BEE? More like BTFO

[Anonymous No.7761833]

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-david-foster-wallace-by-larry-mccaffery/

>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.

[Anonymous No.7761847]

Awww snap another Dave's World thread!!!

[Anonymous No.7761861]

>>7761847
The last one is still up, Taytay. It's been up for over a week now.
S1 never

[Anonymous No.7761910]

>DFW challenges William Faulkner to a tennis match. Faulkner agrees, but only after him and Wallace have a drinking competition first. The scene ends with Wallace passed out on the tennis court while Faulkner spikes tennis balls at him.

[Anonymous No.7761913]

>>7761910

>>7761861

[Anonymous No.7761914]

>>7761861
It will take a Dave thread to kill a Dave thread.

[Anonymous No.7761921]

>>7761833
Savage.

[Anonymous No.7761926]

>>7761833
Succinct

[Anonymous No.7761927]

I really like this critique.

[Anonymous No.7762068]

The other thread is nearing 300 so episode progress should resume here.

[Anonymous No.7762092]

>>7762068
No it's not. It has more than 90 bumps left.

[Anonymous No.7762111]

>>7762092
Then bump it? Poster was probably just surprised the thread was so large in the first place.

[Anonymous No.7762135]

Funny how it applies to other authors as well. Houellebecq for ex

[Anonymous No.7762169]

wow he was really afraid of BEE. i figured he was a smart enough narcissist not to mention other people. did he ever review swift? i can see him calling it twee and soon after saying he doesn't mean to imply racism but society makes him.

[Anonymous No.7762190]

>>7762135
Houellebecq is always proposing "solutions" of some kind, at least in his later works. Granted, his solutions sometimes seem kind of ironic.

[Anonymous No.7762213]

>>7762169
It doesn't sound like you actually read what he said. Or can even read at all.

[Anonymous No.7762658]

>>7762213
no i read what he said and it's like critiquing swift for saying that irish people should eat babies. it shows you didn't understand what a satirist's job is and that you fell into one of the traps being highlighted by the satirist.

Criticising BEE for the long lists of affluent consumer brands when BEE has even straight out said that if you look them up, they make no sense as outfits or decor, and it's to highlight that the psycho probably can't engage with all the people who's lifestyles he envies because it's not vernacular language to his character-- that shit's just dumb. The depth of reading displayed in OP is not as though he read it as a satire, but he read it as a narrative which attempts honesty and realism and an uncaricatured psycho, which is such a swing and a miss I'd almost call him out on that alone. Did he think that Ellis by calling the character, who embodies all these cynical traits of Americana DFW so detests, a psycho was inhuman? The entire thing is an exercise in demonstrating how removed from human reality you will become if you adopt that supposed contemporary condition, and the criticism in OP is as dumb as hating on American Psycho for being a promotion of violence against women.

If he'd wanted to go after BEE on writing, Rules of Attraction is a much worse written book than American Psycho. RoA probably touched too many nerves with DFW for him to talk about it though. Ellis wrote too much shit which criticises DFW's bread and butter trying to appear as schmaltz for Wallace not to be scared. But this kind of response to that work is like he got so butthurt he couldn't think. It's near the butthurt levels of when Buckley called Vidal queer. I imagine Ellis reading this interview with the same smug gay look on his face Vidal had: Wallace just handed it to him.

[Anonymous No.7762691]

At least I didnt kill myself and can make it through an interview without making a million meme faces you fucking sperglord

[Anonymous No.7762698]

>>7762691
Stop being such a faggot, Brett.

[Anonymous No.7762704]

>>7762691
You're only mad because DFW will be part of canon and you're already on your way to being forgotten.

[Anonymous No.7762711]

>>7762704
>DFW will be part of canon
nobody falls for memes this hard.

[Anonymous No.7762728]

>>7762711
Don't get me wrong, BEE isn't the worst. I thought Glamorama was decent. But ot's not a meme. Wallace, Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy, DeLillo, Marquez, Bolano. These people will all be memorialized. Ellis will be quickly forgotten. Sad truth, senpai.

[Anonymous No.7762744]

>>7762691
fucking kek, this is just so mean

not nice brat, not nice

[Anonymous No.7762747]

>>7762728
Pynchon's already canon. Books on postmodernism in other media will assume you know who he is. The unfortunate problem with your proposition is that more of them assume you know who the author of American Psycho is than the author of Infinite Jest is; Ellis is already canonized, and Saint David is used mockingly for a reason.

[Anonymous No.7762812]

>>7762747
People also mock young men who enjoy Pynchon and teenage girls who like Austen. Something getting thrown around as an insult somewhere doesn't mean all that much.

