passive-digressive

There are two kinds of people* – those who like forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps etc, and those who don’t. But we’ll get back to that shortly.

* there are more than two kinds of people. Possibly infinite kinds of people. Or maybe there’s only one kind; I’m never sure

A few times recently, I’ve come across the idea (which I think is mainly an American academic one, but I might be completely mistaken about that) that parentheses should only be used when you really have to (but when do you really have to?) because anything that is surplus to the requirements of the main thrust of one’s text is surplus to requirements full stop, and should be left out. But that’s wrong. The criticism can be and is extended to anything that interrupts the flow* of the writing. But that is also wrong. Unless you happen to be writing a manual or a set of directions or instructions, writing isn’t (or needn’t be) a purely utilitarian pursuit and the joy of reading (or of writing) isn’t in how quickly or efficiently (whatever that means in this context) you can do it. Aside from technical writing, the obvious example where economy just may be valuable is poetry – which however is different and should probably have been included in a footnote, because footnotes are useful for interrupting text without separating the point you’re making (in a minute) from the point you’re commenting on or adding to (a few sentences ago), without other, different stuff getting in the way.

*like this¹                                                                                                                                                                ¹but bear in mind that people don’t write footnotes by accident – the interruption is deliberate²                        ²and sometimes funny

Poly-Olbion – that’s how you write a title page to pull in the readers

I would argue (though the evidence of a lot of poetry itself perhaps argues against me – especially the Spenser’s Faerie Queen, Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion kind of poetry that I’m quite fond of) that a poem should be** the most economical or at least the most effective way of saying what you have to say – but who’s to say that economical and effective are the same thing anyway?)

** poets, ignore this; there is no should be

 

 

 

Clearly (yep), the above is a needlessly convoluted way of writing, and can be soul-achingly annoying to read; but – not that this is an effective defence – I do it on purpose. As anyone who’s read much here before will know, George Orwell is one of my all-time favourite writers, and people love to quote his six rules for writing, but while I would certainly follow them if writing a news story or article where brevity is crucial, otherwise I think it’s more sensible to pick and choose. So;

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Absolutely; although sometimes you would use them because they are familiar, if making a specific point, or being amusing. Most people, myself included, just do it by accident; because where does the dividing line fall? In this paragraph I have used “by accident” and “dividing line” which seem close to being commonly used figures of speech (but then so does “figure of speech”). But would “accidentally” or something like “do it without thinking” be better than “by accident?” Maybe.

Never use a long word where a short one will do. The key point here is will do. In any instance where a writer uses (for example) the word “miniscule” then “small” or “tiny” would probably “do”. But depending on what it is they are writing about, miniscule or microscopic might “do” even better. Go with the best word, not necessarily the shortest.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Note that Orwell wrote ‘always’ here where he could just have said If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out. Not everything is a haiku, George.

Never use the passive where you can use the active. Surely it depends what you’re writing? If you are trying, for instance, to pass the blame for an assault from a criminal on to their victim, you might want a headline that says “X stabbed after drug and alcohol binge” rather than “Celebrity kills X.” You kind of see Orwell’s point though.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Both agree and disagree; as a mostly monolingual person I agree, but some words and phrases (ironically, usually ones in French, a language I have never learned and feel uncomfortable trying to pronounce; raison d’etre or enfant terrible for example) just say things more quickly and easily (I can be utilitarian too) than having to really consider and take the time to say what you mean. They are a shorthand that people in general understand. Plus, in the age of smartphones, it really doesn’t do native English speakers any harm to have to look up the meanings of foreign words occasionally (I do this a lot). The other side of the coin (a phrase I’m used to seeing in print) is that with foreign phrases is it’s funny to say them in bad translations like “the Tour of France” (which I guess must be correct) or “piece of resistance” (which I am pretty sure isn’t) so as long as you are understood (assuming that you want to be understood) use them any way you like.

Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. It’s hard to guess what George Orwell would have considered outright barbarous (and anyway, couldn’t he have cut “outright”?) but anyone reading books from even 30, 50 or a hundred years ago quickly sees that language evolves along with culture, so that rules – even useful ones – rarely have the permanence of commandments.

So much for Orwell’s rules; I was more heartened to find that something I’ve instinctively done – or not done – is supported by Orwell elsewhere. That is, that I prefer, mostly in the name of cringe-avoidance, not to use slang that post-dates my own youth. Even terms that have become part of normal mainstream usage (the most recent one is probably “woke”) tend to appear with inverted commas if I feel like I must use them, because if it’s not something I would be happy to say out loud (I say “woke” with inverted commas too) then I’d prefer not to write it. There is no very logical reason for this and words that I do comfortably use are no less subject to the whims of fashion, but still; the language you use is part of who you are, and I think Orwell makes a very good case here, (fuller version far below somewhere because even though I have reservations about parts of it it ends very well):

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read. (1945) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4. Penguin 1968, p.72 

the fold-out map in The Silmarillion is a thing of beauty

Back to those two kinds* of people: I am the kind of person that likes and reads forewords, introductions, prefaces, author’s notes, footnotes, appendices, bibliographies, notes on the text, maps and all of those extras that make a book more interesting/informative/tedious.

 

*I know.

