Friday Tyrant - Get in the Dreamvan with Blake Butler

Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia just dropped last week from author Blake Butler, and by way of the punkest big dog press of the moment, Harper Perennial. If all the small presses of the indie-lit world were the hundreds of street gangs from the film The Warriors, then Blake Butler is our Cyrus. (Yes, I did just compare today's literary types to New York gang members from the seventies. I do not feel weird or wrong about this.)

Blake runs HTML Giant, the only lit blog that matters, and also finds the time to crank out some of the most jaw-dropping, experimental literature this generation has going for it. Part informative and entertaining study on sleep, part beautiful exercise in language, insanity, and the human spirit, Nothing is like nothing else (rimshot!). It is ridiculous to deny the fact that we—those of us alive today—are experiencing a great shift in reality and human life, via technology and the internet. I continually had a recurring thought while reading this book: "This is the first book to capture how things are within this change." I think in the future, people will point to this book and say, "Look, look, this is when everything started to become really great/fucked up."

Blake and I had a chat, but not about the book itself. I mostly asked him questions about what reading

got me thinking about.

VICE: When I was little I used to pray in bed before I went to sleep. Nights that I found myself unable to sleep, most often times I'd realize that I hadn't prayed. No more than a couple seconds post-Amen, I'd be fast asleep.
Blake Butler: I think I only prayed as a product of not being able to sleep, like I'd only remember you could do that when I'd been awake for hours. I would always just pray that people I knew would be OK. I think it made me calmer, too, to do that, but it seems awesome you could just pray and be like boom, I'm out.

How many times have you masturbated in a row? With no more than 15 minute breaks between each sesh. I made it to 11 once.
I was way more into masturbating for really long periods of time. I actually used to keep a ledger about it, like recording the time I started, time I finished, what I looked at or was doing, etc. Seems like my longest was more than four hours. I'd just sit in front of the computer forever on the slow wank.

A good friend of mine got caught up in meth and it's been a sad thing to watch. She liked to stay up for weeks at a time and once said to me, "After like day five, it feels like you've just smoked some really good kind bud." My answer, of course, was, "THEN SMOKE SOME GOOD KIND BUD!" There have been many nights that I haven't slept, but it always ruins me for a day or two after. And if I know I'm not going to sleep, all I can think of is that. It amazes me how to some people staying up for three or four nights is no real biggie.
The closest I've been to being kept up by meth was I shared a wall in an apartment with this dude who had Tourette's and also was a meth head, so he'd be up all night all the time, fucking whatever dudes he brought over while spazzing on the tics, or if he was alone just watching gay porn and talking to his dog. His #1 tic was "WOO!" over and over. He'd go in his bathroom, which was right on the opposite side of the wall from my bed, and be in there jostling around with something. My girlfriend then said it seemed like he was making meth in the tub, so then all I thought about all night was it exploding.

I feel like I haven't had a good night's rest in over ten years. I will sleep for 8 to 12 hours each night, no big deal, but I can remember when I used to wake up feeling really hopeful and physically great. My waking moments and mornings were almost euphoric. I think this maybe has to do with age and that that shit is just over for good.
I feel you on that. Often it seems like sleeping actually makes me more tired when I get a proper or extensive amount, because my body is way more used to like 5 or 6 hours with a lot of waking up in between. So then when I get more than that, my body's like, What the fuck, why don't we always do this?, and then I just drag ass all day and feel asleep while I'm up walking around and shit. But then when I try to lay down again, the frustration doubles in that I'm fucking exhausted and my body wants it, but my brain just keeps spinning and shitting on itself. So the pattern reinforces bad behavior, and yeah, the older you get the more tired that tired feeling feels, and the deeper the troughs are. I can't remember the last time I was stoked to wake up.

In Nothing, you mention a Vietnamese farmer who'd supposedly gone for more than 30 years without sleeping. Love his line, "[My] biggest dream is to have a dream." What do you think about this guy?
You have to imagine he's full of it, right? He refused to be subjected to sleep testing or anything, but then at the same time this film crew followed him around for several days and all he did was work in his garden and hang out with people during the day and read books and chill. My guess for an explanation is that he microsleeps in an abnormal way. Microsleep is like when you nod out and don't even realize it, which works as a dose of heavy rest in a very short period, and can really add up though you mentally feel like you've been awake unrelenting. So maybe he just microsleeps constantly, like little blinking shits. Or maybe he's a true freak. His dreams would probably just be of farming some more anyway.

I have a little bit of a bone to pick with you. The footnotes. What the shit? Would you mind explaining this for me? I hated the constant to-and-fro endnote page flipping of Infinite Jest. I know it was supposed to represent a "fracture" or something like that for Wallace, but I really don't think the pay-off is worth that sentiment. In the case of Nothing, I began to read the footnotes on the page before I started into the main text from the top. WTF, bro?
Ha ha, well, my footnotes are really for the most part only in the one section of the book that is meant to replicate the kind of thinking that occurs when your brain won't shut off. When I'm thinking in that mode, lots of little thoughts burst of the main stream of thoughts, like little interjections that I can't stop, which yeah, are super fucking annoying. So that it is annoying in the midst of the monologue seems good too. Otherwise I'm not really a footnote guy, beyond where in the book I noted my sources. Wallace and, like, Nicholson Baker already to me mastered the utility of a footnote as adding to a narrative, so I wouldn't really fuck with that beyond in that specific, effective way of feeling beat up when all you want is flood.

