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FRIDAY TYRANT - A CONVERSATION WITH BLAKE BUTLER

Today's Tyrant is a conversation between GianCarlo and Blake Butler. It's an inside peek into the stuff literary types talk about amongst themselves. As it turns out, they talk a lot about sex and masturbating to books.

Blake Butler: The first public place besides my backyard I ever masturbated in was a library. All those old books when they get together smell like skin, and in a room like that it's like several hundred thousand kinds of skins and I guess I was bored that year and maybe looking for something. I went into the men's room and stood at the urinal, not in the stall, and I jacked off into the thing. I wasn't thinking about the books really while I was doing it obviously but I was surrounded by them. Each book held all its words arranged the way I would at home arrange photos and mpegs to get off to in my privacy. They were around and they went on and later other people touched them and read what was inside them, though most days most of the books would stay closed and not show shit to anybody and their words remained the same.

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Sometimes you take books home. I got excited about reading when I was kid because my mom got a bag and filled it up with books and told me I could take one out and when I had read it I could take another. It was the mystery of what was in the bag that made me want to eat the book, but also the book got inside me. People like drugs but books work in silence and they go on without you and they will drag you and you can keep them beyond the 15 minutes or hour or whatever and the next time you open them they might be different, while composed of the same parts. I'd prefer not to think of the bag of books in association with the masturbation, but it's already happened.

GianCarlo DiTrapano: When I was a boy, this other boy told me about getting spanked and how he avoided receiving the pain of the spanking by sliding a book down the back of his pants. I remember asking, "Which book?" because I didn't immediately think of the physical book or its hard cover doing the protecting but thought that maybe it was something in a certain book, or the writing in the book, that defended this boy's ass. Like that there was maybe a spell or something written in a certain book that was written with the well-being of all the asses of the world's young children in mind. And by putting the book down your pants it like threw up a force-field or something to make sure you didn't get hurt. I felt really stupid at the time but now I just realize that I have always been a fucking genius.

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BB: Forcefields, yes. In the same way too some nights when everyone else was asleep and it seemed like there was some kind of machine or black shape around the house trying to eat the house and me inside it, I would get out and a book and in reading it it would be like the house fell into this other fold, not not existing, because I wasn't some magical little retard, but under the cover of somewhere else. Like if I was listening to the words in the book in my head the black mass couldn't crush us and I could like exit through the sound of it for a minute, or more like putting time on pause or holding it off like blocking punches in a video game.

Other nights I would record myself reading to myself into a machine and play that over and over above my bed until the words kind of smeared into this wall like the wall that sleep is and I was asleep while awake. Hearing the same tape repeated every night would make the words not get stuck inside me but be like a second part of the house that was always there and protected without my even paying attention. Years later I recorded over the tapes with the sound of women getting fucked on the Spice Channel, which had a different kind of effect but also deleted space in the same way. The tape inside the cassettes was black.

GD: Magical Little Retard (The Unauthorized Biography of Blake Butler)

BB: Yeah maybe I probably was one. I remember looking up 'vagina' and 'sex' and 'orgasm' in the dictionary and being turned on by that. Not that I knew what they meant by reading what it said the word said, but by the word itself, by seeing it written there on paper and folded in this book in my parents' house on the same shelf near the bible and like Fitzgerald and whatever else my mom had. I'd take the dictionary in my room with me and close the door and stare at it and think about it in there and against me. I think now the best things in words have that same kind of feeling, like something that might get you hard if it were the real thing but it is more than the thing because it can repeat a different way and is held inside this trap that a word is. I wish there was a word I could look up now that would make me want to come.

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GD: O, word? I used to do that shit too. I can remember looking up sex words, and since I was raised in a catholic household I thought everything that had even the smallest thing to do with sex was bad and could be used as a cuss word. So whenever I would get in trouble or get angry with my parents, I would run into my bedroom and stand right between the wall and where my bedroom door was and I would pull the door in on myself, crushing myself between the door and the wall, like I was in the middle of a closing V. As I pulled the door in on myself, I would recite all the bad words I had gleaned: intercourse, orgasm, vagina, birth, testicles, mammary, condom, homosexual, etc.

BB: I knew you were a crusher. What was the last book you jacked off to?

