Bret Easton Ellis talks to Matthew Specktor

An interview for Salon.com

Bret Easton Ellis (left) and Matthew Specktor (right)

From Salon.com:

Matthew Specktor and Bret Easton Ellis have known one another for 20 years. Neither of them can remember how they met. “I think it was at the Bowery Bar in New York,” Specktor says. “But that could just be a mathematical probability.”

Approximate generational peers, Ellis grew up in Sherman Oaks, Specktor in Santa Monica. These were two different versions of the same city. On a recent Friday night they sat down at the Polo Lounge, a Beverly Hills landmark that seemed as good a place as any for the two writers to drink martinis (Hendricks gin, with cucumbers) and talk about Los Angeles, writing, Twitter and Specktor’s new book, “American Dream Machine.” [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine
• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis talks to NUVO Magazine

Joshua David Stein talks to the controversial American novelist

Bret Easton Ellis. Photo: Sarah Soquel Morhaim

Joshua David Stein (NUVO Magazine):

One doesn’t expect Bret Easton Ellis to live in a cheery apartment building on a tree-lined street in West Hollywood with ugly two-tone art deco chairs in the lobby and mezuzahs on the door frames of his neighbours.

To be surprised, of course, one has to have expected something in the first place. That there are so many expectations as to how and where the author of American Psycho and a slew of other equally misanthropic works might live is testament to the power of his work and the heft of his public persona. Ellis is 49, and there’s still a glimpse of the boyish face seen in so many photographs at the table of some hot Manhattan restaurant years ago, but it’s caught now only fleetingly. Perhaps the only subversive thing about him today is that he’s wearing a winter jacket, inside and in Los Angeles. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Advertising and Consumer Culture: Postgraduate Symposium

University of York · 31 May 2013

Advertising and Consumer Culture
Third Annual Postgraduate Symposium
University of York
Centre for Modern Studies
Bowland Auditorium
Humanities Research Centre
Friday 31 May 2013

About the Symposium

Commercial speech – advertising – makes up most of what we share as a culture . . . As the language of commercialism has become louder, the language of high culture has become quieter.

– James B. Twitchell, Twenty Ads that Shook the World

Throughout the modern period, advertising and consumer culture have dominated everyday life; moreover, the trappings of commercialism permeate much of supposed ‘high culture’. Commodities clutter the pages of novels from Dickens and Zola to Bret Easton Ellis; works by Joyce and DeLillo are enlivened by advertising jingles and slogans; brands and trademarks pervade the practice of artists from Picasso to Warhol and the visualisation of consumer desire is appropriated and challenged in the work of Richard Hamilton and Martha Rosler.

Whether celebrating or critiquing advertising and consumer culture, art reflects our enduring fascination with them, despite research into the psychological effects of advertising, concerns over the evils of consumerism, and the often sinister nature of market research. The recent television show Mad Men, for instance, has revivified interest and scholarly debate surrounding the power of advertising and the consumer, as well as restaging debates around sexism, truth and the heteronormative ideal. Meanwhile, sociology in the wake of Erving Goffman continues to explore advertising’s uses and abuses of gender, identity and desire. Countervailing against consumerism and advertising’s many critics, theorists such as Michel de Certeau and the critical movement Thing Theory have endeavoured to examine advertising and consumer culture from a standpoint that goes beyond the model of the ‘passive consumer’ or Marx’s account of commodity fetishism.

We invite abstracts for 20 minute papers from postgraduate students and early-career researchers working in the modern period (1850-present day) across the humanities and social sciences. This conference aims to provoke interdisciplinary discussion about advertising and consumer culture. We therefore welcome papers that address these topics from historical, sociological, political or anthropological perspectives, as well as papers that analyse advertisements themselves and the representation of advertising and modern consumer culture in literature, film, television, theatre, and visual art.

