"'Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written' is how his new novel, The Shards, his first in thirteen years, begins."

"It is narrated by Ellis’s alter ego, a fifty-six-year-old writer named Bret.... Bret listens to bands such as Icehouse and Ultravox (he especially likes the song 'Vienna,' with its soaring, mournful refrain, 'This means nothing to me') and spends weekends at parties or the movies, or in his room working on the book that will one day become Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero (1985).... Ellis published Less Than Zero when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Bennington College. Its cultural impact is hard to overstate. The book is narrated by Clay.... Clay drives around, does drugs, goes to parties, and remembers his dead grandparents.... ... Ellis’s desire to see the worst is so all-consuming that it blinds him to anything else. He has a once-in-a-generation talent for conjuring dread and disgust and exposing them as the consequences of a sick, hollow, and narcissistic culture; he’s also funny. But the truth that lies beneath the surface of the world is not that we are depraved authors of Boschian nightmares; it’s that our Boschian nightmares exist alongside acts of love, compassion, faithfulness. Ellis’s stark and unsentimental moral vision is blind to half of human truth, and in this way has remained as childlike as the innocence it wants to dispel...."

Writes the novelist Christine Smallwood, in "The Exorcist/Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty" (NYRB).

You can buy "The Shards" here. I've never read a Bret Easton Ellis book. Have you? I've never seen a movie based on one of his books either. I'm not recommending the new book, just observing its publication and trying to understand what Christine Smallwood is saying about it. Maybe read her novel: "The Life of the Mind."

Bret Easton Ellis explains his feeling of being "anti-anti-Trump."

The anti-Trump people who bother him so much are the elitists who reacted when "this boorish clown... walked into the china shop and started knocking things all over the place with his orange skin and his weird hair." Their problem is, according to BEE, that they take Trump "literally" instead of getting the "overall message."

Now, that's mostly wrong, in my view, even though I too have the feeling of being "anti-anti-Trump." I'd say the anti-Trumpsters don't stick to the literal text of what Trump says. They move to the level of "overall message" and they get a very alarming message.

BEE is making his argument too easy. In the end of that video, he tells his fellow elitists that they've got to start "realigning" how they "feel" about Trump. Why? If it's all about feeling, why should they reject their initial feeling? Is BEE saying that because Trump looks funny — orange skin and weird hair — the initial feelings of elitists ought to be risen above while other people's feelings are better for some reason? Who is feeling this out the right way?

Speaking of judgment based on the way people look, here's a photo I took of Rob Reiner freaking out about Trump. This was on the Chris Matthews show on Friday. I took this photograph of my TV screen because I thought Reiner looked like a man drowning and paddling furiously to keep his head above water:



Here's the text of what Reiner was saying as he looked like that:

"There were five hard examples of obstruction of justice laid out in the Mueller report. What else do you need? The guy’s working with the Russians. He says he is going to continue working with the Russians. The Russians are already playing. We’ve seen the Senate Intelligence Committee tell us that they’re playing right now and they’re working hard to defeat us. Are we now saying that we’re just going to give ourselves over to the Russians? We beat them in the Cold War, and they’re beating us now in the cyber war. And if we don’t stand up to them, it could be the end of our democracy."

That's awful as a literal text and I was reacting to the way Reiner looked. Would BEE critique my anti-anti-Trump feeling because I'm seeing Reiner as a boorish clown and paying attention to his actual words? Would BEE say that I need to be more sophisticated, overcome that reaction, and understand Reiner's "overall message"?

FOOTNOTE: The expression is "bull in a china shop," not "clown in a china shop." For a lengthy discussion of the expression "bull in a china shop," read this post from 2017.

"The hysteria over Trump is what I am talking about. It’s not about his policies or supposed racism. It’s about what I see as an overreaction to Trump...."