 

In one of my favourite films, Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan (1990), the protagonist Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), says “I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.” Well, that is not me; but I do love a good bit of criticism and analysis as well as a good novel. One of my favourite ever pieces of writing of any kind, which I could, but choose not to recite parts of by heart, is the late Anne Barton’s introduction to the 1980 New Penguin Shakespeare edition of Hamlet*. I love Hamlet, but I’ve read Barton’s introduction many more times than I’ve read the play itself, to the point where phrases and passages have become part of my mind’s furniture. It’s a fascinating piece of writing, because Professor Barton had a fascinating range and depth of knowledge, as well as a passion for her subject; but also and most importantly because she was an excellent writer. If someone is a good enough writer**, you don’t even have to be especially interested in the subject to enjoy what they write. Beyond the introduction/footnote but related in a way are the review and essay. Another of my favourite books – mentioned elsewhere I’m sure, as it’s one of the reasons that I have been working as a music writer for the past decade and a half, is Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots from the Hip, a collection of articles and reviews. The relevant point here is that more than half of its articles – including some of my favourites – are about musicians whose work I’m quite keen never to hear under any circumstances, if humanly possible. Similarly, though I find it harder to read Martin Amis’s novels than I used to (just changing taste, not because I think they are less good), I love the collections of his articles, especially The War Against Cliché and Visiting Mrs Nabokov. I already go on about Orwell too much, but as I must have said somewhere, though I am a fan of his novels, it’s the journalism and criticism that he probably thought of as ephemeral that appeals to me the most.

*All of the New Penguin Shakespeare introductions that I’ve read have been good, but that is in a different league. John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet (1935, though the edition I have mentions WW2 in the introduction, as I remember; I like the introduction) is sometimes easy to disagree with but it has a similar excitement-of-discovery tone as Anne Barton’s essay

** Good enough, schmood enough; what I really mean is if you like their writing enough. The world has always been full of good writers whose work leaves me cold

a scholarly approach to comics

All this may have started, as I now realise that lots of things seem to in my writing did, with Tolkien. From the first time I read his books myself, I loved that whatever part of Middle-Earth and its people you were interested in, there was always more to find out. Appendices, maps, whole books like The Silmarillion which extended the enjoyment and deepened the immersion in Tolkien’s imaginary world. And they were central to that world – for Tolkien, mapping Middle-Earth was less making stuff up than it was a detailed exploration of something he had already at least half imagined. Maybe because I always wanted to be a writer myself – and here I am, writing – whenever I’ve really connected with a book, I’ve always wanted to know more. I’ve always been curious about the writer, the background, the process. I’ve mentioned Tintin lots of times in the past too and my favourite Tintin books were, inevitably, the expanded editions which included Herge’s sketches and ideas, the pictures and objects and texts that inspired him. I first got one of those Tintin books when I was 9 or so, but as recently as the last few years I bought an in many ways similar expanded edition of one of my favourite books as an adult, JG Ballard’s Crash. It mirrors the Tintins pretty closely; explanatory essays, sketches, notes, ephemera, all kinds of related material. Now just imagine how amazing a graphic novel of Crash in the Belgian ligne claire style would be.*

*a bit like Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s fantastic-looking but not all that memorable Hard Boiled (1990-92) I guess, only with fewer robots-with-guns shenanigans and more Elizabeth Taylor

a scholarly approach to cautionary 1970s semi-pornography/horror: the expanded Crash

A good introduction or foreword is (I think) important for a collection of poems or a historical text of whatever kind. Background and context and, to a lesser extent, analysis expand the understanding and enjoyment of those kinds of things. An introduction for a modern novel though is a slightly different thing and different also from explanatory notes, appendices and footnotes and it’s probably not by chance that they mainly appear in translations or reprints of books that already enjoyed some kind of zeitgeisty success. When I first read Anne Barton’s introduction to Hamlet, I already knew what Hamlet was about, more or less. And while I don’t think “spoilers” are too much of an issue with fiction (except for whodunnits, which I have so far not managed to enjoy), do you really want to be told what to think of a book before you read it? But a really good introduction will never tell you that. If in doubt, read them afterwards!

Some authors, and many readers, see all of these extraneous things as excess baggage, surplus to requirements, which obviously they really are, and that’s fair enough. If the main text of a novel, a play or whatever, can’t stand on its own then no amount of post-production scaffolding will make it satisfactory.* And presumably, many readers pass their entire lives without finding out or caring why the author wrote what they wrote, or what a book’s place in the pantheon of literature (or just “books”) is. Even as unassailably best-selling an author as Stephen King tends to be a little apologetic about the author’s notes that end so many of his books, despite the fact that nobody who doesn’t read them will ever know that he’s apologetic. Still; I for one would like to assure his publisher that should they ever decide to put together all of those notes, introductions and prefaces in book form, I’ll buy it. But would Stephen King be tempted to write an introduction for it?

 

* though of course it could still be interesting, like Kafka’s Amerika, Jane Austen’s Sanditon or Tolkien and Hergé (them again) with Unfinished Tales or Tintin and Alph-Art

 

That Orwell passage in full(er):

“Clearly the young and middle aged ought to try to appreciate one another. But one ought also to recognise that one’s aesthetic judgement is only fully valid between fairly well-defined dates. Not to admit this is to throw away the advantage that one derives from being born into one’s own particular time. Among people now alive there are two very sharp dividing lines. One is between those who can and can’t remember the period before 1914; the other is between those who were adults before 1933 and those who were not.* Other things being equal, who is likely to have a truer vision at the moment, a person of twenty or a person of fifty? One can’t say, though on some points posterity may decide. Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one’s world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one’s intellectual roots.”

*nowadays, the people who can or can’t remember life before the internet and those who were adults before 9/11? Or the Trump presidency? Something like that seems right

 

 

shooting the messenger; moral panics, the 1980s, American Psycho turns 30

 

Marshall Arisman’s superb artwork used on the Picador first edition of American Psycho

Happy New Year! I’ve written before about the way that new decades seem to bring their own distinct identities with them (probably too often; here was I think the most recent time) and as we ascend/descend/just go into 2021 an auspicious anniversary approaches; 30 years since the publication of Bret Easton Ellis’s classic novel American Psycho, a book which seemed to set the seal on certain aspects of the 1980s, preserving them in a concentrated form for future… hmm, enjoyment seems the wrong word (but it’s not).

