famous "contemporary" writers who are hardcore

(this is the third part of my series looking at the life and times and motivations of famous "contemporary" novelists.)

there are a lot of famous writers at the moment who are "hardcore". by "hardcore", i mean, writers who include more acts of violence, sexual imagery, coarse language, and drug use in their novels than is really necessary to tell the story. also (and this is important), the promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs are not included in sarcastic or humorous ways – like writing about a heroin-addicted antelope with tourette’s syndrome going on a killing rampage could be humorous – but are included as completely ”serious” and “truthful” elements of the stories.

some novelists and their novels in this category: “american psycho” by bret easton-ellis, “fight club” by chuck palahniuk, and “trainspotting” by irvine welsh (although sometimes irvine welsh is kind of funny). also, in australia, there is a new book called “rohypnol” by andrew hutchinson, that i have read “will become a cult classic”, which is about date-rapists living in melbourne. the target audience for these writers would probably be 15 to 30 year old males.

you can choose the read these books if you want, and i am not judging the content of the books – that is for you to do in your own brain with your own subjective values. i just want to make some observations about these novelists, and why i think that they write these sorts of “hardcore” novels.

firstly, “hardcore” novelists almost always think that they are writing novels that offer “intensely biting social commentary”. they say that they portray excessive violence, sexual promiscuity, and drug use as a way to “satirize” the excesses of western culture.

for instance, bret easton-ellis has said, “my work is really about a culture that pisses me off, and a world that we live in that values all the wrong things. i mean, that’s what satirists write about.”

now, i am just going to take a stab here (no pun intended) and propose that bret easton-ellis was actually lying when he said that. my proposition is that bret easton-ellis actually writes about promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs because he thinks that it is “cool” to write about those topics. bret easton-ellis writes about promiscuous sex because he thinks it will make him seem “cool”, because people who have promiscuous sex can then read his novels to re-affirm their existing worldview, which is that “promiscuous sex is what normal ‘cool’ people do”. they read his novels and then think “if i have more promiscuous and unemotional sex then i can be more like the people in this book, which would validate my existence even more than before.”

i have nothing against promiscuous sex if that’s what makes your existence feel more validated. but i am just saying that bret easton-ellis is not a satirist, he is a “glamorist” – he says that our culture “values all the wrong things”, but instead of writing about other topics, he values the wrong things as well. i am guessing that he already realises this, but thinks he is being “ironic”. what he (possibly) doesn’t realise is that everybody else also thinks they are being “ironic” by being obsessed with promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs, which is exactly why our culture values these things.

just a bit more about satire: “american psycho”, for instance, is clearly not satire. it is about one person killing a lot of other people, what is satirical about that? the process of killing another person in highly original ways is not funny, i don’t think, unless the process of the death is extremely absurd and unrealistic – for instance, in seinfeld, where george’s fiancé dies from licking envelopes (although that was not murder). but reading about somebody being decapitated with a chainsaw (i think that is in the film version of “american psycho”) is not funny, it is just sad and disturbing. for instance, when i read the newspaper and see an article about a baby being suffocated to death in a suitcase, i do not start laughing and think, “this journalist is a great satirist of our culture” – i just feel sad for a little while, or try to ignore the story and read the comics page. but if i read about someone being killed by a creative zen mp3 player (don’t ask me how) i would probably find that funny because it is absurd.

what i would like is if “hardcore” novelists were actually honest, and told people the real reason why they write “hardcore” novels. the real reason would be (probably) because the novelists want to feel as though they have experienced these things (even though most “hardcore” novelists are not actually “hardcore” in real life) by writing about them, but are too scared to actually do those things in real life. for instance, chuck palahniuk probably wants to hurt a lot of people through physical violence, but is afraid that he might be hurt in real life, or might be punished, which is why he writes about hurting people through physical violence. this is not a “bad” thing, because people need to express their urges somehow, but it does seem “bad” that chuck palahniuk is trying to tell himself and other people that he is writing about violence because he is against violence. that seems like a lie, if chuck plahniuk was against violence, he would not write a book about violence, he would just live a non-violent life and not be obsessed with violence. for example, if i did not particularly like koala bears, i would not write a 600-page non-fiction book about koala bears.

