I went into raw space without you

Not just any cat, a stray cat.

PRERAMPLE:

          Ok so, full admission, this is like, not, actually like, a book I enjoy reading. Its not that I dont like it, its just that American Psycho is horribly boring. Thats half the point, I know, but still. Its one of those books that is much more fun to talk about than read (im looking at you Joyce!). Not only that, Ellis is such an asshole to everyone and everything in the book, I mean, its kind of petty, but its so refreshing. Im so fucking tierd of people acting like offending people is the worst thing ever. In the words of Ellis "So fucking what?"

          Its an odd thing to contrast this book with Lolita. Nabokov takes a horrible protagonist and works hard the entire book to make you love him. He is humanized by the end of the novel, he isnt just a pervert or whatever. In part I think this is some kind of, perhaps not so subtle, humanism that Nabokov is pulling. Contrast this with Ellis in AP. He begins with a morally reprehensible human being and never tries to redeem him. He makes you hate him even further than you might otherwise expect. Not only is Bateman a horrible murderer and total fucking asshole, he is boring as fuck. I cant remember who it was, they called Ellis's writing the "aesthetics of boredom" or something to that effect. Totally hits it on the head. There is this old quote by John Ruskin about how "there are two kinds of artist, those who create what they are in their art, and those who create what they want to be." I tend to think of this as a truism about art but when applied to both instances of Nabokov and Ellis in these two books im not sure how it squares. They obviously both think they are horrible beasts or villains. But Nabokov works to humanize himself whereas Ellis just plunges further into his own nihilistic, dehumanizing fantasy. It is, I think, one of the most incredibly self critical books I have ever read.

           Now, this is all assuming that you actually think that the author is writing himself into the book at this point. This is actually a fascinating question. I dont have a particularly firm stance on it. On the one hand it seems like some kind of logical fallacy that an artist, from within their own mind, might be able to create something that is not a reflection of them or their environment. Simultaneous to this, it is also obvious that on a literal level an artist is not exclusively writing themselves into the work. Also this assumes that the artist is actually saying what they want to say. In my experience, people, artists included, rarely say what they mean or mean what they say. I have, for instance on this blog, unintentionally said things many times that I only catch reading over later. There are themes and threads, you might call them meta-narratives (IF I SEE THAT GODDAMN WORD ONE MORE TIME!) of sorts within the blog. Wherein you might come to an understanding of things I wrote by looking at all of the things on the blog rather than at individual posts. I dont think any writer is any different.

         But I think it is unavoidable to see both of these characters, Bateman and Humbert, as extensions of the author. Particularly with Ellis, being that he has variously said that Bateman was based on himself, or a part of himself at the time, or off of his father. Which is getting more and more interesting as an interpretation the more I think about it . . . anyway. Particularly if you read the novel as being about Ellis and Batemans murders being an analogy for Ellis being gay. In fact, the entire story actually makes sense at that point. Bateman isnt even enigmatic at all thought of in this way. Although I just said I dont think artists always mean what they say or say what they mean, ive got to say, I think Ellis is intentionally writing himself into the story in a very clear and visceral way. This is why I say its so self critical. Particularly when compared with Nabokovs Lolita which revolves constantly around self condemnations and self justifications. Ellis denies Batemans own humanity, pushes civilization and whatever you might think of as human, further and further away. Into some kind of abyss of hatred and jealousy. This of course  just makes me love Ellis that much more. Because im that same kind of asshole on the inside.I dont want to be part of any club that would have me as a member. Also I fucking hate it when people sympathize with me. I dont have a fucking vagina, I dont want to talk about my feelings. I used to have this economics professor who said that the reason everyone on wall street was so greedy and always acted in their own self interest was because they had "the evil gene" and welp, it just meant they were born evil. It was a joke of course but its as good an explanation for why Ellis is Ellis and Bateman is Bateman . . . Evil Gene . . . when in doubt make shit up. I wonder if that was my professors version of the selfish gene? I think Ellis actually gives something approximating an explanation for his own internal life with the Notes from the underground quote in the beginning of the novel . . . anyway, ill complete this post later, I have to guy buy whiskey and powdered graphite because . . . ART!

THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD:

Towards a Better Understanding of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman

          Probably one of the most violent, offensive, and ironically, boring novels in the latter half of the last century, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho stands as a contemptuous rebuke to anyone that might happen to read it. "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" rings out as the first line of the novel (Ellis 2). A hallucinatory cacophony of advertising copy, pornography, apocalyptic prose, slasher flicks, fashion magazines and the Zagat guide all rolled into one, American Psycho is such a peculiar blend of our modern American fabric that it is at times unintelligible. Patrick Bateman, a self described "fucking evil psychopath," narrates this misanthropic tale, and the various interpretations of the novel largely revolve around the interpretations of his character (Ellis 15). Although Wayne Parry, writing in the International Review of Psychiatry, believes that Bateman "fails to meet the criteria for a psychopath," he certainly doesn't qualify as normal (282). Martin Rogers, in his "Video Nasties and the Monstrous Bodies of American Psycho," notes a common response of readers to the novel: "Patrick's narrative threatens and repulses," it is a "refutation of the act of reading, rendering it a half-creature of the literary margins" (234). Most criticism has revolved around the notion that Bateman is created as some kind of dense, labyrinthine critique of the world in which he exists. As if the novel was created as a puzzle or riddle to be unlocked by only the most clever readers (these are invariably the readers who are writing the critiques). This complexity skews towards a kind of obscurantism that unnecessarily complicates the novel, and simultaneously ignores its most outrageous passages. Though no assessment of a work of art can be said to have any objective validity, the novel Ellis presents is not a critique of any social, cultural, or political system. Instead, it is a search for catharsis, in which Bateman attempt to find value in his life by destabilizing his own inexorable nihilism.

          Unreality permeates the novel, particularly as it pertains to the most infamous element in the story, murder. The violence of the book is portrayed in an intense, pornographic, style. In fact, numerous scenes dovetail seamlessly from "hard-core montage" into murder (Ellis 222). The descriptions of the murders and their aftermath are so blatantly unhidden, and uncensored, both from other characters in the novel and the reader, that many have assumed they do not actually occur. Rogers remarks on the impact of the violence: "When the gore arrives midway through the book, it is indeed like an anxiety attack for the reader" (233). Bateman chainsaws a women in half at one point and this presumably arouses no suspicions from anyone in the building (Ellis 243). This disbelief in the events as portrayed is largely the view that Mary Harron takes in her film adaptation of the novel, American Psycho. Produced well after the end of the 1980s', it is a natural take for Harron's film to be conceived largely as a satire. Mary G. Hurd, who writes a biographical sketch of Harron in her book "Women Directors and Their Films," recounts the difficulties Harron had in making the film: She was nearly thrown off the project and replaced by Oliver Stone, and was forced to edit some of the sex scenes or face an NC-17 rating (65). The violence is re-imagined in the film. Marco Abel in his article "Judgment is Not an Exit: Toward an Affective Criticism of Violence with American Psycho," notes that the films violence "functions merely as a metaphor for capitalism's cannibalistic cruelty - one that can be accepted precisely because it merely allegorizes the larger point of the novel" (142). Although there are satirical elements in the novel, they are complex undertones compared to the rather conventional presentation of the film. The music in particular is used to underline the ridiculousness of the era and the murders, as in the scene in which Paul Allen is killed while "Hip to be Square" By Huey Lewis and the News irreverently plays in the background (Harron). The songs goofy lyrics, contrasted with Allen's murder, encapsulate the themes of the film so well you might be excused for thinking it was composed specifically for it. Though provocative in its own right, Harron's film sanitizes Ellis's novel, perhaps in part to avoid the kind of backlash from critics the book had upon its release. Abel comments on this compromise: "critical discourse affirms her satirical strategies and praises her decisions to alter the novel so that just about everything offensive about it has disappeared" (142).

          Though disbelief in the events of the story makes it perhaps more plausible (and palatable), it fails to grapple with much of the substance of the novel. Abel articulates a conventional criticism of an unreal story like that found in the novel: "The closer art resembles life, the higher its value; the less accurate its representation - the more dissimilar the copy is from the original - the more questionable its merit" (138). Ellis's writing is too enigmatic, perhaps too sophisticated, for the didactic moral readings found in the film. This is not an emperor has no clothes type satire. There is in the novel, just beneath the surface, an intense affection for Bateman's world of vapid materialism and the easy life of idle rich men. Ellis's contempt for this world is one bred of familiarity. If Bateman's life is empty, it is not a symptom of late 20^th century capitalism. Instead, the blame is laid purely at the feet of human existence itself: "It did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one's taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person's love or kindness. Nothing was affirmative, the term 'generosity of spirit' applied to nothing, was a cliché" (Ellis 274).

          Viewing the novel as a critique of consumerism, Reaganomics, masculinity, or a satire, misses the nihilistic point of the novel (if we can for a moment consent to such a contradictory term). Indeed, Bateman and the other characters have a kind of aspirational conformity that is almost entirely unchallenged throughout the book. "Why don't you just quit? You don't have to work." Bateman's fiance asks him at one point. "Because I want to fit in" Bateman responds (Ellis 174). Ellis does not investigate the value of this attitude, instead he "investigate the value of value itself" throughout the novel (Abel 138).

