September 8th, 2012 / 12:13 pm
Snippets

Old news, but: Bret Easton Ellis goes down hard on DFW. What you think?

34 Comments

  1. Erik Stinson

      it’s a funny and smart romp

  2. Michael Fischer

      What do I think? That we shouldn’t take anything he Tweets seriously; he’s a troll. Nothing he says is genuinely provocative (unlike Giraldi’s recent review). He’s incredibly immature, insecure, juvenile, and has nothing to say, because his Tweets are never part of larger conversations he’s having elsewhere–they’re just random pot shots.

  3. Don

      I think he is wrong.

  4. Amelia

      A relevant statement from a relevant author

  5. Amelia

      jk

  6. A D Jameson

      DFW once asked a bunch of us who our favorite writers were. One guy said BEE.

      DFW was not pleased.

  7. Guest

      What kind of idiot would vote this comment down? Ellis is the 50 Cent of Literature. He just jabs to jab. There’s no substance behind any of it.

  8. wmtwalsh
  9. Matt Tyler

      the kind of person who thinks disagreeing on an opinion of taste doesn’t have any correlation with intelligence

  10. Guest

      Not sure what you’re saying. The topic is his Tweets, not the mere fact that he has particular tastes or is smart/stupid.

  11. Matt Tyler

      I was answering your question re: what kind of idiot votes down your comment

  12. shaun gannon

      i think he seems like quite the douche! who woulda thunk it

  13. Bobby Dixon

      Re twitter, I think Mary Kate has more insight on dfw than the bee

  14. Ethan

      Thanks for posting that Salon piece, I hadn’t seen that. Must have been cool to have edited both DFW and BEE. That story “Girl With Curious Hair” is my favorite thing DFW wrote (especially that long sentence with more and more parenthetical asides that ends like “?!?!?!?!?!)))))).”, that cracked me up) and I never realized it might have been a parody of BEE.

  15. Ethan

      I like both those writers. Or more accurately: I like their work. Hemingway was a dick, but I still like his work.

      No doubt, BEE is an attention-seeking jerk. But he’s also a provocateur. If he wasn’t, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

      It seems like Ellis is expressing some jealousy over Saint Wallace’s literary legacy. Ellis has received both film adaptions and death threats for his work, and that kind of response doesn’t come easily. But DFW’s work is revered as literature, whereas BEE’s work is confined to the pulpy splatterpunk genre ghetto.

      The fact that BEE attacks not just DFW but his fans as well is kind of a genius move. “Anyone who finds David Foster Wallace a literary genius has got to be included in the Literary Doucebag-Fools Pantheon…” It’s like saying “Anyone who feels differently than me is an idiot.”

      I’m probably a doucebag idiot for still liking Ellis despite the fact that he’s a jerk.

  16. Andrew Worthington

      lol

  17. Golgonooza

      The idea that BEE is jealous is bullshit. And as regards to DFW, I find it quite disturbing to learn such unflattering personal details about an artist, even though I know we’re supposed to be able to separate and artist from his or her work.

  18. Golgonooza

      Not sure I agree with your assessment that “BEE’s work is confined to the pulpy splatterpunk genre ghetto.” American Psycho is highly regarded in some literary circles (Larry McCaffery included it in his “20th Century’s Greatest Hits,” for example), not just among gorehounds.

  19. Matt Rowan
  20. Ethan
  21. jane lane

      why is salon so hideous

  22. Matt Rowan

      I don’t know!!! Good articles, though.

  23. Matt Rowan

      I didn’t realize he was quite the sex addict he apparently was, at least ostensibly.

  24. Paul Jessup

      Oh it’s even worse than that. I just finished reading the biography- he bought a filed off gun from an excon so he could murder this woman’s husband he was crazy infatuated with (he later changed his mind and didn’t shoot him) & he would also go into violent fits of rage and break shit and throw things. It was always women he would go into these rages around.

      Nobody seems to mention these things in the reviews I’ve read. So I plan on mentioning them in a review of the book I’m doing for Zouch Magazine. I’m not focusing on these negatives, but it seems odd that people would just gloss over a lot of them…

      I’m thinking of calling the review “Sex & Guns & Semiotics”

  25. Trey

      50 Cent goes hard god damn it

  26. Trey

      lol I was like about to write an unnecessarily hostile comment about how of course those facts haven’t come up in reviews because they have nothing to do with DFW’s writing, and then I realized you meant *reviews of the biography*

      I think it’s important to point out these moments of not flying off the handle in a comment, these moments of personal growth

      carry on

  27. Nick Antosca

      DFW is smarter and infinitely more technically skilled as a writer. And I like American Psycho more than anything he ever wrote.

  28. Nick Antosca

      Meanwhile, Lunar Park is one of the worst novels I’ve ever read.

  29. marshall mallicoat

      who is the dfw of rap?

  30. Taylor Napolsky

      He screams out for attention on twitter all the time. I don’t think he’s jealous—I’m sure he genuinely dislikes DFW’s writing—but more than anything I think he wants more popularity, which is why he’s so indiscreet.

      Poor guy, he wanted to write the screenplay for 50 Shades soo bad and didn’t get it. I actually felt sorry for him.

  31. deadgod

      Some of Ellis’s Wallace tweets would make interesting section headings for a Selected of Wallace’s short fiction and essays.

      –and Ellis would make a fabulous commencement addressor. It’s something that Wallace cared about doing well that Ellis could actually be better at doing.

  32. Flavors

      lil b

  33. Richard Grayson

      Sigh.

  34. Joan Markson

      I’m being such a geek now, but those convoluted parenthetical asides probably come from Cortazar’s ‘News about Funes’. DFW loved Cortazar.