packing for vermont. a note about blake butler.

so i'm going to vermont for a few days to visit family. will be back around tuesday. will at some point post about the dollar store tour in philly.

so i've been reading vacation by deb olin unferth and it's been blowing my mind. really. this and don b's paradise are the two novels that i look at for. for how i would write a novel. paradise for the way it manages to use very small pieces to tell a much larger story and move you along without a sense of being moved along at all. but vacation. the word tight doesn't describe it. tight is like. tight is how a fucking shirt fits yknow? it describes a fit. this fucking prose it just perfect. everything about really short fiction that anyone in the world would ever love, really just sentences that are like a trampoline in their construction, that propel you upwards and onwards, and after each one you think where could this go that could make it more perfect and then fuck me there 200 pages left, because that was after like the second chapter or something, and fuck, it's like miles and miles of trampolines, tightly constructed, heartbreakingly fucking gorgeous, moving you upwards and onwards, forever and ever, holy fuck. it was 5 bucks from mcsweeneys. get it now. fucking buy it.

also at the dollar store i picked up an early copy of scorch atlas.

first off it's incredible. the design of this book. as an object, it's goddam magnificent.

and second. i've been sort of reading scorch atlas. the other night i couldn't sleep and picked it up instead of going on with vacation. and listen. blake butler i need to say something to you. in public. for everyone to see.

generally it is safe to say i stay away from the grotesque. from the things that seem to consume you and gary lutz. they tell me "In modern English, grotesque has come to be used as a general adjective for the strange, fantastic, ugly, incongruous, unpleasant, or bizarre." blake i don't feel safe when i read your writing all of the time. but like with lutz, and sometimes more so because of how tightly wound lutz's words are, but what it is is that i am dragged, sentence by sentence, inch by inch, into your words and every moment inside of them bristles with this strange magic i don't feel in any way comfortable around, and because of these words, the ones you picked from your head and put on the page, all i can do is awe at it. at this strange and bristling and wonderful terror.