Related to my previous ignorance, I also have a problem with space on a page. And you are all about it. What I don't really get is what is the difference between separating two words with seven spaces and eight spaces. Or the difference between having nine or ten spaces between two lines. I just feel like a pause is a pause, or a break is a break, but I don't understand the many variations. This all adds up to me being dumb, but I'd really like to try to understand.
For me, it comes out of the writing itself. The way a word gets set down on some space when you are making it can be affected by the way it feels to put it there, and how it looks. So when I write I feel sometimes more like I want to play a videogame with words than I want to tell a story or whatever. It doesn't always work, and yeah sometimes it's super lame, but I think even on the reading end the way something is presented can affect the meaning of it, and can affect how you feel about it. Purists, like yourself, Dr. Ditrapano, will automatically be like "Yo, Ray Carver didn't do this shit. Neither did [other old white guy]." You're probably more right than I am about it, but you also live in New York.

Did I get this right? You propose that Michael Jackson's dance moves were partly a result of having spasmic attacks due to insomnia?
I think the quote in the book that I took from MJ is that he felt God was moving through him when he was dancing, or that he was channeling God? I thought that was interesting in a funny way, more than I thought it was related to him being spastic, though he certainly seemed to be, and he was rather well-known for having serious sleep problems. I read recently that near the end he was having people put him under for days at a time in his little chamber thing, forcing himself out for as long as possible. I wouldn't say the sleep trouble made him spastic, but I would say the desperation of wanting to sleep when you can't certainly didn't make him any more sane.

Do you write a lot in dreams? I had a dream once where I was vomiting into a public trashcan on the corner, though instead of vomit, I was throwing up sentences and pages, but it wasn't on paper. And the stuff was really good. Obviously I couldn't remember all of it, but that which I did remember was beautiful. It was much better writing than I have ever done in real life. So much so that it felt like it came not from myself.
I actually find myself editing my writing more in dreams than I do writing in dreams. I've had a lot of really vivid ones where I am just fucking with these huge blocks of texts, and they seem awesome to me in there and sometimes when I wake up I can remember little bits. I used to write in my sleep sometimes, or like a half sleep, I was trying to train myself to do it better. H.R. Giger had really bad sleep terrors and would draw in bed like that. I like thinking of him in bed spazzing out drawing that shit. Lately, I've been tweeting in my sleep more than writing anything. Dreaming about Twitter makes me feel like shit.

Have you ever done cocaine? One time, and this is a personal record for me, I stayed up for three nights and was in Brooklyn at a bar where some friends' band was playing. Sleep deprivation causes a fantastic sense of euphoria, but at one point I was out front when I noticed that the sidewalks were filled with black cats. Hundreds, passing between my legs, jumping over one another, running up and down the block. I felt great, but thought it may no longer be safe for me to be in public. Seems to me that hallucinations from sleep-deprivation are much stronger and more real than any drug-induced ones I've experienced. With psychedelics, you mostly get to where objects appear to breathe and swirl, but nothing that isn't already present, in one form or another, just appears out of thin air.
I haven't done coke. I always kind of avoided drugs because I felt fucked up enough just sitting around. But it makes sense that the sensations would be similar from being up on chemicals as opposed to "naturally," though at the same time there's kind of a safety net acting under the drugs, I think, in that you can stop ingesting them, and they will wear off and you can be how you are without them again, unless you're so fucked up that you can't remember you're on drugs. Whereas when you can't sleep because of something inherent in you, it feels even more without exit, and therefore even more desperate and terrifying, like you're locked in yourself. It depends on the person, I'm sure. Though one thing I noticed in research is that a lot of the people who would set world records staying up did it on purpose, to try to set the record, and not because they were actually having problems. A lot of those forced sleepless people would then say that they felt totally normal after being up forever, just weary. They claimed it wasn't really that surreal or damaging to them overall. Whereas there are tons of reports of people killing others or themselves or doing damage as a result of being up a really long time and not knowing how else to get out of it, or what to do, what is real. Sleep is so particular to every individual, with so many qualifications and attributes. That's part of why it's often so hard to cure sleep disorders—there are usually so many factors at play it's unmappable.

I've never had too much of a problem sleeping. I've had periods where I can't sleep well, but it usually doesn't last more than a week. A lot of times I am so dreading the next morning that I would prefer to lay awake in bed all night and actually experience the calm and rest rather than be thrown into 9 AM so abruptly. You mention Mitch Hedberg in Nothing, and it got me thinking about when he says that he wished when he slept that he would dream of watching himself sleep. But instead he's forced to put together a go-cart with his landlord.
Ha, I've always kind of gotten off on my nightmares. I have pretty fucked up, violent, intense dreams almost every night, and I've gotten to really enjoy it. I like feeling terrified and interacting with shit that doesn't occur in waking life. Because, yeah, then when you wake up again the shit that is terrifying when you live in an American city is like being in gross traffic or being trapped into talking forever to shitty people or other monotonous behavior. Laying in bed trying to relish that relaxing period is rarely relaxing for me because my brain always jumps past where I am and starts burning on what's next. I'll take a dream-machete in the face over a flooded email inbox of nothing interesting any day.

One time I had a dream that I emailed myself from my dream and when I woke up I was scared to check my email, for I was certain it was there.
Don't be a pussy. You're the one who told me that it's beyond obvious that if someone pulls up in a van and tells you to get in, you should get in. Get in the dreamvan.

You quote the Old Testament in here with: "In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat—for he grants sleep to those he loves." Does God love Blake Butler?
I guess he gets around to it when he feels like it.

Follow Giancarlo DiTrapano on Twitter: @nytyrant