Monday, August 29, 2005

Bret Easton Ellis can fuck right off.

He went to my college. Not the one I'll be graduating from; the one I was kicked out of.

And his books aren't so great. Really, I promise they're not. I watched Rules of Attraction, as a movie. It kinda sucked. It was only worth it to watch someone overdose in a facsimile of a dorm I spent two years in. The campus didn't even look the same- that's where the producer fucked up. Bennington is a strange place. It looks strange. It does not look like a college. It doesn't look like anything. There's only one brick building on campus- all the dorms are white clapboard houses that look like farms or upscale new england group homes for addicts or neurotics. Which is basically what they are. I've read some of the books- they suck.

They're alright. But they're not so great. Not greater than anything I could write. Not greater than anything anyone with a snide sense of self-satisfaction and half a college education could write. This fucker, though, takes something anyone else could write, and smears himself, brands himself, markets himself all over it, until it's entirely covered in his goo. No one wants to read about rich kids debauching themselves with the tacit approval of a decadent college administration anymore. They've already READ it. And it's got Bret Easton Ellis all over it.

Which would be fine. If the books were great. But they're not. They're style. They're marketing. They're a product of the decade they were written in- all surface and coke and savage, glittery, acid materialism. Fuck him.

I'm 23, able to string together a half-decent sentence in english, and spent the requisite time at Bennington. Where's my 300,000 second novel advance? Where's my motherfucking FIRST novel, even?

Gay, folks. Gay. There's no opportunity in the world anymore. The eighties sucked half of it out, and the internet boom sucked the rest of it. There's no point in being 23 right now. Motherfuckers used it all up. Alex P Keaton fucking Dot Com fucking Real Estate fucking Social Security fuckers. I'm young, bright, hard working. And I'll be poor forever. Unless I go to law school. Which I probably will. But I'd rather write a shitty novel.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Pfft. I heard the same complaints in the 80's and 90's. Opportunity is not where you find it, but where you make it.