genius Reg McKnight on Monday night – breaking out his first book for a live crowd in a decade. Then my VOX Reading on Tuesday night, once again at Cine, to a big crowd in their beautiful screening room. The good folks at UGA arranged for two excellent writers to read with me – Andy Jamison, and my old Athens buddy, Patrick Denker. Patrick got up there, threw his three-day-old Sony Vaio on the cement floor, and then gave a sweat-fueled dramatic reading from his epic-in-progress transliteration of Dante’s Inferno. It was good. I can’t wait to see this thing finished. I warned the crowd that I would fail following a reading like Denker’s. I went ahead and read stuff from The Complete Collection; I read an old story called “Waterslide” that I’ve always loved a lot, but is only finally being published – in the next issue of Anemone Sidecar – and then I premiered some sections from new book about Baltimore. The book only exists in handwritten notebooks that no one else has read, so it was a bit scary revealing it before a live studio audience. I think it went well. I’m tentatively calling the book 100 Atrocities from a Fictional Town Called Baltimore. We’ll see if that sticks.

Here’s the evidence (didn’t take enough pictures – missed Atlanta all together):

Lots of little news to catch up. My house new house is a construction site so production is slow, but I have started posting over at Big Other, with a smart and thoughtful bunch of writers. Lets of good stuff to read over there.

First off, our new Action, Yes is up. This is the first of four issues that is largely collected from our very first open submissions period. We were hoping to get one issue out of it, and then we got FOUR. I’ve heard so many tales of terror about the slush pile – but we didn’t see it – it was a rare submission that didn’t have something interesting going on. Plus we have a specially curated section from Canada.

New Pear Noir! is out, and it’s got my comic “My Brother’s Shoe.” It’s a story that takes place in autumn in New York.  Pretty similar to this movie:

And I have some drawings in the new Caketrain that accompany a series of J.A. Tyler’s Jimmy stories. Totally different project that our image-text novel Glimpse. I think it’s fair to say that the Jimmy drawings are illustrations – which I rarely do.  Here’s one of them:

Leaving for five days – three reading in Georgia. Friday night will be in Athens at Cine with Sabrina (Orah Mark) and Blake (Buter). This is the launch for Sabrina’s brilliant Tsim Tsum, and my southern celebration for The Complete Collection in the town where it was born, and Blake with be bringing his Scorch Atlas to town. Sabrina says this thing will be more party than reading  and she promises RAFFLES, which are similar to the lottery. Then Blake is hosting Sabrina and me, and Laura Carter and Sandra Simonds, at his Solar Anus series at the Beep Beep Gallery in Atlanta. Then next Tuesday I’m reading for the VOX Reading series at my alma mater back in Athens.

Speaking of Georgia, I’ve been reading Jamie Iredell’s Prose Poems: A Novel today. Really desperate stuff – I’m going to go talk about it at Big Other…

Click these shots for links to more info about the people in them.

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: