Nothing (38 page)

Read Nothing Online

Authors: Blake Butler

BOOK: Nothing
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87
Am. I am. Swam, or swimming. Swat team.
A-Team
. Guns. Fire. Forest. Mountain climbing. I can’t imagine fathering a child. I can’t imagine my child ever reading that I wrote that, if I do have one. The complex history of personal hate. Hair. Money. Pigs. Sun. Superpowers. Stop.

88
“The time from going to bed at night to rising in the morning is all continuous, with no interruption, no suppression of consciousness. . . . The nightmare continues uninterrupted and, in the morning, start what, since there’s no difference since the night before? That new life doesn’t exist. The whole day is a trial, it’s the continuation of the trial.” Cioran.

89
You’ve got to start somewhere, might as well be now.

90
“Each fall made a channel.” Joyelle McSweeney,
Flet.

91
“In my desiring perception I discover something like a
flesh
of objects.” Sartre.

92
The words and sound and light I could have packed into me. More cells, more smudge, more hair.
Why doesn’t hair grow hair? Does it?

93
The word repeats until it never does again.

94
Stop.

95
“A system of mirrors that would multiply my image to infinity and reflect its essence in a single image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.” Calvino.

96
Stop.

97
The light rind of silent hair, the butt ridge, the anus.

98
How a week used to feel like some strong unit and now feels more like two or three days. The halving and halving of the halving. Having. Hey.

99
The day beginning before I even go to wake, technically, that click of hour between 11:59 PM and the hour default and blinking in new clocks.

100
Next next, oof off, boom boom. Hey hi. Hello. Ding dong. Bah bah. Baby. Hey. Hey. Hi. Stop.

101
Cycle, cycle within the cycle, cycle within the cycle within the cycle, holes.

102
“Correction of the correction of the correction of the correction.”

103
“What variety and at the same time what monotony, how varied it is and at the same time how, what’s the word, how monotonous. What agitation and at the same time what calm, what vicissitudes within what changelessness.” Beckett, “Texts for Nothing 9.”

104
“The connections are the important thing they don’t exist before you make them.” Ronald Sukenick.

105
“That’s right, wordshit, bury me, avalanche, and let there be no more talk of any creature, nor of a world to leave, nor of a world to reach, in order to have done, with worlds, with creatures, with words, with misery, misery.” Beckett, “Texts for Nothing 9.”

106
“All nights are equal.” Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Fall of Sleep.

107
“Whose voice, no one’s, there is no one, there’s a voice without a mouth, and somewhere a kind of hearing, something compelled to hear, and somewhere a hand. . . .” Beckett, “Texts for Nothing 11.”

108
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sleep.

109
Adapted from Smyrnaeus’s epic poem “The Fall of Troy.”

110
Galen, “On Diagnosis in Dreams.” (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgajpd/medicina%20antiqua/tr_GalDreams.html).

111
Stearns, Rowland, and Genefke, 349.

112
Discipline and Punish
, 3.

113
Critique of Pure Reason
, 138.

114
Much of the historical details regarding innovations in sleep theory found here was derived from Thorpy and Yager’s
The Encyclopedia of Sleep and Sleep Disorders.

115
Hammond, 19.

116
Stearns, 345.

117
Ibid., 350.

118
Ibid., 352.

119
Ibid., 357.

120
Ibid., 359.

121
Ibid., 355.

122
“Texts for Nothing 11.”

123
History of Madness
, 471.

124
http://www.infoukes.com/history/inventions.

125
Goldsmith, 219.

126
A Thousand Plateaus
, 268.

127
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temazepam.

128
Colten and Altevogt.

129
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D99NORBO0&show_article=1.

130
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic.

131
Colette.

132
http://www.xenophilia.com/str_biol05.htm.

133
“My Kingdom for a Snooze,”
Vietnam Investment Review
, October 30, 2006.

134
Thao, Vu Phuong.

135
Morin, 29.

136
Massumi, 57.

137
Ibid.

138
The Fatalist
, 26.

139
Rao et al., 483.

140
In 1993, the Guinness World Record holder for loudest snorer clocked in at 93 decibels, the same volume as a belt sander, and more than half that of a rocket launch.

141
The Age of Wire and String
, 8.

142
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_question.

143
http://hermetic.com/crowley.

144
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homicidal_somnambulism.

145
Pressman, 1041.

146
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_sex#cite_note-3.

147
Pressman, 1039–41.

148
Stone, 230.

149
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/weltspiegel/Sterbehilfe-Dignitas-Minelli;art1117, 2502357.

150
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7960448/Death-that-stalks-the-sleepwalker.html.

151
Difference and Repetition
, 281–82.

152
The Passion According to G.H.,
19.

153
Goldsmith, 44.

154
Warhol and Hackett, 33.

155
Goldsmith, 93.

156
Douchet, 126.

157
Gove, 787.

158
“ ‘Reading,’ he says, ‘is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead. . . .” 72.

159
“Italo Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage,” 29.

160
Within this book, another book created in reference,
Prunebomb
, “a book that explains everything . . . but it hasn’t yet been written actually it is being written right now but it will never be finished it is being written by you and me and everybody and it includes almost everything . . . what it does not include is what interests me as soon as I discover what it does not include I include it then it doesn’t interest me anymore.”

161
“I prefer,” writes Borges, “to dream that burnished surfaces are a figuration and promise of the infinite. . . .”

162
Massumi, 60.

163
Cinema 1
, 2.

164
Ibid, 17.

165
Sparling, 133.

166
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/exchange/node/1690.

167
Kellerman, 120–121.

168
Morin, 13.

169
Brackman, 175.

170
Vincent and Lewycky, 807.

171
Brown, 14.

172
Ibid.

173
Hammond, 21–22.

174
“I am writing,” Hammond says, “simply to give him information in regard to an exceedingly interesting and important subject, a mere smattering, as it were, and not sufficient, even if he were possessed of a medical education, to enable him to use any one of the substances brought to his notice.”

175
http://sleepdisorders.about.com/b/2009/04/09/insomnia-doubles-the-risk-of-suicide.htm.

176
Montgomery, Perkin, and Wise, 94–98.

177
Strong, 193.

178
http://www.wendi.com/html/insomnia1.html (SomnuLucent four-cd set, $117).

179
Kala Trobe, “Anti-Insomnia Spell,” http://www.workingwitch.com/spells/sleep1.html.

180
http://www.spells4free.com/Article/spell-for-sleep/220.

181
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1QxSlwc4Ow.

182
Difference and Repetition
, 293.

183
Ibid, 365.

184
Tilman Baumgärtel, “ ‘We Love Your Computer’: The Aesthetics of Crashing Browsers,”
Telepolis
, October 6, 1997, http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/6/6187/1.html.

185
Also available in the video archives at Ubu.com. More at their website JODI.org.

186
“Interview with Jodi,” Rhizome, May 19, 2001, http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/29955/#2550.

187
Ibid.

188
Interview with Eno for BBC, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_06fTFFMoi0.

189
Dear Ra.

190
Göransson, on his becoming: “Or when I was about 10 I was hospitalized for this or that reason and I refused to eat the hospital food (as I refused to eat most food at this age, I was a spindly wreck of a boy) and on my way to an X-ray session I passed out in the corridor and had to be carried to the room. This is how I invented erotics. Later when I was operated on and was anesthetized, I had this vision where doctors in doctor clothes wearing gas masks were smashing computer screens with sledgehammers. It was beautiful.” (via email)

191
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE7m_4Fch14.

192
http://www.gmail.com.

193
http://www.facebook.com.

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