Moral panics (“an instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society” is how the internet defines the term) don’t occur very often, though something tells me that in the next few years they may be one of the few areas of growth in the UK, and moral panics about books are even more rare. But American Psycho caused one, and until it was to some extent defused by Mary Harron’s excellent (though necessarily less graphic) 2000 film adaptation* the novel remained (appropriately I guess) a kind of bogeyman, in some countries (still?) only being displayed in shrinkwrap lest an unwary child catch a glimpse of the dangerous words it contains.

*the film managed to avoid great controversy partly I think because it confirmed what many of the book’s defenders had always maintained; that it was (among other things) a satirical black comedy

At the heart of any moral panic there is generally one catalyst, but it usually overlays a more or less complex set of issues. These tend to be fundamental things like; should there be limits to free speech? Should human beings have control over their own bodies whatever the consequences to their health? How much control should parents exercise over their children? Is it important to be able to clearly define individuals within specific traditional pigeonholes and if so, why? Interestingly though, the point of the panic (generally sparked by a newspaper, politician or an interested pressure group) is usually, perhaps always to avoid the discussion of these issues, and instead to simply wish whatever it is – ‘video nasties’, drugs, loud music, raves, books, certain kinds of people – out of existence entirely. The unstated aim is the reiteration of a prevailing – often obsolete – orthodoxy; films that aren’t explicit, children that are ‘seen and not heard’, Christian ideas of morality). And coincidentally or not, whatever the panic happens to be about, it’s usually the same orthodoxy that is being reinforced and promoted.

one of the UK’s classic moral panics; punk

Literature and cinema have a special place in the moral panic spectrum, because, unlike, say drugs, prostitution, hoodies or (more ridiculously) ‘happy slapping,’ those defending them (to be fair I don’t think anyone really defended happy slapping) almost always have to use, or at least generally do use, arguments that are unrelated to the charges the accusers make. DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is probably the most famously banned book in Britain, but when it was finally un-banned it was because of arguments about the quality of the book. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is indeed an important book, written by an important writer, it is ‘literature’. But, typically, the people who wanted it banned didn’t care about that, didn’t even necessarily dispute it, or disapprove of the acts that were considered so outrageous when described in print. After all, even most Festival of Light type people don’t believe that no-one should ever have sex. Mostly, what they cared about was the actual words used in the book; and, strangely, the words that were considered most offensive in the 1920s (when it was written) and the 1960s (when it was printed legally) are mostly still the same ones that are considered offensive – which is handy for the arbiters of public morality. If your tactic is simply to be outraged, you can count the number of bad words in Lady Chatterley, just as, 30-odd years after that was printed in an unexpurgated edition, critics could count the swearwords in a novel by James Kelman or Irvine Welsh, preventing them from having to address whatever uncomfortable things the books might actually be saying.*

* although swearwords are routinely still censored in print in newspapers (f**k and whatnot), the irony is that this kind of censoring only works for people who already know the words. If you know a word and are offended or horrified by it, but read it with some letters missing, does it become less offensive? Recently I’ve noticed people self-censoring non-swearwords that (I presume) might cause discomfort, such as writing ‘r*pe’, rather than ‘rape’. But a) does the use of the word ‘rape’ itself cause trauma? and b) if it does, does reading it in context as ‘r*pe’ cause less trauma? Because although it’s possible that the word I am assuming is ‘rape’ might be be warning me about ‘rope’ or ‘ripe’ – but rape is the only word that makes logical sense. And seeing that the sentence will only make sense if you understand that “r*pe” is “rape,” is the letter ‘a’ really the problem there? Are the letters “uc” the problem with the word “f**k”? This seems different to me from something like self-censoring a word associated with, say, racial abuse, where the censoree is avoiding an offensive term while also showing that they recognise its offensiveness and are distancing themselves from its casual use. But I am no authority!

the much maligned 1987 film of Less Than Zero is surprisingly faithful, perhaps because it was a product of the milieu that it depicts.

What was often lost in the furore surrounding American Psycho is that Ellis’s first two novels, Less Than Zero (1985) and The Rules of Attraction (1987) had also been controversial; it’s just that they were controversial in a way that was more comfortable for literary critics and especially for publishers. After all, you don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being young (Ellis was 20 years old when Less Than Zero was published), or in some way terrible. With Less Than Zero, it was as much the described world itself – decadent, affluent, mid-80s consumerist LA with its drugs and excess and callousness – as the behaviour of the protagonists which shocked reviewers. And (which is also true of his second novel The Rules Of Attraction but definitely not American Psycho) the positive reviews selected for quotation for the book’s cover were largely admiring of that excess, in the classic, coolly jaded ‘yes-it’s-all-very-shocking-if-you’re-old-and-shockable’ vein:

This is the novel your mother warned you about. Jim Morrison would be proud (Eve Babitz)

Bret Easton Ellis is undoubtedly the new master of youthful alienation … makes Jack Kerouac and his Beat Generation seem like pussies (Emily Prager).

the Picador Rules of Attraction paperback is a definitively 80s artefact

For whatever reason, nobody said that American Psycho made Charles Bukowski or Norman Mailer or even Stephen King seem like “pussies,” even though, in the sense that Prager means it, it certainly does. With The Rules Of Attraction, set in more or less the same social milieu as Less Than Zero, only on a New England College campus, the controversy was again more moral than literary; promiscuous sex! Drugs! These young people are amoral, unpleasant and cynical, why would anybody want to read, let alone write about them? But again, this is the kind of controversy that critics and especially publishers are comfortable with; low level outrage that is shocking enough to attract new readers but not shocking enough to require justification for publishing. This time, the approving review used by the publisher (at least of the UK Picador edition I have) is less gloating and perhaps slightly more defensive – yes he’s young and outrageous but please note that he’s a good writer too – appealing frankly (and I think accurately) to the literary precedent for books like Ellis’s:

Compelling … and sympathetic to his “lost generation” the way only Fitzgerald was about his (nameless Vanity Fair reviewer).

