Bret Easton Ellis

"poortreon"? dude is already famous & has a fanbase. he says in the second part that the company he was with for four years (podcast one) really wanted him to stay, and that he was being courted by audible. if you're already established patreon is by far the best way to do a podcast: no overhead, fewer middlemen (patreon takes a modest cut), the podcasts can be totally freeform.

If you're independently wealthy, it's even easier and more freeform not to ask people for financial support.

yeah, he has 633 patrons at $1.50 apiece, so he's making about $1000 a month. that would be an enormous help to a lot of people but seems like chump change to ellis.

the weirder thing is, only those 633 people can listen to his podcast. i'm not sure what his audience would be if it were free, but probably much much larger, which you'd think would be the most important factor for him.

EDIT: since starting this post he now has 636 patrons, so maybe he's still rapidly building his audience

684.

new book White out April 2019.

Combining personal reflection and social observation, Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction is an incendiary polemic about this young century's failings, e-driven and otherwise, and at once an example, definition, and defense of what "freedom of speech" truly means.

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies. An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and refused categorization, he captured the depravity of the eighties with one of contemporary literature's most polarizing characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain. In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo.
Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being "accepted," and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity.
Provocative, incisive, funny, and surprisingly poignant, White reveals not only what is visible on the glittering, pristine surface but also the riotous truths that are hidden underneath.

What a pseud

glamarosa or gtfo

Review of White, and boy is it a doozy: https://www.bookforum.com/inprint/026_01/20825

The prose in White is shapeless, roving, and aggressively unedited. One waits in vain for an arresting image. Several passages recycle or embellish material from the past few years, including a baffling 2011 essay for Newsweek on the difference between “Empire” and “post-Empire” celebrity that reads like Marshall McLuhan without the rigor. For a man who prides himself on roguish individuality, Ellis uses a laughably derivative vocabulary, a mélange of Breitbart talking points and weirdly apolitical antiestablishment ideas, as if he has just discovered Nietzsche on his older brother’s bookshelf. He bemoans “the democratization of culture,” he calls social media “Orwellian,” and he regularly tosses off words like “groupthink,” “corporate,” and the dreaded “status quo.” The Man, man. “Social-justice warriors never think like artists,” Ellis declares, as if this is a sentence. Like his hero Joan Didion, Ellis believes that style is everything; what a shame he has written a book with so little of it.

Mostly, Ellis hates social media and wishes millennials would stop whining and “pull on their big boy pants”—an actual quote from this deeply needless book, whose existence one assumes we could have all been spared if Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter.

From the writer: https://scontent-sjc3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/55458151_324343171769101_6588478681012764672_n.jpg?_nc_cat=105&_nc_ht=scontent-sjc3-1.xx&oh=cd58fe617a2cc410518bac28c2a403ca&oe=5D454E40

that was a pretty excellent takedown

well-written negative reviews of books are such a joy to read

the author was also responsible for this recent classic

https://www.affidavit.art/articles/no-one-wants-it

“I’ve been rated and reviewed since I became a published author at the age of twenty-one, and I’ve grown entirely comfortable in being both liked and disliked, adored and despised.”

Social-justice warriors never think like artists,” Ellis declares, as if this is a sentence.

say what you will about the sentence, but it is definitely a sentence.

literalist

well, when you're writing about bad prose...

god i wish there were more interviews like this, ellis is such a fucking self satisfied dope and out of his depth

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/bret-easton-ellis-thinks-youre-overreacting-to-donald-trump

Agreed. Agreed.

Well, you said it—of course you agree. So what you are saying is that everyone can agree assault is wrong, but maybe we are going too far?

so good, man

Ouch. I almost couldn’t finish that, I was so embarrassed for him.

I have... thoughts.

I read the whole thing, which was excruciating. Here's what I posted on a friend's FB thread:

"I’m a fan of his, with reservations post-2013. (He isn’t making it easy.) As I said on someone else’s share of this interview, I’m actually HAPPY this interview happened - because it might help inspire Ellis to shut the fuck up about politics, which he’s admittedly misinformed about (not just here, but on his podcast and social media) and stick to what actually makes him INTERESTING and of value for many of us who follow him - which gets drowned out by the political/cultural stuff, which grabs headlines and has transformed him into an all-around punching bag - his aesthetic perspectives on film and literature."