>>7762728
I think Rules of Attraction should be the Ellis that everyone reads in a literature major. He really captured and mocked a lot of the disgusting, immature shit that goes on at a New England liberal arts college.

[Anonymous No.7762817]

>>7762812
>He really captured and mocked a lot of the disgusting, immature shit that goes on at a New England liberal arts college.
What a brave man. An inspiration.

[Anonymous No.7762823]

>>7762812
Isn't that from Preacher?

[Anonymous No.7762832]

>>7762812
>People also mock young men who enjoy Pynchon and teenage girls who like Austen. Something getting thrown around as an insult somewhere doesn't mean all that much.
I think you misunderstand how canon is formed by focus of criticism, and have not read enough about any literary movement to have a distinct conception of any canon outside of memes. Sorry, but sometimes history doesn't listen to the drum of one anon and his hot opinions, and it's not following your line of thought on this. Ellis is already too deep into culture to erase him, even if we stop the memeing, but DFW's best chance of not being forgotten is a bunch of /lit/ autists memeing until a movie comes out which isn't even one of his works.

[Anonymous No.7762833]

>>7762691
Maybe you should. Kill yourself that is.
>>7762658
I think what DFW is saying that BEE is part of the problem, just highlighting the disease without , to speak in the words of DFW (sincerity may be with him)"preforming cpr on the parts of humanity still intact." I agree with DFW, being a sentimentalist, but I don't think he succeeded either.

[Anonymous No.7762851]

>>7762833
I think that a lot of the problem DFW has with Ellis is that Ellis criticises feigned sentimentality, which behind it has an inhuman calculating oneupmanship, and that has obvious ways to be taken as a criticism of DFW's sincerity and work in general as not sentimental but self worship.

[Anonymous No.7762853]

BEE is one dimensional. Do people really take him Sealy?

[Anonymous No.7762879]

>>7762832

How is Ellis culturally relevant? Less Than Zero and American Psycho sold well and are not bad, but does anyone take the guy seriously as an important literary figure? Just a trendy bestseller. These days the best he can hope for is a Twitter controversy here and there to remind people of his existence, and it seems like as soon as he's gone, his trendy nihilist works will be as well.

Not defending DFW (I like him because I'm a sap, but he didn't escape the shadow of Pynchon enough to be 'canonized', imo), but saying that Ellis is "deep into the culture" seems like a real stretch.

[Anonymous No.7762892]

>>7762817
Campus novels are almost uniformly bland and petty, so it's actually something that he made one that wasn't.

>>7762832
You idiot, I'm not even the guy who was saying Ellis would be forgotten.

>>7762879
Is it even possible to finish a literature major without reading Less Than Zero or American Psycho?

[Anonymous No.7762916]

>>7762658
>comparing Brett "Every brand name must be listed" Ellis to Jonathan Swift

Seriously kill yourself. His whole point was that it was lazy because the things it was satirizing are so self-evident that it takes absolutely no talent or effort to write about them the way BEE did.

[Anonymous No.7762938]

>>7762892
>Is it even possible to finish a literature major without reading Less Than Zero or American Psycho?

No idea desu senpai. Surprised if such shallow works have found a place in academia.

[Anonymous No.7762948]

>>7762892
>You idiot, I'm not even the guy who was saying Ellis would be forgotten.
then you can read the bits about wallace's chances
>>7762879
He's relevant in the same way that Tennessee Williams is relevant to culture: he had a pervasive effect on two major media over an extended period of time. Tennessee Williams is dead and it still doesn't affect his relevance to canon that he doesn't even have a Twitter or a pulse. Not knowing what American Psycho is indicates a person has been living under a rock, not just in literary terms, but in broader cultural terms too. Not knowing anything affiliated with DFW besides "No discernable talent" doesn't make you poorly read even in literary circles, except in the ones that think 4chan memes are a literary movement.
>>7762916
I could compare him to the satire used by Flann O'Brien in his criticism of literary masturbation when he lists things that don't make sense and rips on people who learnt Latin in ASTB, but that would assume that the criticism was informed. Since I was pointing out it was as uninformed as misrepresentations of Swift, it makes no sense to compare the reaction to one O'Brien received for the same effect. I'm not comparing the technique, for which there are better satirists to compare Ellis to from Ireland alone, but comparing the level of misunderstanding DFW made to those who didn't get Swift's political satires.

[Anonymous No.7762996]

>>7762948
>Not knowing what American Psycho is indicates a person has been living under a rock, not just in literary terms, but in broader cultural terms too

But couldn't you say the same thing about Fight Club, The Hunger Games and Tom Clancy?

[Anonymous No.7762998]

>>7762948
You failed to point anything out and actually misunderstood what DFW said, so you have absolutely no point. Satire's value comes from the fact that it points out things no one wants to or is allowed to talk about. By the mid 1980s, there really wasn't anything you "couldn't" talk about anymore in America, and the banality of the culture was something that was tacitly understood.