Interestingly, although Simon & Schuster in the USA sparked and fuelled the controversy of American Psycho by declining to publish it, Ellis’s UK publisher Picador didn’t follow suit, and the blurb and reviews chosen for the first UK paperback edition are instructional; they knew exactly what they had on their hands tabloid-wise, and it’s interesting to look at what the publisher says they are selling:

a bleak, bitter and aversive novel about a world we all recognise but do not wish to face, but also an explosive novel which brilliantly exposes American culture today and finally a black comedy, a disturbing portrait of a madman [strangely archaic phrase that], a subtle send-up of the blatant behaviour of the ‘80s – and a grotesque nightmare of murder and insanity.

It may be all of these things, but the word that, having just re-read the novel, feels at first oddly out of place there is ‘subtle’. American Psycho does not feel subtle. It’s a maximalist (is that a thing?) novel, roughly twice the length of the author’s first two, and perhaps half of that length is made up, in effect, of lists; what – in detail – every major and minor character is wearing when Patrick Bateman (the psycho of the title) encounters them, what kind of hygiene or beauty products characters are using, what food is being eaten and where, detailed analyses of the careers of the narrator’s favourite musical artists.* As mentioned before, until the film adaptation of American Psycho was released, the blackly comic aspect of the book – although explicitly mentioned in the blurb – was mostly overlooked (or outright denied), but one of the things that makes the nasty parts of the book so effective (and they are still bracingly explicit and intense 30 years on) is that they don’t happen until half way through the novel, at which point – if not for the title – the book is to all intents and purposes an immersive dip into the more absurd aspects of New York/Wall Street consumer yuppie culture.

* interestingly and humorously, outside of those few psycho-approved artists (Huey Lewis, Whitney Houston, Phil Collins) and current 80s hits (Madonna, INXS), every musical reference Bateman makes – to what is playing on the radio, or in a cab – he gets the artist wrong; when asked towards the end of the novel for the saddest song he knows he names You Can’t Always Get What You Want by The Beatles (sic)

Christian Bale, iconic as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of American Psycho

What Ellis does – and significantly, it’s what made Less Than Zero such a formidable debut – is to adopt a strangely blank and hypnotic voice (a bit like the famously ‘glazed’ tone used by JG Ballard – about whom more later – in his classic Atrocity Exhibition/High Rise/Crash period), which somehow (I guess this is the subtle part) ends up being the opposite of cold or uninvolving. In The Rules Of Attraction, one of the novel’s protagonists, Sean Bateman (as it turns out, the brother of American Psycho’s  Patrick), is a generally unpleasant, amoral, cynical opportunistic drug dealer, but the reader realises (though Sean himself seems not to) that this attitude is at least in part a defence mechanism to protect the more sensitive and romantic aspects of his nature that he would rather not acknowledge. In American Psycho, the reader has direct access to Patrick Bateman’s thoughts and feelings; not just what he really thinks and feels, but also, in some of the book’s stranger moments, what he seems to think he should think and feel. There’s a very odd page-and-a-half long monologue where Bateman lectures a group of friends and acquaintances on a kind of socially responsible, enlightened conservatism that is comically at odds with the reactionary nihilism we usually read in his thoughts:

Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger… Better and more affordable long-term care for the elderly, control and find a cure for the AIDS epidemic, clean up environmental damage from toxic waste and pollution, improve the quality of primary and secondary education… (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.15)

It’s never entirely clear if this is Bateman being funny – he does have a sense of humour, but usually he tells us if he’s making a joke (his jokes are however – importantly – not the funny parts of the novel). Or if it’s his way of making his friends uncomfortable while trying to impress people who aren’t from his social circle, in this case a bohemian couple, which seems quite likely. Or if it’s just anomalous parts of his submerged and fragmenting personality coming through; throughout the book there are moments when we realise that this is, more or less, how he’s perceived by the other characters; the ‘boy next door’, an unusually sensitive and perhaps even shy member of their set, which reaches a comic climax when he leaves a confession of his hideous crimes on the voicemail of another of his interchangeable set of yuppie acquaintances. It’s treated as a not-very-successful joke by the recipient, who like everyone in the book, has trouble differentiating between the people he knows and thinks that Patrick is someone else:

‘come on man, you had one fatal flaw: Bateman’s such a bloody ass-kisser, such a brown-nosing goody-goody, that I couldn’t fully appreciate it…. He could barely pick up an escort girl, let alone…  Oh yes, ‘chop her up’’ (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.387)

the still-pretty-cool US first edition

The fact that Bateman is on the surface a normal member of his peer group, and by their standards even a fairly laudable example of the 80s yuppie is of course one of the things that made the book uncomfortable in 1991. A couple of years before American Psycho was published I had read and enjoyed Slob (1987) by Rex Miller. It’s a novel about a grotesque (and unlike Patrick Bateman) grotesque-looking, remorseless, obese sadistic outsider maniac who, having previously been utilised, hopefully improbably, by the government as an assassin in the Vietnam war, returns home and continues his ‘work’. It’s more or less relentless graphic violence and sex (in that order), not really a searing indictment of anything, (although obviously not pro-serial killer either) but as far as I know the publisher had no qualms about publishing it and, far from feeling the need to defend it in the blurb or quotes, took pride in its extremeness; Slob is almost too crudely terrifying to be read… (said Stephen King, quoted on the front cover) But it is too compelling to be put down. 

a powerful indictment of overweight people wielding chains

Well yes; Slob is genre fiction after all, and therefore weirdly immune – on an individual level at least* – to the vagaries of the moral panic. It’s a fact that questions like ‘would American Psycho be published today?’ still pop up in newspapers from time to time, while the excesses of gory 80s horror are, if they are still in print, (rightly) still there in bookshops to be read by anyone who wants to do so. And some of those books really are mindlessly violent or repellently misogynistic, without the publisher feeling any particular need to defend them. No shrinkwrap is required, no literary reviewer was disappointed to find that their faith in a promising young writer had been repaid by Slob and nobody (or at least nobody powerful or influential) made to feel uncomfortable by the things it was saying about the country. If it had been written by, say, Jay McInerney and called American Slob perhaps there would have been some concern about teenagers buying it and circulating it among their friends; possibly it would also have sold more copies (though I think it did pretty well); because of course the ultimate irony of any moral panic is that it creates an interest in and appetite for what it condemns. Notoriety is good publicity.