another thing is that the “hardcore” novelists seem to think that our society is fully based around promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs, which is why it is “bad”. in a review of the film version of “fight club”, somebody said: “the purpose of showing all this bloody pummeling is to make a telling point about… what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy.”

this doesn’t make sense to me. if people do go “crazy” because “capitalist consumer society is so monotonous and alienating,” that craziness is not normally manifested in people having promiscuous, unemotional sex, while simultaneously injecting heroin, stabbing a man in the face, and swearing. if anything, the craziness is manifested in people feeling lonely, talking to their cats and non-sentient objects, feeling depressed, feeling quietly unfulfilled, bored, watching too much television, going shopping to momentarily numb their existential anguish, mistakenly believing that “if i date this girl/boy i will feel completely fulfilled forever”, becoming a born-again christian etc. in other words, for most people, promiscuoussexviolencecoarselanguageanddrugs might be a small part of their lives, but it is not the main part.

“hardcore” novelists are writing about the world in which they think they would like to live, i think. they want to live in a world where they can stab and kill people, have sex with a lot of people at the same time, swear a lot, and take a lot of drugs. they are writing for 15 to 30 year old males who would also like to live in this sort of world, but do not really think that it is possible to live in such a world, because such a world would be extremely frightening. “hardcore” novelists do not write satire, and they are not writing truthfully about Western capitalist culture. they already know this, but if they tell anybody this, they will not be respectable “novelists” any longer.

ian mcewan is an extremely intelligent, thoughtful philosopher god

It is important to note that these photographs are not in chronological order. In the more recent photographs (#3 and #6 in particular, but also #1 to a lesser extent), Ian does not make such extensive use of the left-hand index finger. If Ian McEwan is reading this, could you (Ian McEwan) please tell me why you no longer use your left-hand index finger? Thank you for your participation, Ian McEwan.

This is entry 2 in my series exploring the life and times of famous "contemporary" novelists.

famous "contemporary" writers who do not blog

there are a lot of famous "contemporary" writers who do not blog. these are writers who (i would imagine) make a lot of money by selling their words to publishers, who then print said words on sheets of paper, which are then bound and sold in bookstores in the form of novels or poetry collections or short story collections.

(when i think of famous "contemporary" writers who do not blog, i am thinking of zadie smith, jonathan franzen, possibly even bret easton-ellis or irvine welsh. ian mcewan has a blog, but it is just a list of advertisements to sell his books, it does not have any of his thoughts or feelings, just advertisements.)

these famous writers who do not blog are people who use microsoft word to write their stories, and who probably spend a lot of time on the internet, considering that they probably procrastinate a lot, or get bored while writing their stories. they probably read a lot of blogs themselves.

i don't understand these sorts of writers, the ones without blogs. if you are a "writer", shouldn't you be wanting to share your writing as often as possible, and to as many people as possible?

the only reason i can think why these famous "contemporary" writers do not have blogs, is because they are deliberately trying to tell people (through not having a blog), "my words are better than your words, because my words cost money. if you want to read my words, you will have to pay me". that is a bad attitude. these writers do not want to be seen as real people, they want to be seen as "creative geniuses" who are "superior" to their readers.

i can think in the way that these writers think. they think, "publishing words on the internet is low culture, but publishing words on bound paper is high culture." no. words are just words, it does not matter where they are published, they will still have exactly the same meaning. i can read things that are humorous on facebook, or things that are sad in sms messages, or intelligent in emails. these authors think that they are better at using language than people who are "non-authors", but in reality everybody is an author, if they are able to talk or write to any degree. these authors who do not have blogs are trying to pretend that they are "professionals", but in reality they are just normal people whose words are as equally valid as everybody else, and they do not want people to see this.

that is why i think that all authors should have blogs, and people should not read any "contemporary" author who does not have a blog (if they live in sub-saharan africa and do not have access to an internet cafe, they are exempted. writers who are too poor to afford internet access are also exempted).

how to learn to want what you don't want

I wrote this story a few months ago. I was writing heaps of really shitty stories back then, this was the only one that I thought was marginally ok. I probably wouldn't write this sort of thing, now, but maybe I would, except in a different way. When you are reading this story with your book club, please consider the following question: "Is the mother character completely fucked in the head, or is she merely trying to come to terms with the realities of a life that could not live up to the impossibly perfect future that she had planned out, in her youth?" Please discuss this story with your book club.