GD: I don't know if I've ever jacked it "to" a book. If a book gives me a boner, it's over. I have to set shit down and take care of things. And then I just mostly go to my default fantasy scenes and only return to the book once I've wiped my hands off. But the book that most recently gave me a boner was from the writer known as xTx called Normally Special. There was something in there about a fat old man doing something sexual so, naturally, I got a boner. This was only two weeks ago and I was on a plane. I considered going to the bathroom of the plane and going at it but my seshes have gotten to be so loud and destructive lately that I thought I should maybe wait until we landed. But I remember being really young and whenever I read fucked-up shit, like even rape shit that wasn't supposed to be hot, I would get a boner. And then I would think to myself, "You will definitely be in prison one day."

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BB: Yeah it's hard to actually masturbate to a book. I think it's better that way too, as an instigator that doesn't want you to fuck it. It's fucking itself already. It reminds you of holes in the world that you can go find and get into, or things you can get inside you, whatever. I think the first substantial thing I ever wrote was a text based role playing computer game that I programmed in BASIC on my parents' computer. I wrote it specifically to jerk off to. I would masturbate while I was writing and so I'd only get so far each time before the coding period ended and then I'd have to come back and begin again, so the book that the game made was like this mess of exposition and climax again and again. There were all these loose ends also that went nowhere and so the game just went into itself. I ended up deleting it one night after I got embarrassed of having made up this scene fucking fourteen girls at once in a white room off a beach. I think that's why now I like to think of writing as programming and reading as being inside this machine with a space to explore instead of a direct authorial dick leading me around. I think you could invent a whole book fetish society if people started thinking of books again as ball gags or mental whips.

GD: You and your role-playing games never cease to amaze me (amaze me = make me feel embarrassed for you). But I guess we all have our own versions of that story. In my situation, instead of creating role-playing games on a computer, I was hanging out with friends. There was this one kid I grew up with whose dad had subscriptions to Playboy and Penthouse. Besides taking turns at bat in the bathroom with the latest ish, we would go down to his basement and one of us would sit in a lazy-boy chair and jack off while the other one would sit behind the chair on the couch and read the Penthouse Forum out loud. I remember always saying to each other, "You can't see me, right? You better not be like a secret fag or something. You better not be looking." Have you ever jacked off to someone reading something to you? Or am I as avant-garde (when it comes to every possible thing in life and in the world) as I've always assumed?

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BB: I like that out in the open and not looking thing. I don't think I ever did do something like that. I used to steal my dad's Penthouse Letters magazines and read them out loud to myself, which seemed like someone else reading them because I wasn't a trucker or an alcoholic like so many of the people that wrote in the 80s seemed. I feel like when I am writing though that it is someone else reading to me. There is something already written there before I've written that is like farting up my blood and I'm just kind of listening and my ass starts to hurt from sitting there so long but that's when it's right. That's one thing I wish I felt more in more books: the sense that someone was telling me something they had heard while they were in a basement with someone not looking at them while they jerked off. A lot of writing seems too quickly trying to be just the picture of the fucking instead of fluids and skin and breathing and all the other shit. I wish at least more people would do like Kathy Acker and write with a dildo up their hole. Or like in a Ted Bundy mind, where we acknowledge that the more fun part isn't after the thing is dead but in the plotting and wanting and leading up to killing. That's what makes you come, and you don't even have to come.

GD: Nice. You ever write something and read it later and have no recollection whatsoever of writing it or what the writing is even talking about? Even if it's like an email that you sent a couple days prior?

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BB: I remember writing almost nothing that I write. I think the only time I recognize something I wrote as me writing it is when it's a huge piece of shit. If I wanted to remember what I was writing while I was writing I would have become an accountant or stuck with the computer programming crap. It makes me ugh when people talk about their characters as if they are real people, who they are figuring out and learning as people, like it's someone they could fuck. To me one of the big reasons books stopped turning a lot of people on is that falseness, expecting people to be just as willing as you are to drop the world of flesh and money for long enough to get into this head that doesn't exist. The one thing books have going for them over anything else is a terrain that can be infinitely tricked out or beat to shit or deformed or covered in gestures and money and still exist inside a thing that is right there in your lap. TV will beat you there every time if you're working on the same turf as it. People need their egos smushed and something more like their blood on paper. I remember every email I ever sent because email is shit.

What about a book turns you off? Have you ever had a book made you not want to have sex for a while? Probably not. I think you could get hit by a truck and still want to hump it.