          The social justice crusade of a satire, or social critique, is parodied by Bateman himself. At dinner with friends he opines at length on the need for a social transformation of America: "But we can't ignore our social needs either . . .We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women . . . we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people" (Ellis 11-2). If Ellis critiques anything in his novel it is not materialism, or wealth, or inequity. Instead, it is the concerns of feminists, homosexuals, minorities, and anyone not vicious or wealthy enough to take everything they can from other people. Power, wealthy, and beauty are championed; they are the only redemption in an otherwise pointless, post-modern, godless America. Bateman does not search for our sympathy or understanding. As Volker Ferenz notes in his essay "Mementos of Contemporary American Cinema: Identifying and responding to the unreliable Narrator in the Movie Theater," "our allegiance with him is one of complete antipathy" (267). As Bateman declares at one point: "This is true: the world is better off with some people gone. Our lives are not all interconnected. That theory is a crock. Some people truly do not need to be here" (Ellis 164). Or in another one of his misanthropic reveries: "Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in… this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…" (Ellis 274)

          Though Bateman's character is difficult for some to countenance, the very structure of the novel seems to be made intentionally excruciating for readers. Rogers remarks that the novel has an "almost total resistance to plot or character development, forcing the book to exist as a collection of forms and formal discourses" (239). There is little if anything that passes for plot arc either. You might open the book at any page and begin reading and be just as well abreast of the story as if you had began at the beginning. You would also be just as uninformed if you had started at the end and read backward to the beginning. Nothing of value is lost in this episodic reading, and it mirrors the very structure of Bateman's personality: "It is hard for me to make sense on any given level. Myself is fabricated, an aberration. I am a noncontingent human being. My personality is sketchy and unformed" (Ellis 276). Ellis creates a mind numbing "private maze" for the reader, as well as Bateman (254).

          Speaking of the excesses of both the murders and the prose Rogers notes, "these passages are, structurally speaking, no different in combinatorial 'value' than the long passage in the early chapter 'Morning' wherein Patrick describes his morning grooming ritual" (233). The excruciating minutiae of the novel is at times almost as difficult to read as the murders. Far from being satire, social criticism, or erotica, violence is portrayed as an attempt at circumventing Bateman's own nihilism. "It is precisely the novels excess of violence that overwhelms, frustrates, annoys, upsets, and even sickens; it is this (literal) overkill that provokes readers to throw away the book, to tear it apart, to spit at it and, potentially, to talk or write about it" (Abel 144). One wonders if the chorus of voices attempting to understand the inane and repetitive nature of the narrative is not so dissimilar from the narrative itself.

          Although it has been the subject of intense scrutiny, I would argue that Batemans violence against women actually says very little about Batemans attitudes towards women. The violence against women in the book is a very specific twist on the atrocious nature of Bateman. It is not enough to kill a man, as societies ideal of men is virile and independent. Women on the other hand are seen, by feminist writers and others, as victims without agency that need defending. Bateman's murders and rapes (the two are almost always simultaneous in the novel) of women do not show Ellis's hostility to women, instead, they work to underline the "impaired capacity to feel" in the novels central character (Ellis 254). As Vartan Messier explains in his essay "Violence, Pornography, and Voyeurism as Transgression in Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho," "The irony of Ellis' minimalist prose style . . . is that they relegate the responsibility for feelings and emotions to the reader . . . the reader is able to feel what Bateman does not—namely, feelings of disgust and repulsion for the acts of sexual violence" (86). The violence against women reinforces Bateman's orgiastic "bloodlust" and demonstrate his inhumanity to those humanity deems most in need of societies defense, namely women (Ellis 206). Complicating this, the murders mix both predation and retaliation. Many of the women and men that Bateman kills have had some kind of power or rank over him. As with his ex-girlfriend Bethany, in the novel, or Paul Allen in the film.

          Many have voiced outraged at the violence in the novel, such as Jane Caputi in her article "American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction." To summarize, she sees Bateman's murders as a mirror to the reality of violence perpetrated against women in contemporary America, and implies that this type of fiction can encourage that same violence (104). The outrage seems to be directed at the perceived misogyny of Ellis, rather than the fact that people are being tortured and murdered en mass in the novel. This should not be seen as a fault of Caputi's assessment however. Richard Giles notes in his essay “I Hope You Didn’t Go into Raw Space without Me”: Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho," "At times one feels that Ellis is deliberately writing the most politically incorrect novel imaginable" (161).

          Though the violence against women is overt, it is not in isolation. Mark Storey, in his article "And as Things Fell Apart," characterizes this violence as "a wish to objectify women in purely aesthetic terms and to deny them any interiority or autonomy that might threaten masculine superiority" (66). Storey gets it half right. No one is safe from the dehumanizing aestheticization of being a murder victim in the novel. Throughout the story Bateman murders: bums, dogs, taxi drivers, puppies, prostitutes, coworkers, a five year old boy, street performers, police officers, rats, his fiance, his fiance's neighbors, delivery boys, maids, socialites, call girls, and competing businessmen, to name a few. The list of people he does not kill is almost more telling than the list of people he does. He is on the verge of killing both Jean, his secretary, and Luis Curuthers, a closeted homosexual coworker, both of which are in love with him, numerous times, but does not. Caputi and other critics argue that such serial killer narratives "terrorizes women . . . and empower men," but Bateman specifically contradicts this reading in the novel (101): "I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this - and I have, countless times, in just about every act I've committed - and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling" (Ellis 276). These murders are not performative, they are not a symbolic attack, or defense, of anything. The victims of the murders are not the object of concern for Bateman, instead it is his own intense, apocalyptic, and meaningless internal world.

