we talk to blake butler, author of the four books covered in this module, about making readers feel yucky, capturing america in his writing, and all-you-can-eat buffets.
“there are more cages than possible locations, the thought you think trying to think the prior sentence as a thought reminds you. instead of trying to figure out what you could do with that idea, you slip the tip of the restraint’s nib under your tongue and close your slits and feel your skull begin to fill.”
“it’s as if whole dimensions of her person, passed through decades, even withered and undependable as they had been, stand now at risk by mere suggestion, under defeat. it isn’t right, alice feels sure; this narrative is not at all like what had happened; in fact, it’s a willful degradation of her truth, so it appears, designed to pull the world out from beneath her, all explanation held behind some curtain she can’t see. who had set this up, and from whom did they gain access?”
“and yet we still can trace no claim, no sense within you what it is about you that might be furthered pressed down or altered to finally allow us to perform the necessary aspects of the aforementioned trajectory unto the benefit of all, without the at least by now irregular and yet no less irritating fomentation of socio-political grindage that does nothing else but slow the system to a fault, filling what could be gorgeous, restful hours with wailing sirens, gnashing of meat, not to mention such informal torture of our own kind as where we are now, you and i, here in what seems to be much like the middle of nowhere would have seemed to a wandering populace, herein suspended as on a page, a passage where we remain stranded, sentence by sentence, in constant fear of simply being highlighted and erased, chalked up as refuse to the process, a cursor that bears no answer, only ever blinks and blinks.”
“the best thing about planning to kill everybody in america is you can begin with anybody in america.”
publishers weekly has called him “an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.”