Topics for Discussion

Topics for discussion may include but are by no means limited to:

• The ways in which advertising and consumer culture intersect with issues of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity
• Psychological/psychoanalytic perspectives on advertising and consumer behaviour; how identity is created and reflected through participation in consumer culture; the legacy of Freud and Bernays
• How artists have appropriated the techniques of advertising, or have been co-opted by advertising and commodity culture (Koons, Rosler, Murakami, Kusama and Hirst) -Theorists who have engaged with advertising and consumer culture (Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Certeau, Fukuyama, Goffman, Klein, Marx, McLuhan)
• The use of music in advertisements
• The formal innovations literature has adopted to create a poetics of advertising/consumer culture
• Shopping, the rise of the department store, brand names, and their representation in culture
• Histories of advertising agencies or ‘ad-men’
• How the importance of advertising in art may challenge the boundaries between high and low culture and/or modernism and postmodernism
• Anti-consumerist movements (the Situationist International, Adbusters) and strategies (détournement, culture jamming)
• The recent transformations advertising has undergone as a result of social media -The advert as spectacle or ‘event’ (celebrity endorsements, Christmas advertising, product placement, Pawel Althamer’s Real Time Movie)
• Figures who have worked in advertising, either before or during their artistic careers (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, DeLillo, Warhol, Lynch)
• Political advertising and the roles of politics in advertising

Submissions

Abstracts for papers should be no more than 300 words in length, and submitted by Monday 25th March 2013 to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk. We ask that applicants also include a short biography. For further information about the symposium or the CModS Postgraduate Forum, please contact us at this address, or visit http://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Don DeLillo on Mad Men and Writing
• Don DeLillo on Bookstores
• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

The Troubled Birth of American Psycho

Shortlist.com follows the journey of Ellis' novel from book to screen

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron's adaptation of American Psycho (2000)

Shortlist.com recalls the difficult production of Mary Harron's 2000 film American Psycho, adapted from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis: 'Panned by critics on release for its subject matter, rejected by cinemagoers (the $8m [£5.2m] film made only $15m at the US box office) and featuring an unknown former child star as its lead, it’s surprising anyone remembers the film at all. Yet, in fact, the outrage surrounding the story began some 10 years previous – even before the original book was published.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero
• Bale to star in J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island

Schrader and Ellis to collaborate on The Canyons (2013)

Youth, glamour, sex and Los Angeles, circa 2012

American novelist Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction) has written a screenplay for a collaboration with director Paul Schrader (who many will remember as the screenwriter of Taxi Driver). The film is entitled The Canyons, is rumoured to star Lindsay Lohan in the lead, and is described as a 'contemporary thriller' that 'documents five twenty-something's quest for power, love, sex and success in 2012 Hollywood.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Taxi Driver to be remade?
• Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama
• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis on Glamorama

American novelist interviewed on the Charlie Rose show in 1999

Bret Easton Ellis. Photograph: Source

A conversation with author Bret Easton Ellis about his book Glamorama, which explores the subjects of fashion and terror. He also discusses his development and influences as a young writer and the significance of his family in his life. [Watch the interview]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho
• Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

Picador 40th Anniversary Series

Picador re-issues titles by DeLillo, Ellis, McCarthy, Bolaño and others

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

John Banville, The Sea

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Don DeLillo, White Noise

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

To celebrate Picador’s 40th anniversary, the publisher is re-issuing 12 of its classic fiction titles. [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Christopher King on Book Cover Design
• The Book Cover Club
• 20 Most Iconic Book Cover Designs?
• Book Cover Archive
• Judging a book...
• The Great Gatsby: Re-Covered
• Peter Mendelsund in Design Bureau

Bret Easton Ellis on Imperial Bedrooms and Less Than Zero

New York Magazine interviews controversial American novelist

Marla Hanson, Jay McInerney, and Ellis at a New York party for a movie premiere in 1990. Photo: Catherine McGann/Getty Images

In an interview with Carl Swanson of New York Magazine, Bret Easton Ellis talks about Imperial Bedrooms, the sequel to his debut novel Less Than Zero: 'I did not want to write a sequel to Less Than Zero, but I was interested in, well, where is Clay now and what is he doing? [...] And it just sort of haunts you. The question doesn’t go away. You can tell yourself, Look, forget about it, concentrate on something else, but it just doesn’t happen. So then you start making notes, you start going, Well, I guess he’s a screenwriter. What does that mean? I guess he’s back in Los Angeles, right? And then you want to follow it through, regardless if it is for a reader or for an audience. Regardless of whether this is a betrayal of the text of the first book or not. It’s something that you as a writer really don’t have a whole lot of control over.' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

Bret Easton Ellis on American Psycho

Video interview conducted in 2011

American novelist Bret Easton Ellis discusses the legacy of his most controversial novel. The interviewer is a little on the aggressive side, but Ellis' responses are interesting nonetheless.