A Storm in a Teacup

Three things are important in life: literature, science and teacups. Especially teacups. Teacups are essential.

[p-a-p-e-r-t-o-w-n-s]

Autumn 🍂 is here !!

[pierppasolini]

[annoys-parrot]

Nosferatu (1922).

[soundiver]

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Joy Division, 1979.

[vaticanrust]

Ian Curtis on stage with Joy Division at The Factory in Manchester, 1979.

[vaticanrust]

Ian Curtis on stage with Joy Division at the band’s only show in Paris at the Bains Douches Club, 1979. Photo by Danny Dupic.

[wehadfacesthen]

James Dean reading in his dressing room during the filming of Giant, 1955

[lazygaypotato]

[cinemabreak]

[annoys-parrot]

Some more Casablanca, 1942.

[silkfilmbaby]

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Casablanca, 1942.

[futuretage]

[life]

Legendary musician Ray Charles was born 87 years ago today on Sept. 23, 1930 in Albany, Georgia. He is pictured here having a good time on his tour bus in 1966. (Bill Ray—The Picture Collection/Getty Images) #LIFElegends #RayCharles

[bkcollage]

“Stella was a diver and she was always down” - collage & animation by @bkcollage

[art-tension]

[annoys-parrot]

Tokyo by night. Photos by Masashi Wakui.

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Larry McCaffery But at least in the case of “American Psycho” I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

David Foster Wallace 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.

[annoys-parrot]

Dresden, 1945, view from the city hall (Rathaus) over the destroyed city.

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Madly in love with Joan Didion.

[asbigasbartoli]

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From The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992).