dear otto, in a perfect world, your mouth is on my knee, yellowed teeth sinking into flesh, not creating a hickey but instead eating me alive.

"in his bed, we made out with our merlot mouths and explored each other’s skin despite the relentless heat and the constant warnings about staying six feet apart."

"maybe to be controlled was a privilege. i tried to appreciate the asphyxiation of the leash around my neck, the euphoric suffocation of obsessive love. it worked for a while."

we landed the big account, ghostbusters-style.

"over cheap beer and well drinks, they shared classic stories, brave recollections, and dark musings. the rumors, the gossip, the urban legends ran wild. new canaan had a curse, their peers decided. their generation, the classes of the first five years of the infant millennium, they were all stepping through life with a piano suspended above them and bull’s-eyes on the crowns of their skulls."

“i didn’t leave the boat house because you were with her; i left because i’m sick of watching you be a coward […] there’s just not enough room for me in your life because cocaine is your mistress. she’s there when you need her, and she makes you feel bigger than life. why would you want anything else? you don’t have to worry about her hurting you or about you disappointing her. and you can share her with your friends without jealousy or guilt.”

brackett omensetter was a wide and happy man. he could whistle like the cardinal whistles in the deep snow, or whirr like the shy white rising from its cover, or be the lark a-chuckle at the sky. he knew the earth. he put his hands in water. he smelled the clean fir smell. he listened to the bees.

"a little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment."

suck shit, sufjan stevens. (#5)

"you came here to speak of what it means to love your best friend. ask: if flexing is being able to say the most in the fewest number of words, is there a greater flex than love? nowhere to hide, nowhere to go. a direct gaze."

"in the course of time your life will be there in front of you: a life without motion, without crisis and without disorder, a life with no rough edges and no imbalance. minute by minute, hour after hour, day after day, season after season, something is going to start that will be without end: your vegetal existence, your cancelled life."

“he showed me the circus in a way i had not been able to see it before,” celia says. “how it looked from the outside. we wrote letters to each other for years.” // “i would have written you, myself, if i could put down in words everything i want to say to you. a sea of ink would not be enough.”

"the driver opens the side door of the van and retrieves your suitcase from the rear. you tip him in u.s. dollars because it’s all you have. you took out $300 at miami international because you’ve learned from your travels to countries like cuba and argentina how valuable it can be to have u.s. cash. you tip the driver with a twenty-dollar bill. later, you will wonder if this was your initial mistake."

"calmly, calmly. you were quite calm three nights ago when you told her that it was intolerable, you could stand it no longer, you were being pushed into insanity, and the only way out was to kill either her or yourself or both. the words were violent enough, but you were quite calm. it didn’t faze her; nothing would, except this. what did she say? something about your being excited over nothing!"

"you ask: why is the malady of death fatal? she answers: because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. and also because he's like to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing."

"your life was a hypothesis. those who die old are made of the past. thinking of them, one thinks of what they have done. thinking of you, one thinks of what you could have become. you were, and you will remain, made up of possibilities. your suicide was the most important thing you ever said, but you’ll never be able to enjoy the fruits of this labor."

"you are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. but here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy. you are at a nightclub talking to a girl with a shaved head."

"you are about to begin reading italo calvino’s new novel, if on a winter’s night a traveler. relax. concentrate. dispel every other thought. let the world around you fade. best to close the door; the tv is always on in the next room. tell the others right away, “no, i don’t want to watch tv!” raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“i’m reading! i don’t want to be disturbed!” maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “i’m beginning to read italo calvino’s new novel!” or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone."

you are the sun and moon and stars are you.

we talk to blake butler, author of the four books covered in this module, about making readers feel yucky, capturing america in his writing, and all-you-can-eat buffets.

"there are more cages than possible locations, the thought you think trying to think the prior sentence as a thought reminds you. instead of trying to figure out what you could do with that idea, you slip the tip of the restraint’s nib under your tongue and close your slits and feel your skull begin to fill."

"it's as if whole dimensions of her person, passed through decades, even withered and undependable as they had been, stand now at risk by mere suggestion, under defeat. it isn't right, alice feels sure; this narrative is not at all like what had happened; in fact, it's a willful degradation of her truth, so it appears, designed to pull the world out from beneath her, all explanation held behind some curtain she can't see. who had set this up, and from whom did they gain access?"

"and yet we still can trace no claim, no sense within you what it is about you that might be furthered pressed down or altered to finally allow us to perform the necessary aspects of the aforementioned trajectory unto the benefit of all, without the at least by now irregular and yet no less irritating fomentation of socio-political grindage that does nothing else but slow the system to a fault, filling what could be gorgeous, restful hours with wailing sirens, gnashing of meat, not to mention such informal torture of our own kind as where we are now, you and i, here in what seems to be much like the middle of nowhere would have seemed to a wandering populace, herein suspended as on a page, a passage where we remain stranded, sentence by sentence, in constant fear of simply being highlighted and erased, chalked up as refuse to the process, a cursor that bears no answer, only ever blinks and blinks."

"the best thing about planning to kill everybody in america is you can begin with anybody in america."

publishers weekly has called him "an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer."