Blake Butler, Mike Young (l - r) (2008)

vicemag:

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. She did this despite warnings that it would be too much for her to handle—even with regular assistance—because the conditions in the homes were too depressing to bear. 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.

VICE: How does your average day begin?
BB: Usually I wake up before LD and get dressed, and I try to get the coffee made and the cereal stuff out. But if he wakes up first, I just get him cleaned and dressed and then do the other stuff.

What time does he get up?
He’s gotten so he goes to bed between 8 and 9 PM and sometimes sleeps until noon. One day I was so tired and exhausted that I didn’t hear him and he got up and went into the den at seven in the morning. He ended up somehow falling, and I found him on the floor tangled up in the chair. But usually I wake up before him and get dressed real quick, because if I don’t he watches me do every single thing, and it drives me crazy.

Why does he watch you?
Because he doesn’t have anything else to do. He just stares. And he wants to see what food I’m making.

I know he usually wets the bed at night, even through the disposable underwear. Do you change the sheets after you wake him up?
I take the sheets and the pajamas and the shirt and socks and just wrap them up in that plastic liner that keeps the mattress pad dry. Sometimes if he wakes up before I do he’ll have already taken his underpants off. I get him to the bathroom and have him sit on the toilet so I can get his wet clothes off and wipe him off with Handi Wipes.

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vicemag:

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. Fortunately, I’m a perpetual eight-year-old at drawing, so this came naturally. I drew the pictures based on some scenes from books I remembered while seated on the floor at my coffee table drinking whiskey and apple juice, which means they might not be anything like the scenes at all, but only how they are now forever damaged in my brain.

Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H.

This scene is pretty much the only one in the whole book: a woman standing in her bedroom by a wardrobe from which a cockroach has just emerged. Lispector is able to maintain this scene for 173 pages, requiring little to no action and only the depth of her inborn disorientation and horror of several seconds to maintain a rigorous, insane monologue that floats behind my face like the color green.

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Blake Butler

(Source: lkwldn)

vicemag:

My Greatest Moments 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 acceptable to just grunt in response. Even sports start to make sense, which means to me that to live in America is to be approaching a certain death by endless, needless fat ingestion.

Having grown up a fat kid who lost the weight of a whole third grader over a summer to assume my current body shape of a normally-appetited guy, Thanksgiving is one of the few times I let myself feel like who I really am on the inside. “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach,” my mother used to tell me when our family would go to Morrison’s cafeteria and I’d try to take one of almost every item (they were eventually forced to limit me to five). Sometimes I think my entire life has been me trying to prove I can eat everything I touch.

Holidays not-withstanding, here are some of my choicest moments on my lifelong journey to becoming a lard ass. Some are marathon-like, and some stretched over years, because the truest form of binge-eating takes whole eras; each is pretty much the only time I’ve ever really began to feel like a person among people. In other words, a human.

1. Lettuce Soup-Rise You

My friend John and I were bored in the suburbs and we’d already watched Eddie Murphy’s Raw three times and Dumb and Dumber twice when we decided to go to the soup-themed buffet chain down the street and see who could eat the most. Lettuce Soup-rise You was a place that had a salad bar in the front that was hyped as the central draw, though every time I ate there I remember everybody walking straight past the salad to where they had the pasta with meat sauce and the pizza and the beefaroni and the bread and the ice cream and the chocolate cake. John and I ate plate after plate for three hours, refusing to say anything to each other while shoveling horrible things into our faces that we had stopped enjoying after the first ten minutes because all buffet food tastes like it was made for horses. At some point the food turns from seeming like food and into cement, and there you are. I don’t remember which of us offered a truce, but I do remember I couldn’t really lift my arm to shake on it. When we got home we both went into our rooms. I felt so disgusting I came up later to find John watching Dumb and Dumber again and told him I felt demonic and he told me I should force myself to puke like he had as soon as we got back. Having never been able to force myself to barf, I let John talk me into taking my first shot of vodka ever (I was straight-edge at the time) to induce the barf-desire and then hung over the toilet semi-crying and still not able to get it out. The food liked where it was in me and insisted to stay there. Finally I decided to go for a run for the first voluntary time in my life, putting on sweat-clothes that felt tighter than ever to go pudge-trudging through the neighborhood sweating grease. I have run at least six days a week every week since, trying desperately to rid myself of what the rest of me keeps making.