*while it’s rare – though not unheard of – for a single genre book or film to be targeted by a moral panic there is always the chance that the ‘powers that want to be’ will try to remove a whole genre or sub-genre at once as with the UK’s notorious ‘video nasties’ furore. In a way the horror genre is always stuck in a kind of self-perpetuating, positive/negative loop – horror can ‘get away with’ pretty much any kind of extreme and transgressive material it wants to, because that is part of its raison d’etre. On the other hand, it’s very hard for that transgression to have much of a wider impact beyond the horror genre because it’s ‘just’ horror.

The reviews used by Picador on the back cover of American Psycho are as interesting at its blurb. Retraité terrible* Norman Mailer is quoted;

He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novels try for that much anymore.

Clearly, Mailer had not been ‘forced to look at’ Slob. Or anything by Skipp and Spector, or Clive Barker, or Shaun Hutson (whose Spawn made me feel physically sick on first reading, which American Psycho, presumably because of the influence of Spawn, and lots of other books like Spawn, did not. More about that kind of thing here). That ‘forced’ is fun too; forced how? Because he was paid to review it?

* Vieil homme terrible? if I could speak any French at all I could have made this joke more confidently; in English I’d say something like ‘OAP terrible Norman Mailer’. Which is as good a point as any to mention a particular paternalistic and I think class-based kind of censorship that used to exist in the UK. Several times I’ve come across older books (most recently a book about the historical figure Erzsébet Báthory (the real Hungarian ‘Countess Dracula’) by Valentine Penrose, the wife of surrealist Roland Penrose, that was written in French and translated into English by the wayward Scottish writer Alexander Trocchi. Translated apart, that is, from any especially salacious parts, which were left in French, presumably so that only well educated British people could be traumatised by them. 

(American Psycho is) a very disturbing book, quoth Joe McGinnis, but the author is writing from the deepest, purest motives. Which may be true, but is it relevant? Pan books did not feel the need to reassure readers about Rex Miller’s motives. In fact, Picador, when selling Less Than Zero, chose quotes which actively encouraged the idea that Ellis’s motive with that book was to shock people. But surely if shocking readers is a valid motive (it is) then American Psycho was far more successful even than Less Than Zero? If Bret Easton Ellis’s motives had been to provide the reader with some kind of complicated entertainment, to amuse and entertain and make them think, or if he wanted  to lecture them on morality or to disgust and repel them, or even if, as his detractors said, he just got off on writing about violence, sex and Phil Collins, does that change the book itself? These are questions, I’m not sure about the answers.

Although the book contains horrifying scenes, said Nora Rawlinson, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.

This seems fair enough, but it also contains some odd statements; that ‘but neither’ is strange, isn’t it? Being neither ‘pleasure reading’ (whatever that means) nor pornography suggests firstly, that pornography isn’t pleasure reading; maybe not, but what is it then? People seemed to be reading the Fifty Shades… books for some kind of pleasure, which is, believe it or not, not a judgement of the books. And secondly, it suggests that a novel can be read for something other than pleasure – which it obviously can, but a novel, even a polemical novel (and American Psycho isn’t that) still isn’t a lecture. JG Ballard – him again – was less squeamish about what his books were or weren’t, and wrote, for a 1995 edition of his most controversial novel Crash;

I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. (Crash, Vintage books, 1995, p.6).

This – although he later slightly recanted and said that Crash was purely a ‘psychopathic hymn with a point’ – seems to me a more valuable observation than any of those printed on the back cover of my edition of American Psycho. (Interesting but value-free information; Vintage, the publisher of that edition of Crash, was also the publisher that picked up American Psycho in the US after Simon & Schuster refused to print it. And James Spader, who plays a slimy drug dealer in the movie version of Less Than Zero is also in David Cronenberg’s Crash. Connections! But what of them?)

transgressive 80s classic

There is more than one way of dealing with a controversial novel; and the fact that Picador was squeamish or at least cautious about the book they were publishing comes through clearly in that careful choice of quotes from positive, but very sober reviews. That several of those quotes are from women is also probably no coincidence; the book was attacked (most visibly by Gloria Steinem) as being misogynistic. And indeed it is, insofar as the narrator and his milieu, and the 1980s, and consumerist capitalist culture are and were. But the book is called American Psycho; not What Bret Easton Ellis Thinks About Women and it seems surprising that, coming just as Gordon Gekko and his ilk seemed like historical figures and the 90s had established its own distinct identity, a very personal satire of the 1980s, written by an author whose earlier work was both a thoughtful product of and also an embodiment of that era (and also not misogynistic), should be taken at something less than face value. Too soon, and too extreme perhaps? But if it had come later it would suggest an absolving clarity that can only come with hindsight, and if it had been less extreme an absolving kind of a shrug; but it is what it is because the 80s were what they were; a kind of wild, extravagant, decadent but above all exclusive party; exhilarating, on the surface, for a while; if you were invited and could afford to attend. In a way, Picador missed a trick; given the book’s pre-publication notoriety, they might have been better to quote from both positive and negative reviews, as Abacus did with Iain Banks’s 1984 debut The Wasp Factory. In both editions that I have owned (a mid 80s paperback and a 2005 reprint), the book has several pages dedicated to reviews which say things like Perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish (The Times). Of course, these kinds of reviews are really a selling point, just as, in the 90s, an author being sneered at by Tom Paulin and Allison Pearson on The Late Show was usually a promising sign.

