what are you reading now?

[padraig (u.s.)]

I think Ellis himself comes across as so disingenous and such a provocateur that any defense he mounts makes people increasingly suspicious

sounds right. seems like he was badly effected by reviews/attacks, got quite defensive.

he's definitely a smart guy (how could he not be), shame he tends only to pop up for odious and/or grasping reasons the last couple decades.

Glamorama is where he starts rewriting the same book to diminishing returns, LTZ + AP hollowed out

all the lists of names and sex and violence (which I would agree is often gratuitous here) just themselves, no greater sum of parts

dated in a very bad way, unlike American Psycho which is dated in the best of ways

there are some potentially interesting ideas about celebrity/social capital (and possibly, their relation to violence) unfortunately lost in the mix

the Zoolander rip-off angle is pretty amusing

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

the famous Europe trip montage from Rules of Attraction is a significantly better/more interesting exploration of Glamorama's ideas than the book itself

anyway, most artists never have a single interesting to express, so having one extremely powerful thing is actually pretty good

Burroughs essentially rewrote the same thing (heroin, beautiful boys, ectoplasm, language viruses, etc) his entire literary career

 

[version]

I liked the two phrases he kept repeating -- "We'll slide down the surface of things..." and "The better you look, the more you see" - and the final passage about the mountain was intriguing.

shame he tends only to pop up for odious and/or grasping reasons the last couple decades.

That New Yorker interview I pointed Tea to was toe-curling. He came across as either playing dumb or genuinely clueless.

 

[version]

the famous Europe trip montage from Rules of Attraction is a significantly better/more interesting exploration of Glamorama's ideas than the book itself.

There's supposed to be a feature-length version of that called Glitterati that only a few people have seen.

Glitterati (2004) ⭐ 8.0 | Drama

1h 30m

www.imdb.com

 

[IdleRich]

I'm still not sure exactly what happened by the end. He seemed to be in some sort of limbo, either figuratively or literally, and his father or someone had set him up and had him replaced with a doppelganger?

Yeah that actually rings a bell, I remember I was living in Maida Vale when I read it so it must have been, probably, 2000, so obviously anything I say about it is to be taken with a pinch of salt... but I think there was something like that. But I mainly remember sickening violence and little more, in a way that I don't with AP.
What about Bonfire of the Vanities? I've seen people say that that was a more successful attack on that world than AP but I don't see it myself.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

I liked the two phrases he kept repeating

like I said, some potentially good bits lost in the mix

I knew about Gliteratti. they didn't get consent from anyone filmed, always makes me wonder how Avary explained the camera.

as far as Bonfire of the Vanities, no thanks. "topical" and dated in the bad way. Tom Wolfe is a general no thanks from me tbh

American Psycho isn't really an "attack" in that sense (and Bonfire is an attack on Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton as much as anything)

it's about Wall Street bros obviously, but it's simultaneously more and less personal

on the one hand it's about Ellis himself. on the other it's about Batemen etc as synecdoche for all those worst elements in American culture etc.

 

[version]

Avary's a weird dude. He went to prison for running someone over or something, iirc. He's also on the latest episode of the BEE podcast.

 

[IdleRich]

Perfect synchronicity with the Bonfire of the Vanities post (it's about a bond trader who injures or kills someone in a hit and run and his world collapses)... I knew attack wasn't the right word but I thought "no-one will pick me up on it" so I didn't spend time trying to find the right one....

 

[version]

I'm rereading AP now. I'd forgotten just how unpleasant the thing is as a whole. It's not just the violence. It's everything. A "psychological black hole" as one reviewer put it. It's also very good.

 

[Corpsey]

Been reading poetry by Hopkins, Hardy and R.S. Thomas.

Do not say, referring to the sun,
'Its journey northward has begun,'
As though it were a bird, annually migrating,
That now returns to build in the rich trees
Its nest of golden grass. Do not belie
Its lusty health with words such as imply
A pallid invalid recuperating.
The age demands the facts, therefore be brief —
Others will sense the simile — and say:
'We are turning towards the sun's indifferent ray.'

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

just how unpleasant the thing is

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.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

related, I was listening to Metal Circus - the best Hüsker Dü record - yesterday, which of course features the great and totally chilling "Diane"

made me think of AP - artistic portrayal (by men) of a man brutally murdering a woman, in a totally neutral, flat, disaffected manner

huge touchstone for "Polly" I have to think, and I'm pretty sure HD themselves were influenced by PIL's "Annalisa" in a similar vein

 

[Corpsey]

It's funny, reading the plot summary of Less than Zero (which he wrote when he was 21), it has the sort of sensationalist elements that I'd have stuffed a novel with (had I ever written a novel) when I was around that age. For a book to really interest me at that age (well, more like when I was 18), it needed hard drugs, hard sex/rape (preferably quasi or actually paedophilic), violent murders, a general sense of disaffection/nihilism — and the whole thing would have to culminate in the protagonist's suicide. The video nasties of literature, essentially.

 

[Corpsey]

Makes me wonder if I 'grew up' or became more bourgeoisie in my avoidance of 'shock'. Kafka said a book should be an axe for the frozen sea in us — and a shocking book can certainly shake things up that have become too settled. 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? Perhaps the value is in reminding us how shocking and depressing these things should be, before the ice of familiarity freezes our feelings and turns them into a more palatable world-weary cynicism. (Again, though, this is complicated by the fact that BEEllis, as far as I recall, comes across as a world-weary cynic...)

 

[Corpsey]

"Lolita" is a fascinating book from the POV of shock, because what shocks us isn't so much Humbert Humbert's behaviour (though it is shocking) but the way in which HH's (Nabokov's) linguistic genius makes it seem less shocking, even at times palatable, even at times Romantic.

 

[Mr. Tea]

That New Yorker interview I pointed Tea to was toe-curling. He came across as either playing dumb or genuinely clueless.

The themes that jumped out at me in that interview were his repeated insistence that he doesn't care about politics at all - despite obviously caring a great deal - and that he isn't personally a Trump supporter (heaven forefend!) but is just annoyed/amused by how much liberals hate Trump.

It just made him sound like a run-of-the-mill right-wing edgelord troll playing an endless game of "I'm not triggered, you're triggered!" on a Twitter thread.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Owning the libtards, one NPC meme at a time.

 

[Corpsey]

He could write a sequel to AP entitled American Liberal. There's definitely a lot to satirize there. And, unlike wall street traders, liberals read books (beyond 'The Art of War' and the 57 laws of power etc.). A liberal serial killer! Now there's an idea... (Reminding me that Dennis Nielsen was a Labour party member and diligent dole centre employee.)

 

[Corpsey]

Actually, nowadays perhaps there's not much of a division between businesspeople and the 'cultured' (if there ever was, mind you) — the modern business guru microdoses LSD and is avowedly (publically) liberal.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I meant "liberals" less in the sense of "cultured, vaguely right-on, middle-class capitalists" than in the way that gun-toting, MAGA-hatted lunatics use it for anyone less right-wing than themselves, from relatively sane, non-Trumpist Republicans to actual communists (the other crowd whose default insult is "liberal", ironically enough).

(Not that B.E.E. necessarily owns an assault rifle or a MAGA hat, but that interview made it sound like he has sympathies in that direction. )