          A satirical or moralistic reading of the novel condemns the reader to the same kind tautology that Bateman is trapped in. It is an endless reexamination of entrails. The facts of the murders, whether they did or did not happen, are largely irrelevant, as is any moral validation or condemnation of the events of the novel.The violence and ennui work together to create the impressionistic effect of the novel. As Abel observes: Ellis's abandonment of any pretense to characterization, psychology, or motivation paradoxically lures readers into longing for the very violence Ellis does to English prose. Readers prefer the affective quality of prosaic boredom to that of heightened graphic aggression, yet it is of course the exposure to the former that affects and effectuates the response to the latter . . . the text decidedly exists on both levels, as evidenced by the forcefulness of the critical responses to it: that of the actual physical violence committed by Bateman and that of the prose itself (143).

          If the structure or subject matter of the novel provoke or frustrate readers it is no accident. Moreover, it is a common theme of post-modern fiction to insist that the reader find their own meaning in the text, even if they arrive at the conclusion that the text itself is meaningless. Taking the long view of American fiction through an examination of two very different books, Sylvia Soderlind in her essay, "Branding the Body: American Violence and Self-fashioning from The Scarlet Letter to American Psycho," concludes: "If THIS—being a postmodern American in a world in which interiority doesn’t matter, where value has no meaning outside the world of commerce and where nation signifies exclusion—does not offer an exit from hell, then our task as readers is to look for its potential counterpart—THAT which might" (76).

          Though catharsis evades Bateman throughout the book, it is still possible to parasitically indulge in it for the reader. Whether by examining the novel, engaging with its more difficult passages, or quiting it altogether . An impressionistic bend would be well advised, as Bateman's warts are many. Living beneath them is a sphinx, and though its nature is mysterious, its vitality and intensity is unquestioned.

who are all these toxic whores???

WE DONT STOP TILL THE SCREAMING STARTS

From my collection . . .

 

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. 

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

BEEP BEEP, BEEP.

 


PRERAMPLE:

      I do genuinely believe Lolita is the greatest love story I have ever read. This perhaps says more about me than it does about Lolita, but all the same. When my professor pitched the paper to us he specifically said he didnt want us to write about two things, pedophilia, and love. This hurt a bit, because ive read Lolita twice now, and the overwhelming thing I took from it both times was how absolutely tragic of a love story it is. Between all of Naboko's word play and humor and backhanded complements to american culture there runs the deeply inscribed love story that provides the whole theme of the book. There are particular sections, ugh, look at this, if you cant relate to this kind of romanticism just kill yourself:

“I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago - but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither - I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.” 

This endless and infinite and terrible unrequited love. This vicarious and imaginary love, ohh man, it hits me hard:

“We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep.” 

I think I could go all night just pulling lines from this book. The quality of the writing is incredibly high right from the first page and remains throughout. You would be better served highlighting the sections that arnt worth quotes than highlighting the ones that are. Id only rank it below Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian for sheer literary craftsmanship. I dont know what kind of mindless goon you have to be to read Lolita and then stop, or put it down for good, because of the, *gasp!* immorality of it. Or the amorality, or whatever. I dont know. 

     Anyway, the Adrian Lyne film, though no were near as good as the book, is still an alright movie. Jeremy Irons is pretty good in it actually, though I imagined humbert as a bit more of a buffoon. But because Lynes film, as well as kubricks absolute crap fest, were both so markedly different I latched onto that as a subject. The Marshall McLuhan quote "the medium is the message," is near and dear to me and, frankly, has shaped and continues to shape my entire world view. I should make a blog post about it at some point . . .

     So, for this one I left the work cited notes in because the essays I cited were actually pretty interesting. Also a note about the title . . . "Get out of my dreams, get into my car" (WATCH THE VIDYA MAN!) is actually a reference to an old ringo star song, which was a cover of another song which was titled "You're Sixteen" by the Sherman Brothers. It contains the line:

You walked out of my dreams, into my car,
Now you're my angel divine.
You're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine.

Which parallels nicely with the story of Lolita of course. And then the Billy Ocean song, which flips the line and syncs up with the final meeting between lo and humbert, 

“Life is short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.” 

Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car:

An Exploration of Private and Public Space in Lolita 

      Perhaps one of the most audacious story lines conceived in the last century, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita at first seems an improbable classic. The novel documents the tale of our humble narrator, Humbert Humbert, an itinerant and worldly incroyable with a Hollywood handsome face and a "fancy prose style" (Nabokov 9). Humbert's cool visage, however, conceals monstrous secrets. Not only is he no stranger to sanatoriums or Parisian prostitutes, Humbert is a life long pedophile, incestuous stepfather, and by the end of the novel, a murderer. It might be expected that Humbert would alienate readers, but Nabokov so exquisitely manages his novels aesthetic that many have been able to look past Humbert's unseemly acts. As Jen Shelton observes in her essay "'The word is incest': Sexual and linguistic coercion in Lolita," "Nabokov plays with readers, whom he pushes towards a moralistic reading of the text and then taunts out of that reading" (Shelton 273) . Lolita confounds typical methods of analysis. Nabokov himself characterized his explanations for the origin of the book as "a conjurer explaining one trick by preforming another" (Nabokov 329). This complex sexual drama being what it is, it is no surprise that the book has twice been adapted into film, most recently by director Adrian Lyne as Lolita. Although still functionally the same story, Lyne's Lolita differs predictably. Speaking of Lyne's film adaptation, Sarah Miles Watts in her essay "Lolita: Fiction into Films without Fantasy," argues that the lack of Nabokov's prose in the film leaves the characters bereft of anything but perfunctory dialogue (Watts 298). Although Lyne "fails to probe Nabokov's depths of language," (Watts 299) it is not Nabkov's prose but the very architecture of the novel itself that leads to such difficulty in creating a film adaptation. Artistic possibilities differ in film and literature and the radically different structure of these two media taints any adaptation of Nabokov's novel.

      An explicit reenactment of the text in the public medium of film would be inconceivable, not because it wouldn't be able to bring Nabokov's "fancy prose" to the film (Nabokov 9), but instead because the prose style exists specifically to obscure what humbert himself is terrified of; the explicit public examination of his sex life with Lolita. Jennifer L. Jenkins, in her cleverly titled essay "Searching high and Lo: unholy quests for Lolita," makes the point eloquently: "Humbert takes refuge in ornate prose and ritual circumambulation to shield himself from the devastating reality of his sacra" (Jenkins 213). Oddly enough it is Lolita in Lyne's film that best captures this tension between internal ideation and external reality: "You look one hundred percent better when I can't see you!" she barks at one point in the film (Lyne). Lolita's youth defines her status as a nymphet: "I would have the reader see 'nine' and 'fourteen' as the boundaries" (Nabkov 17). It is the very youth of the "fey child," not Nabokov's prose, that makes her on screen depiction so difficult (Nabkov 132). Shorn of her youth, Lyne's Lolita is played by the seventeen year old Dominique Swain. Too old to be Humbert's Lo. 

      The fact of Lolita's age is no small thing. Shelton observes that "the presence of the incest taboo separates 'civilized' societies from uncivilized ones" (278). Although Shelton speaks specifically about incest taboos, analogous cultural attitudes exist towards pedophilia. As strong as any social taboo may be "In practical effect . . . incest that is not publicly narrated is acceptable "(Shelton 278). A public demonstration, such as film, that violates these taboos flies in the face of the social order, and so must "lead to disciplinary action" (Shelton 278). But unlike film, Literature creates a direct dialogue between writer and reader. The interior of the readers mind if much less subject to such invasive "disciplinary action" (Shelton 278).
      
     Literature operates in a private sphere. Bereft of images, a novelist must create within the mind of the reader with only words on a page. The experience of the reader is encoded within the text. The author stimulates and simultaneously anticipating the readers own imagination, something Nabokov does quite well incidentally, such as in Humbert's final meeting with Lolita: "Then I pulled out my automatic – I mean, this is the kind of fool thing a reader might suppose I did. It never even occurred to me" (Nobokov 297). The signification of the author's word is given meaning inside the readers mind. We can imagine what we cannot say, and we can imagine what cannot be. 
 
      Film is different from literature in that it is a public forum and a public spectacle. An actor emotes into a camera, not into the audience. Stripped of Nabkov's "linguistic leaps into thought, memory, and imagination" and put under the glare of the spotlight, Humbert is "no longer a poet, obsessed with creating his aesthetic dream; he is a pedophile" (Watts 297). The medium of film sets a narrative boundary to the communication possible within the medium. This recalls Marshall McLuhan's old aphorism that "the medium is the message". Live action film is tied to reality in a way literature is not. In film the map most emphatically is the territory. Film, by nature of the medium, is especially concerned with surface textuality, principally that of its actors. The narrative of a film is public and is therefore publicly scruitable. Herein lies the impossibility of bringing Nabkov's work to film. 

     Nabokov's complex game of bombing out the very trenches he digs to fight from has proven to frustrate and fascinate readers and directors alike. Lolita's age and Humbert's pedophilia provide the framework for the story, but also revolt many. Though distasteful, these elements cannot be removed. "The poison was in the wound, you see. And the wound wouldn't heal" (Lyne). 

Works Cited

Jenkins, Jennifer. "Searching High and Lo: Unholy Quests for Lolita" Twentieth Century Literature 51/2 (2005): 210-43. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Lolita. Dir. Adrian Lyne. Perf. Jeremy Irons, Dominique Swain and Melanie Griffith. 1997. Lions Gate Films Home Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. New York: Everyman's Library, 1992. Print.

