A Pornographic Introducion

Blake Butler

For this issue's special feature, I am going to write about each of the pieces submitted by the author, and how or why they were published. I think about this question when I read certain journals: Why was this published? Under what circumstances? Sometimes I feel confused when I read certain things in certain places and I wonder what happened to make it get there. Following the ideology of porn, I would like to expose myself and the evidence behind each of these creations, for better or for worse.

I am going to write about each in order. This issue works in a very nice way if you read them in order from the way they are posted.

Noah Cicero's AN INVESTIGATION: Noah sent this to me. I had known of him a lot but we'd never had correspondence. I was happy when I saw he'd sent something without being asked. I read the piece (Poem? Rant? Ruin?) and felt scared. I actually felt frightened and/or hurt or ashamed after reading his words. I also felt funny and I laughed several times while reading. Noah told me later that the piece "is a remix of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor," which added something even more weird and endless to the words. This had to be the first work in the issue, and it was a large part of what made me think of the issue's pornographic theme.

Jesse Ball's TWO FICTIONS: After I read Ball's novel SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS I looked him up on the internet at his website JESSE BALL WAS A SPY BUT HAS RETRIED TO THE COUNTRY and saw that he had a lot of work he had finished but not yet published. I thought I'd try to solicit him. The email on his site did not work. Shane Jones, who contributed to our last issue, had recently interviewed Mr. Ball for Hobart and said he found Mr. Ball through the networking tool known as Myspace. I contacted Jesse there and said I'd like it if he sent me something, which he did. He sent three short excerpts from a longer work and I took the two that most seemed to fit together. The pieces are strange and about mother and child and seemed to have a weird resonance under the heading PEOPLE PORN, which is where I put it. This is the first of only two solicited pieces that appear in this issue, which is unusual for this magazine. Our last issue was all solicited except for one piece. I like not having to solicit as much.

Corey Mesler's TWO FICTIONS: I knew of Corey Mesler from a lot of his work online. I was glad when he sent me these two short pieces. I read them and liked them and accepted them and as I was putting the issue together they seemed to follow out nicely from the weird relationship language of Mr. Ball's texts. They seemed to add another layer to the developing forms of relationships in which people expose themselves to one another.

Michael Hemmingson's GIVE ME THE GUN: I knew of Michael Hemmingson from us both being on the William Vollmann discussion mailing list. I had seen his name a lot. I was very happy when he sent me this short work, which could not more aptly come out of Mesler's piece in the ramification of people porn. It was a perfect bookend. His words made me feel like I was reading something on a screen much bigger than my body.

Kathryn Regina's TWO TEXTS: This is the only other solicited piece in this issue. I read Kathryn's blog where she'd posted some poems about a hot air balloonist that were written in interview form. I liked them and asked her to let me publish them or something else and she sent me these from a series of related pieces. I like that the Pedro characters has 49 words for fire. There's something pornographic about that in a way that is different from any other sort of porn I know. I like to imagine his other words for fire. I like to make the words go boom. I am feeling pornographic in speaking of my specific reaction and I am thinking I should shut my goddamn mouth.
Paul Kavanagh's NURSES, CRIMES AND BROKEN TAILS & Misti Rainwater-Lites's PRINTER FRIENDLY: These were both submitted around the same time. They seemed somehow to fit together. I accepted them both at different times without fully realizing the connection. Later, on reading back again, I realized the connection, and the similar tones that were coming out of the work I'd acquired at that point. It is strange how words collide. How things that do not know of one another come together. After I received these two I decided I wanted to do a whole issue on just fairy tale porn, but I underestimated the difficulty of creating such, which is why I could not develop a whole issue just around that idea, even though since I mentioned it on my blog I have had a ridiculous amount of traffic just from people googling the phrase.

Karie Buss's FOUR POEMS: I read Ms. Buss's poems many many times over before I accepted them, but not because I wasn't sure if I wanted to accept them. These poems seems to make a perfect recondition of the brain of Roald Dahl and the weird repercussions of fairy tale-type logic. They were a nice move away from the straight-interpreted pornographic thought of the others in this middle category, defining pornography as the way people condition themselves amongst one another.

Prathna Lor's QUELQUES MOTS SUR LE CHEMIN AU FARFELU: This was the last piece sent to me. Mr. Lor had sent me another piece and I liked it and said he should send me something pornography related. He did that. This piece caught something new and of the world I've had in the past 2 weeks of not being able to fall asleep before sunrise and feeling off and zapped and when during sleep having long frightful dreams of enormous houses with many many rooms, dreams that last hours and hours, longer than my actual sleeping time, so that I wake up more tired than when I went to sleep.
Susan Slaviero's A LESSON IN CARTOMANCY: I think this was the first piece I accepted for the issue, before I conceived of the pornography, but I found it strange the way little segments of her words fell along into the hum of those fairy tale texts, but stringing out into some kind of fetish over language. For her piece, I originally had this section titled LANGUAGE PORN, but as I accepted a couple other pieces I did not want people to be mistaken that they were being taken for their ornate language alone, so I switched to THOUGHT PORN, which is different, I think than just the dirty thoughts and apocrypha associated with the former, as one might consider the innerworkings of a person's person, however not overtly sexual, is the most fulfilling kind of pornography we could want.

Stephen Chamerblain's TWO TEXTS: I like blocks of text that I don't know what they're saying, that seem to be babble bent from nowhere. My most pornographic intuitions, I think, have been like this: text I could not explain to another if I tried, but that seems to understand it's own reason, and is waiting that you or I or someone somewhere else might catch a peek.

Blake Butler's A Pornographic Introducion: Like Mr. Savoca's words, I did not fully understand what made me react to this piece. I was confused as to why I kept hearing the last line 'Teach me tiramisu?' in my head after having read it only once. For some reason that line made me feel dirty, in a different way than any of the other pieces in this issue had. I think maybe because the line is not the kind of line I normally respond to, and yet I found it burrowed in my head. Like a dirty thought. Like something that should not be. Someone's underwear over my head. What?
Matthew Savoca's TWO TEXTS: The first text VINCENT was submitted near the end of the issue's breadth. Something about it made me feel dirty. The words worked in a way that seemed to do something most texts do not do. I can not define what this text does. I don't know why it made me feel anything. I accepted this text entirely because it made me laugh a little, but more because I could not think of anything else like it. On Christmas eve, Mr. Savoca sent me the second short text to go with the first one and I liked it as much and thought it fit well and so it got applied also. I think this text might make me feel weird and yet good enough to smile a little more on Christmas day and wonder what exactly is in the food I'm eating, which is the best present of all. I like the way this, going into the last piece, works to end the set, the series and/or loop around the beginning text again, the fuck.

Minna Lincoln's SOFT WINDOWS: This was sent to me via regular mail. I don't know how this person got my address. I posted this as much in fear of repercussion as I did in the enjoyment of the words. Along with the words Ms. Lincoln sent a photo of a color in a thing I could not recognize. I felt afraid while looking at it. I hid it underneath my bed, like all the magazines I once had. Nothing is okay.



Why did I do this?