what are you reading now?

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read the interview, he just seemed confused to me—and presumably embarrassed to read it afterwards. Perhaps he's a contrarian who feels compelled to swim against whatever tide he finds himself swimming in—which now is a tide of (depending on your pov) hysterical liberalism... whereas when he was younger, he was swimming with the wall street sharks, or the Beverly Hill trust fund kids. (An edgelord is a variety of this species — a species which I must, alas, admit that I belong to.) So is seems perfectly possible to me that he doesn't care about politics. He cares about questioning/subverting/insulting the prevailing attitudes/views/behaviours of those people who surround him. He isn't standing on the firm rock of considered opinion, he's just trying to knock other people off their perches.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Not to align myself with him or what he said there but I certainly recognise an unfortunate element of my own character there — a contrarian questioning of things, but only when everybody (including me at first) believes in it... Especially a belief that you don't find yourself holding and which it makes you feel inadequate not to hold.

Hence, presumably, my 18 year old instinct to fill my never-to-be-fleshed-out plots to the brim with grotesqueries, so as to #own the normies (who I couldn't successfully emulate).
 
version

version

Well-known member
padraig (u.s.) said:
definitely. tho unpleasant in such an utterly compelling manner. transfixed on that black hole at the heart of darkness. can't look away.

which again is why the violence is important I think - it fixes and holds your gaze on all the other terrible things.

I still think LTZ is more disconcerting as you're staring directly into the black hole, unmediated by AP's affection, excess, luridity

but much more palatable to actually read, and the passivity or active unease of the narrator with the truly terrible things gives you an out of sorts.
Click to expand...

It seems to be a common experience with both. This review of LtZ on Amazon was pretty much my experience too,

"This book seems boring and shallow, and reading it gives me an anesthetized, hollow, detached feeling that I would not describe as entirely pleasant.

And yet I cannot seem to stop, and whenever I have to, I become very anxious to return to it as quickly as I can. Its appeal is no less powerful for being difficult to pinpoint or explain."
 
version

version

Well-known member
Corpsey said:
OTOH, is BEEllis describing rich kids being emotionally empty or stockbrokers treating people like things really shaking things up, or simply confirming what we (the literate audience) already believe?
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This was Wallace's issue with AP...

" ... I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend “Psycho” as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that."
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
That's how I feel about one of my favourite (despite myself) authors, MAmis — his characters are all cardboard cunts, and when he tries to flesh somebody out with heroism or nobility, it can't be done, he can't get it up for the virtuous. I still enjoy the show, but it never feels particularly more substantial than a show.

Sometimes I read these novels where every character is a cunt and wonder if I've just been exceedingly lucky not to have encountered many awful people in my life, or if I've deliberately (even if subconsciously) avoided these awful people — or if the author just is unable to or uninterested in depicting what most 'real' people are like, even the fairly awful ones...

Amis's The Zone of Interest is set in Auschwitz, the protagonists are Nazis directly implicated in the holocaust, so of course they're morally bankrupt, base, cruel, hypocritical at least. So there's no 'problem' with him making them all of those things. But I still don't believe them as people. Outside of the outright psychopathic (who no doubt were more common in the Nazi party than in general pop), I think that a lot of those Nazis would have had to feel, to tell themselves, that what they were doing was good.
 
version

version

Well-known member
This is a decent counter to the Wallace angle and echoes some of what Padraig was saying about the violence being essential and it being a 'decline of empire' novel.

