"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."

"small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. the white whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung."

we once again prove we're the world's most patriotic podcast.

"i go for a walk around downtown and: steinbach, closed, kitchen etc., closed. of course, abernathy's, closed! and you know i want, i really want not to just click on amazon, but what can...? because like amazon's nowhere so they can be anywhere, and sure that's handy but what i want, what i'm missing is what -- here-ness, ok?, herity. damn, there isn't even a word for it, not a one that gets close, it must be important... but that's it, you know; the grace of the heart that comes from something being here, just, right, here. where you can maybe drag a finger across it. see it in a window reflection. not when i want it, not when i need it, but enduring, earth-solid, a part of—"

"the gods of the valleys are not the gods of the hills."

"the solitude of vermont was weighing on me; the community was mythological; in reality life was isolating, each household its own entity."

suck shit, sufjan stevens. (#4)

"the winter starts straight after all saints’ day. that’s the way here; the autumn takes away all her tools and toys, shakes off the leaves—they won’t be needed anymore—sweeps them under the field boundary, and strips the colors from the grass until it goes dull and gray. then everything becomes black against white: snow falls on the plowed fields."

we talk to stephen markley, author of the deluge, about prescience, cynicism vs. optimism, and mutual friends.

[warning: this news xpere is intended to be consumed with 3d asmr fractal visuals and a soothing binaural soundscape. without these elements, some users may find this content disturbing.]

"i said that’s not what my father taught me. my father said there were two things in this world that would never change: the mountains and the sea."

we talk to jeff wood, author of the glacier, about ohio literature, two dollar radio, and david lynch's twin peaks part 8.

"houses destroy and rebuild themselves in a repeating cycle of self-annihilation and regeneration. the neighborhood crumbles and reconstructs in a looping circuit of collapse and assembly, over and over and over again—"

"those are stories my mother tells. neither you nor i have time for this. we’re looking for worms, something very much like worms, and the exact moment when they touch your body for the first time."

we talk to deb olin unferth, author of barn 8, about heist stories, teaching literature, and chickens.

"barn 8 was the first thing to truly go wrong. later everyone would say so. the mistake of barn 8 would endure. barn 8 would go down as the colossal error that ensured the defeat of the greatest animal heist in recorded history."

"terrible, definitely. but it’s not really an emergency, he thinks, putting on his signal and shifting into the fast lane, if you can drive around it. an emergency would be everywhere you looked, inescapable; some long-submerged animal intelligence would recognize it with fierce instinct. in an emergency, the mind would not drift aimlessly from daydream to distraction as his did now, in search of something to grasp."

"sounds come up and out of nick’s mouth, syllables that mean, loosely, oh, my hopeless jesus. he has seen monster trees for weeks, but never one like this. mimas: wider across than his great-great-great-grandfather’s old farmhouse. here, as sundown blankets them, the feel is primeval, darshan, a face-to-face intro to divinity. the tree runs straight up like a chimney butte and neglects to stop. from underneath, it could be yggdrasil, the world tree, with its roots in the underworld and crown in the world above. twenty-five feet aboveground, a secondary trunk springs out of the expanse of flank, a branch bigger than the hoel chestnut. two more trunks flare out higher up the main shaft. the whole ensemble looks like some exercise in cladistics, the evolutionary tree of life—one great idea splintering into whole new family branches, high up in the run of long time."