Isolation: Day 152

 

I never realized this song is an homage to Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. It's obvious, really, but somehow I missed it. 

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Let's talk about Comics. In fact, let's talk specifically about one comic: Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples' Saga.

 

I had honestly not realized that issue 54 of Saga came out two bloody years ago! I mean, like every other die hard fan, I am very aware that the cliffhanger lingers, but two years? Wow. All I can say is, I am absolutely fine with the hiatus, knowing that when Saga does return, the tracks will be greased for month-after-month, on-time issues. My gut tells me before the end of this year, but we'll see.

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Something occurred to me earlier today as I sat finishing my re-read of Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero. The idea that the narrator Clay may be responsible for some of the atrocities that occur 'off-screen.' His sister's dead cat; the girl tied up and murdered at the Palm Springs party a year before. There's a number of horrible events he can't be responsible for in the book, thus is Clay and his peers soulless, vapid world, but Clay's disassociation from the people and world around him - a disassociation we revisit in the 2010 sequel Imperial Bedrooms only to find Clay may well have grown into a psychopath over the intervening thirty years between books - feels like it might just hide a burgeoning killer. My theory then is this is not a concrete interpretation, but definitely an element of the character that planted the seeds for Patrick Bateman in Ellis' second novel, American Psycho. Bateman himself then evolves in Ellis' 2005 masterpiece Lunar Park. 

In finishing Zero, I took to the internet to see if anyone else has ever discussed these possibilities, and though I didn't find that, I did find a fantastic article about Zero, which you can read HERE and is absolutely worth your time if you're an Ellis fan.

After finishing Zero, I am now on to Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. As I mentioned here recently, although I have read almost all of Palahniuk's work up to and including Pygmy, this is my first time reading Fight Club, being that I've been away from his work long enough now that I find myself at a place where I don't feel like my love of the movie will work against my reading of the work it is based on. I'm very much looking forward to comparing and contrasting the novel with the film, something I would have possibly had trouble doing previously.

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Playlist:

Protomartyr - Agent Intellect

Run the Jewels - RTJ4

X - Los Angeles

Low Cut Connie - Hi Honey

Otis Redding - Otis Blue

Windhand - Grief's Infernal Flower

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Card:

Back to my original Thoth deck for today's Pull:

 

I have a complicated relationship with the Wands suit. Where wands are Will and a more logic-based interpretation, ten is Malkuth, and therefore wholly of the material world. This basically tells me I'm spending too much time distracted by shit like movie and tv, and that I need to spend more time working. It was a good feeling yesterday when I passed the final version of Murder Virus - now 100% the title of the new book regardless of whether I end up publishing it through THV Press or not - off to my first beta reader. For the first time since mid-March, I closed all Scrivener documents pertaining to MV and re-opened those for Shadow Play Book Two. Now, the real work begins.