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Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Fair enough.
I've only read his essays. I found them interesting. A bit naval gazey but I'm a naval gazer myself so I sympathised.
I don't fuck with postmodernist fiction though. The illusion we can see through is what I like about fiction. I don't need somebody winking at me all the time. Nabokov is about as pomo as I can take.
I've only read his essays. I found them interesting. A bit naval gazey but I'm a naval gazer myself so I sympathised.
I don't fuck with postmodernist fiction though. The illusion we can see through is what I like about fiction. I don't need somebody winking at me all the time. Nabokov is about as pomo as I can take.
The absolute worst I've read of Wallace is the author's note section or sections in The Pale King along with the stuff about a character called "David Wallace" where he insists that "this isn't one of those cutesy postmodern things... " whilst breaking the fourth wall and writing himself into the novel.
Corpsey
bandz ahoy
Martin Amis's novels I generally can't stand because of this queasy blend of postmodern winking/wanking and a strained "profundity" where I think he's trying to emulate Bellow.
I can see why authors want to do it of course, it's a very tempting opportunity to fuck around and show how clever you are.
I can see why authors want to do it of course, it's a very tempting opportunity to fuck around and show how clever you are.
luka
Well-known member
https://cittaviolenta.blogspot.com/search?q=Eye+for+the+ladies
"I was always subtle about this: there was posture or the way her legs looked in nylon, skirt and heels, when crossed. The eyes, their colour, what they convey - humour, mischief, mystique, occasional genius, joy, loss, or sorrow. Even spite - now that was something - just NOT blank, bored, or self-serving. Charisma contained like a secret revealed in body language and movement - for example, the way she walked down the street, flicked hair out of her eyes, or smoked a cigarette. The feel of clear skin or a cold body warming up.
I was overtly romantic at some point, and still there seemed to be a problem. Well, yes, apparently there was a problem. I just wasn't told. You think that could mitigate it? Her desire was mobile, moved continually, or died. To be left standing still, or to be caught, or trapped, was to be left in silence with her own thoughts. To be left with nothing. In the end, it came down to this:
vanity. In retaliation I learned to love it and so revenge its covert form; I admired its extremes. The best dressed and the mirror-struck. I began to afford them the simple respect they deserved. They would be judged on personal taste, self-obsession, or detachment. I knew where to stand and there would always be reflected glory. There was also The Image all over the rest.
How words betray us, for in saying your image I did not want to make you believe I saw you. No. If only I had! I sometimes tried desperately to see you, by shutting my eyes or just the opposite, by opening them very wide upon the darkness of the room.
There was also "my eye for the ladies," twitching like a maniac, with insane industry, converting someone on the street into something as flat and fleeting as a bus stop Versace poster. (George Melly said that losing his sex drive was like being untethered from a wild beast!)
Not just images and bodies but every material: metal, glass, plastic, fibre. So tactile! The connection between Guy Bourdin's early slides of LA doorways and curbs and his later fashion photographs make exact and perfect sense now. He made connections that would come to define the link between lust and consumerism. He realised this subtle intimacy between things, how it would, in the future, finally determine reaction and response, undercurrent and contours.
This is more to do with blank and obtuse visual dynamics, the awkward and cruel pose of bodies, the sheen of skin glossed into a plastic (fetishist) desire, the sharp colours and angles of concrete curves and corners, corrugated iron doors, road signs, and the discreet order of rock formations (Bourdin's early photos of cliffs and granite structures, and his Kodak slides of LA buildings and road patterns set up the visual lexicon of his fashion photographs - a tactile and textural language is worked out before and directly informs these pictures). Bourdin creates an impersonal visual world (coldness and cruelty) that remains glacial and grotesque in its distance and distortion, and is therefore necessarily and inescapably seductive. A cold eroticism that freezes LA sun."