Blake Butler: Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

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)