Shelton, Jen. "'The word is incest': Sexual and linguistic coercion in Lolita" Textual Practice 13/2 (1999): 273-94. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

Watts ,Sarah Miles. "Lolita: Fiction into Films without Fantasy" Literature Film Quarterly 29/4 (2001): 297-302. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Oct. 2012.

I THINK THE ONLY REASON I EVEN BUY MAKERS MARK IS TO PEEL THAT ANOYING RED SHIT OFF THE TOP

Fogging it in

TIME AND PRESSURE

Information is Ammunition: Risk Management in "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"

      Although Stephen King is most famous for his works of horror, his range as a writer extends far beyond that. His novella "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" was adapted by Frank Darabont into the film The Shawshank Redemption, and is widely regarded as one of the best films of its time (Richard Armstrong, "Self-Made Man: The Shawshank Redemption" 83). Hope is a central theme of the story, and the protagonist Andy Dufresne battles with hopelessness throughout the film. "That tall drink of water with the silver spoon up his ass", Andy is sent to Shawshank prision for a crime he did not commit, and should have been broken by what he endured (Darabont). In spite of this Andy remains resilient, even rebellious. "Get busy living, or get busy dying" Andy quips (Darabont). He ultimately uses his knowledge of the prisons walls and sewer systems to free himself and retire to "a warm place that has no memory" (King 66). Though having hope is important, Andy's hope is not just a vague panacea for worry. Andy's hope drives him to "perseverance and hard work" (King 85). It drives him to accumulate the knowledge necessary to manage the risks of prison life, and prison escape.

      Ariel Meirav, in his essay The nature of hope, presents an interesting hypothetical scene between Andy and his close friend in the story, Red. In it, Meirav attempts to understand the role of hope in the film:

"Suppose Andy and Red have been discussing the chances of attaining freedom, reviewing all options . . . Perhaps Red summarizes the picture by saying that the chances are one in a thousand. And Andy does not disagree. But, assuming them to be as rational as we like, where does this compel them regarding their hopes one way or another? Red will say, ‘I grant you it is possible, but the chance is only one in a thousand!’,whereas Andy will say, ‘I grant you the chance is only one in thousand, but it is possible!’." (223)

Meirav presents Andy's hope and Red's relative hopelessness as the crucial difference between the characters. Although Andy may indeed believe in the possibility that his hope grants him, this alone cannot be all that sustains him through his time in prison. Nor is hope the soul cause for his schemes. A "tough-minded" calculator, Andy uses all of the skills that propelled him to success outside the prison to make good his escape from inside it (Armstrong 80).

      Frank Partnoy, a professor of Law and Finance at the University of San Diego School of Law, in an interview for the PBS documentary series Frontline, presents a somewhat different assessment than Meirav as to why two parties with the same odds of success might make different choices. The question regards were risk will flow in financial markets: "If you ask people, they're basically split between two camps: One says that risk will flow to the smartest person, the person who best understands it, and the other says that risk will flow to the dumbest person, the person who least understands it". Andy takes an incredible risk by attempting to break out of the prison. Red estimates that there have been about 400 escapes from "the Shank" and only about 10 had succeded (King 75 ). Andy takes the long odds on breaking out of the prison because his hope is married with years of meticulous plotting. In the film Red remarks, "I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall . . . Andy did it in less than twenty " (darabont) . Andy's plans work on geologic time scales. He has a "patient, meticulous nature" (King 86) . He researches the lay of the prison sewer lines, and experiments with the strength of the prisons walls. Andy invests in something that the warden, the other prisoners, and the guards, do not, knowledge. Because he is better informed he can manage risk in a way other prisoner of Shawshank can't.

      Carving strait through the prision walls was a gamble. Andy was "playing for high stakes" (King 90). Though prisoners of the past had also took the gamble, it was Andy's insider knowledge that made his success "possible" (Meirav 223). The walls of the prision that had confined so many men were only a challenge to him. Hope planted the seed, but Andy then got to the hard work of making that hope a reality.

(ed. not the greatest paper but shawshank is boring and I like the Partnoy quote.)

I WANT TO GO BACK IN TIME AND HAVE SEX WITH CARSON MCCULLERS

IF I COULD FIGHT ANYONE ALIVE OR DEAD ID FIGHT CHUCK PALANIUK

Dont make me say it!

PRERAMBLE:

     Fight club was the zeitgeist film of my high school age. It set a fire in everyone of my friends bellies and we immediately began making rumors and small talk of starting our own fight club. Whispered about in the back of the class, this terrified a few of my post-columbine teachers who obviously never got the joke. We were fascinated by the nihilistic philosophy and tylers undeniable charismatic swagger. But personally, a decade later and inexorably wiser, the didactic, anarchistic mode of the film falls very flat. I dont need tyler to tell me how to think. I dont need tyler durden to define masculinity. Trying to define something like this, even in fiction, is just silly. Instead id like compelling answers to the problems raised in the book. Unfortunately the solutions given are ineffectual or absurd. Stripped of its wit and aesthetic polish the story reveals itself to be a sophomoric, though entertaining, fantasy. The whole thing has this weird late 90s "geewiz!" buzz to it that doesnt take itself seriously but simultaneously wont let the viewer take it seriously. It still makes for great fiction, but not very compelling social criticism. 