"I just think that there is a man that got elected President. He is in the White House. He has vast support from his base. He was elected fairly and legally. And I think what happened is that the left is so hurt by this that they have overreacted to the Presidency. Now, look, I live with a Democratic, socialist-bordering-on-communist millennial. I hear it every day.... I am not that interested in politics. I am not that interested in policy. What I was interested in was the coverage. Especially in Hollywood, there was an immense overreaction. I don’t care really about Trump that much, and I don’t care about politics. I was forced to care based on how it was covered and how people have reacted. Sure, you can be hysterical, or you can wait and vote him out of office.... I think I am an absurdist. I think politics are ridiculous.... I think the problem is that I don’t necessarily see this as interesting as fiction.... It’s interesting to have that back-and-forth pull in an interview. The only problem, however, is that I am not that political, and so, when we have this conversation, and you confront me with certain things like this, I really am, I have to say, at a loss."

Said Bret Easton Ellis, interviewed by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker. BEE is promoting his new book, "White," which comes out in 5 days. My excerpt leaves out all of Chotiner's contributions. Put them back in, and you can see Chotiner must believe he's made a fool out of BEE.

"The collective outrage over 'American Psycho' provides a context for the essays in 'White,' whose topics range from [Bret Easton] Ellis’s unsupervised 1970s childhood..."

"... in upper-middle-class Sherman Oaks, Calif., to his critiques of movies and movie stars, to President Trump and the digital echo chamber. His points are not always agreeable, but that’s never stopped him. In one essay, 'Liking,' Ellis indicts the 'horrible blooming of "relatability" — the inclusion of everybody into the same mind-set … the ideology that proposes everybody should be on the same page, the better page.'... He’s complained about liberals who think he’s a Trump apologist.... 'Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,' Ellis said. 'The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.' He really wishes everyone would just calm down...
[He prefers] to treat the news cycle as fleeting entertainment rather than the end of the world ('Really, Jared Kushner looks great in a bathing suit')... Ellis finds himself now in his longest relationship to date, with a 32-year-old musician named Todd Schultz.... He described their post-2016 household as 'a bad sitcom of a crusty old Gen X-er, who’s kind of a lapsed liberal centrist, and my communist gay boyfriend.'... Todd’s a 'political monster' who 'sits in front of MSNBC having meltdown after meltdown … yet his bounce-back time is pretty good.' If Schultz stands for the melodramatic, media-obsessed millennial, then Ellis identifies as 'the old man on the porch,' whining over the cultural profundity of decades past."

From "Bret Easton Ellis Has Calmed Down. He Thinks You Should, Too. In the 1980s and ’90s, the novelist was seen as a literary bad boy and the voice of his generation. Now 55, he’s about to publish his first book in nine years" (NYT).

Here's that book of essays: "White."

Why's it called "White"? Is it racial? The article says that the original title was "White Privileged Male" and that it means to acknowledge the great old book of essays by Joan Didion, "The White Album."

ADDED: The opposition to the idea that "everybody should be on the same page" caught my eye because, just recently, somebody took me to task simply for using the phrase "on the same page" — "We need to be on the same page." He hated that, I was told.

"This kind of ideology is another example of how people don't care about movies or art anymore. Movies should only be made by a PC democracy!"

"It will hopefully not take years for a generation to rid itself of this kind of mindless, regressive, identity politics groupthink. Resist."

Tweets Bret Easton Ellis, linking to...

Why #ThreeBillboards has become the villain of this awards season https://t.co/EWm1oR4wNM

— Vulture (@vulture) January 11, 2018

"Why do I find Stephen Miller completely compelling and want to write a novel about him? Why do I not want to write a novel about Jim Acosta?"

Tweets "American Psycho" author Bret Easton Ellis.

Should you want to be the guy Bret Easton Ellis wants to write a novel about?

If you don't know what he's talking about, here's the hilarious/painful interchange between Miller (the Trump adviser) and Acosta (of CNN):



Selected quotes:

Acosta: “What the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’”

Miller: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”

Aside from his suitability as a character in a novel, Miller is certainly right that Acosta is conflating the Emma Lazarus poem with the Statue and that the original historical meaning of the statue precedes and is not the same as those famous lines in the poem. WaPo points that out:

“New Colossus” was not part of the original statue built by the French and given to the American people as a gift to celebrate the country’s centennial. Poet Emma Lazarus was asked to compose the poem in 1883 as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s base.... In 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’ death, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s base, just as millions of immigrants were streaming into New York harbor....

Earlier this year Rush Limbaugh blamed Lazarus for the false connection. “The Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration,” Limbaugh said on a January 31 broadcast. “So why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”...

From the Rush Limbaugh link:

It was originally intended to be delivered to celebrate the centennial of the Declaration, the American Revolution.... The statue was not intended to recognize immigration. It was intended to recognize liberty and freedom. If you think they’re intertwined, don’t be misled.

Rush proceeds to mock Madeleine Albright for saying that Trump's immigration policy is making the Statue of Liberty cry:

The statue doesn’t cry. The statue is a statue. It’s made out of bronze. It doesn’t cry. There aren’t any tears coming from the eyes of the Statue of Liberty ’cause there aren’t any eyes, and the Statue of Liberty is not welcoming immigrants. What it represents is the beacon of liberty and freedom!

Yeah, well, maybe, but it's not made out of bronze. It's pure copper. We're just all misreading everything. But there's a continuum from misreading to interpretation. I can say for a fact that the statue is made out of copper, but the meaning of the statue is cultural, and it means what it has come to mean in the hearts of Americans. What the French had specifically in mind when they sent it to us is relevant if that's what's in our hearts.

You know, it wasn't even green when it arrived. Being copper, it was copper-colored. Do original meaning fans deny that it's green?

IN THE COMMENTS: Fernandinande wrote:

"American Psycho"/I tried reading that a few months ago, and speaking of run-on sentences and that silly "grade" metric, I stopped reading after a two-page sentence which painfully detailed all the products and actions the guy used in his morning routine.

And yet, it you gave me 2 pages right now of Bret Easton Ellis's description of what he imagines Stephen Miller does and uses in his morning routine, I'd eagerly, happily read every word of it. I assume it would be... completely compelling.

Bret Easton Ellis is feeling the new zeitgeist.

Not having political discussions with anyone anymore. Done. Too much insanity. Another dinner ruined. People are fucking crazy. Get a grip.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) July 16, 2017

Defending the American voter I'm yelled at in Sunset Tower for being a Trump apologist and colluding with Russia. Is the Left fucking NUTS? pic.twitter.com/Bavvq5IqEV

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) July 16, 2017

"I don’t really know what the path to power is with protest, it’s done, this is where we are."

"If you wanna protest, protest the DNC, protest Hillary, protest whatever. But what you’re protesting here is an elected president. I think the protest is aiding this divisiveness, social media is aiding this, celebrity culture, the worst, is aiding it.... It is all about image and how people are swayed by surfaces and Trump disgusts people.... They see this big orange lump, angry, big puffy face and it really is quite a different step from the celebrity hep-cat, glamour of Obama.... People love celebrities, I love celebrities, I’m obsessed with celebrities, I’ve written books about celebrities, so I love that celebrity culture exists. But when celebrities become these kind of strident, political advisers, wagging their finger, really people don’t buy it. I do think there has been an overreaction to what’s going on. But that’s just endemic in the culture. It did not help Hillary Clinton at all having this mountain of celebrities on her side. Rejection, rejection."

Said Bret Easton Ellis. I'm totally with him on this. Exactly right. I'd say it myself, except the part about having written books about celebrities. But I have been blogging about celebrities for 13 years. I've been watching these characters as they interface with politics. They're just awful. Of course, BEE — great initials — is himself a celebrity and he's doing politics so... whatever. I love celebrities, I’m obsessed with celebrities....

Normalize, part 2.

Part 1, earlier this morning: "Trump steals their word: Normalize."

Now, I want to look at the history of the word "normalize." It makes me think of the sort of words that Strunk and White disapproved of:

-ize. Do not coin verbs by adding this tempting expression. [...] Never tack -ize onto a noun to create a verb. Usually you will discover that a useful verb already exists. Why say “moisturize” when there is the simple, unpretentious word moisten? 

They even single some -ize words out:

Finalize. A pompous, ambiguous verb....

Personalize. A pretentious word, often carrying bad advice. Do not personalize your prose; simply make it good and keep it clean.

Makes me feel like singing the Bob Dylan song:

I ain’t lookin’ to block you up
Shock or knock or lock you up
Analyze you, categorize you
Finalize you or advertise you

All I really want to do is, baby, normalize you. 

The OED traces normalize back to 1864,* to a New York Times article about the abuse of government power: "These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive." Here's the article, "Prussian Politics."

Measures to confirm and legalize the most arbitrary acts of the recess have been prepared and introduced into both Houses. A new anti-press bill, which embodies some of the most oppressive and odious provisions of the ordinances, has been carried through the Herrenhaus; while a projet de loi, which will entitle the Minister to raise revenue and make disbursements as often as the Deputies decline to sanction his budget, is before the Second Chamber, and will form the first subject for debate after the holidays. These attempts to normalize despotism display the impotency as well as the malignity of the Executive, for, of course, neither one measure nor the other will ever become law.

Normalize there meant to pass laws that would support what the government was doing. It's a synonym of "legalize," which also appears in that paragraph. The word "legalize" is no neologism. It goes back to the 1600s.

And, by the way, "finalize" was a new-ish word when Strunk and White bitched about it. (The OED says 1919.) "Personalize" goes back to the 1700s, if the idea is to represent something as a person — e.g., "The Poets are fond of personalizing both physical and moral Qualities" — but the annoying meaning begins in advertising with this bit of crap from 1910:

The Calvert label in a garment..identifies the best there is in Clothing Woolens; the highest grade of modeling and making. They've got the snap and the style that personalizes them; they've got the intrinsic worth that substantializes them.

As for "substantialize" — which looks quite idiotic to my modern eyes — it goes back to the 1700s. ("A sedate yet fervent sense of gratitude towards God... substantialized in the practice of every Christian virtue.")

The OED has an entry on the "-ize" suffix. The earliest word seems to be "baptize." There's a set of words that came to English from the Greek, and perhaps words with this pedigree are more... normal:

characterize, crystallize, harmonize, idolize, monopolize, organize,  stigmatize, symbolize, systematize, tantalize, agonize, apologize, philosophize, sympathize, theorize....

Can't object to those great words! They're not pompous or pretentious. They're solid English words, words that make you glad English is your native tongue.

The OED make a separate category out of words that came to English from Latin:

actualize, authorize, brutalize, civilize, colonize, familiarize, fertilize, formalize, fossilize, humanize, immortalize, legalize, memorize, nationalize, naturalize, neutralize, patronize, pulverize, realize, satirize, scrutinize, solemnize, sterilize, terrorize, vocalize....

They start to look weird when you see them all together, but these are also great words.

But is there some rule against creativity here, something wrong with ize-izing beyond the Greek and Latin? What bugged Strunk/White so much? The OED lists words "from later sources":

bastardize, jeopardize, villanize, womanize....

And words based on ethnicities — Americanize, Anglicize — and names — Bowdlerize, galvanize, mesmerize — and substances — carbonize, oxidize — and some odd "recent uses" like "The troop of nakedized children rushed downstairs" (from 1885).

Now, I have to go get dressed. I've got places to go, appointments to keep.

Please keep up the conversation. Verbalize. Conversationalize. Scrutinize Donald Trump and help determinize whether he ought to be normalized or Hitlerized... if you can believe your own eyes.
______________________________

* There's one earlier medical use of the term from 1847, but I'm going to ignore that. If I was going to take a tangent here, it would be about the use of normalize in a couple of famous fairly recent novels:

Erica Jong "Fear of Flying" (1974): "You always insist on normalizing your life."

Bret Easton Ellis, "American Psycho" (1991): "One should use an alcohol-free antibacterial toner with a water-moistened cotton ball to normalize the skin."

"Why is it once again that I feel the well-intentioned young liberal self-proclaimed feminist left has become so oversensitive about everything that we have entered into what is really an authoritarian cultural moment?"

"It just seems that it's so regressive and so grim and so unreal, like in some dystopian sci-fi movie: there's only one way to express yourself as some kind of neutered thing, this mound, this clump, turning away from your gender-based responses - towards women, towards men, towards sex. This neutering, this castration, is something no-one really wants or believes in, I hope. But hey, maybe if I go with it and pretend to believe it, it'll fill my column - and I do need to put out some clickbait this week."

Says Bret Easton Ellis, complaining about a specific incident which if you go to the link to find out about, you will, if you scroll down, be imposed on by a photograph — an arty photograph — that includes a bare breast.

You can also listen to his rant in podcast form, here, which I did. No bare breast to intrude on your peace of mind if you're listening to a podcast, other than the bare breasts your mind's eye summons up. That's an imposition of another kind. When I listened, I listened distractedly enough to hear "I do need to put out some clickbait this week" as BEE disparaging his own writing.

I told you about the cascade.

Just back from a dinner in West Hollywood: shocked the majority of the table was voting for Trump but they would never admit it publicly.

— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) February 21, 2016

What I posted a month ago: "The coming cascade of smart, educated people embracing Trump."

ADDED: Here's something I've been meaning to say about Trump: If a Democratic candidate were drawing in the sector of the American public that is going for Trump, they would be bragging about their appeal to the working class, the salt of the earth. 

"But it all ties into Generation Wuss and its wussy influence on social media to a degree; if you have a snarky opinion about anything, you’re a douche."

"To me, that’s problematic. It limits discourse. If you just like everything, what are we going to talk about? How great everything is? How often I’ve pushed the Like button on my Facebook page? Is it BuzzFeed who said they’re not going to run any negative reviews any more? Really, guys? What’s going to happen to culture then? What’s going to happen to conversation? It’s going to die."

Something Bret Easton Ellis said right after saying that "David Foster Wallace is a complete fraud" who by committing suicide has acquired "a very sentimental narrative."

Much more at the link, including a photo of Bret, lounging on his bed. He's barefoot and propped up with pillows and has Kleenex and a cell phone nearby. I don't think he was in that pose at exactly the moment when he denounced Generation Wuss and its wussy influence, but it's funny to think that.

"Lindsay [Lohan] topless and looking uncomfortable, real life porn actor James Deen frontless and pantless and unable to perform (I mean act)..."

"... added up to a disaster of a film that shouldn’t have been made in the first place."

The movie "The Canyons” — directed by Paul Schrader directed and written by Bret Easton Ellis — makes only $30,100. That's quite a feat, making that little, with that many elements that might draw the curious. In the old days, something that bad would attract some so-bad-it's-good attention. I'm thinking that, these days, there's so much bad that we've become immune to the so-bad-it's-good effect. When's the last time anyone said "So bad it's good"?

My preliminary efforts to answer that question fixes on the February 10, 2011, the day "Friday," by Rebecca Black was uploaded to YouTube. You have to go to Rebecca Black's official YouTube page, here, and endure a commercial if you want to see the video that was originally uploaded and derided.

I suspect "So bad, it's good" isn't a viable concept anymore. I looked for the phrase in Wikipedia and got taken to a subsection of the article "Cult film." I note that the article at the first link to this blog posts says that IFC Films released the film, for which it paid "nothing," in the hope that it would become "a cult film." "So bad it's good" is one way films in the past have arrived at "cult" status. Wikipedia's analysis of the phenomenon reveals emergent skepticism:

Jacob deNobel states that films can be perceived as nonsensical or inept when audiences misunderstand avant-garde filmmaking or misinterpret parody. Films such as Rocky Horror can be misinterpreted as "weird for weirdness sake" by people unfamiliar with the cult films that it parodies. deNoble ultimately rejects the use of the label "so bad it's good" as mean-spirited and often misapplied. Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zack Carlson has further argued that any film which succeeds in entertaining an audience is good regardless of irony. The rise of the Internet and on-demand films has led critics to question whether "so bad it's good" films have a future now that people have such diverse options in both availability and catalog, though fans eager to experience the worst films ever made can lead to lucrative showings for local theaters and merchandisers.