Funny Games; it’s not very nice though this poster reminds me of the one for Howard the Duck somehow

But if, as the positive reviews said, American Psycho isn’t to be read for pleasure then what is it to be read for? Education? Certainly it has – especially over time – gained a kind of educational value as a time capsule or artefact of some aspects of – and the texture of – 80s American culture. But is that what it is for? Or should it be seen as – which Rawlinson’s quote seems to be suggesting – a kind of literary analogue to a something like Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, where the director is saying ‘so you like to watch horror films? You like violence and torture do you? Well here you go. Not very nice is it?’ But that isn’t how American Psycho feels exactly, despite being published at the height of the early 90s serial killer boom (there’s a phrase), a time when Jonathan Demme’s straightforward and well made horror thriller The Silence of the Lambs was somehow elevated to Oscar-worthy, cultural event status; clearly something, like the stench emanating from Dennis Nilsen’s drains, was in the air.

If JG Ballard’s aforementioned 1973 novel Crash was, as Ballard sometimes stated, cautionary as well as pornographic; a novel to be read for (peculiar sexual) pleasure, but also a vision of the future concerning how humanity might be shaped by the very environment it had built to suit its needs and whims; a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape is how he put it in that introduction (Crash, Vintage Books, 1995, p.6), then in American Psycho, it was already too late for caution. This is a historical novel; this, says Ellis, or at least says Patrick Bateman, is what we became in the 80s. In the chapter End of the 1980s, Patrick himself gives us an extremely Ballardian kind of collage:

The dreams are an endless reel of car wrecks and disaster footage, electric chairs and grisly suicides, syringes and mutilated pinup girls, flying saucers, marble Jacuzzis, pink peppercorns(…) A month ago was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death… Football games flash by, the sound turned off… All summer long Madonna cries out to us “life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone…” (American Psycho, Picador, 1991, p.371)

This is still recognisably the author of Less Than Zero, but where Ellis seemed before to coolly comment on the state of the society he was talking about, here he is immersed in it. As before, the author shows us a group of people who are numb, alienated from the world and from each other, possibly looking for some kind of connection with humanity while also (inadvertently? deliberately?) distancing themselves from the possibility of it. But while outwardly, Bateman prides himself on just this kind of cool detachment, from our position inside his head we can see that however unreliable he is as a narrator (it’s never clear what really does or doesn’t happen, partly because, like everyone else in the book, he can’t really tell one person from another, outside of his closest friends), he is anything but emotionless, but instead a mass of obsessive, raw neuroses, circling endlessly around status, wealth, sex and (increasingly) age; turning 30 is something that would probably fill him with nameless dread, as many things do. Whether or not he really murders anyone (a source of frequent debate, though the publisher’s blurb takes for granted that he does), the title still stands. And it’s an important title too; after all, Robert Bloch’s Psycho was also American, but only because Robert Bloch was. American Psycho is deliberately specific.

I’ve mentioned JG Ballard’s Crash a few times, because for all its differences, it met with a similar response to American Psycho (not least from Ballard’s publisher – had Ballard been a mainstream and not genre author, it would have been an ideal contender for moral panic status. Something similar happened with the movie, where the fact that it was made by director David Cronenberg, maker of legendarily peculiar horror films, to some extent defused the more controversial aspects of the film although the Daily Mail etc tried, bless them). Like American Psycho, Crash‘s mixture of extreme violence and sex remains potent and shocking decades after its original publication. Like American Psycho too, it’s often a funny book, although the humour was not really translated to Cronenberg’s good but oddly restrained film version. Partly the film is less comical because toning down the mayhem (a film that really looked like the book reads would have been banned everywhere in the world) makes it less funny*, but also because robbing the story of its very specific object of obsessive desire, Elizabeth Taylor (presumably because she was still alive at the time; the stuff about Jayne Mansfield is still in the film) makes it less absurdly funny. The film version of American Psycho is still humorous (especially regarding the swapping of business cards), but the novel’s funniest scene, which is also one of its most strangely moving, is not included for – I presume – similarly practical reasons.

*see also Paul Verhoeven’s classic RoboCop, where the cuts administered by the BBFC to some of the more ludicrously violent scenes made what was brutal and blackly funny into something that was just brutal; do these people not want extreme violence to be funny??

Throughout American Psycho, we see Bateman revelling in, and/or boasting about his alienation from the human race, his merciless coldness and basic inhumanity etc etc, but there are several scenes where, against his will, he is forced into some kind of intimacy with another character. Usually it’s Luis Carruthers, a friendly acquaintance who mistakenly believes that Bateman is in love with him and unfortunately reciprocates, or Jean, his secretary who Bateman assumes is in love with him, but whose feelings, we learn, are more complex than Patrick realises. But strangely we see Patrick at his most naked and human and afraid at a U2 concert where, to his alarm, he shares a rare and intense moment of connection with Bono, of all people; the horror. This is not the kind of relationship that Bateman has with the artists he really likes. There is though, an almost equally funny moment in the late chapter Huey Lewis and the News (the last of Patrick’s disarmingly straightforward, cheerful and perceptive rundowns of his favourite artists’ careers) when his veneer of normality starts to crack – as well it might – and he says The album [Small World, 1988] ends with “Slammin’,” which has no words and it’s just a lot of horns that quite frankly, if you turn it up really loud, can give you a fucking big headache and maybe even make you feel a little sick.