     That being said, the film has an amazing kind of longevity. It has this social purchase I almost cannot understand. Even today I hear random references to the flim in the conversations of passers by. It is routinely parodied in television. It may be nothing but fantasy masturbation, like Stokers dracula or something, but somehow it keeps being relevant. The incredible thing when I think about this, it would have been relevant in the 1970s as well. It is a critisism of the past and the future. I think one of the reasons for its staying power is the declarative nature of the film. Its far and away different from so much of this "choose your own adventure" type postmodern literature bullshit. Fight club doesnt leave the ending up to the viewer, it doesnt let you wonder about what its saying. It emphatically beats you about with every one of its messages until you understand it, and once you think you understand it?Well it keeps on beating you with it until it no longer makes any sense. Maybe its just my hazy nostalgia but I cant help but think of it and the matrix at the same time. Both of them are so different, so good, in sections and yet they are both so obviously flawed. Whatever the case, I guess I still love them like some kind of goofy faced childhood crush. Anyway, on to the homework:

I saw a shirt like this for 10$ at target yesterday, what the fuck target.

From cautionary tale to passion play, the transfiguration of Fight Club.

      Chuck Palahniuks's novel Fight Club, and David Fincher's subsequent film of the same name, have become the zeitgeist of late 20th century angst. Its nihilistic philosophy and anti-consumerist ideology paint a bleak veiw of American life in which, as Asbjom Gronstad puts it in his essay "One-Dimensional Men: Fight Club and the Poetics of the Body", "Strategies of apathy have become the only seduction" (8). Although the film has been wildly sucessful, and garnered Palahniuk much fame, there is a striking divergence between the book and the film in the closing scenes. Palahinuk's book was a cautionary tale. Although it criticized contemporary America, it also cautioned against those who would destroy it to save it. Fincher's film flys in quite a different direction. It roundly celebrates nihilistic self destruction while simultaneously operating as a parody of that nihilism (Gronstad 5). It then goes on to build that nihilism into a constructive, self-actualizing, ending for our main character, Jack. In doing so it dramatically shifts the message of the book. Palahniuk's book paints Tyler's philosophy as a dead end. Fincher portrays it as a means to an end.

      Most fiction is constructed as a morality tale and Fight Club is no different. This being the case, the end of the fiction, and the events that lead to it, can dramatically alter the message. As well, we should not conflate the message of specific characters with the message of the author. Palahniuk's book ends with a bleak and temporally endless scene. Jack is locked away in an asylum, presumably more or less forgotten by anyone but himself. ‘‘The complete and right-away destruction of civilization’’ was Tyler's goal but it fell far, far short (Palahniuk 125). Although Jack seems to have matured beyond his Tyler Durden phase to some degree, he is only brave enough to contradict himself a bit when he lets slip near the end of the book, "We are not special. We are not crap or trash either" (154). Little development seems to have happened between Lou's basement and God's walnut desk. There is a self conscious disdain for the nihilistic philosophy of Tyler Durden that Palahniuk writes into the ending of the book and this is a very real and personal level of criticism from him. It is easy enough to lampoon IKEA furniture and middle class consumerism, but the obvious next question - the existential question for which Tyler and project mayhem is infatically not Palahniuks answer – is, whats next? So we are the "all singing, all dancing crap of the world" (Fincher). Okay, what next? Jack hits bottom and builds a personal army. Okay, what next? Jack's answer in fiction is project mayhem, but this leads Jack to ruin and near as the reader can tell not much else.

      Fincher's Fight Club comes as a much neater, do it yourself, type package (Marla Misek "Case study: for Fight Club and Seven, PACKAGE makes PERFECT")(1). Many of the most clever and insightful lines of the book are given to Tyler and this heavily emphasizes his importance in the master-student relationship he has with Jack. Tyler is supreme, everyone else is subordinate. "THE FIRST RULE OF PROJECT MAYHEM IS YOU DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS!" (Fincher). Fincher constantly breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the audience. The already didactic narrative of the book becomes a direct scene by scene lecture. Built into this is Fincher's in-line commentary. When Robert Paulson is shot and brought back to the paper street house, Jack's reaction is that of any reasonable person taking a look at the project mayhem play book: "You morons! You're running around in ski masks trying to blow things up? What did you think was gonna happen!?" (Fincher). Strangely enough this self-destructive, superman tale even has a happy ending. Rather than the defacto prison of the book, Jack in the film is liberated not just from his previously banal life but from Tyler himself. Gronstad teases out a crucial point from this final scene: "it is tempting to read Jack's execution of his alter ego at the end of the film as the completion of a long process of symbolic divestiture." (6). Not only does Tyler not lead Jack to ruin in Fincher's film, he is a crucial step to maturation. Hitting bottom "works" for Jack in the film. Tyler is the yang to Jacks IKEA boy yin, but both must eventually be destroyed before Jack can graduate into a more mature, self-actualized form.

