Articles by Blake Butler

A Day in the Life of an Alzheimer's Caregiver

My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about three years ago. After an extended stay at the hospital and stints in two different rest homes, my mom brought him home to care for him herself. There is an unseen routine in the lives of most home caregivers that makes Michael Haneke’s 'Amour' look like 'Sesame Street.' I wanted to find out what the day-to-day life of someone tasked with keeping another adult alive is like, so I talked to my mom about it. Full story

2013 Mar 14 Blake Butler Stuff

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Sergio De La Pava’s Narrative Mutations

Sergio De La Pava’s 'A Naked Singularity,' clocking in at just under 700 pages, seemed to appear out of nowhere near the end of 2012. It gained attention quickly for being initially self-published by the author and then picked up by University of Chicago Press. Now De La Pava is… Full story

2013 Mar 6 Blake Butler Stuff

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The Disorienting Novels of Kobo Abe

I wanted to read all of the novels by one person in a short time, kind of like a rapid upload of someone’s whole career into my brain. I’d never read a whole book by Kobo Abe, frequently referred to as the Japanese Kafka, despite already owning three of them. So after watching Te… Full story

2013 Feb 26 Blake Butler Stuff

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Social Work in the Tenderloin Will Kill Something Inside of You

My friend Lorian is a social worker in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a neighborhood containing seven of the ten most violent crime plots in the city. Homelessness, public drug use, and prostitution are said to be as common there as the liquor stores and strip clubs lining the stree… Full story

2013 Feb 19 Blake Butler Stuff

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Tim Hecker Builds Mountains with Sound

For more than 15 years now, Montreal’s Tim Hecker has been creating some of the most engaging sound landscapes on record. I gave him a buzz to talk about his writing process, how he builds an album, the audience, identity, and phantoms. Full story

2013 Feb 13 Blake Butler Music

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Anne Carson Vs. George Saunders

The first quarter of 2013 sees new works by two of the most highly regarded North American authors. George Saunders’s 'Tenth of December,' a collection of stories published over the last five years, and Anne Carson’s forthcoming 'Red Doc>, ' a conceptual sequel to perhaps her mos… Full story

2013 Jan 22 Blake Butler Stuff

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The Jim Jones of Poetry

Rauan Klassnik seems like someone you’d find lingering out behind a porno bookstore in a jacket and hat, creeping around the dumpsters. His blog is full of obsessive posts about Nicholas Cage and guns and National Poetry Month. I’ve probably read his first book, Holy Land, at lea… Full story

2013 Jan 17 Blake Butler Stuff

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How Will the David Foster Wallace Legacy Survive Itself?

As much as I despise the thought that all this post-death doing is killing what was wonderful about what had been, it is a good reminder to anybody that what you do or say or create often only begins to define what you always are. Full story

2013 Jan 8 Blake Butler Stuff

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Brief Reviews of Every Movie I Saw in Theaters in 2012

Maybe American movies used to be better before they started trying to remake everything, or maybe I was just a little kid then and now I’m slightly more tired of it all. Whatever the case, here are some tiny shitface diatribes about the eight movies I sat in a room and stared at… Full story

2012 Dec 31 Blake Butler Film

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Men Are Victims of Workplace Sexual Harassment, Too

For five years now, a friend of mine has been telling me stories about an older male coworker who asks him unsolicited questions about his junk—on a daily basis. Full story

2012 Dec 21 Blake Butler NSFW

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Blake Butler