In other news, WHO WANTS TO BUY SOME REALLY GOOD PURE MDMA?!

That's fair, I just felt like they were a fairly innocuous way of trying to give a representation of something intrinsically unfilmable while still progressing the plot (whether or not introducing drugs into the mix in the first place is lazy is, I think, a different matter entirely).

I feel like all these comments about the realism of the MDMA scene are ridiculous; it's a pseudo- or almost- or something- psychedelic drug (irrespective of the degree to which it does or doesn't induce visual hallucination (even LSD doesn't sometimes)) to which, contrary to its popular reputation, the idea of set and…

I'm a generally snobbish, pretentious asshole who for the most part enjoys shittalking Hollywood more than watching movies, but I bought opening day matinee tickets to this the literal minute they became available.

So fucking cool seeing Harry Matthews and Aeschylus and Evenson being mentioned here…

The Sixth Sense is a piece of shit though; the twist makes no sense whatsoever. Like, really, how was the billing for those therapy sessions working?

I'm not sure this applies to this particular topic, but yeah, all opinions are definitely not created equal

I don't think he's said anything to indicate he believes all people are going to be going out to read Thus Spoke Zarathustra all the time (he even explicitly says the opposite, that most people are ultimately incapable of appreciating art aesthetically); what's horrifying is when schools assign Harry Potter in place…

or, hey, you could try listening to him as he's our (that is, the world's) foremost literary expert and, indeed, quite possibly the /most well read person to ever live/.

I agree in the sense that I felt like it was substantially less graphic than Drive but much, much more brutal.

good god this looks like garbage (i love the book, for the record)

Just finished Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down after a solid month with a few detours (mostly Hobsbawm). Thinking either War & Peace + Anna Karenina (both Pevear/Volokhonsky) or The Bible + The Quran (once and for all goddammit—purely for nonreligious purposes, I swears it!) next…

Oh man, The Recognitions is probably my favorite post-war American novel besides Gravity's Rainbow (well, Gass' work is also strongly in the running). Absolutely go for it. Huge influence on Pynchon (and all the other po-mo that follows it).

Totally agree; the dialogue always sounded to me like writers in a room trying to sound street, the acting felt staged, and I found the subtext/themes/whatever way lacking in subtlety. The writing of The Sopranos, on the other hand, is a masterpiece of irony.

Yeah that's definitely not true of Roth

Wait, what? I'm not familiar with Naipaul, but Philip Roth (huge fan) uses split infinitives all the time (example from The Counterlife c/o a cursory Google search: "a willingness to not always, in every circumstance, think the best of us").

Whether one likes him or not, trying to argue that Henry James' prose is anything less than masterful would be extremely silly.

If split infinitives were good enough for Henry James (and they were!), they should be good enough for anyone else.

I don't read too many new books, but of the 2014 lot I read, Coover's Brunist Day of Wrath was easily the best (better than Origin)

I'm impressed with Sorkin. I always think he couldn't possibly become a bigger pinhead than he already is, and then he goes out and raises (lowers) the bar that much further