headlessparrot

As a teacher of first-year students:

WHY U LET IN SO MANY DUMMIES!?

What's your opinion of the movie version of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close? I'm curious, especially given how extraordinarily divided critical opinion was. (A related question would be how much--if any--input you have had in the movie versions of your novels.)

Wasn't so much refusing to acknowledge; Wallace fairly openly derided Ellis. "Girl with Curious Hair" (from the collection of the same title) is a pretty obvious satirical take on the kind of po-mo nihilism you find in some of Ellis's work (and I say that as someone who nevertheless quite likes [some of] Ellis's writing).

In a rather famous interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace also said of American Psycho that "it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself." He goes on:

"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."

I find this response interesting, because I don't think the D.T. Max bio did treat Wallace with kid gloves. I thought it was a pretty even-handed treatment that was, at times, incredibly unflattering (especially in depicting Wallace's relationships with women and his family), and took great pains to navigate between the high-flown idealism and earnestness of his work, and the failure again-and-again of the real-life Wallace to live up to those ideals.

Yes.

Because I'm patiently waiting for Jonathan Safran Foer to recognize my genius--based on one reddit comment, tossed off in ten seconds--and take me under his wing, thereby plucking me from obscurity and making me known to all.

Yes. I write like a dick. Blame it on grad school if you want.

Edit: also, I fucking love steak. And I ate a Big Mac after finishing Eating Animals.