GD: Jesus. You know, a lot of the time it isn't pre-come, and I really did just spill beer in my lap. So whatevs with that last comment of yours. Has a book turned me off? Not from sex. You're right when you say I can't be turned off from sex. That would be like being turned off from pissing or shitting or breathing. Yeah, certain things have made me feel like, "O fuck, there is just no way that I do not definitely have AIDS," or "I probably should have maybe at least said 'Hello' and found out a little about that guy before letting him blow me," but, you know, sperm builds, and that building tends to displace any thoughts that might get in the way of the sperm getting out of me.

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What's it like to be straight? I mean, I used to know what it was like, but then one day I didn't know anymore. I know what it's like to enjoy sex with both a man and a woman. As a straight person, do you feel denied of like half of the world since you only have sex with women? (I'm assuming here, of course, that you aren't a secret fag or something.)

BB: I don't really feel denied of half the world. I more like feel relieved of half my semen, like I don't have to go and find a place for it now. I don't know, oddly I get more turned on reading gay shit in books than I ever do hetero shit, but that's probably because gay writers are much more able to tear into something, like instead of trying to pathetically put together some kind of cooked love scene they have all this weird violence and terror situations and it's much more of a punch in the balls. Watching straight dudes try to write about sex always ends up in Regis and Kelly territory, seems like impossible to do it right, or if you do do it right it's just funny and never sexy. So if getting a hard on from reading Genet or Cooper or Burroughs or whatever else means I might be a secret fag, that's fine by me. Maybe I'm literarily bi, or literarily gay. I know that sounds stupid. I can deal with that. But that body on paper and in the brain is different to me than a human body, the same way space is. Ha, OK, now go ahead and run wild with that one, dude.

But anyway, there are books that turn me off from wanting sex. Specifically I remember reading The Mirror in the Well by Micheline Aharonian Marcom, which is very sexually explicit and about heterosexuals and heavy in the right way, but with this kind of air around it that made me feel like I was being made to cut myself on the balls or something. Like the writing was hot about bodies but it also induced a shame in me or like the bodies were covered with mold while they were fucking. It was probably me inflicting my own issues or fears on myself, which is a good response to have to books.

GD: Riiiiiiight. Literarily gay is a very safe way to put it. Give me one second and let me call my mom and give her the good news that I am only literarily gay. She'll be thrilled. Now, getting back to the books, I agree with you about the hetero/homo writing thing. I don't know why that is. Maybe because it's just different than what you grow up around. I grew up in a very heterosexual home and environs, surrounded by heterosexuals and the talk of hetero sex. I never could stand listening to guys talk about getting pussy. And today when gay friends start to talk about having sex, I kind of cringe. It's like, "Cool, you got laid, but I don't want to hear the details of the actual event." It's probably my own hang-ups, but talking about having sex just seems kind of personal and cheesy. Unless it's a good story surrounding the sex part. The only sex stories I ever tell are when there's a good story attached to it. Like if it was weird or story-worthy in any way. And I guess that's the case with the homo/hetero thing in books. Those gay writers are (were?) working from a totally different place from where I was in my life when I read them. I was talking with a very straight friend of mine about how much he loved My Lives by Edmund White. He was saying that he just really fucking loved it but that all of his gay friends who he recommended it to weren't as enthused about it as he was. Maybe it's because they'd already seen it all or felt it all or whatever. But I don't know. I read that book. In like one night. Couldn't put it down. And then a week later, I saw Edmund White outside of a party here in New York. I wanted to go up and say hello and tell him how much I loved the book, but I felt like I had just been caught going through his desk or something and I couldn't even move. And this wasn't just because he's a famous writer. When you live in New York, whether someone is famous or not stops mattering pretty quickly. But there I was, totally frozen. I couldn't even make a step in his direction. Later that night I thought back on how him writing something, and then me reading it, caused that reaction in the physical world—me not being able to move on the sidewalk a few hours before. That felt like a pretty amazing feat and, among the many other obvious reasons, I admire the man's writing because of that. He froze all two hundred-pounds of me on a sidewalk with what he did years before with a lightweight pencil and some paper.

BB: I think that freezing is exactly the difference I was talking about. Like the zone that exists there is something different than flesh. It can operate on the flesh but it's like this weird machine around you. "Literarily." It's nice to get reamed or destroyed by something like that and still be able to walk straight and get a sandwich and talk to whoever about whatever else the world is.

GD: Yes. It's nice to get frozen, but it's also nice be able to talk about what the world is. Sometimes. Sometimes I just want everyone to shut up. First and foremost, myself.

BB: There's a reason most people masturbate alone. Or two reasons. Or one.

GD: Fag.