What I have perhaps not stressed enough here is the general sincerity of the book. Some critics felt that Ellis was being sneeringly cold and cynical about the people and lifestyle he portrays, but (to me at least) it doesn’t feel that way, especially compared to his first two novels. Obviously American Psycho isn’t, thankfully, autobiographical in a narrow sense, but Bret Easton Ellis was still – more than ever – concerned with the fate of his ‘lost generation.’  These were successful young American people for whom a whole culture had been built to fulfil their every whim and enrich – albeit at a price – every element of their lives, but which instead seemed only to emphasise its own emptiness. You might think that it’s hard to feel sorry for people who have (in material terms) everything, and you might be right; but these are his people. That the worship of visible success makes anything that isn’t visible success look like abject failure seems like a glib kind of lesson, but it’s only one element of a richly textured, (sometimes literally) tortured and yet funny and readable book. Thirty years on, what’s funnier (in more than one sense) now than it was in 1991 is Patrick Bateman’s Donald Trump obsession – also less of a feature in the film – which, from the perspective of 2021 seems quite surreal but also strangely fitting. American Psycho is, after all, largely Patrick Bateman telling us, based on his experience, how the world works, and sometimes he’s right.

dancing about architecture: the non-art and non-science of music reviews

On the rare occasions that anyone asks me anything about my writing, it’s usually about music reviews. The consensus seems to be that a good review (I don’t mean a positive one) should either be ‘listen to the music and say if it’s good or bad’, or ‘listen to the music and describe it so that other people can decide whether it’s their cup of tea, but keep your opinion out of it’. As it happens, I’ve given this subject a lot of thought, not only because I write a lot of reviews, but I also because I read a lot of reviews, and some of my favourite writers (Charles Shaar Murray is the classic example) manage to make me enjoy reading about music even when it’s music that I either already know I don’t like, or that I can be fairly certain from reading about it that I won’t like. Because reading a good article about music is first and foremost ‘reading a good article’.

Anyway, over the course of pondering music reviews I have come to several (possibly erroneous) conclusions:

* “star ratings” HAVE TO BE relative and all stars don’t have the same value. For instance, one might give a lesser album by a great artist 3 stars, but those are not the same 3 stars one would give a surprisingly okay album by a generally crappy artist.

* Musical taste is, as everyone knows, entirely subjective, but reviewing (for me at least) has to try be a balance between objective and subjective; just listening to something and saying what you think of it is also valid of course.

* Objective factors alone (see fun pie chart below) can never make an otherwise bad album good, but subjective factors can.

* ‘Classic’ albums make a nonsense of all other rules.

Let’s examine in more detail, with graphs! (are pie charts graphs?):

Objective factors:

factors that objectively might contribute to the quality of an album

Objective factors (see fun pie chart) are really only very important when the reviewer doesn’t like the music: when you love a song, whether or not the people performing it are technically talented musicians/pitch perfect singers etc is entirely irrelevant.

But, when an album or song (or movie, book etc) is dull or just blatantly abysmal, some comfort (or conversely, some outrage and annoyance) can be gained from the knowledge that at least the participants were good at the technical aspects of what they were doing, even if they are ultimately using those skills for evil.

Subjective Factors:

the true gauge of how highly you rate a piece of music; not a very helpful chart though

Although there are many subjective factors that may be relevant; nostalgia for the artist/period, personal associations, all of these really amount to either you like it or you don’t; simple but not necessarily straightforward.

The positive subjective feeling ‘I like it!’ can override all else, so that an album which is badly played, unoriginal, poorly recorded and awful even by the artist’s own standards can receive a favourable review (though the reviewer will hopefully want to point out those things)

Meanwhile the negative subjective feeling ‘I don’t like it’ can’t help but affect a review, but should hopefully be tempered by technical concerns if (an important point) the reviewer feels like being charitable. They may not.

Ideally, to me a review should be something like 50% objective / 50% subjective (as in the examples somewhere below) but in practice it rarely happens.

“Classic” status:

The reviewing of reissued classics can be awkward, as ‘classic’ status in a sense negates reviewing altogether; it is completely separate from all other concerns, therefore said classic status can affect ratings just because the album is iconic and everyone knows it. Reviews of new editions of acknowledged classics usual become either a review of what’s new (remastered sound, extra tracks etc) or a debunking of the classic status itself; which as far as I know has never toppled a classic album from its pedestal yet.

Classic album status is normally determined by popularity as much as any critical factors, but popularity itself shouldn’t play a part in the reviewer’s verdict; just because 30,000,000 people are cloth-eared faeces-consumers, it doesn’t mean the reviewer should respect their opinion, but they should probably acknowledge it, even if incredulously. Sometimes or often, classic status is attained for cultural, rather than (or as well as) musical reasons*, and it should be remembered that albums (is this still true in 2020? I don’t know) are as much a ‘cultural artefact’ (in the sense of being a mirror and/or record of their times) as cinema, TV, magazines or any other zeitgeist-capturing phenomenon.

* in their very different ways, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thriller and The Spice Girls’ Spice were all as much ‘cultural phenomena’ as collections of songs

another pointless chart

SO ANYWAY; how does this all work? Some examples:

I once offended a Tina Turner fan with an ambivalent review of the 30th anniversary edition of Ms Turner’s 1984 opus Private Dancer.

As a breakdown (of ‘out of 10’s, for simplicity) it would look something like this:

TINA TURNER: PRIVATE DANCER (3OTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 9/10 – hard to fault the adaptability or technical skill of her band
* songwriting – 6/10 – in terms of catchy, verse-chorus-verse efficiency & memorableness these are perfectly good songs, if a bit cheesy & shallow & therefore a waste of Tina Turner
* production – 9/10 – no expense was spared in making the album sound good in its extremely shiny, 80s way
* originality – 0/10 – as an album designed to make TT into a successful 80s artist, it wasn’t really supposed to be original, so hard to actually fault it in that respect
* by the standards of the artist – 2/10 – in the 60s/70s Tina Turner made some great, emotionally forceful, musically adventurous and just great records. In 1984 she didn’t.