Bret's "satire" is lazy and worthless because it's nothing more than a regurgitation of the same tired shit everyone was already talking about and recognized.

[Anonymous No.7763009]

>>7762996
Yes. Anyone who's a scholar of art and literature from the last three decades should be familiar with Fight Club and Tom Clancy. DFW listed Clancy as a must-read or something like that, in reference to his earliest work, not because Clancy is great, but because his research and the way he lays that research out is instructive.

[Anonymous No.7763076]

>>7763009

Fair enough, but that just tells us that cultural importance has nothing to do with literary merit or whatever. Hence BEE being "in the culture" doesn't means he's actually a good writer with important ideas or anything.

I agree with >>7762998. Worst part about it is that mockery of the culture is so ingrained in that culture that Ellis' satire ends up being conformist and safe as fuck.

And I don't see Fight Club standing the test of time, but that's just an unbased subjective opinion. Clancy might because of sheer volume and brand recognition. I mentioned Hunger Games - what's your take on that?

[Anonymous No.7763160]

>>7762996
Fight Club certainly if you want to talk in broad cultural terms not literary ones.

For the current generations, Fight Club is more formative than Red October because it inspired more new trends in culture, and about as formative as A Clockwork Orange in the 70s and for the same reasons. However, Burgess could stand to be canonized on his body of work in literature, while Palahniuk doesn't have the canonical influence Burgess had [yet], and like with Kubrick, a lot of the influence from the movie culturally didn't necessarily kick back to the author for Palahniuk either. Palahniuk got some new readers out of that, but most of his readers get bored after three books, and it didn't make him stylistically dexterous like Burgess was. So, he's culturally significant, but doesn't have literary significance. BEE has more stylistic dexterity than Palahniuk, probably is an influence on Palahniuk and enough other writers to be seen as a part of the canon.

Hunger Games being popular doesn't make it canon, but it'll probably secure Takami's canonization because it demonstrates how pervasive his ideas became globally that someone could write a shitty facsimile without even reading it. It's also riding on the back of a lot of other cultural influences, so it'll probably be remembered in the same way that robinsonades and cowboy genre flares are considered by canon: popular for the time, but nothing new or beyond formulaic.

>>7762998
>Satire's value comes from the fact that it points out things no one wants to or is allowed to talk about.
That would mean that DFW undercut his own point, since he certainly want to re-taboo the subject, and you later undercut your own point by saying that it's "tacitly understood" which would mean nobody was talking about it then either.
>>7763076
>Fight Club standing the test of time
This moment has passed. It's already in history as its cultural moment is somewhat passed. It did well in its time though-- not many people will write something which inspires that cultural reaction.
I disagree on criticising Ellis for being a bad satirist for the above reasons though. [It's hard to tell whether he's being criticised for talking too much about something which is unwritten or overwritten in that >>7762998 but I want to note that a lot of the reason why Ellis is considered conformist now is because he became such a model for so many things after, including some less satirical and more safe by abstraction works like Fight Club]

[Anonymous No.7763484]

>>7763160
The point was that there had already been so much discussion on that topic, that by the 80s you didn't have to talk about it anymore because everyone knew and was sick of people who thought they were privy to some great secret on account of "discovering" something everyone else already knew, so no, you're just retarded.

It's not about it being taboo, it's about it serving a purpose. Without a context that justifies it and makes it relevant, satire is little more than some know it all teenager cracking jokes that make everyone else embarrassed for them.

And no, it was already safe and conformist by the time he did it. The same ideas and themes were already done to death from the 50s to the 70s and the situation he was "satirizing" had only changed in superficial ways since then. His "work" is nothing but fluff.

[Anonymous No.7763633]

>>7763484
Dude, writing a book about how American capitalist consumerism would drive someone to cutting up hookers and repressed homosexuality is not something that would have been easily publishable during the Cold War.

Most of the work of the Beats wasn't as deliberately provocative as that, and Vidal's Myra isn't half as murderous and was still scandalous.

Blood and Reagan weren't as scary in the 50-70s because AIDS and Reaganomics weren't around to be played with. Burrough's didn't attempt to satirise mainstream society, because it was intended to provoke through being avant garde not to criticise through imitation of their mores.

I'm trying to think of someone who would have written that book during the Red Scare years, prescient of the reemergence of Wall St, as a satire of yuppies not just a criticism like Bonfire of the Vanities. Vidal is the closest I've got, and he spent the other half of his career writing historical fiction of America to prove he was a patriot enough to write satire because that shit was so scandalously communist at the time.

You seem to just be saying random shit and hoping it sticks.