Re: RARA-AVIS: Ellroy: thoughts while mowing the grass
James Rogers (jetan@ionet.net)
Thu, 28 May 1998 21:57:24 -0500 (CDT)
At 02:39 AM 5/29/98 GMT, you wrote:
>
>
>I haven't enjoyed Ellroy's last two books (_American
Tabloid_ and _My
>Dark Places_), which I regard as the works of a
conspiracy nut and
>minor-league pervert.
SNIP
> Sure, the
>writing is intense, sharp, almost supercharged -- and
wholly
>unbelievable. To be honest, I should tell you that I'm
what Ellroy would
>call a "dyed-in-the-wool right-wing square," and I
believe Lee Harvey
>Oswald was a vicious crank acting alone (see Gerald
Posner's _Case
>Closed_).
>
>As for _My Dark Places, well, that was an embarrassing
revelation of a
>panties-sniffing dope fiend. Yeah, he's pulled himself
out of it, at
>least a short ways, but he sees (bills) himself as
the
>Calvinist/profligate spawn of hicktown drunk Geneva
Ellroy. _MDP_
>strikes me as a sad exercise in ancestor worship, and
what Ellroy calls
>"Calvinism" is really hyper-Calvinism, more akin to
Islam and fatalism
>than anything else.
>
>I think Ellroy is in serious danger of writing crackpot
conspiracy
>literature. I think his next two books, detailing the
lives of "the bad
>men of American history" as he calls them, 1963-68 and
1968-73, will
>prove me right, but we'll have to wait and see. Listen
to (US)
>late-night radio sometime and you'll see the huge market
for conspiracy
>theories. Ellroy knows his market, and he somehow knows
how to move it
>upscale enough to make it palatable to the likes of
_Time_ magazine.
>
>Ned Fleming
>
Thanks. The above gave me a chuckle. I haven't yet read
AT
or MDP, but I have to admit that his recent interviews have
made him seem
like an eccentric self-promoter along the lines of Norman
Mailer, Hunter
Thompson and Ernest Hemingway. I can actually see him as a talk
radio host.
speaking of minor league perverts, has anyone noticed the
recent expose of
conservative intellectual/family values icon Paul Johnson as a
flaggeltion
freak?
James
James Michael Rogers
jetan@ionet.net
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