      Tylers Character is turned from a savant terrorist into a messianic man's-man figure. Jennifer Barker, in her essay "A Hero Will Rise: The Myth of the Fascist Man in Fight Club and Gladiator" quotes Robert Kolker as saying that films such as these affirm "what the viewer has always believed or hoped is (odiously) right and accessible. . . The films offer nothing new beyond their spectacle, nothing the viewer does not already want, does not immediately accept" (173). The viewer is coaxed into loving the charismatic wit of Tyler because he reinforces their own beliefs. They are in on all his derisive jokes. He articulates what they can't articulate. He looks, dresses, and fights in a way they never could. There is nothing unsettling about the ending of the film or the death of Tyler himself if you adhere to his logic.

      The dramatically changed final scene and the elevated importance of the Tyler Durden character are part of what has made the movie such a cult hit. The somewhat ambiguous anti-climax of the book has been replaced with a feel good ending. Even if our humble narrators alter-ego is finished he at least has one last hurrah with the credit card company head quarters going down in flames. Not exactly the most realistic ending, but we must accept the fiction as well as the universe it operates in. And to that end Fincher's climax is much more internally consistent and fulfilling.

IF YOU ARNT WASTED THE DAY IS

One day I will be a beautiful white woman.

 

 

SMOKE WEED WHEN IT IS PERMITTED BY THE CONSTABULARY

damn shame . . .

     Eric Baileys feb.24th, 2009 Los Angeles times article "A call to tax marijuana" takes the right side of the argument for all of the wrong reasons ( I dont actually read the LA times but I wrote this for school, you dig?). Bailey supports a ballot measure put forward by california assemblyman Tom Ammiano (it totally got shut down by the feds but what else is new? - ed.) that would create a new regulatory structure to tax and control marijuana similar to the regulations already in place for beer, wine and liquor. This new taxation opportunity could help solve californias budget problems with claimed revenue to the state upwards of one billion dollars a year. (not that anyone believes these specious numbers but still - ed.)

     Though I agree with legalization in some form for marijuana alleviating the states debt should not be the motivating factor. In fact I think this line of thought is a little crass. Easy-outs for worried debtors are hardly neutral territory for policy making. If marijuana is so harmless that it can be legalized as part of a taxation scheme then we ought to legalize it whether or not it creates tax revenue. We should first consider what harm legalizing marijuana could cause and then weigh this against the harm that the prohibition on marijuana causes. I dont even think the question should be framed the way it typically is. It should not be "why should we legalize marijuana?" but instead "why should marijuana be illegal?". If the voters of california decide that legalization is less harmful to society than prohibition discussion of taxation can come after that. The potential revenue should not be a driving factor. Reducing the issue strictly to the level of dollars saved is a reduction into absurdity. The role of government is not simply to save the government money at any cost (never-mind what the libertarians say - ed.). The role is instead to mitigate harm to society at large and to promote its welfare.

     Predictably enough although legalization supporters in Bailys article frame things as strictly an economic issue the opposition does not. They instead consider the public harm legalization might cause. This is then a case in which both sides speak right past one another. Addressing the way drug cartels might respond to legalization Calyina Fay, executive director of Save Our Society From Drugs says "They're (drug cartels) going to heavily target our children". Statements by other legalization opponents follow similar themes. I dont put any credibility in these warnings. They read like abstract game theory explanations with assumptions predicated on assumptions. Politicking and the subsequent lawmaking is typically reduced to this. The premise of these arguments is always that human beings are rational actors with easily predictable behavior. They assume that we are fully informed about all of the possible variables in the environment that might influence peoples behavior. Reality flies in the face of these artificial scenarios and yet they gain traction in part because they seem plausible enough as they are presented. I wonder though, how could Fay possibly know how drug cartels will react to legalization? Or drug users for that matter? Or how this cascade of events might effect children? How would anyone know, being that this sort of experiment has never before been attempted? The cost of legalization is entirely unknown. No one is served by sweeping conjecture and impassioned pleas about "what if" scenarios. I understand that there is always uncertainty in lawmaking but if there is not even an attempt at rational analysis of applicable statistics and facts we are left with nothing but fear mongering and paranoia.

     Although I support legalization, neither tax revenue not naive appeals to emotion are the cause. Instead it is because, to steal a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, "it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg". Not only does legalization not pick my pocket, it seems to me that prohibition does. Further, legalization does not harm me in any direct way. It seems to me that the prohibition on marijuana causes much more harm to users and the society at large than marijuana itself does. Prohibition as it stands does almost nothing to limit access to the drug but multiplies its damages. This being the case I am led to take up the side that seems most pragmatic . I support legalization not because it is good but because this is the best way to mitigate harm to society at large.

OMG WTF WHY AM I ALWAYS ON HOLD FUCK

dead dudes and bombs and shit