Where are the Boy Scouts when you need them.

The opposite possibility is to be like J.G. Ballard, who perversely continued to insist that he was writing SF, even when the rest of the world had decided that he wasn't.

!!!UOY LLIK LL'I !EKOJ YM S'TAHT

Money is the great Anglo-American novel.

When Mailer is bad, he is very very bad, but that doesn't mean that he didn't have his heights. The Executioner's Song is proof that he could have written standard "good books" had that been interesting to him, but instead he wrote a lot of interesting, bad books, with a few interesting, good ones thrown in. I keep…

Maybe you were confused and thought you might get a sexy pic of Marilyn Chambers, a stabby tenticle emerging from her armpit?

[the silent sadness of no one screaming nooooo…]

I read Cultgen's The Average American Male, which rides that fine line between "genius satire" and "actually reprehensible," but when I tried Men, Women, & Children (blurbed by Stoya, BTW), I thought the writing was so bad that I quit. It honestly felt like someone had "prosified" a pretty decent screenplay, so this…

I made it about halfway. If the publishers are working on lowering expectations…good job, I guess?

Probably involves the infinite zero-point energy of quantum field theory, responsible (so they say) for the Casmir effect.

I'm not sure it endorses colonialism, either, but hammy I'll stand behind. It's been a few years since I've watched it, and I still remember the winking scenes that imply but don't flesh out (sorry) lusty sexytime with the natives. That, and the saturated technicolor exoticism of the cinematography, is what I guess…

The Man Who Would Be King isn't the sort of movie that's very well-respected anymore (hammy colonialist romance), but damn if Connery doesn't do a fine job in it.

Patrick Bateman heartily agrees.

I read the book then watched the movie, and the movie seemed pretty dead in comparison. This might be just because I hated the syurpy soundtrack, though, doing the emotive Mickey Mousing all the way through. McCarthy's better than that, at least.

I'm sort of split on this one. Last night, my wife and I were rewatching old BB eps, and I noted that I thought the scene when Marie is having Skyler "confess" to her affair ("Doesn't it feel good to get that out?" Marie says, after Skyler hasn't said a word) was tremendously funny, and I was called out for thinking…

You're not wrong, Doc. I remember one of those cloying Thought Catalog articles with the topic "Advice for Aspiring Writers" having as one of its subpoints, "Have a Trust Fund." (The author said, parenthetically, "Why is everyone so weird about money?") Thanks, guy, I never thought of that one either!

This story now makes me wonder if Shame was just a @avclub-e57f718840a576abbb40a7d046c4e3b0:disqus biopic.

Counter-counter-counterpoint: Within reason.

@avclub-578e8fa3ff67e364550447d75dce678d:disqus It's hyperlinked in the word "here" of the comment above. If your browser won't let you see it, Google "laurent binet the millions" and it'll be the first result.

I don't agree with Binet's point, really (for one, I thought HHhH wasn't 1/3 of the novel The Kindly Ones was), but since you're interested, here you go. It's a section that wasn't in the novel, though, and I think anyone who's been edited can see why pretty clearly.