2. Taco Bell Drive Thru

Some percentage of my current total body is comprised entirely of Taco Bell shit. It’s probably my face. I don’t know what it is about the colors of that sign, but every time I’ve had even a drop of alcohol I find myself magnetized to the glass like a brain damaged vacuum toddler. You can tell you’ve eaten Taco Bell when the next day you wake up feeling like someone rinsed your chest with rubber cement. Once I actually called ahead to the Bell from the bar at 3:00 AM to verify they were still open on a Sunday. The most I ever spent at Taco Bell was when my friend York and I pulled through and pretended like we were ordering for all the other people we’d been at the bar with, even though they’d already gone home to bed. Somehow every time the lady asked “Is that all?” one of us said “No” until we’d racked up $50 worth of recycled beef and beans and flour and cheese. I remember somehow we were both riding in the backseat on the way home like blue-eyed human voids each hoarding nachos and folded taco shit into our faces while an invisible driver escorted us magic carpet style to the scene of the crime where we would each gain ~10 pounds in beef weight before passing out still listening to Danzig.

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vicemag:

“Sometimes he will just come up to my mother and do his best to hold her and he will say thank you or I love you. Then he will go back to knocking his fists against the door’s glass.”

—“I Asked My Dad, Who Has Dementia, to Annotate Jonathan Franzen’s How to Be Alone” by Blake Butler is a thing you should read right now.

stephentullydierks:

My first post as a regular contributor at HTMLGIANT is called “I Am Prepared to Read Many More Novels About People Fucking.” It’s a response to Blake Butler’s recent anti-realist piece at VICE. Steve Roggenbuck, Tao Lin, and James Joyce are discussed.

300,000,000 by Blake Butler

vicemag:

A Chat with David Byrne About How Music Works

If you’ve never read any of David Byrne’s books, his newest, How Music Works, might be the best place to start. The book is an encyclopedic compendium of mini-essays spanning a huge range of musical subjects from the history of venue architecture, aspects of performance, how a music scene develops, the anatomy of recording contracts, as well as in-depth reflection on his career with the Talking Heads and beyond. As I was reading the book, I kept imagining David Byrne standing inside my face in the big suit reading aloud. Sadly, that strange daydream was better than a lot of live bands I’ve seen lately.

VICE: You write early on in How Music Works that “Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike.” Do you think of yourself as channeling something when you are writing a song?
David Byrne: Well, lots of people use that metaphor that they’re channeling something, or that they’re a conduit and they don’t know where the inspiration comes from and they’re just a pen that writes it down or whatever. That’s pretty common. And yeah, there’s definitely something to it. I guess what I’m also saying is that it is usually presumed that the emotion is something that’s put into a song, that it comes from the person and goes into the song. And there’s probably a lot of truth to that, but I’m saying that just as much as that happens, I think it happens in the exact reverse way, where a person makes a song and the song makes the writer feel emotional. The song brings out the emotions in the writer. You realize that this chord changing and singing this melody and these words, it takes you to a place. As a writer as well as a listener. I mean, we all share that in common. And so the song becomes the thing that does it. It’s not that the writer necessarily channels the emotions or the ideas or whatever and puts them down on paper. What got put down on paper is also a thing that reaches inside the writer or the person listening and brings that stuff out of them.