In the next week or two I'll have a review of White out in the world, which I'll link here when it's up.

my impression is that his fiction, and its portrayal of people who are often decadent and at best morally ambivalent, reflects his actual view of human nature. the validation of his work being successful has made him think that everyone's like one of his characters and doesn't get why claiming real life figures and their behavior falls within acceptable boundaries brings outrage

he's not exactly a writer of stories where characters come to epiphanies about their own behavior although he's due a few of his own

ray is otm, so much of BEE's podcast is old man yelling at cloud / millennial boyfriend. but i enjoy his film commentary, even if i disagree with him most of the time.

We could totally do without him by now, couldn't we?

We could totally do without him by now, couldn't we?

Pretty much, yeah, and I'm someone who loved Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Glamorama (the latter in particular; I've read it four or five times).

Lunar Park is the one... his most sincere & moving prose

I tried Lunar Park but couldn't make it to the end.

he's doing this to get his name in the cycle imo. if this interview goes well, who reads it? almost no-one. instead...

does he express the same dipshitted thought-free views on his podcast for hours every week and in other interviews and in his writing as part of the same long game?

yes

his whole career has been exactly like this

any decade now, he's going to write something that isn't surface-level vapid in its understanding of humans and money, and we'll all be wowed because of his careful cultivation of alternate expectations over the rest of his output

Having heard many of his podcasts I'm always amused that his opening salvo about whatever he saw at ArcLight that week or some snowflake grievance is done with his guest waiting quietly there with him. He'll go in for 10 minutes before introducing them and they have to jump in wherever he is.

10? more like 45

it is a good bit

any decade now, he's going to write something that isn't surface-level vapid in its understanding of humans and money, and we'll all be wowed because of his careful cultivation of alternate expectations over the rest of his output

ok I just read the interview... wow 🥵

You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.

Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?

You say it in the book.

Yeah, right, I quoted her.

Thanks so much for talking.

It’s interesting to have that back-and-forth pull in an interview. The only problem, however, is that I am not that political, and so, when we have this conversation, and you confront me with certain things like this, I really am, I have to say, at a loss.

what a choad

he’s SO imperious like some regent giving audience to a scribe which is hilarious bc almost no-one gives a shit about him anymore

Seems like the people posting here give a shit about him

I kind of hate that they used that dewy, youthful glamourshot of him in that interview (note: I've never given a fuck about him besides that checkmark on gay men who are terrible misogynists.).

the shtick of saying wrong or irritating things in conversation to get attention, only to reveal you don't remember any particular conversation because you had no real emotional investment in one thing

doing so in print and then shrugging it off as "oh, I guess I wrote that, whatever" to further irritate an interviewer and the audience makes me think he's subconsciously going for next-level jackanapes status

The entire comes off as him having had many decades of therapy but ultimately he just doesn't care because it doesn't affect him personally (except for not being able to fuck his millennial boyfriend in peace). Please buy his book.

otm, that disaffected stance of "I don't give a shit about any of this but it's the only thing anyone around me will talk about. I'll just be contrary so they pay attention to me."

As I posted upthread he was reflective when talking about this when I saw him a decade ago, but since then he’s obviously gone full culture war and decided that he was the wronged party and that he’s never, ever getting over it.

I think I am an absurdist. I think politics are ridiculous.

Maybe don’t write a book about it. Would that be the solution?

[I think the problem is that I don’t necessarily see this as interesting as fiction.

Yeah, I could tell.

lmao

i love isaac chotiner's interviews, he's remarkably good at letting people hang themselves

I haven't been able to track down who they're talking about, but some people on twitter have mentioned that Bret's partner is a boring-ass centrist democrat.

He seems to be a Biden fan, so yes.

Does Biden have a lot of millennial support? Wouldn’t have thought so.