version

Well-known member
 

luka

Well-known member
There's a Gore Vidal piece I've wanted to read for a while where he talks about Barth, Barthes, Barthelme, Pynchon and others called "American Plastic".

Nine years ago I wrote an exhaustive and, no doubt, exhausting account of the theory or theories of the French New Novel. Rejected by the American literary paper for which I had written it (subject not all that interesting), I was obliged to publish in England at the CIA’s expense.
 

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Beast of Burden
I read all the time. I read your essay this morning remember. I just tell Stan not to read because I don't want him to get too clever.

You were hurling abuse at me in December simply because I defended the activity of reading books!
 

version

Well-known member
Bret Easton Ellis made me want to watch American Gigolo, but I still haven't seen it.

ALEX ISRAEL — We’ve spoken about your interest in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo. Tell me about your relationship to the film.

BRET EASTON ELLIS — I was 16 when it came out and back then it seemed very shocking. It was Paramount’s big spring movie of 1980 and it reverberated through our culture and started to change things. What was shocking was that there had never been a movie that looked at male beauty in the way American Gigolo did. We’d seen women lit, addressed, and undressed in that fashion, but we’d never seen a movie essentially about male beauty. It was the first metrosexual movie. I think it anticipated a change in culture that would be seen with more clarity later on in Calvin Klein ads and in the photographs of Herb Ritts.

ALEX ISRAEL — So it offered a new way of thinking about male sexuality’s role in mass culture?

BRET EASTON ELLIS — A lot of movies have dealt with male sexuality. But does American Gigolo really deal with male sexuality? Richard Gere plays a prostitute in it. It’s a film noir. Regardless of what Paul Schrader was going for at the time, it has a heavy homoerotic element. But it wasn’t a gay film. It was saying, look, this is where we’re headed as a culture: male beauty in straight culture is going to be embraced in this way — not as it is in gay culture, but in this other way. I remember seeing the movie a number of times, knowing that it wasn’t a great film, but that it was very suggestive. Now, 30 years later, it’s a key LA movie.

ALEX ISRAEL — An especially key movie for you, right?

BRET EASTON ELLIS — Completely, right down to the fact that I named Julian in Less Than Zero after Gere’s character in American Gigolo. For better or worse, in 1980 I began working on Less Than Zero. There wasn’t really a Julian character in the first draft of that book. When that character began to announce itself in subsequent drafts he was named Julian — in homage to American Gigolo.
 

luka

Well-known member
There's a Gore Vidal piece I've wanted to read for a while where he talks about Barth, Barthes, Barthelme, Pynchon and others called "American Plastic".
I'll tell you what it reads like it reads like Barty pretending to listen to music in good faith while scattering one liners about it all over the place. "Sounds like a Bulgarian wedding" "sounds like playing with your new Lego on Christmas morning"
 

luka

Well-known member
"More stories. More graphics. The pictures are getting better all the time. There is a good one of a volcano in eruption. The prose…as before. Simple sentences. “Any writer in the country can write a beautiful sentence,” Barthelme has declared. But he does not want to be like any writer in the country: “I’m very interested in awkwardness: sentences that are awkward in a particular way.” What is “beauty,” one wonders, suspicious of words. What, for that matter, is “awkward” or “particular”?"
 

luka

Well-known member
Guilty Pleasures (1974). This writer cannot stop making sentences. I have stopped reading a lot of them. I feel guilty. It is not pleasurable to feel guilty about not reading every one of those sentences. I do like the pictures more and more. In this volume there are more than thirty, pictures. In the prose I spotted hommages to Calvino, Borges, early Ionesco. I am now saving myself for The Dead Father, the big one, as they say on Publisher’s Row, the first big novel, long awaited, even heralded.
 

luka

Well-known member
"She works from something very like life…I mean “life”; she has an extraordinary ear for the way people sound. She do the ethnics in different voices"
 

luka

Well-known member
There's nothing remotely intelligent or interesting said in that essay. Only read it if you like Gore Vidal being Gore Vidal.
 

version

Well-known member
There's nothing remotely intelligent or interesting said in that essay. Only read it if you like Gore Vidal being Gore Vidal.
I've never read Gore Vidal, but now I'm glad. It seems it's best to just watch him being a dick on chat shows and leave it at that.
 

Murphy

cat malogen
Then backtrack your chronology. These ‘films’ didn’t evolve from zero, although they have devolved to such.

In the war of good taste, I refuse to watch Fastly Furious when I can rewatch that gas guzzling road bucket Steve McQ drives. I refuse to indulge the Stath when there’s Lee Marvin.

Both actions will increase your t-levels and out-sexually tyrannosaur anything Jesse Ventura can swing a club at

 

luka

Well-known member
the scholarly research I'm intending on isn't about action films and fast cars it's more about the eighties, ie, my childhood!
 
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