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: