the shards – JimmyBramlett Dot Com

the shards

December 23 2023

I Need More Perversion

jimmy Blog books, bret easton ellis, britney spears, dead souls, gravity's rainbow, the shards, the woman in me, thomas pynchon 0

I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to this year. I always have this illusion that I will be that pretentious motherfucker who just reads and reads and reads and will be really fucking insufferable about it. But no. For the most part it was me trying to hide myself from the world while watching stupid Youtube videos. As always. Yup.

But I did manage to complete two books I had always wanted to finish.

I was so happy to finish Gogol’s Dead Souls. It was funny, riveting and irritating in all the best ways. The satire was very biting and made me realize that people have always been fucking idiots. Although it didn’t have that goth sensibilities I fantasized about during my adolescence having the same title of a Joy Division album, it was quite good.

Too bad Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow didn’t leave me as satisfied. While I did enjoy Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, for most of its 777 pages GR was absolute torture. I understood what the words meant, but when they were put together in the form of sentences, paragraphs, chapters, all meaning was lost. I was happy that I finished it, but for the most part I did not like it. Maybe I’ll have to reread it? (Yeah, let’s hold off on that idea for a while.)

And I don’t know if reading GR killed my enjoyment of reading because I quit the next two books I tried to read midway: Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe and New Millennium Boyz by Alex Kazemi. I found the Fuccboi unbearable and even though I am about five years older than the kids of NMB I didn’t identify with any of the kids. I didn’t even identify with some of the older kids. To be honest, I had borrowed NMB as an ebook from the library and let the loan lapse. Even though I didn’t identify with the kids, I did enjoy it more than I did Fuccboi.

I think I just need a big wasabi palate cleanser to my brain, CTRL+ALT+DELETE, whatever.

I also listened to my first audiobook: Britney Spears’s memoir The Woman in Me. I did like listening to the book, but don’t get me wrong: listening to an audiobook IS NOT READING. But this is a sad story, and listening to Michelle Williams narrate, especially during the head-shaving era, it was just fucking tragic. It put me back during that period, and I remember thinking that Britney was going punk because she had no other options. And with all of the shit people have been saying over the last few months, I guess people still haven’t learn to leave Britney the fuck alone. (butit’sstillnotreading)

I liked Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel The Shards especially for the nostalgia of 1981 LA, and I didn’t really like Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger. I now understand The Meaning of Mariah Carey (my birthday twin) and really want to hear her “grunge” album with her vocals. I dipped my toes into the “feminist retelling of Greek mythology” with Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra which was all right, meh, and fucking loved Ernst Junger’s WWI memoir of the battlefields in Storm of Steel.

Oh! I almost forgot. I also finally read Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye! Jesus fucking Christ how subliminally perverse! I need more perversion in my life. (I really think everyone does.)

March 20 2023

That’s So Bret!

jimmy Blog books, bret easton ellis, literature, the shards 0

I don’t know how to process Bret Easton Ellis. I don’t know if I like him, think he’s a twat, find him being a performative act. I just don’t know. I tend to like the fact that his opinions piss people off, and I always find myself not really caring what it was that pissed those people off. But fuck, he comes off like a pompous ass which sets my hair on end.

(From a Goodreads review of this book: “Banal, polemical, self-indulgent, misogynistic, sensationalist, verbose, and frankly, just all over the place. Ellis is an edgelord who brought to mind those wannabe auteurs like Sam Levinson whose work is desperately trying way too hard to be transgressive and brilliant (emphasis by the reviewer.)” Bret must have really pissed this reviewer off.)

Nonetheless I always tend to like his novels. I love his drug-hazed, philistine characters who are bereft of any emotions. I like the how they can be like caricatures at times much like how I love Gregg Araki’s characters in this teenage films.

In The Shards, Bret goes faux-tobiographical to his senior year at Buckley, a rich hoity-toity private school in the hills. It’s 1981, the start of his senior year, and he just wants to get through senior year and get the fuck away. A few things keep him occupied: writing his first novel which would become Less Than Zero; staying mostly in the closet by dating the prettiest girl in school Debbie Schaffer while having side pieces Matt Kellner and Ryan Vaughn; having a crush on his best friend Susan Reynolds’s boyfriend Thom Wright; a serial killer nicknamed The Thrawler on the loose attacking random young women in the area; a new kid Robert Mallory from Chicago transferring in his senior year who has a mysterious past who Bret thinks is mixed up with the serial killer (if not the serial killer himself.) Bret documents the murders, the parties, the shenanigans that all lead to the climax on Saturday night, November 7, 1981.

Bret does a great job of setting the scene. He gets everything down to the clothes, the scent, the cars, the places, the soundtrack. While the aforementioned reviewer thought it was Bret flaunting their status and wealth, these are things that 17-year olds are obsessed with regardless of status. As someone who grew up 15 years later (and much poorer) on the other side of the hills, I did appreciate the details. As cool and blasé as he wanted to be, he fully acknowledged some of the naïveté he still held on to: when his girlfriend’s father Hollywood producer du jour Terry Schaffer came calling for script ideas, he was disappointed when it amounted to nothing more than a booty call. I also thought it was funny that Bret kept interspersing full names throughout the story as if he was also trying to keep acquainting himself with the characters.

This book could have used some editing. It is 588 pages, and there are parts when Bret takes us out of the narrative to tell us just how his friends don’t understand all of his misgivings about Robert Mallory. Even I did not see how he jumped to the conclusion that Robert was the Trawler, although I would have liked to have seen them hook up.

Yeah, the book is worth the read. Bret Easton Ellis can be a total cunt for all I care, but he surely can create one hell of a story.

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