Overall: 26/50 = 5.2/10

Subjective Factors

* I don’t like it: 1/10 (but not 0, because Tina Turner is a legend and it would be wrong to deny that somehow)

Overall 5.2/10 + 1/10 = 6.2/20 = 3.1/10 = 1.55/5 (round up rather than down, out of respect for Tina) = 2 stars

and in fact I did give the album two stars, though I didn’t actually do any of the calculations above; but it’s pleasing to find out that the instinctive two stars is justified by fake science.

by way of contrast, a favourite that seems to be an acquired taste at best:

VENUSIAN DEATH CELL: HONEY GIRL (2014)

Objective factors
* musicianship – 1/10 – David Vora’s guitar playing is not very good, plus the guitar is out of tune anyway, and his drumming is oddly rhythm-free
* songwriting – 2/10 – the songs on Honey Girl are not really songs, they may be improvised, they don’t have actual tunes as such
* production – 0/10 – David pressed ‘record’ on his tape recorder
* originality – 10/10 – Vora doesn’t sound like anyone else, his songs are mostly not about things other people sing about
* by the standards of the artist – 9/10 – I like all of Venusian Death Cell’s albums, they are mostly kind of interchangeable, but Honey Girl is one of the better ones (chosen here over the equally great Abandonned Race only because of the uncanny similarities between the cover art of Honey Girl and Private Dancer).

Overall: 22/50 = 4.4/10

Subjective Factors

* I like it: 9/10 (but not 10, because if encouraged too much David Vora might give up and rest on his laurels. Though if he did that I’d like to “curate” a box set of his works)

Overall 4.4/10 + 9/10 = 13.4/20 = 6.7/10 = 3.35/5 (round up rather than down, out of sheer fandom) = 4 stars

And in fact I did give Honey Girl four stars, but I’ve yet to hear of anyone else who likes it. Which is of course fuel for the reviewer’s elitist snobbery; win/win

Star Ratings

 

 

 

I’ve used scoring systems above, but the writers I like best rarely use scores or ‘star ratings’. I don’t think anybody (artists least of all) really likes star ratings or scores because they immediately cause problems; if, for instance, I give the Beach Boys’s Pet Sounds four stars (and the critical consensus says you have to; also, I do love it), then what do I give Wild Honey or Sunflower, two Beach Boys albums that are probably demonstrably ‘less good’, but which I still like more? But at the same time, I suppose scores are handy, especially for people who want to know if something is worth buying but don’t want an essay about it – and who trust the reviewer. The best ‘score’ system I’ve ever seen is in the early 2000s (but may still be going?) fanzine Kentucky Fried Afterbirth, in which the genius who writes the whole thing, Grey,  gives albums ratings out of ten ‘cups of tea’ for how much they are or aren’t his cup of tea; This may be the fairest way of grading a subjective art form that there can possibly be.

Critical Consensus

I mentioned the critical consensus above, and there are times when it seems that music critics seem to all think the same thing, which is how come there’s so much crossover between books like 1000 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die (I always feel like there’s an implied threat in those titles) and The Top 100 Albums of the Sixties etc. I’m not sure exactly how this works, because like most people I know who love music, my favourite albums and songs aren’t always (or even usually) the most highly regarded ones. My favourite Beatles album isn’t the ‘best’ one (Revolver, seems to be the consensus now); Songs in the Key of Life is the Stevie Wonder album, but it’s probably my third or fourth favourite Stevie Wonder album; I agree that Bruce Dickinson is a metal icon but I kind of prefer Iron Maiden with Paul Di’anno (granted PD wouldn’t be as good as Bruce at things like Rime of the Ancient Mariner but it’s less often mentioned that Bruce is definitely not as good at singing Wrathchild etc as Paul was.) Much as I genuinely love The Velvet Underground and Nico, I genuinely love the critically un-acclaimed Loaded just as much; there are so many examples of this that the idea of an actual critical consensus that means anything seems like nonsense.

I’m content to like it even if you don’t

I’ve been writing music reviews for many years now, but my own involvement with ‘the consensus’ is rare and the only solid example I can think of is a negative one. I thought – and I still think – that Land, the fourth album by Faroese progressive metal band Týr, is the best thing they’ve ever done. I gave it a good review, not realising that the critical tide was turning against the band, and, for whatever reason (fun to speculate but lack of space is as likely as anything), my positive review never appeared in print. It wouldn’t have made any real difference to the band or to the album’s reception in general, but it did make me feel differently about albums that are notoriously bad (or good). Who is deciding these things? I’m a music critic and I’m not. And although I – like, I think everyone – take reviews with a pinch of salt anyway (someone else liking something is a strange criteria for getting it, when you think about it), I have to admit if I hadn’t had to listen to Land (which I still listen to every now & then, over a decade later), I wouldn’t have been in a hurry to check out the album after reading again and again that it was dull and boring.

Throughout this whole article the elephant in the room is that, at this point, the whole system of reviewing is out of date. You can almost always just listen to pretty much anything for free and decided yourself whether you like it, rather than acting on someone else’s opinion of it. But in a way that makes the writing more important; again, like most people, I often check things out and stop listening at the intro, or half way through the first song if I just don’t like it – except when I’m reviewing. Reviewers have to listen to the whole thing, they have to think about it and say something relevant or contextual or entertaining.* And if the reviewer is a good writer (Lester Bangs is the most famous example, though I prefer Jon Savage or the aforementioned CSM and various nowadays people), their thoughts will entertain you even if the music ultimately doesn’t.

 

*worth a footnote as an exception which proves the rule is a notorious Charles Shaar Murray one-word review for the Lee Hazlewood album Poet, Fool or Bum: “Bum.”