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.
194 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ziggurat_of_Ur.
195 http://wrongwaywizard.blogspot.com/2008/10/bore-me-again-o-wrong-way-wizard.html.
196 http://www.wendi.com/html/insomnia1.html.
197 Any of the said links too, perhaps by the time of being read wherever, having turned up dead, leading instead to error fields or flats of white.
198 http://gizmodo.com/5422324/each-american-consumes-34gb-of-data-a-day.
199 Morin, 112.
200 From a definition of the word relief (http://www.definitions.net/definition/relief).
201 http://www.weirdasianews.com/2010/10/01/chinese-suicide-interrupted-sleep.
About the Author
Blake Butler is the author of the novel There Is No Year, the novella Ever, and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas, named Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. He edits HTMLGiant, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future,” as well as two journals of innovative text, Lamination Colony and No Colony. His writing has appeared widely online and in print, including in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, and Vice, and has been short-listed in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Butler lives in Atlanta and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com.
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Praise for Books
Praise for There Is No Year by Blake Butler
“Deeply honest and emotional, a family drama that by its end brings on feelings as complex and satisfying as those summoned by Faulkner’s simple sentence ‘They endured.’… This novel is a thing of such strange beauty [that it yields] the rewards that only well-made art can provide.”
— Joseph Salvatore, New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)
“There is no novel like Blake Butler’s There Is No Year. .. Butler’s prose is persistent and perfected, and he’s able to sustain the shape-shifting narrative for four hundred pages. His sense of humanity bleeds through the jagged edges, and by the end you’ve fallen for this nameless, deteriorating family, hoping it will survive. .. Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.”
— Tucker Shaw, Denver Post
“A smoke signal on the horizon of the American literary landscape. .. [As] if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack. .. [Butler’s prose offers] ecstatic pleasures. .. It bursts and cracks with inventions and constructions.”