Blake Butler
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.
What Is Obscene?
The same people who get upset about 'American Psycho' or 'Irreversible' or 'A Serbian Film' or de Sade or whatever other kind of work that incorporates nasty language or violence are the same ones who begin their day watching 'The View' and Kelly Ripa...
Crude Drawings of Hot Scenes from Literature
I hate when people say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I decided to draw a bunch of pictures that aren’t worth a thousandth of the words they were based on. I drew the pictures based on some scenes from books I remembered while seated on the...
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...
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...
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.
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...
All the Books I Read in 2012
I hate end-of-the-year best-of lists. They are short-sighted and usually hive-mindish. They feel counter-productive or something, like they are trying to trick you. Instead, here’s a list of everything I read this year, 135 books, in order.
Verbal Paintings of Cartoon Dogs Sexting
Patricia Lockwood has a brain seemingly designed to blow up Twitter. Her feed is full of cartoon tween j/o bait and hyper-fantasy sexy stuff like “I am a living male turtleneck. You are an art teacher in winter. You put your whole head through me." Now...
Considering Roberto Bolaño and 'Woes of the True Policeman'
I absolutely hated Roberto Bolaño the first time I read him. I’d heard the endless hype surrounding the release of translation after translation, a kind of post-death onslaught in the manner of some literary Tupac who kept pumping books out after...
My Greatest Performances in Binge Eating
My favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, because the whole point of it is to eat like a hog and then lie on the floor and pretend we aren’t a country of tunnel-visioned murderers. Food fills your blood and brain, and if anybody talks to you it is...
Just Because You’re Bored Doesn’t Mean You Have to Be a Surrealist
Surrealism is pretty stupid. It’s always just about women with clocks for faces or animals that can use cell phones. It wants you to believe it deserves more attention for pretending everything about the world isn’t just a mess governed by math. Jason...