Williamsburg

A few weeks ago I was standing outside the Bedford L stop on a Friday night and a couple turbo bros (turbros?) walked past.  One asked, “Yo, where are we?” to which his companion—swathed in a state school sweater, board shorts and a hemp necklace—replied, “Williamsburg, yo!  There’s a million bars and everybody looks just like us!”  He was fucking thrilled (and obviously wrong).  I’ve been thinking lately about how what we see is filtered through the lens of our own interests and it occurred to me that perhaps my tedious derision for North Brooklyn hipsters has everything to do with what I see of myself in them (and, consequently, others).  I.E., the only thing keeping me from enjoying Williamsburg—with its many bars, restaurants, parks and venues—as much as Fratty up above is my own self-loathing.  So that sucked.

On Bret Easton Ellis and American Psycho

“You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. 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.”

—Courtesy of this interview with the much more talented but unfortunately less alive, David Foster Wallace.