 

Anita looks at Tyson through the reflection in the rear-view mirror of the two-door hatch.

“I wish I’d never bought a car,” she says, “When I was younger I wrote down a list of things that I would never do and I wrote that I would never buy a car, right at the top of the list. Did you know that?  I never had a list of ‘plans’ or ‘ambitions’. I thought that was so stereotypical, sickeningly stereotypical.”

They are driving home from the day-care centre that Tyson has been attending every weekday, nine to four, for three months.

“I wrote that I would never have children because I wanted to spend all my time on my art, even if that meant me being a homeless person.”

They drive past a Chicken Lickem outlet and Tyson says, “Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mum. Mumumumumumumumumumumummmmmmmmmmmmmm.”

Anita orders a Chicken Little value pack, which has a plastic toy and burger and fries and soft drink and is packaged precisely in a cardboard box sporting colourful images of the franchise’s trademarked cartoon characters.

“You know what it is, that awful shit that you are eating, Tyson? Factory-killed hens, fattened up so big that their legs break right underneath them. By making me buy you that meal, you are indirectly supporting torture, murder and the deforestation of the Third World for intensive factory farming.”

They continue driving, out of the city and into the suburbs. Anita thinks about smoking a cigarette but then thinks about Tyson and mouth cancer, and abstains. She thinks about drinking coffee and tea and various alcoholic beverages all at the same time and how content that would surely make a person, any person.

Anita stops the car and calmly takes off her seat belt. She climbs over the seat and sits next to Tyson, who is seated on a booster-chair.

“I don’t know how to talk to you,” she says. “That’s a frank admission. It’s not just you – maybe, I don’t know. I am afraid that you will end up hating me one day, for messing you up. I am afraid that you will one day know all of my secrets and will use them against me to blackmail me or pit me against your father for some reason. I am afraid that you will not accept me as a person and will make me feel unworthy for even existing.”

Anita climbs back over the seat and starts up the car again. It revs quietly and then starts to accelerate. There is only silence in the car. Tyson is eating his chicken burger noiselessly.

“I am going to act differently towards you from now on,” Anita says when they arrive at home, as she is unstrapping Tyson from the booster-seat. “I am going to pretend that I exist only for your benefit, and that I am your slave. I am going to be subservient to you, and only talk to you when you address me first. I don’t know why, but I think that this will make me feel better.”

Anita carries Tyson into the house and sets him up in front of the television. Anita cleans up the toys Tyson has strewn across the living room and says “I am happy” in her head and then says “I am happy” out loud.

Owning a television was on the list, the list of things Anita would never do. Owning an air-conditioner was on the list. Owning a big house with a big kitchen was on the list. Having a desk-job was on the list. Wearing makeup was on the list. Saying “I am happy” out loud was on the list, maybe. Pant-suits were on the list. Having children was on the list. Living past twenty-four was on the list. Hair dye was on the list. Plastic-wrapped foodstuffs were on the list.

There was a lot on the list.

 

 

summer ice

This is a prose-poem. I think i have a destruction obsession at the moment or something, at least in an abstract way.

I will plow down your house

I will plow it down by running into it twenty three hundred million times times

I will pretend that I am in a car having multiple horrific car crashes

I will think

“This car crash is because I swerved to avoid hitting an oncoming Canadian moose”

“This car crash is because I swerved to avoid hitting a pensioner but I still hit the pensioner”

“This car crash is because there was summer ice”

“This car crash is because of a car crash”

This will be okay

Each time I run into your wall I will shout “fuck you” at your house for being obstinate

I won’t be angry, this will just be for effect

Your house will realise that I am only shouting for effect

 

After I run into your house twenty three hundred million times

It will collapse

It will collapse out of tired frustration

 

You will arrive in your driveway and see your house reduced to a pile of debris

You will be angry at me

But then I will tell you that I plowed down your house out of love

You will see this and you will be happy

 

You and I will set the debris of your plowed-down house on fire

It will be beautiful

We will dance around your burning possessions wearing gas masks

And we will shout “No more history no more history”

 

You will ask me “Did you plow down your own house?”

I will say “Of course not. I need to live in my house. Do you think I am an idiot?”

I will laugh at you because you are stupid

You don’t even have a house anymore, how can I trust a homeless person?