Is that why you refer in the book to the big major chord as a trick?
Yes. [laughs] And that’s not a value judgment. It doesn’t mean the major chord is bad, or that you should never use it. But it is, it’s like a guaranteed thing. You do that, and you get this kind of feeling. You start to learn things like that. You do this, you’re going to get this kind of feeling, and it’s going to make you feel that way as a writer, and it’s going to make the audience feel that way, and in that kind of way you kind of learn tricks of the trade. And they’re valid. But if you fall back on them too much, if you start using only those and nothing else, it becomes pretty shallow after a while. It’s one device after another being thrown at us and you go, “Oh, wait a minute. There’s nothing behind this.”

I think you put that very well in the book when you said that people want to hear something familiar in a new way.  
Yes. In a live performance, musicians—or at least popular musicians—are in a kind of difficult place in a way. They’re expected to play the hits, to play a certain amount of stuff that people know, and then if they do only the hits, then they’re a wedding band. They have to find some middle ground where they introduce something new that gets the audience excited, but they also have to give them enough that’s familiar. We all know bands that have gone out and say, “I’m not going to do any of my old stuff, I’m only going to play the new record.” And god bless them if they can do it. I’ve been to those shows too, and it’s sometimes great to hear new stuff, but sometimes you just want a little bit of sugar to go along with all of that. And it’s a difficult thing for us. You wouldn’t go to the movies and say, “Well, I love this director, so I want to see some new stuff, but I’d love to see some of my favorite scenes from some of his older films as well thrown in there. Give me some of that.” [laughs] That would just seem ridiculous.

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creepyfaggotmagazine:

name.  Blake Butler

age. 33

occupation. Lots of shit

1. what is your present state of mind?

Kind of just sitting here. Ate a sandwich like 15 minutes ago. Feel a little more energized than usual though that’s probably about to turn into me lying on the floor.

2. where were you born? 

Marietta, GA

3. where do you live now? 

Atlanta, GA

4. where would you like to live? 

Probably will stay right here, I’m too lazy to move and nowhere else seems that much cooler. 

5. do you think you’re interesting? 

Depends on who you’re talking to. I’m probably not that interesting to someone who surfs a lot or does surgeries. I tried to think of an example of someone I could be interesting to but I’m not sure. I like quiet.

6. how is your love life?

I like it.

7. what were you like as a child? 

Loud talkative kind of demanding at home but shy around strangers hungry talked to myself a lot I liked to read and made up songs about shit all the time probably would find myself very annoying now had a bowl cut my mom dressed me nicely I remember time used to seem so long

8. what did you eat today? 

Greek yogurt, a lot of coffee, a mini Kit Kat bar, a turkey sandwich

9. have you ever created culture or art? 

Sure

10. do you like drinking alcohol or using drugs? 

I drink usually to feel drunk on average twice a week though sometimes more and sometimes less maybe. I don’t really use drugs besides caffeine. I have never smoked pot even. I think I used to be afraid of trying it and now I just don’t care. I text messaged my friend the other night when I was drunk to ask him if I should try DMT because people were talking about taking DMT, I guess when I’m drunk I consider the option but would never actually I think really do it.

11. what kind of people do you hate?

People who talk about themselves too much without realizing they are doing that. People who can’t drive well that are in other cars near me while I am driving. People who talk about politics on the internet. Well, I mean, I hate that those people do those things. Some of my friends do those things and then they stop doing them and I like them again. I think in general I’m easygoing though when I alone I feel more volatile and gnashy.

12. what are your goals, if you have any? 

I guess my goal is work hard at my writing, though I wouldn’t say that aloud except in the way I just did. I work a lot but I keep it in my mind in a very abstract sense. I like to give myself shit while also working hard.

13. do you have any depressing stories about your life? 

I’m tired of being sad about real things. I’d rather it come out in other ways.

14. who are your favorite authors? 

I don’t know anymore really. I used to be the kind of person that would obsess over certain figures and like wait for things and devour them as soon as I could but now things feel more flattened out. It’s not necessarily bad. I like a lot of things enough. I think the last book that really affected me was The Recognitions, which I’d been avoiding reading for years.

15.what will you be doing ten years from now?

Probably either the same thing I do now or nothing.