Dinner as Drama, Party as Play

version

version

Well-known member
There's a film called Decline of the American Empire about a bunch of French-Canadian academics and their partners meeting up at a country house for the weekend that's in this mould. They basically just talk about or have sex the whole time.

I watched it when I went through a spate of watching reunion films like The Big Chill and Return of the Secaucus Seven. They're all some sort of variation on the dinner party thing.
 
  • Wow
Reactions: sus
sus

sus

Moderator
shakahislop said:
there's a load of descriptions of really attractive sounding parties in kerouac. girls and three day binges, and all the lads talking about poetry. its one of the things that makes that whole mileu sound great, which is the appeal of kerouac really. especially to 16 year olds.
Click to expand...
You have to imagine an older more cynical writer would probably have written about it like the Bay area house parties
 
sus

sus

Moderator
wild greens said:
In my early 20s i was seeing a girl for a while who had went to a very posh uni with lots of well to do trust fund mates, whereas I... Didn't.

So, by proxy i got invited to lots of quite high end dos with lots of rich kids and/or adults, and stuck out like a sore thumb. You just have to embrace it though, really, and see what you can get out of the situation. Some were quite awkward
Click to expand...
I went to school with a buncha posh British girls and they looooved the idea of my being a "working" class (read: solidly middle but they couldn't tell the difference) American, with pragmatic disdain for their prissy etiquette, who couldn't care less what silly boarding school they went to. I did really well for a few years, I felt a bit like a token fetish object the way they treated me (a bit like a child sometimes, really). Probably a bit like what they say about men with British accents in America—an exotic aura of sophistication—but uh, the opposite. Anyway, they were largely terrible to go out with, head cases I didn't care to psychologize, preferred to spend my nights doing weird drugs with mates. And they had this idea they could order me around, like I was their pet or they owned me. Eventually one of them, feeling bitter or spurned or like how dare I, waged a Chinese whispers equivalent of scorched earth warfare against me, and my luck wore off.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
IdleRich said:
The cut together conversations in Gaddis' Recognitions become particularly effective in the long party scenes (I think there are two).
Click to expand...

Reading Le Fanu and this scene which is a sort of precursor of the party scenes Gaddis writes...

20230307_034822.jpg

Except of course it's not really, cos the above scene just says "look it's a mess, noone can get anything out of this" whereas Gaddis (and Burroughs etc) say "By throwing all this together and reading it, although on one level it's totally confusing, on another level, the confusion adds up to a greater view of the whole, and if we look at in the right way, just like with a cubist painting we can see a better view of the deeper truth in there somewhere" - which I suppose is a very good example of how modernism differs from what came before.
 
  • Like
Reactions: sus
sus

sus

Moderator
They were wild though. Really next level. Growing up in all "American Schools," which I'd never heard of before. They're all these like racial and cultural and international mongrels, which I don't mean pejoratively at all. Well, what I mean is that they were cosmopolitan as fuck but in a kind of empty drifting unmoored way. Students of the world, so savvy yet so jaded. They'd been going to expensive cocktail clubs and having pillsex since age 12, all their friends are leftists and all their parents are corporate VPs or oil tycoons. None of them are just British they're Saudi Brits or French Brits or Brazilian Brits.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top