 

Then I will go home to my own house

I will watch an hour of TV and go to sleep in my bed

I have new linen blankets on my bed

They are really nice but you can’t have them

You can’t have them

 

 

the psychic call and two little poems

The brick in the wall could not forgive God for God’s impudent oversight.

The brick in the wall wanted little more than to fully exist in the world. The brick in the wall wanted to exist as a productive member of capitalist society. The brick in the wall was comprised of fifty percent clay and fifty percent severe existential disillusion.

The brick in the wall said, “Fuck you, God. My psyche compels me to save Third World children from crippling poverty. I feel compelled to save Third World children from crippling poverty by organising celebrity fundraising rock and roll aid concerts. Why have you made me an immobile brick in a wall? An immobile brick, in a wall that is very small? Unable to act with gall. Unable to act in any way at all.”

The brick in the wall merely wanted to fall.

The brick in the wall merely wanted to fall.

The brick in the wall merely wanted to fall.

“I am depressed,” said the brick in the wall, “I merely want to – fuck you, God.”

The brick in the wall drew me towards itself, scloser and closer, with its psychic powers. A sort of pull. I was hauling garbage at the time. I was a garbage collector. I had no real place in the world. I had no claim to a continued existence in the world.

I drove nearby the brick wall with my haul. It was impossible to ignore the psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall. The psychic call of the brick in the wall.

I drove my haul into the brick wall.

The brick fell from the wall. The wall did not fall, only the brick in the wall fell. The brick broke off on the ground into its composite parts of clay and existential disillusion. 

Meanwhile, I died. I was not reborn. I had no claim to a rebirth. This did not sadden me.

The brick in the wall was reborn. It was reborn as a young man. A young man who saves Third World children from crippling poverty. Good on the old man.

2. You, too, can feel true emotion

 

Happiness.

Dgnwoguwneivqmpeqemcpqomfinrgudgfdgfgfsgsgfsrnbmvpweofmqiengioqerngp!

Fear of death.

Aaaaarrerrrrrwerrrrwerrrrertwrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhh!

Bizarre irreconcilable feeling #23.

Oh. Oh. Ee. Oh. Ah. Oh. Oh. Ee. Oh. Ah. Oh. Aa. Aaa. Aaa. Oh. Aaa. Eh. Ee. (Oh).

 

3. Insecure attachment

 

I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I.   

You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You. You.

I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. I. You. You. You. You. You. You.

I. I. You. You. I. You. I. You. I. I. You. I.

You. I. You. I. You. I. You. I. You. I.

YouI. Iyou. Iyou. YouI. Iyou. YouI. Iyou.

Ioyu. Ioyu. Yoiu. Ioyu. Yoiu. Iyuo. Yoiu.

Yiouyouiyouyoiyuoyiuyoiuyoiuyouyiuyoiuyouyiouyiuyu.

are there any good creative writing universities/colleges?

next year i want to go on an exchange program overseas for a year or half a year. i want to go to a university/college where i can study creative writing. i will be in my second year of college/university.

i don't know what are good places to go to study creative writing. do good creative writing programs exist anywhere? are there any “minimalist” authors or poets teaching creative writing classes anywhere in the world? i can go anywhere in the world as long as the course is taught in english. the "official language" of the country doesn't have to be english though.

if anybody is completing a creative writing course and they think “i love this course, i am now completely fulfilled” then please tell me what university this is. i might not get any responses, i am aware of this.

poem vs prose

It just occurred to me that some people might think that the prose-poem I just posted, "i want to stop distancing myself from all things by creating artificial mountains" is all prose and no poem, because it has paragraphs. I have read that poems cannot have paragraphs.

I don't know exactly how to respond to this. I tried to split the poem into lines, but it wasn’t coherent that way. So I called it a prose-poem. I think that it is a poem, because it privileges thought over action, which is what poems generally do.

I don't like the idea that poetry is just about the visual shape of the text. That doesn't make sense. People don't look at a page of writing and say, "I am not going to read this because the text juts out on the third line from the bottom in a visually unappealing manner." Most people that I know would not read a poem and say, "I love the interesting line breaks," because they would be reading the poem for something more substantial than line breaks. I also don’t like the idea that poetry is about using deliberate techniques to make the words sound nice together or “flow”. If people just want to hear pretty noises without any “meaning” (although what is “meaning”?), they should listen to certain types of soothing music, not spoken words.