www.theguardian.com

Irvine Welsh – American Psycho is a modern classic

When published in 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho caused outrage for its depictions of violence, especially towards women. That was its point, argues Irvine Welsh – it is a brilliant depiction of the savage society we’ve created
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There's perhaps an element of self criticism in Amis's satire (look at the horror the masculine ego - which has arguably driven this showy, muscular prose - so often results in) - but on the whole, his villains are so evil that the author, and the reader, escapes self censure. Is it necessary to provoke that self reflection, or is it enough to just hold up a mirror to the worst of the worst, the worst *imaginable*, to alert us to their presence, to their mindset - to let the sheep know about the wolves?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess (can only guess, not read in decades) the bite in the satire in AP might be more in the wall streetworld's refusal to see and punish his crimes than in Bateman's outre (to put it mildly) perversions, which are too out there to be recognisable to 99.999% of wall Street brokers. (Or am I being a naive sheep?) Especially with the recently "revealed" (but apparently well known) Weinstein/Epstein stories in mind.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Corpsey said:
He cares about questioning/subverting/insulting the prevailing attitudes/views/behaviours of those people who surround him. He isn't standing on the firm rock of considered opinion, he's just trying to knock other people off their perches.
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I've always found this attitude deeply contemptible. For one thing, if you're constantly got to go against the flow of popular opinion, mainstream politics and so on, then your behaviour is just as tightly constrained as that of the "sheep" you feel yourself so superior to, aren't you? And if the prevailing attitude is that we don't kick puppies, are you then going to make a point of kicking puppies, while congratulating yourself for being so brave and free-thinking? It's fucking pathetic.

And in the case of Trump in particular, the idea of being some sort of 'rebel' is surely strained beyond breaking point if your way of rebelling is to support the incumbent President of the Unites States of America. I mean sure, I guess it is against the grain in a general sense if you're an educated, erudite person from a big coastal city, because Trump isn't popular among 'your sort of people', but it's hardly on a par with being in the Black Panthers or Weather Underground.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Just reading that quote Versh posted reminds me how much I dislike Wallace. It's a strong, instinctive, consistent reaction every time he starts chundering on.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Corpsey said:
is BEEllis describing rich kids being emotionally empty or stockbrokers treating people like things really shaking things up
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is the point of these books, to "shake things up"? rearrange our worldviews, stir us to outrage/despair?

it's so weird to me how people seem to treat AP like The Jungle: Wall Street Edition. That was Wall Street.

are these supposed to be revelations, that Wall Street bros are terrible, destructive, etc?

nor do I think the violence is there primarily for shock value. when the Maenads tear Pentheus literally limb from limb in The Bacchae, is it shock value?

American Psycho is - intentionally or not - about the heart of darkness, a problem universal to the human condition

situated in an extremely acute, detailed observation of a specific time/place, which is perhaps what throws people?
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
a big part of the reason it works is that there's some kind of empathy for Bateman.

there has to be for suspension of disbelief. even monsters don't see themselves as the villain.

I imagine that's what puts some people off, the lack of even a tacit condemnation.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
for such a smart dude it's a shockingly bad - and worse, shallow - take

it makes me remember how much I detest the idea of a "New Sincerity" (not something Wallace came up with himself tbf)
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
Corpsey said:
the bite in the satire in AP might be more in the wall streetworld's refusal to see and punish his crimes
Click to expand...
yeah obv that's a big part of the black comedy - the inability/unwillingness of any his peers to recognize what he is, hear his literal confessions

(which is also probably a class comment, as people outside his peer group - taxi driver, prostitute, etc - seem to recognize it easily enough)

but it's also about us - the Wall Street bros are an outlandish, heightened version of all the worst impulses in modern American/1st-world/etc society

"decline of empire" isn't quite accurate. American Psycho was the point at which the rot has set in at the heart but isn't yet visible. the decline is now.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I probably should reread it. Not sure I could take the murder scenes, though - although at least they're made up (in EEllis's mind, or Bateman's), unlike the gruesome tidbits of serial killer facts I've let seep into my brain over the years to fester, forever.

I certainly don't want to make any more contentions about something I'm so unfamiliar with. (An overwhelming temptation for me, especially when I'm supposed to be working.) I'm probably arguing against (or for) some version of the novel I've picked up through reading a commentary on it.
 
padraig (u.s.)

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
you should

it's kind of impossible to totally avoid violence/fantasies of violence, but you can definitely skip the big set-piece murders.

the sex scenes as well, they're quite tedious. which is probably the point.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
There's no way I would skip those scenes if I read it. My mind is a glutton for such punishment, for god knows what reason. That's why I've had to consciously suppress those alluded-to facts about serial killers... And anyway, as you say, they are (should be) intrinsic to the novel.

(Leaving all other considerations aside, there is a lot of joy to be had in watching or reading about horrible people. That's why (or one reason why) I love The Thick Of It, Succession, Peep Show, etc.)

Funny you should mention the Bacchae, sort of, as I've been listening/reading along with Ted Hughes's versions of tales from Ovid. Plenty of unjust, capricious brutality in those stories, for sure.
 
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