Do you like Bret Easton Ellis?
His early work was a little too new wave for my tastes, but when American Psycho came out in '91, I think he really came into his own, commercially and artistically. The whole novel has a clear, crisp brutality, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the prose a big boost. He's been compared to Irvine Welsh, but I think Bret has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humour.
I don't that much. He's a little edgy. His podcast has been entertaining. I always think of him as Elliot Rodger since listening to his podcast, it's really similar in the way he talks and also how self-obsessed and pretentious he gets.
For a author who writes in a similar style about similar things in the same time period, I like John O'Brien better. He wrote Leaving Las Vegas and a few other books.
>He's a little edgy
But don't you know its hip to be square?
tal ent les sha ck!
I see what you did op
The one thing I don't understand is why fucking Duncan Sheik thought it was a good idea at ALL to write a musical about it.
Psycho is garbage, BEE is a braindead hack
kek. funny how it fits so well.
/thread
Glamorama thou
>tfw you will never forcibly sodomize a young twink BEE
Why even live, bros?
CAUSE I AM BARELY BREATHING
Funny guy. Not in any pantheon of lit but the world is better off with him writing in it.
t. edgy contrarian
The irony is that Brett was being one when he wrote that book. When he wrote all of his books, actually.
quality bait
really good job OP
best book
Why does he hate DFW so much?
pretty good, OP.
9/10.
would be a 10 if you made it (somehow) longer.
TRY GETTING A RESERVATION AT DORSIA NOW, YOU FUCKING STUPID BASTARD!
have you heard the songs, they're great
Because DFW called him out on the vapid fiction he produces:
DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s “American Psycho”: it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.
LM: But at least in the case of “American Psycho” I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.
DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. 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.
>DFW didn't understand how satire works
Was he autistic?
>doesn't understand satire
president gentle, subsidized time, "the entertainment", JOI filmography, etc...
DFW puts into words what I feel about most modern writers (Tao Lin, BEE etc.), nice
>modern writers
>Tao Lin, BEE
I spotted the idiot.
ebin :3
I respect this opinion and think its very well articulated. However I disagree, I found AP's tone and texture so saturated that it went beyond irritation for me and became something absurdly comedic. Since i personally found the same content that DFW describes as comedic and enjoyable rather than tedious and painful I appreciated the book and found it very fun to lavish in all the nuances and details of BEE's character building
I feel DFW needed to destroy this book as an icon of the irony he battled, but in 2016 where this post-irony vs irony stuff isnt as fresh as it is in the 90s, I can appreciate the merit of both these authors' styles and artistic goals
< this
Lol what got Norm so butthurt?