If I am transcribing my actual thoughts as they occur in my head, it generally seems better to describe what I have written as a poem, because if I describe what I have written as prose, people might wonder, "Is this fiction or non-fiction? Is the protagonist actually the author?" It would probably just be easier without people placing so much importance on arbitrary distinctions.

this is a prose-poem called "i want to stop distancing myself from all things by creating artificial mountains"

i want to stop distancing myself 

from all things 

by creating artificial mountains

 

At 1.53 in the morning I woke up and felt thirsty and went to my kitchen to pour a glass of juice.

At 2.05 I lay on my pillow and began to feel existentially fucked. I just could not stop feeling existentially fucked.

At 2.07 I thought, “The only thing I want to feel right now is not existentially fucked, but there is absolutely nothing I can think of that will make me stop feeling existentially fucked.”

At 2.09 I thought about reading about Miranda July and Dave Eggers in weekend newspaper literary supplements and this thought made me stop feeling existentially fucked for approximately eight seconds.

My pillow felt soft.

At 2.09 and approximately eight seconds, I thought, “I have to think about something else now, a new thought, I can’t think about nothing, what can I think about, what is there to think about, because if I do not think about something my brain will collapse in upon itself.”

At 2.15 I started to think, “I am in love with at least a dozen people that are not in love with me, most of them I have not even met,” which made me feel dislocated and fucked up.

At 2.19, my brain stopped doing its defence mechanisms so that it made me see everything bad that is not normally consciously visible to me. My brain said, “I can do this anytime, I can let you see everything that is bad about you. You are not safe.”

I felt unsafe.

At 2.30 I thought, “The only way to stop feeling so anxious is to stop being self-absorbed and forget you exist.” Then I began to wonder, “Why are you so self-absorbed?” Then I thought, “This is an ironic thought-process.”

At 2.34 I got scared because of my lack of positive role models and I thought, “How old are you when you are supposed to stop having role models for the purposes of ‘direction’, ‘purpose’, and ‘identity construction’, and actually take on the role of your role model?”

At 2.44 my brain thought, “Everybody I know just uses me as a way to increase their own self-esteem at my expense.” I knew that my brain was only thinking this because of reinforcing negative thought-processes. I knew that if I could think a positive thought then this would stop providing reinforcement to the negative thought-processes.

At 2.50 I forgot what my face looked like, and who I was, so I looked myself up on Facebook. 

At 2.55, I felt as though I would never be able to write anything of value, and I would end up giving up on writing and stop having goals and ambitions. I thought, “The only reason that I write is because I want to privilege my thoughts and opinions over the thoughts and opinions of others as a way to control them.” Then I thought, “This is a self-defeating thought-process.”

Then at 2.58 I felt that if I did not write a poem immediately, something extremely bad would happen.

I thought, “This is what artists must feel like when they are on the verge of creating extremely brilliant works of art, I now understand the purpose of art.”

Then I thought, “You are being egotistical, this poem will not be brilliant.”

Then I thought, “At least it will be true.”

Then I thought, “What is ‘true’?”

At 3.05 I said to myself, “I used to not understand poetry but now I do understand poetry and how it is necessary to some people.”

I opened my laptop and clicked the Microsoft Word icon.

At 3.06 I began to write the poem.

I wondered, “What is my aim in writing this poem? Will it help me connect with other people, or will it alienate me from other people? How much of myself can I show in this poem without other people feeling intimidated or afraid? Will other people think that I am ‘courageous’ for writing this poem? Can other people relate to the experience of feeling existentially fucked at some point in their lifetime, or feeling perpetually existentially fucked at numerous points in their lifetime? Will anyone enjoy this poem and feel happier after reading it, because they feel that they are ‘not alone’ in the sense that they experience the same emotions and the same fears and negative thought-processes?”

At 4.11 I remembered somebody saying something about me writing poetry, which made other people laugh at my expense, and which then made me think, “Maybe I am only alienating myself from people by writing poetry.”

But at 4.12 I thought, “This is not true, I misinterpreted what that person was saying, I think they do like the idea of me writing poetry.”

At 4.20 I thought, “I will publish this poem because I think that it will make some people feel much better, and other people only feel slightly worse.”