Maybe "So bad it's good" was never an accurate explanation of what was happening. Maybe somehow only the old "So bad it's good" stuff — like "Plan 9 From Outer Space" — is still amusing. But I do think it has something to do with all that crap on YouTube. There's so much bad that making it through badness is no longer a concept.

The trick now would be to make something actually good. But I suspect we've lost the knack for that too.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lauderdale Vet correctly notes that "So bad, it's good" was said frequently about last month's "Sharknado." My perception that the end had come was false. It's like that scene in a bad monster movie where you think the monster is dead, and — suddenly! — he attacks.

In "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves," Bret Easton Ellis — author of "American Psycho" — complains of his victimhood, as a gay man...

... at the hands of "The Culturally Correct Gay Elite," who enforce a strict stereotype of gay men as victims, to be coddled like children and who punish any gay man who — like Ellis — "makes crude jokes about other gays in the media (as straight dudes do of each other constantly) or express their hopelessness in seeing Modern Family being rewarded for its depiction of gays, a show where a heterosexual plays the most simpering ka-ween on TV and Wins. Emmys. For. It."

Within the clenched world of the gay PC police there has been a tightening of the reigns. It’s as if in this historic moment for gay men we somehow still need to be babied and coddled and used as shining examples of humanity and objects of fascination—the gay baby panda—and this is a new kind of gay victimization. The fact that it is often being extolled by other gays in the Name of the Good Cause is doubly stifling.

Okay, Bret. Much as I agree with you about the problems of infantilization and political correctness, I've got to further victimize you. Not you, the gay man. You the writer.

1. A "tightening of the reigns"? Especially when writing under the title "In the Reign of...," you need to know your metaphors. There's a difference between what kings do in their domain and the leather straps a rider uses to control a horse.

2. If you're offering to be the cutting critic and what you're criticizing is putting gay men into the victim role, don't whine about your own victimhood. It's incoherent. Be cuttingly critical and take the consequences.

Factoid about Ellis: "Feminist activist Gloria Steinem was among those opposed to the release of Ellis' book ['American Psycho'] because of its portrayal of violence toward women. Steinem is also the stepmother of Christian Bale, who played Bateman in the film. This coincidence is mentioned in Ellis' mock memoir Lunar Park."

More recently, Ellis got in trouble with the "gay elite" for tweeting that "openly and famously gay Matt Bomer who is publicly married to his partner seemed a weird idea for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the movie adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey." Ellis needs people to understand — and he's hurt that he was disinvited from the GLAAD awards —  that he "never said Gay Actors Can’t Play Straight Roles." Rather, he "thought this because of Matt’s easy openness with being gay... and with baggage that I believe would distract from the heavy sexual fantasy of that particular movie."

A key exchange in the first section of the book is Anastasia’s open questioning of Christian’s sexuality and his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, it becomes a very META scene. Right now, in this moment, this particular casting would be a distraction—the public/private life of the actor mixed-up with playing a voracious het predator.

Interesting insight... from a gay man who wrote about the ultimate "het predator" in "American Psycho." 20 years ago, when Steinem registered her complaint, we didn't know that Ellis was gay. He sat back and let the feminists develop all our theories about the violence in the hearts of heterosexual men:

A designer serial killer, ["American Psycho"] Bateman knows from Tumi leather attache cases and wool-and-silk suits by Ermenegildo Zegna and wing tip shoes from Fratelli Rossetti....

But his true inner satisfaction comes when he has a woman in his clutches and can entertain her with a nail gun or a power drill or Mace, or can cut off her head or chop off her arms or bite off her breasts or dispatch a starving rat up her vagina.

Can we go very META on that?